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Crawford, Tarleton Perry and Martha Foster (1830-1909), Southern Baptist missionaries in China.
Early in 1851, knowing that as a missionary appointee of the Southern Baptist Convention Foreign Mission Board (SBCFMB) he had to be married before leaving the United States, and learning of a single young woman who wanted to be a missionary, T. P. Crawford journeyed to Alabama where he met, proposed to, and married Martha Foster in less than a month. They arrived in Shanghai in 1852 and worked there until 1863, when they moved to northern China.
More competent and compatible than her dogmatic and often irascible husband, Martha Crawford was proficient in the language, greatly respected, and unusually productive¡ªtraits that were annoying to her husband. (Early in her career she wrote in her diary that God wanted her to be a missionary wife, but later she crossed out the word "wife"). She evidenced unusual ability as a teacher of Chinese children, and though she was convinced that this was her calling, she was equally effective as an evangelist among Chinese women.
Her husband presented an unfortunate contrast. Repeatedly absorbed in conflicts with missionary colleagues and nationals, T. P. Crawford became an outspoken critic of the SBCFMB, primarily because they refused to agree that evangelism and preaching were the only legitimate missionary methods. He compelled Martha, against her will, to cease doing school and medical work and to engage only in evangelism. When he intensified his attacks upon the mission board, he was dismissed in 1892. Although the board wished to retain Martha, she voluntarily withdrew to join her husband in his newly organized Gospel Mission, an independent society that dissolved the year after her death. Before that time she apparently had advised her Gospel Mission colleagues to return to the SBCFMB, and most of them did. Like other Westerners during the Boxer Rebellion, the Crawfords were forced to leave China in 1900. He died in Alabama shortly thereafter. Martha Crawford returned to China in 1902 to continue her work, and she died in China.
Alan Neely