Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942

For Margaret Moninger-a brilliant, fun-loving, and dedicated young woman from Iowa-a career as a missionary in China promised adventure and the chance for responsibility and authority denied most American women of her time. In 1915 she went as a Presbyterian missionary to Hainan Island, China's southernmost territory, where she remained until repatriated in 1942.

During her years in Hainan, Moninger played many roles: she headed a girls' mission school, wrote scholarly articles on the Miao a...