Maria Butler Jameson of Indianapolis was elected the first president of the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions at the Cincinnati meeting and served with distinction from 1874-1890. Butler University is named in honor of her father, Ovid Butler, from whom she learned that “women had brains capable of high thinking and executive doing, that though the home was her first sphere of service, there were other fields that should claim a share of her best life.”

Maria Jameson (married to Patrick Henry Jameson) is remembered as a “virile leader” who as Christian Woman’s Board of Missions president immediately turned her attention to three tasks establishing local mission chapters, raising money to send a missionary overseas, and developing missionary literature.

Because Christian Woman’s Board of Missions work was supported by many small contributions over and above the regular offerings women gave to their churches, raising money was slow going. It took two years before the women of the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions were able to send their first missionaries, Dr. and Mrs. W. H. Williams and their young child, to Jamaica (an old American Christian Missionary Society post). Feeling that an organization supported by women should be represented by women, the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions was eager to send its first single woman missionary into the field. That woman was Jennie Laughlin, who was sent to Jamaica in 1878.

Initially Christian Woman’s Board of Missions reports, letters from missionaries, and financial appeals were published in established church papers. Later, the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions published its own magazine, Missionary Tidings, which first appeared in 1883. Through all the difficulties associated with the beginnings of such an ambitious undertaking as the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions, Mrs. Jameson urged, “Let prayerful anxiety stimulate our ingenuity.”

Debra B. Hull, Christian Church Women: Shapers of a Movement (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1994), 122.