Backstory #2 Kathryn Mahala Wheeler Cameron

Here’s the question I asked: “Would you rather work for someone or be the boss?”  I started each of their backstories (5) with their answers.

My main character is so adamant about being in charge of her life that she abandoned her home in west Texas, endured wholly inappropriate preparation for what she wanted to do, and traveled alone in 1913 from the United States to China, prepared to be there all her life.

This attitude was not evident in her childhood.  One of eight children of an impoverished rancher, she did her best to fit in and be helpful to her hard-working parents and the other children.  But, for some reason, she wanted a way out of this existence.

Maybe she was always interested in escaping, but not aware of her desires until she met the man who would become her fiancé, a man who lured her with the possibility of escaping west Texas for China (!), to do something better than other possibilities, become a worthy missionary, and do something worthwhile. She was crushed when he jilted her as being unworthy of accompanying him to China as a missionary’s wife.

She looked around at the other possibilities and vowed she would not marry an impoverished rancher and raise a passel of brats.  She wouldn’t work for a man in any subservient role (as housekeeper; store or hotel clerk; secretary, stenographer, or bookkeeper in an office). She wouldn’t consider teaching where, as she had already discovered, she was ruled by a male superintendent and a male-only school board that dismissed her without looking into the truth of a misunderstood situation with a beau.

She was practical, however.  She acknowledged that she would always have bosses, mostly male, but she wanted to make the overall decisions about her life. 

As she considered her possible futures, she fashioned a riposte to the fiancé who had jilted her: “I will do this all by myself. I will go to China as a missionary myself, not as the lowly spouse of a missionary.”  She’s a nice lady, so I doubt she would have screeched “na-na na-na na-na” at him, perhaps putting her thumbs into her ears and wiggling her fingers back and forth, perhaps even sticking out her tongue at the fiancé who shunned her.

She was not overly religious for the time, so she probably would not have decided to become a missionary if her so-called fiancé had not offered her that as a way to escape from Texas, from a country whose protocols for women were Victorian, for another country that – well, she wasn’t sure just how China would be different.  

She attended a conservative church with her family, even went to revivals where she claimed her faith repeatedly, only to be lured back into “sin” by one of the many boyfriends hovering around her.  She was as pious as she was supposed to be until the next boyfriend came around.  She probably believed in God but wasn’t revved up by the thought of proselytizing to and converting others.

She might have waited (doing what?) until a suitable beau came around, someone else who could get her out of Texas and help her find work worth doing, but she was anxious.  She was already 22 when she met the fiancé who rejected her, almost old enough to be a spinster.  She didn’t think of herself as beautiful or even pretty, and she wasn’t – at least in the sense of being blonde, buxomy, blue-eyed, and dimpled.  But she was attractive: She was a little taller than most women, five feet, seven inches, and slender in those days. Her face was oval, almost square, and her skin light olive. Her hair was unexceptionally brown, straight, and long, often pulled into a twist at her neck. Her big eyes were hazel and said to be “soulful,” with eyebrows curved like commas above them.  The rest of her features were symmetrical, an ordinary nose and chin, but her mouth curved into the shape of a rosebud (as it was called in those days). 

Was she pretty enough to attract another beau?  She didn’t think so and worried that her chances of doing so would diminish as she aged.

So she became the boss of herself, found a college that prepared women to be missionaries in their own right (and not just wives of missionaries), graduated with a master’s degree and honors, and rejected the Foreign Mission Board’s assertion that she could not go to China.  Eventually allowed to go to China as a missionary, she still preferred to be the boss there. 

She was appalled when she was required to do secretarial work at her first placement in Ying Tak, China, and tried to find ways to do what she wanted to do, even questioning the “mission of the mission” until her boss reined her in.  Within a year she ran away from that situation. She was pleased with her second placement when she was allowed to pursue what she wanted to do – which meant abandoning her preparation for proselytizing.  She enjoyed several years of teaching young girls who otherwise wouldn’t be educated in any formal way.  When the man who was to be her husband rushed her towards their wedding, she ran away to the United States until she could make up her mind.  When he died, she pushed the Foreign Mission Board to reinstate her as a missionary (not a missionary’s widow) and to publish the book she was writing about her husband’s contributions.  She never gave up on those demands, choosing instead to find workarounds that got her what she wanted.