This year marks the 47th anniversary of response magazine. It’s been published now for almost 50 years. But really, this magazine’s history goes back even farther: All the way to the beginning.
The first issue of Heathen Woman’s Friend was published in June 1869, just three months after the founding of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, what is today United Women in Faith. This issue is a continuation of 157 years of Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren women telling their stories.
If my name looks familiar to you, it’s because I was blessed to be one of the women in a long line of editors going back to Harriett Merrick Warren, who at only age 25 was called on to be the first editor of the first organization’s first paper.
“At that time papers and magazines conducted by women were something of a novelty, the field new and untried,” wrote Annie Gracey in 1893 in her memorial to Warren, calling the paper “one of the model missionary periodicals of the world.”
Women’s organizations published magazines not just in the Methodist Episcopal Church but in the Methodist Protestant Church; Methodist Episcopal Church, South; United Brethren in Christ Church; Evangelical Association; United Evangelical Church; Evangelical Church; the Methodist Church; Evangelical United Brethren Church; and The United Methodist Church. The women’s organizations of every denomination that is now The United Methodist Church published a magazine.
“The magazines informed women about church work around the world,” said the Rev. Ellen Blue, Ph.D., in her book Women United for Change: 150 Years in Mission, United Women in Faith’s 2019 mission study. “The women who edited them and wrote articles for them shaped the opinions of women about themselves and what women were capable of doing. They offered insights about how other women were responding to God’s leading. They provided assurance that women could play a role in offering the gospel and ‘life abundant’ to the world.”
Before they could vote, before they could own property, before they could be ordained, the women were advocating for themselves in print, writing and reading about one another from around the world, and sharing stories and reports and prayers and resources to grow in their faith and put their love into action.
So Many Names
As you can see, the history of response reflects the history of United Women in Faith, which reflects the history of The United Methodist Church. At the end of the day, nine different churches became The United Methodist Church, their many women’s organizations became United Women in Faith, and 13 magazines published by women live on in response.
I won’t get to the history of every magazine in this article. For that, I will thank Carol Marie Herb for writing The Light Along the Way: A Living History Through United Methodist Women’s Magazines. Herb was the first and longest editor of response magazine, and before that was an editor for The Methodist Woman, published by the Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church. She wrote The Light Along the Way as a special report to the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries in 1994. This article is not possible without her work.
It may be hard to keep track of the names of all of the magazines, churches, and organizations I mention, but I’ll do my best to bring you along in the labyrinth. Isn’t it amazing to know you are holding history in your hands as you read this?
Let’s Talk About That Name
Yes, Heathen Woman’s Friend was the name of our first magazine. The name was intentional, and it was a proper reflection of the women’s mission and theology at the time. “Heathen” was a common term used especially by white Christians in the early 19th century to denote someone “other,” non-Christian, less civilized, morally inferior, in need of saving.
In her book The Story of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1869-1895, Frances J. Baker writes, “At the very beginning of the Society it was proposed that a monthly paper be issued, and the following prospectus was printed: ‘The paper will be devoted more especially to the interests of the work among heathen women, and will be filled with interesting facts and incidents illustrating that work, furnished by those laboring in heathen lands. Information will be given concerning the customs and social life of the people, the various obstacles to be overcome in their Christianization, and the success which attends the various departments of missionary labor among them.’”
The founders of what is today United Women in Faith were white, educated, Bostonians. The two women who called the first meeting—Clementina Butler and Lois Parker—were missionary wives, and Warren was the wife of Boston University’s first president. So, for women at the time, they held places of relative power and respect. We can honor their choice to devote their lives to uplifting women and children through education, health care, and spiritual growth while also acknowledging the colonialist mentality that then accompanied it.
The name of the magazine remained Heathen Woman’s Friend for 27 years, until after Warren’s death. The new editor, Louise Manning Hodgkins, pushed for a change, arguing that the term “heathen” was objectionable to missionaries and to their sisters in foreign lands, notes Cheryl Cassidy in her 2006 American Periodicals essay “Bringing the ‘New Woman’ to the Mission Site: Louise Manning Hodgkins and the ‘Heathen Woman’s Friend.’” The women missionaries learned from the women with whom they lived and worked that a shift in name and thought were necessary.
At the society’s annual business meeting in 1895, a resolution was proposed to change the magazine’s name. As Mary Isham shares the story in Valorous Ventures: A Record of Sixty and Six Years of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, “Miss Matilda Watson, corresponding secretary of Topeka Branch, introduced a resolution, backed by furloughing missionaries from a portion of the field, asking for a change of name for the Heathen Woman’s Friend. The measure was considered and reconsidered, referred to the committee on publications and rejected, presented in a minority report, and, when it came to vote, passed by a narrow margin.”
The proposal was first rejected. Then, accepted only by a narrow margin.
Isham continues, “Mrs. J. F. Keen, corresponding secretary of Philadelphia Branch, then proposed the name Woman’s Missionary Friend and by almost unanimous vote the dearly loved Friend was rechristened.
“More lay back of this action than appeared on the surface. It was a recognition of the rising Christian womanhood in mission lands and evidence of the passing of a certain condescension in applying the term ‘heathen.’ Already the General Executive Committee had welcomed to its sessions the beloved Phoebe Rowe of India and other co-laborers from foreign lands. The continuance of the ‘Heathen Woman’s Friend’ was no longer courteous.”
Hodgkins wrote to her readers in December 1895 that the new title should be commended “for two reasons: first, because it retains the popular part of our former name, and further, for its naturalness. Who does not use frequently the phrase ‘a missionary friend of mine.’ Let us hope that the old magazine with the new-old name may prove a ‘missionary friend’ to a thousand new subscribers in the coming year.”
Under Warren’s editorship the magazine reflected an evangelical emphasis on duty and self-sacrifice. She was a wife and a mother of four and a reflection of the 19th century’s “True Woman”: Pious, moral, maternal, domestic, hardworking, charitable. Patricia Ruth Hill in her book The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation said of Warren, “When she wrote editorials it was as a Christian wife and mother that she addressed other Christian wives and mothers.”
Hodgkins was Miss Louise Manning Hodgkins, a single woman. In her very first editorial she wrote that missionary societies “opened a new avenue for the energies of woman; it made her whole world larger and her individual world of less account.” Hodgkins stated that “the study of missionary literature will keep us in touch as nothing else will with the great facts of modern civilization.” She was so serious about the magazine being received as professional that for its silver anniversary she shared photos of her office in Boston as the main feature.
It was not just a changing name but a changing century and an expanding view of the capabilities of women and the ways they could live into their faith. response magazine has benefitted from all of the different backgrounds and experiences of the editors who guided the content. (I’m enjoying being a reader of this magazine and its recent changes and new features! This is how it keeps going for years to come.)
The Choice to Change
The Woman’s Missionary Association of the United Brethren Church began publishing the Woman’s Evangel in 1882. The association changed the title to Evangel in 1918 to become the mission magazine for the whole church, according to Herb in The Light Along the Way. Lillian Resler Harford, the magazine’s editor, and Alice E. Bell record this as a decision of the Woman’s Missionary Association Board of Managers in History of the Women’s Missionary Association of the United Brethren in Christ.
The line from Heathen Woman’s Friend to response may be unbroken, but it’s not without the loss of some of its branches. The women of the Evangelical United Brethren church were able to maintain management of all of their magazines even through denominational splits and mergers, with all title changes but Woman’s Evangel to Evangel resulting as an outcome of mergers. Missionary Messenger, as Herb shares, began in 1886 as a cooperative publication for the whole of the Evangelical Association, with two clergymen as editors but also with a woman editor for the Woman’s Department. In 1899 its General Conference agreed that the magazine would be published for the church’s Woman’s Missionary Society, and Mrs. S.J. Gamertsfelder was the editor for its duration until the merger of the Evangelical Association and the United Evangelical Church into the Evangelical Church and the merger of the magazines Missionary Messenger and Missionary Tidings into The Evangelical Missionary World.
The women of the Methodist Church weren’t so lucky. The magazines of women’s societies of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Church were subsumed by their denomination’s general mission boards. The Methodist Protestant Church kept all women editors, however, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, partnered women editors with men.
The women of these denominations were invited back into the publishing fold, however, when the three Methodist denominations joined to become the Methodist Church. The first editors of The Methodist Woman were five women selected to represent the five women’s organizations that came together to become the new Woman’s Society of Christian Service.
In the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the women’s magazines Our Homes and Woman’s Missionary Advocate became The Missionary Voice in 1911, taken over and published by the Board of Missions. This then became World Outlook in 1932, continuing as a publication of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church. It sustained the practice of women co-editors who related to the women’s organization (even though The Methodist Woman was published simultaneously beginning in 1940). The Board of Missions ended this relationship with the women in 1964, part of the “agreements of 1964,” when “Methodist women’s missionary history was transformed by action of the 1964 General Conference upon recommendation of the Board of Missions,” wrote Deaconess Barbara Campbell for her fall 2018 New World Outlook article “Turning Prayers Into Deeds.”
“It removed and transferred administration of all women’s mission projects, personnel, and selected educational functions to other divisions of the board. There were guarantees for increased board membership for women; enhanced women’s staffing, while ‘the women’ (Woman’s Division Christian Service) retained control of property and finances, making annual appropriations to the Board of Missions to sustain (pay for) the work they formerly managed. Division staff was reduced from 54 to 14. That year was a very painful time with many unforeseen and far-reaching consequences.”
World Outlook became New World Outlook in 1970 after the merger of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren churches to become The United Methodist Church and a wholly separate publication from the then-Women’s Division’s response. New World Outlook was published by the General Board of Global Ministries until 2018.
As Herb writes in A Light Along the Way about the women’s magazines, “None of the magazines were discontinued due to editorial, financial, or circulation failures. Their fates were sealed by name changes or by mergers within or between denominations.”
An Important Voice
Some of you reading this may have once subscribed to The Methodist Woman or The World Evangel. These were the two women’s magazines that came together to become response. This is also when the Women’s Society of Christian Service and Wesleyan Service Guild (Methodist) and the Women’s Society of World Service and Christian Service Guild (Evangelical United Brethren) combined to become United Methodist Women.
Are you still with me?
The women kept publishing. The magazine is still going. You won’t find the stories that are here anywhere else.
In an interview for the General Commission on Archives and History’s Un-Tied Methodism podcast, professor and pastor Amy Laura Hall described that while she was writing her book Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction, she studied a magazine called Together: For Methodist Families, an “official organ” of The Methodist Church published by the Methodist Publishing House in the 1950s and 1960s. She also studied the magazines of the women’s organization.
“For future historians to have some fun, go to the archives and look at Together magazine and look at what Methodist women were publishing at that time,” she said.
“Their publications even in the 1950s are much more about civil rights and what we would now perhaps call post-colonial thinking, thinking through how mission contexts, families, and leaders in formerly mission contexts needed to speak back to women in Methodist women’s groups.”
Herb found strength in “the Division’s time-honored stances made by democratic decisions of predecessor organizations for over 125 years,” calling them solid, respected, and followed.
“I appreciated the opportunity to edit for an organization which was not built on shifting sand,” she wrote in her 1994 report. Her view, she said, “was not to generate controversial articles, but never to back off from controversy.”
“I considered response part of the ‘alternative’ press and tried to offer viewpoints not presented in other women’s publications or secular news magazines.”
United Women in Faith remains on solid rock and response remains its way to inspire and inform its members.
I will give the much-deserved final word to Herb.
“The women and men on the pages of the women’s magazines brought the light of Christ to the readers as well as to those whom they encountered face to face. These followers of Jesus were not portrayed as saints but as ordinary human beings willing to be challenged.”
May we continue to be ordinary human beings willing to be challenged. Thank you for reading response.
Tara Barnes is director of denominational relations for United Women in Faith. She served as managing editor of response from 2010 to 2015 and as senior editor 2015-2022.
This content was originally published by United Women in Faith; republished with permission by ResourceUMC on June 15, 2026.