Lucy Whitehead McGill Waterbury Peabody

Lucy Whitehead McGill Waterbury Peabody (born March 2, 1861, Belmont, Kan., U.S.—died Feb. 26, 1949, Danvers, Mass.) was an American missionary who was an influential force in a number of Baptist foreign mission societies from the 1880s well into the 20th century.

Lucy McGill graduated from Rochester (New York) Academy in 1878. Thereafter she taught for three years in the Rochester State School for the Deaf. In 1881 she married the Reverend Norman W. Waterbury, a Baptist minister. Two months later they sailed to India, where they worked among the minority Telugu people of Madras until Reverend Waterbury’s death in 1886.

Lucy Waterbury returned to Rochester for a time, then moved to Boston in 1889. The next year she became corresponding secretary of the Woman’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society. In 1890 she also founded the Farther Lights Society, a girls’ auxiliary to the mission society, and helped promote the establishment of an annual day of prayer for missions, an idea that became known as the World Day of Prayer. From 1902 to 1929 she was chairman of the Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions. In this position she developed a series of textbooks for use by women’s study groups and by a network of some 30 summer schools of missionary studies. In 1908 she founded Everyland, a missionary magazine for children that she edited until 1920. She resigned as secretary of the Woman’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society on her marriage to Henry W. Peabody in 1906; he died in 1908.

In 1912, largely at Lucy Peabody’s instigation, the Interdenominational Conference of Woman’s Boards of Foreign Missions in the United States and Canada created the Committee on Christian Literature for Women and Children, of which she became an influential member. The committee collected, translated, and published magazines for distribution around the world. In 1913 Peabody became vice president for the foreign department of the newly unified Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (WABFMS), and she was instrumental in transforming the Interdenominational Conference into the more effective Federation of Women’s Boards of Foreign Missions in 1916. She made a world tour of inspection of missions from 1913 to 1914 and another from 1919 to 1920 as chairman of a commission studying mission schools. She led a fund-raising drive from 1920 to 1923 to finance the establishment of seven women’s colleges in the Far East. She subsequently sat on the boards of directors of three of the seven: Women’s Christian College (Madras, India), Women’s Christian Medical College (Vellore, India), and Shanghai Medical College.

Peabody resigned as vice president of the WABFMS in 1921 in a dispute over ecumenism, which she supported, and in 1927 she resigned from all other denominational offices in a disagreement over missionary qualifications and modernist theology, which she opposed. She then formed the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, which undertook new missions in the Philippines. Peabody was president of the group until 1934, and from 1928 she published its periodical Message. During the 1920s she also was at the forefront of opposition to the growing movement to repeal Prohibition, serving for more than 10 years as president of the Woman’s National Committee for Law Enforcement.