Martha Jane Cunningham: A Women’s Missionary Society Pioneer

By the early twentieth century the Canadian women’s missionary movement had collectively become the largest women’s organization in North America. The Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church of Canada (WMS), established in 1880, founded three girl’s schools in Japan to help meet the need for female education and to evangelize through these students. One of these schools was Shizuoka Eiwa Jo Gakkō of Shizuoka, whose first principal was Martha Jane Cunningham, a WMS missionary from Halifax, Nova Scotia. This article tells her life-story