Scranton, Mary Fletcher

( 18 32 - 1909 )

   Methodist missionary in Korea

   Mary Fletcher Scranton was born in December 1832. Little is known of her early life. In 1885, she, her son, Dr. William B. Scranton, and her daughter-in-law accepted an assignment to Korea as missionaries. Mary became the first female Protestant missionary in Korea while William pioneered medical missions.

   Upon her arrival in Seoul, she opened the first school for girls in Korea. The school would grow into one of the country's most prestigious institutions, Ewha Women's University, currently the largest all-female university in the world. Scran-ton spent the rest of her life expanding her school and working among the Methodist women in the country. Mary Scranton died in 1909.

   Further reading:

   ■ Marion Lane Canrow, Our Ewha: A Historical Sketch of E.W.U., 1886-1956 (Seoul, Korea: Ewha Women's University Press, 1956)

   ■ Anne B. Chaffin, Fifty Years of Light: Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Seoul, Korea: YMCA Press, 1938).