Christian missionary J. E. Lundahl wrote in 1917 that the local Muslim women in Xinjiang married Chinese men because of a lack of Chinese women, the relatives of the woman and other Muslims reviled the women for their marriages. —A number of British and German friends are subscribing to support a new mission with headquarters in Kashgar and Yarkand, two cities of Chinese Turkestan, and the work is to be carried on not among the Chinese, but among the Mohammedans, who are in a large majority in that district. The new mission is interesting, in that it is an attack upon China from the west. Two German missionaries, accompanied by a doctor and a native Christian, will in Kashgar next spring and begin work. It may be added that the British and Foreign Bible Society is at present printing the four Gospels in the dialect of Chinese Turkestan, and that in all probability they will be ready before the new mission is settled at Kashgar. Women missionaries Missionary societies initially sent out only married couples and a few single men as missionaries. Wives served as unpaid "assistant missionaries." The opinion of male-dominated missionary societies was that unmarried women should not live unprotected and alone in a foreign country and that the spiritual work of missionaries could only be undertaken by ordained men. Over time, as it became clear that Christian schools were necessary to attract and educate potential Christians and leaders and change foreign cultures that were unreceptive to the Christian message as proclaimed by male missionary preachers. The first unmarried female missionary in China was Mary Ann Aldersey, an eccentric British woman, who opened a school for girls in Ningpo in 1844. In the 1860s women's missionary organizations, especially the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and women began to become missionaries around the world in sizable numbers. Women missionaries, married and unmarried, would soon outnumber men. By 1919, American Methodist and Congregationalist (ABCFM) women missionaries numbered more than twice the number of male missionaries in China. The rise of female missionaries to prominence was not without friction with men. An 1888 Baptist conference affirmed that "women's work in the foreign field must be careful to recognize the headship of men." and "the head of woman is the man." In China, due to cultural norms, male missionaries could not interact with Chinese