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Voices and influences

Ann Hasseltine Judson

The first American woman sent overseas as a missionary, who kept her husband alive through seventeen months in a Burmese death prison.

Summary

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  • Lived 1789 to 1826, American.
Ann Hasseltine Judson. Painted by Richard Woodman. The file is marked public domain. This site's record does not give the artist's death year, which is what settles the painting's own rights. The file record

Ann Hasseltine Judson

Lived
1789 to 1826
Nation
American
Tradition
Baptist missionary

Own words

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The life, in order

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Ann Hasseltine married Adoniram Judson in February 1812 and sailed for Asia thirteen days later, the first American woman commissioned to go. Her father had let her go with a line people quoted for a century: he would not stand in the way of her doing good. In Burma she learned the language faster than her husband, taught women who had never been taught anything, and translated the Gospel of Matthew into Siamese — the first Scripture that language had. When war broke out between Britain and Burma in 1824, Adoniram was chained in the death prison at Ava. For seventeen months Ann walked there with food, argued with officials who could have killed her for it, gave birth in a nearby hut, and hid the manuscript of his Burmese New Testament sewn into a hard pillow the guards thought worthless. He survived. She died of fever at Amherst a year later, aged thirty-six.