Eliza White

Eliza White ( Leigh) (11 July 1809 – 28 February 1883) was a Wesleyan Methodist missionary to New Zealand and leader in establishing a Ladies Christian Association in Auckland. This organisation was a predecessor to the Auckland Young Women's Christian Association. Her journal, archived at St. John's Theological College in Auckland, provides a unique first-hand account of the life of an English woman evangelist in New Zealand. Early life Eliza Leigh was born on 11 July 1809 in Earith, Huntingdonshire, England. Her parents Elizabeth and Thomas Leigh were Non-Conformists who attended Wesleyan services, and she joined the Wesleyan Methodist Church at sixteen. By this point the Wesleyan Methodists had long been supporting the effort to promote the marriages of male missionaries living in non-white communities around the world, and the letters from missionary wives abroad were regularly read at church meetings. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society begun in 1813 together with the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804) connected the religious fervor of evangelism with the teaching of reason, happiness and civilisation. When Rev. William White, a Methodist missionary from New Zealand, visited a nearby village to preach and recruit a wife, Eliza took up the challenge. She told Rev. White and his companion, Rev. Thomas Buddle that she had been influenced by a minister's wife "the niece of the celebrated Fletcher of Madeley, and one of the most noted women of John Wesley's time." Her role model, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher was a popular preaching Methodist woman in Shropshire, and her example of Methodism carried her through a life of active charity work, visitation among the most needy and schoolteaching. She and Reverend White were married on 30 June 1829 in Bluntisham, Huntingdonshire. Life as a Missionary Wife in Māngungu William and Eliza White sailed to New Zealand, taking many months to finally arrive on 30 January 1830 at the recently established Māngungu Mission in the Hokianga Harbour. Her first home was in a raupō hut near the Mission House where Rev. John Hobbs lived with his wife, Jane Broggref Hobbs. Besides growing accustomed to domestic work in a colonial hut, Eliza White took up teaching the local children. Eliza White's first child was stillborn on 3 April 1830. Her second child, William Leigh White, died as an infant in August 1831. In January 1833, a third baby—a girl—died, strangled by the umbilical cord.