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William Carey, the “Father of Modern Missions,” is revered by mission enthusiasts from every denomination and mission society. He stands as a model for generations to come—but not in his family life.

Carey’s performance in the arena of family life has most marred his image—and not just in the twentieth century when family issues have assumed a high priority. In Carey’s own day, people questioned his seeming insensitivity to family concerns.

But questions about Carey’s judgment in family matters were muted by the spirit of the times. It was an age when by law a wife and children were essentially a man’s property. Eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone summarized the marital legal code of his day by quipping, “The husband and wife are one, and the husband is that one.” So it was with William Carey and his first wife, Dorothy—or Dolly, as she was affectionately called.

It was William’s decision, and his decision alone, to leave everything behind for a lifelong commitment to India. Dolly’s resistance was natural for a mother of three little ones, expecting the fourth. Nevertheless, she is the one who has suffered at the hands of biographers. Wrote George Smith: “Never had a minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate, due largely to … latent mental disease.” Furthermore, “she remain[ed] to the last a peasant woman, with a reproachful tongue.”

William was still a teenager—not quite 20 in the summer of 1781 when he married Dorothy. She was nearly six years his senior. There is no indication theirs was a love-match, but the marriage lasted until her death 26 years later.

William and Dorothy had little in common. She was illiterate at the time of their marriage; she signed an X in the parish marriage register. Carey might have waited and married a woman whose capabilities and interests more closely paralleled his own, but he did not.

It would be mistaken, however, to imagine that Dorothy had shrewdly snared the hometown’s most eligible bachelor. He was described as a “poor journeyman-shoemaker,” and during the dozen years before he sailed for India, he was never able to bring his family above the poverty level When his mother visited them at the time of their baby daughter’s death, she was appalled by their abject poverty.

But despite the Careys’ financial hardships, there is no evidence Dorothy was dissatisfied with her marriage or circumstances in life. William’s pastoral duties at a tiny Baptist church consumed precious time and energy with inadequate compensation. Yet she supported him to the point of consenting to be rebaptized as a Baptist—a noteworthy decision considering her devout Puritan upbringing.

But Dorothy’s support for her husband’s ministry had its limits. When he announced he had volunteered to become a missionary in India, she adamantly refused to be part of the venture. There is no evidence William had previously shared his dreams with Dorothy. And his decision came suddenly—not at home with Dorothy at his side, but at a Baptist Missionary Society meeting in a neighboring town.

William reluctantly acquiesced to her refusal to join him, but he did insist on taking their oldest child, Felix.

Why did Dorothy oppose serving with her husband as a foreign missionary? Critics have charged not only a lack of wifely submission, but also spiritual impotence. But considering the departure was immediate, the cross-cultural move was permanent, and the venture was woefully underfunded, it is not difficult to understand her frame of mind.

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