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Etta Doane Marden

Etta Charlotte Doane was born in Owosso, Michigan,^[1] the daughter of Gilbert Griswold Doane and Lucy Guilford Doane.^[2][3]

Doane was commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1881, in Boston, to be Congregationalist teacher in Turkey.^[4][5] She remained there from 1881 to 1825, serving first in Marash (Maraş), and later at a school in the Gedik Pasha (Gedikpaşa) quarter in Constantinople.^[6][7][8] The Gedik Pasha station offered meetings and vocational training for women, in addition to Bible lessons for men and women, a coffeehouse, public lectures, and a school for children and youths.^[9][10][11]

Marden spoke about her work at a statewide women's mission gatherings in Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota in 1902 and 1903.^[12][13][14] In 1910 she sailed from Liverpool to Boston on the Lusitania,^[15] and in 1910 and 1911 Marden toured in the United States with other American missionary women,^[16] including Jennie V. Hughes, Helen Barrett Montgomery, and Mary Riggs Noble, to speak at jubilee celebrations in various cities.^[17][18] She left Constantinople to spend a health leave in Switzerland in the summer of 1917,^[19] and was giving lectures in the United States the following spring.^[20]

Marden moved to southern California when she retired from Turkey in 1925. She spoke on her experiences at church events in California during her retirement.^[21] She wrote to the editors of the Los Angeles Times to protest unsubstantiated information they published about "Turkish harems".^[22] She donated an example of Turkish embroidery to the Art Institute of Chicago.^[23]

Doane became the third wife of fellow missionary Rev. Henry Marden in 1882, in Marash.^[24] She was widowed when Henry died from typhus in Athens in 1890.^[25][26] She died in 1946, aged 94 years, in Claremont, California.

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