Martha Root: The Leading Ambassadress of the Faith

Martha Louise Root was born in 1872 in the small town of Cambridge, Ohio. She grew up in the western Pennsylvania countryside, was educated at Oberlin and at Chicago, and made her early career as a journalist and women's-page editor for the Pittsburgh papers of the 1890s and 1900s. She had been raised in a sober Methodist home; she came to the Bahá'í Faith in 1909, in her late thirties, after attending a series of lectures by an early Bahá'í teacher in Pittsburgh.

Her conversion, the chronicle records, was complete and permanent. From 1909 onward she ordered the rest of her life around what she had decided to call her teaching travels. Her first international journey was to South America in 1919; from that journey she never really stopped travelling. She would, in the next twenty years, circumnavigate the globe four times. She made her own arrangements, paid her own way out of journalism contracts, and travelled, often alone, with two suitcases and a typewriter.

She visited China, Japan, India, Iran, Burma, Indonesia, Australia, the Pacific Islands, the whole of Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, every country of South and Central America, much of Africa. Wherever she arrived, the chronicle records, she had already made arrangements through correspondence to address local newspapers, women's clubs, religious societies, and university gatherings. She met heads of state. She met, famously, Queen Marie of Romania, who would publish — at Martha's quiet urging — the most public testimony of any European monarch to the Bahá'í Faith.

She wrote constantly. She filed news articles to American papers; she sent telegrams to the Guardian; she composed long letters to the believers of distant communities about progress in countries they had never visited.

Shoghi Effendi corresponded with her with unusual personal warmth across the years. The cables he sent at her death in Honolulu in 1939 named her, with deliberation, as the foremost Hand of the Cause of the Western world in his time — a title he conferred posthumously and at his own initiative, to recognise the unequalled scale of her teaching work in his generation.

She had travelled, by the chronicle's reckoning, more than a quarter of a million miles in the service of the Cause. She had done so on the slender resources of a working journalist. She had not married. She had not retired. She had not stopped until the cancer that took her had put her in her bed in Hawaii.

She was buried in the small Bahá'í section of the Honolulu cemetery. The Bahá'í world remembered her as the model of the travel-teacher — the woman who, with two suitcases and a typewriter, had quietly proved that the worldwide community the Master had asked the Western believers to build could in fact be built by a single faithful person, walking from country to country.

Source: Bahá'í Chronicles (https://bahaichronicles.org/martha-root/).

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/martha-root/