Minnie Vautrin

Wilhelmina Vautrin was born in 1886 in the small town of Secor, Illinois. Her mother died when she was six, and her father, a blacksmith, could not keep her at home for long; she worked her way through the University of Illinois and in 1912 went to China as a missionary teacher. By the 1930s she was in charge of Ginling College, a small women's college in Nanjing, whenever its president was away.

In December 1937, with the Japanese army closing on the city, most foreigners left. She stayed, and with a handful of others declared a safety zone. When the city fell the soldiers began weeks of killing and mass rape. Vautrin opened the college to women and girls, and thousands came, sleeping in classrooms, corridors and on the lawns; at the height there were some ten thousand of them. She stood at the gate, argued with soldiers, went out to fetch back women who had been dragged away, and was struck and threatened repeatedly. Her diary, kept every night, is one of the main records of the massacre.

She stayed on, running the college and helping women whose husbands had been killed learn trades. But the years took their toll. In the spring of 1940 she broke down and was sent home to the United States for treatment. In May 1941, in Indianapolis, she killed herself.

Chinese survivors called her the Goddess of Nanjing, and there is a statue of her on the college campus.