|
 arch
is National Women’s History (Herstory) Month. Though we are pushing it
by a week, that upcoming event is part of what encouraged me to give you
these brief portraits of those women who have gone before to prepare to
way for the Unitarian Universalist women who sit in this room.
There are some of you in this room who may have been living when the
women’s suffrage movement finally resulted in the nineteenth amendment
to the Constitution in August of 1920. It was not very long ago. Until
that time, women were not able to vote in most states. The last state to
ratify this 19th amendment to the US constitution in that summer of 1920
was Tennessee. It came down to a one vote swing. A 24 year old
legislator surprised his conservative colleagues by voting for
ratification, becoming the vote securing a two thirds supermajority to
make it official. At the time he voted, there was a letter from his
mother in his pocket saying, “be a good boy and vote for the suffrage
amendment.”
I am proud to tell you that women were able to vote in Wyoming beginning
in 1890, when that state entered the union. And in Utah, Idaho, and
Colorado beginning in 1900. The females in the West have been
independent and powerful for a long time.
Many of the leaders of the suffrage movement were UU women, of course.
We’ll meet some in a minute.
The largest barrier to getting the vote for women was the attitude and
resistance of men. To give you an idea of the depth of that resistance,
let me share this.
In 1872, Myra Bradwell, a lawyer, challenged Illinois law which
restricted membership in the state bar association to men. The U.S.
Supreme Court upheld the law. Justice Bradley said in his concurring
opinion:
"It is true
that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties,
complications, and incapacities arising out of the married state,
but these are exceptions to the general rule. The paramount destiny
and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of
wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of
civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things,
and cannot be based upon exceptional cases. "
Olympia Brown challenged this chauvinistic world with a fierce
directness that was unsettling to men of her time. She grew up in
Michigan, one of four children of Vermont Universalists. She attended
Antioch College in Ohio, whose president was Horace Mann. The great
educator had grown up in the Unitarian church in Massachusetts and was
greatly respected in the Unitarian world. She then enrolled in St.
Lawrence University in New York, a Universalist theology school, to
prepare for ministry, despite strong resistance from the President of
the school toward having their first female student. She graduated in
three years, in 1863 despite the resistance, and despite being teased
unmercifully about her high pitched voice by her fellow, male, students.
She then approached the Universalist conference about the question of
being ordained. She felt confident about the outcome as she had
preached, and been well received at the church of one of the main
decision makers. She was subsequently ordained as a Universalist
minister in 1863, becoming the first woman in any American denomination
to be so empowered. Her career spanned almost 70 years. She served
congregations in Massachusetts and Connecticut, then moved to Racine,
Wisconsin to lead the church there. She became deeply involved in the
suffrage movement, working a lot with Unitarian Susan B Anthony. She
also worked with skill and purpose to develop a strong, clear speaking
voice that was not made fun of again.
"The ministry was the first objective of her life," wrote her daughter
Gwendolen Brown Willis, "since in her youthful enthusiasm she believed
that freedom of religious thought and a liberal church would supply the
groundwork for all other freedoms. Her difficulties and disillusionments
in this field were numerous. That she could rise superior to such
difficulties and disillusionments was the consequence of the hopefulness
and courage with which she was richly endowed."
At age 85, she voted in her first presidential election, in the fall of
1920. She then returned to her former church in Racine and shared her
last sermon. Part of it is quoted in our hymnal, the part I would like
to share.
“Stand by
this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in
all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has
placed before us the loftiest ideals. Which has comforted us in
sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful.
Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be
entrusted with this great message. That you are strong enough to
work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on
finding ever new applications of thse truths and new enjoyments in
their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives
and loves.”
She died at age
91 in 1926.
Clara Barton was
born on Christmas Day in 1821, raised in a Universalist home in Oxford,
Massachusetts, the youngest of five children. Her family was an
emotional mess. Her mother lapsed in and out of mental illness,
characterized by rage attacks. Her oldest sister, who had been Clara’s
teacher, had a “nervous breakdown” and was locked in an upstairs room
during much of Clara’s upbringing. Her brother, David, was injured in a
fall. Clara, age 11, tended to him day and night during a two year
convalescence. She, herself, was very restless. She could not stand
having nothing to do. Despite her great shyness, at age 20 she took a
position as a teacher in the local school. She was masterful. She played
with the kids at their level, and they loved it. She taught there for
ten years. She then started a school in New Jersey, the first free
public school in that state’s history. It was so successful they brought
a man in to head it up at twice Clara’s salary. As a result, she left
and went to Washington, DC. She was there when Ft. Sumter was fired upon
and the Civil War began. One of the first units of what became the Union
Army to arrive in DC was one from Massachusetts. They had been attacked
by secessionists in Baltimore and were in disarray. Clara found she knew
many of them from her teaching days and worked to tend wounds and help
get them organized again.
This was the
beginning of her activities throughout the Civil War that led to her
title of the “angel of the battlefield.” She had to constantly push
through resistance to be on the battlefields, but she was there at
Manassas, Fredricksburg, Antietam, and many other battles, nursing the
wounded. After the war she traveled around the country giving lectures
about her Civil War experiences, making her famous. She went to Europe
during the Franco-Prussian War and brought back support for both the new
Geneva Convention and an American branch of the fledgling International
Red Cross. She spent the rest of her life alternately leading and
supporting the Red Cross into the 1900’s. Though she did not live to
vote in her first election, she also supported the suffrage movement
along with Brown and Anthony. “ I think 'taxation and representation are
and of right ought to be inseparable.' I most devoutly wish that
intellect, education and moral worth decided a voter's privileges and
not sex, or money or land or any other unintelligent principle.”
During her last
years Clara summered in a house she bought in North Oxford and continued
to attend suffrage conventions and veterans' encampments. Her celebrity
status brought with it much correspondence, some from children asking
about her childhood. In response she wrote The Story of My Childhood,
published in 1907. She died of pneumonia at Glen Echo, Md, the location
of the headquarters of the American Red Cross, where she lived in an
apartment, on April 12, 1912.
Lucy Stone was a
woman of firsts. She is listed as being the first female college
graduate in Massachusetts history. She also was the first woman in the
country to refuse her husband’s name, remaining Lucy Stone all her life.
And finally, at the end of her life, she was the first person cremated
in New England. She was raised a Congregationalist, but when they kicked
her out, she happily went to the Unitarian Church for the rest of her
life.
Both Olympia
Brown and Stone found good men to support their independent journey.
Brown said at John Willis’ death, after 20 years together, “endless
sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was one of the the best men who ever
lived.” She had kept her own name, like Lucy Stone before her. Stone
married Henry Blackwell, 7 years her junior, when she was 37. “Two years
of courtship and friendship convinced Lucy to accept Henry's offer of
marriage. She wrote to him, "A wife should no more take her husband's
name than he should her's. My name is my identity and must not be lost."
Henry agreed with her. "I wish, as a husband, to renounce all the
privileges which the law confers upon me, which are not strictly mutual.
Surely such a marriage will not degrade you, dearest."
Before they
married, Stone had graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, the first
college in the country to accept both women and blacks. She began to
speak in support of women’s rights and was hired by the American
Anti-slavery Society to organize and speak on behalf of its work. Which
she did tirelessly around the country. Said Wm Lloyd Garrison with whom
she worked, “she is a very superior young woman, and has a soul as free
as the air.” Stone’s passionate speeches on both subjects drew
opposition. Posters were torn down, heckling was a regular experience,
and books and other objects were thrown at her. She was a speaker at the
first national convention for women’s rights in 1850. It was this speech
that recruited Susan B Anthony to the cause. Later, she recruited Julia
Ward Howe. After the Civil War the suffrage movement split into two
camps, the conservative and liberal. Stone and her husband led the
conservative group. They edited the Woman’s Journal which lasted until
1917.
Lucy Stone died
in 1893 of cancer in Boston. Her last words to her daughter, Alice Stone
Blackwell, a leader of the suffrage movement in her own right, were,
“make the world better.”
Let’s take a
breath for a moment. What these three women share in common it seems to
me, besides their New England roots incredible ego strength, and Ohio
education, is a freedom to act from their own inner light, to follow
their own calling, that many of us, women or men, are rarely capable of
doing. They inspire by their sheer audacity, their capacity to simply
step through the laws, rules, mores and folkways of the time and act
according to that light. It would be interesting to know more about
whether they saw that light as being outside or inside them. I expect
both.
Another theme in
common, as I pointed out, is the presence of evolved, loving men in
Stone and Brown’s lives. They were not threatened by the radical acts of
their wives. It is good to be reminded that all men were not chauvinists
even in the 1800’s.
As I’m sure
you’ve noticed, there are no Westerners in this group. I’d like to
present one now.
Eliza Tupper
Wilkes
Eliza Tupper
Wilkes (October 8, 1844-February 5, 1917) was a circuit-riding preacher
who started eleven Universalist and Unitarian churches in the American
West. Among the first women ordained into the ministry, Wilkes worked
with and mentored other liberal women ministers in the West. Known as
the "Iowa Sisterhood," these women found opportunity and support in the
Women's Western Unitarian Conference and from the leading western
Unitarian minister, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, at a time when women ministers
were derided by most of the established clergy and spurned by the older
congregations "back east."
Eliza grew up
Baptist, but saying she had "left the devil behind," Eliza underwent a
second baptism in 1867 and, to the dismay of her parents and friends,
became a Universalist. In 1871 she was ordained as a Universalist
minister. She and her husband, William, then moved to Colorado Springs,
then in Colorado Territory. Wilkes helped start Colorado College,
becoming the first president of its auxiliary board. She supported
several initiatives for women’s suffrage while there.
After she and
her son developed heart problems, the need to live at a lower altitude
brought them to Sioux Falls Dakota Territory, later to be the state of
South Dakota. It is here that she really made her mark. With the support
of a group of Unitarian and Universalist female ministers now called the
Prophetic Sisterhood in a new book available from Skinner House Books,
Wilkes became a tireless starter of new congregations in the, then,
American West. She and the other women started U or U congregations in
South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota. Eleven in all. It was not unusual for
her to preach at one of her nearby congregations on Sunday morning, and
another on Sunday afternoon. She would visit the far flung congregations
at least once a year, to see how they were doing.
Eventually her
health caused her to move to California, there to found a congregation
in Santa Ana and to serve as the Associate Minister at the 1st Unitarian
Church in Oakland.
On a trip back
east to visit her daughter in 1917 she died of a heart attck. She is
buried in the family plot in Sioux Falls, SD.
There are many
others I could have included in this sermon. I had to draw the line
somewhere though. I did not include Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another
strong leader of the suffrage movement. Or Dorothea Dix. Or Margaret
Fuller, who was one of the Transcendentalists, praised by Emerson and
Thoureau, who died at age 40 in a senseless accident at sea. And the
many women of the West who followed Eliza Tupper Wilkes.
I would like to
end with one other who I have talked to you about before. Julia Ward
Howe. Perhaps the most famous of all Unitarian women in the 19th Century
for the penning of one of the most famous songs of that time, the Battle
Hymn of the Republic. Set to the familiar tune of John Brown’s Body, it
became an instant hit during the Civil War and was sung everywhere the
Union Army went. She composed the lyrics in one sleepless night. In a
few minutes, we will sing it together.
We thank you,
all you women and men who have come before us, on whose shoulders we
stand. We thank you for your courage, your vision, and your absolute
refusal to take no for an answer when the cause was just. You inspire
us. Your successors to whom you have given this powerful inheritance sit
in this room, carrying your work forward. Making a difference in the
world.
Amen.
|
