A Juicy Slice of UU History: The Iowa Sisterhood

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 17, 2013

The Universalists were among the first denominations to ordain women. These women had a picture of how church should be that differed somewhat from their colleagues of the time.

The Call to Worship
by Olympia Brown

Dear Friends, stand by this faith…. Work for it and sacrifice for it…. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith… which has placed before you the loftiest ideals,… which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty and made the world beautiful for you…. Do not demand immediate results… but rejoice that you are worthy to be entrusted with this great message… and rejoice that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost…. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation.

Meditation Reading
by Olympia Brown, written 130 years ago

Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God and must share the wealth of the world…. You may say this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished,… but it is the work we are appointed to do…. Sometime, somehow, somewhere,… we must ever teach this great lesson.

Sermon: The Iowa Sisterhood

Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.

The Iowa Sisterhood is a story from the later part of the 180Os, from the Midwestern Unitarian churches.

In the Unitarian Universalist Association (what we call the UUA) today, half of our ministers are women. The beginnings of this are in the Midwestern women ministers of the late 1800s.

The Iowa Sisterhood was an informal network of 20-25 women ministers, who at one time held every major office in the Western Unitarian Conference, including President. They shaped liberal religion in the Midwest, designing and building churches to look like houses, each with a large fireplace in it, to make it more like a home. They organized over 20 churches from Iowa to Colorado, preached a radical theology that would stir controversy in most churches even today, and poured out their lives for the cause of liberal religion and womens suffrage. They read William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. Their heroes were Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Olympia Brown, the first women who were ordained in 1852, around the time most of these women were born.

In a book called Prophetic Sisterhood, author Cynthia Grant Tucker explains, they believed:

God had created the universe to run by natural laws and did not perform miracles, or intervene in people’s daily lives and that nothing was served by believing in Christ’s divinity, people’s corruption, or the Bible’s status as divine revelation.

They were, for that time, shockingly liberal compared to the more Christian tenor of the New England Unitarian’s.

Why did they emerge in Iowa? The two women who started the whole thing wee Mary Safford and Eleanor Gordon. They grew up on farms near to one another, around Hamilton, Iowa, and they were friends. The year they were born, as I said, was the year the first woman ministers in the US were ordained. In the mid-1870s, when both were in their early twenties, these two young women, sitting under an old apple tree, pledged to one another that “they would spend their lives together serving the world as a team.” Their commitment began a life-Iong devotion to their joint work and to each other. The last church they founded together was in Orlando FL in the 1920s.

Together, with the help of a nearby Unitarian minister, Oscar Clute, they organized a church in Hamilton. The success of their church attracted the attention of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, then the secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference. Jones was a radical man who was an irritant to the Unitarian Association in Boston because he pushed to separate liberal religion from its Christian roots. He felt that labeling Unitarianism as broadly Christian was too limiting, that free religion was what Unitarian had best to offer. Jones became the mentor of the women ministers, participated in their ordinations and encouraged them to recruit more women. His status before he left the American Unitarian Association, helped them, and his time and attention fueled their ministries.

In 1880 he offered Mary Safford the pastorate of the church in Humbolt Iowa. This is the time when Thomas Edison was starting his company and installing electric lights on streets and in homes. Gordon arranged to become principal of the school there, so she and Safford were able to continue working in tandem.

Some non-Unitarian members of the Board of Education were alert for evidence that their principal was teaching evolution, which they considered to a Unitarian doctrine. When Gordon told her physiology class that the opposable thumb made possible the arts of civilization, a Board member reported her. Asked to explain herself; she invited her opponent to have his thumbs immobilized for a day. “If at night he does not agree with me I will be glad to discuss the matter with him.” Her challenge was not accepted and the matter was dropped.

After a few years she became discontent with teaching, and Jones encouraged her to pursue studies for the ministry. If you will, you can, he said to her. Together, Safford and Gordon ministered in churches through out the Midwest, taking an interest In any young women who wished to advance themselves through education, often helping them financially. They brought several women into the ministry, feeling that women, especially if they were willing to remain unmarried, thus letting go of the competing responsibilities of a family, were well suited to be ministers.

Partly, the women succeeded in that time because they cast the ministry as a sensible extension of women’s roles. They spoke of themselves as “mothers of congregations who were making good homes for their families by using not only their sympathies but also their mental powers, business acumen, and understanding of world affairs beyond the kitchen and the nursery. If the conception of ministry as religious housewifery made the male clergy worry about being lesser men, it offered their sisters a change to aggrandize their womanhood by elevating the sphere that had been theirs historically.” (Tucker)

For several decades in the Western Unitarian Conference, a division had been developing between those who thought Unitarians should be identified as “broadly Christian” and Jenkin Lloyd Jones and “the Unity men,” who thought any profession unnecessarily exclusive. Believing that radical, rather than traditional, Unitaria nism offered the best hope for the advancement of women In the affairs of religion and feeling that there ought not to be a “copy-right on the word Unitarian,” at the 1886 WUC convention Gordon and other members of the Iowa Sisterhood helped defeat a motion that would have committed their movement to a liberal Christian formula. Abiel Livermore, the president of Meadville Seminary, later charged that “a company of women” had ruined the WUC. This struggle went on for years. It is still going, actually. The women did not join Jones when he split off from the Unitarian Association, though, after a vote to keep the Unitarians under the banner of the religion of Jesus.

Along with their religious voice, many of the women found their political voice as well. The group had the textbook disagreements about the ways to make change happen. Early in Eleanor Gordon’s career she had advised women to wait for evolutionary social progress to bring them political equality. In 1907, after she became President of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association, she became more militant. During her term she led a group of women who removed physical obstacles to ballot box access, started a campaign to pressure political candidates, and introduced parades and other confrontational tactics. This is the same dynamic found in civil right’s struggles both for African-Americans and for gays and lesbians. Some want to be more confrontational than others, who want to trust the system to change and evoIve. You need both kind of people, but that’s another sermon.

The story of these female ministers in the 19th century is full of courage and bravery but also of sorrow, defeat and bitterness. Not only did frontier parishioners face the problem of poverty, sickness and climate, but they were regarded as heretics of the worst kind by their orthodox neighbors, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Calvinist Congregationalists, all of whom had preceded them in the region. Non-Trinitarians were ostracized and persecuted; they were made the object of scorn at public revivals and had their businesses boycotted.(Tucker)

In 1870 there were only five female ministers in the United States. In 1890 there would be over 70 women of the approximately 101,640 Protestant clergy listed in the 1890 census. Of the seventy ordained women the Universalists had the largest number – 32; the Unitarians were next with 16 and the Methodists and Congregationalists combined for 15. After their years of service, it seems there was a feeling that, in that area, the women had taken over. Studies show that the main group feels an other group is taking over when it tops 20% of the whoIe.

Mary Safford suffered a breakdown from exhaustion. She and Eleanor Gordon had tensions in their relationship when folks gravitated more to Mary (in fact, there was a joke. What do Catholics and Unitarians have in common? They both worship the Virgin Mary. Sometimes Gordon was treated like a parish associate, sometimes her work, writing, her ideas were attributed to Mary. They suffered the scorn, not only of the non-Unitarians in their communities, but that of the mainstream Unitarian church in Boston. Especially later on, after the First World War, there was a trend in the US toward the masculinization of society, which, it was felt, had not been manly enough. The Unitarian publication, on its masthead, promised a virile religion. I can imagine ho w the women ministers felt about that. Maybe all that had to be in balance for giving women the vote. The pulpits that had been filled by women were now filled with men. Teddy Roosevelt, the rough rider, the cowboy, was elected, as he embodied all those qualities.

The last church Safford and Gordon founded was In Orlando, Florida, where Gordon served as its minister from 1910-27. They are both buried in Hamilton, Iowa.

Safford said that “true religion must first of all be ‘free’ religion, free from irrational dogma that discouraged personal growth.” She held that the human soul would evolve, not in solitude but, through community. That is what church is for. People make their common tasks divine “by doing them in the spirit of love and helpfulness.” May we make our common tasks divine. May our struggles for civil rights be divine. May we learn the perspective that comes from seeing our struggles In the broad stream of history. May we all be mothers of children, mothers of causes, mothers of our community. They had a hard road, and it wasn’t always a happy road. They did what they set out to do, but they didn’t see how much their influence undergirds our current situation. People wonder about their purpose in life, and sometimes they know, but they wonder if they accomplished that purpose. These women were successful in changing the UUA.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776