The 1800s were a time of migration in this country.
Perhaps we remember it best as the time of Western expansion and manifest destiny.
It was a time when progressive and forward thinking people were leaving the East to start new lives out on the prairies of the upper Midwest.
People like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, were leaving the East to find greater religious freedom and toleration out in the newly opened territories and states.
Some of the great experiments in utopian living such as the Amana and Oneida communities, as well as the Universalist Hopewell community founded by the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou, were reaching their greatest popularity.
In 1865 the Western Unitarian Conference was formed as an organizing body for the churches in the Midwest. Quickly it became a far more radical organization than anything found in the east.
Under the leadership of Jenkin Lloyd Jones the Western Conference became the standard bearer for the radical liberal version of Unitarianism that soon flourished in that region.
Under Jones's leadership the Western Conference drafted a statement of belief titled "The Things Most Commonly Believed Today Among Us." This document include wording such as:
We believe that to love the good and to live the good is the supreme thing in religion.
We hold reason and conscience to be the final authorities in matters of religion.
We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good....
We revere Jesus and all holy souls that have taught us truth and righteousness and love.
Beyond these sweeping statements the Conference refused to define itself as Christian.
In fact, it had refused to make any form of theism a requirement for fellowship, and thus there were in many of the western congregations agnostics, as well as, atheists who came together over a shared concern for the moral and ethical qualities of life.
This period of the mid- nineteenth century also coincided with the first wave of feminism in our country.
Out of such social movements as temperance, abolition and women suffrage emerged a group of women who were attracted to the Unitarian acceptance of reason and "righteous love".
These women aspired to ordination within the Unitarian movement and soon many of them became the voice of liberal religion in the upper Midwest until after World War I.
The presence of women in the professional ministry was controversial and their status was ambiguous.
Cynthia Grant Tucker observes in her work The Prophetic Sisterhood, that many of the women were "called only to the small or shakier congregations that men would not take, often married to ministers whose position obscured or reduced their own, and regarded by the denominational leadership as a blotch on their image and best kept on the organizational sidelines, the women in ministry were a largely unnoticed presence whose existence came to be known primarily through the efforts of a still smaller group who banded together on the frontier in the 1880s and 1890s and became known as the western Sisterhood."
These generally young women, along with their male sympathizers like Jones, soon altered the staid Unitarianism of old New England.
They had new ideas concerning church architecture, the organization and purpose of congregations, and the roles and responsibilities of ministers. They were deeply committed to their liberal religious values as well as the cause of greater civil rights for all women.
They were engaged in spreading the loving and progressive message of Unitarianism in a region where more conservative Protestant religions had strong roots.
The best known among this group of 21 female ministers were Eleanor Gordon and Mary Safford.
Gordon, who served congregations in Sioux City, Iowa, Fargo, North Dakota and Des Moines, was born in Illinois. She attended both the University of Iowa and Cornell University.
Much of Gordon's ministerial work centered around organizing churches, forming new congregations and campaigning for greater educational opportunities for all women.
As one biographer noted she deplored the "distinct trend in both the professional and industrial world against a woman's place in both."
Mary Safford, a close friend of Gordon's, was outspoken in her belief that women could make an important contribution to the ministry.
Unlike Gordon who spent her energy in local churches, Safford became engaged in denominational affairs, serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Unitarian Association and as the director of the Women's Unitarian Conference.
She was a strong community organizer and fundraiser. In all she assisted in establishing over ten Unitarian churches.
Often Stafford and Gordon worked side-by-side taking on many of the important issues of life on the prairies. Tucker says of their ministry:
"They were regarded as heretics of the worst kind by their orthodox neighbors, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists and Calvinist congregations.
Nontrinitarians were ostracized and persecuted; they were made the object of scorn at public revivals and had their businesses boycotted."
Nonetheless, they worked hard to bring a message of hope to the people in their communities.
They saw themselves, as reformers, teachers and they wanted to be recognized for their own accomplishments in ministry.
As religious reformers they worked to "demystify" the pulpit and bring their message of love and community closer to the people in the pews.
While they might use Biblical texts as the basis for their sermons, they would often resort to current events and history.
Many of these women had begun their professional lives as teachers and they maintained that a sermon did "far greater good as a teaching instrument if it stirred deep thought and was based on the best of modern scientific thought."
They also sought to emphasize the importance of life passages. They were among the first to offer child dedication services in which the minister spoke directly to the parents and had them pledge to give their children the best homes they could.
Their simple, but elegant, ritual was to place a white rose in the infant's hand, to sprinkle a few drops of well water on their heads and pray that each would feel God's love through the love of their families and church.
The sisterhood was also one of the earliest groups of ministers to remove the word "obey" from the wedding ceremony, "pointing out that it was demeaning for any adult person to be expected to pledge blind obedience and agree to be given away like a piece of property."
Again, as Cynthia Tucker tells us," At no time were the ministers more attentive to the importance of family than when they conducted a funeral or memorial service.... By rejecting the concepts of hell and damnation and stressing the ongoing progress of every soul, their religion made 'salvation' accessible to everyone.
The women ministers strove to create a sense of family among church members and they worked to develop a sense among their parishioners that the church was not just a place for worship, but also a place for learning and mutual support.
In the construction of their buildings they sought to have their churches resemble private homes more than sterile institutions by including parlors, kitchens and classrooms. All told the sisterhood built 15 new churches—some with seating for over 300 congregants.
But in spite of the apparent success out on the prairie, there was an ongoing tension between the women and the Unitarian leadership in Boston and this tension came to a head during the early 1900s.
This confrontation came at a time when national sentiment was turning to a renewed sense of vitality and masculinity in sports, politics and government, and many in the Unitarian leadership back in Boston felt that their own perceived loss of status and prominence was due to the number of women in the ministry.
In an attempt to steer women away from ordination, Samuel Elliot, then President of the American Unitarian Association pressed for the establishment of a "school for Parish Assistants" where women could learn to be Sunday school teachers, visitors in the homes of the sick and elderly, and general program coordinators.
Access to pulpits was so severely restricted that one young woman wrote to a friend that the church Boston had encouraged to apply to had already locked its doors and had gone bankrupt.
And finally as the times changed and society changed, Unitarians shifted their focus from the frontier, preferring to support the establishment of new churches near universities and in large cities.
Tucker observes that, "To this (increasingly) exiled sisterhood, it was obvious that the church had become not stronger, but only weaker, by keeping its women in inferior roles, excluding them from the pulpits and boards and other positions of real leadership...
Failing to see that the only true test of a "manly religion" was women's equality in it, the church had effectively alienated it most devoted and talented women, who then had no choice but to turn to the secular world for a place to do ministry."
By the early 1920 the prophetic sisterhood had become a memory and within 30 years there were no ordained Unitarian women in the ministry.
I suppose this could have been the end of the story but fortunately it isn't.
Today, in most mainstream denominations female clergy remain a minority in almost every area of church life.
Although some observers may lament that "women are getting all the best jobs for political reasons," the numbers indicate that clergy women remain significantly underpaid and underemployed relative to men.
Women are more likely to be part-time, to leave parish ministry, and to be in specialized ministries.
However, if we look at women as a percentage of all ordained clergy in a particular denomination, the Unitarian-Universalist Association has the highest percentage of women in their clergy workforce.
The Southern Baptist Convention, which has formally adopted resolutions against the ordination of women, has the smallest.
The first woman ordained in the United States was the Universalist, Olympia Brown who received the right hand of fellowship in 1863 and by the late 1890s the Unitarians and the Universalists had ordained approximately 70 women.
By the 1920s, the number of ordained Unitarian Universalist women had risen to 130 only to fall off sharply, as the story of the Prophetic Sisterhood acknowledges, so that by the late 1950s there were no settled female Unitarian parish ministers and only three female Universalist ministers.
Ten years later, following the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists the situation for women in the ministry began once again to improve so that by the end of the 1960s there were 21 women in parish ministries.
Beginning early in the 1970s the tide turned dramatically and by 1978 there were 57 settled female ministers, and by the late 1980s there were 276 women in parish ministry. By the year 2000 over 50 per cent of all settled UU ministers were women.
While I was in seminary, I came to have a great deal of respect for many people.
I respected and admired the students from Korea who arrived in September with limited English proficiency and immediately found themselves in courses with difficult theological and Biblical ideas presented only in English.
I came to have respect for the married students who had often moved to Washington with their families and were living in the very cramped married student quarters and their children found themselves displaced from old friends and neighborhoods and enrolled in new schools.
I came to have respect for both the very young students—those fresh out of college—who struggled to have the same credibility as those of us who were entering the ministry from previous careers.
And I had great respect for the students who came to seminary in their seventies and in one case eighties because it had always been their dream.
But perhaps the people I respected the most were the women from denominations that do recognize the ordination of women.
These women were completing all of the requirements for their divinity degrees knowing only too well that upon graduation there would be no jobs for them.
These women felt as deep call to the ministry as their peers in more open denominations. They survived on the idea that some day in some place they would be able to preach from the same pulpits as their male colleagues.
Among these women were African-American students who belonged to some of the more traditional black churches who hold that preaching is a career open only to men.
And there were Baptist women, who knew that their chances of being called to a church were slim at best.
I remember one evening sitting in the Wesley Seminary chapel as a young black woman took her place in the elevated pulpit and proceeded to give one of the best sermons I had ever heard.
On the way out of the chapel I overheard her say to a companion, "That is something I would never be able to do in my own church."
Her comment underscores the reality of the following statement concerning women in the ministry taken from an evangelical website:
"God has ordained that only men are to serve in positions of spiritual teaching authority in the church." states one commentator on the role of women in the church.
This is not because men are necessarily better teachers, or because women are inferior or less intelligent. It is simply the way God designed the church to function. Men are to set the example in spiritual leadership - in their lives and through their words.
Women are to take a less authoritative role. Women are encouraged to teach other women. The Bible also does not restrict women from teaching children.
The only activity women are restricted from is teaching or having spiritual authority over men.
This does not make women less important, by any means, but rather gives them a ministry focus more in agreement with how God has gifted them."
I hope that in time gender discrimination in all of our churches will become as abhorrent to the public as racism.
I hope that in time all denominations will come under increased pressure to conform to non-sexist secular standards in choosing their ministers.
I hope that all faith groups will be expected to evaluate candidates for ordination, not on the basis of an accident of birth, but on the basis of the candidate's knowledge, sense of call, personality, commitment, ability, etc -- but not on the basis of gender.
I hope the time comes soon when religious institutions come to be perceived by the general public as answering to a lower ethical standard than the rest of society—causing their credibility to be diminished.
In our Unitarian Universalist tradition we are witness to the power that women bring to our ministry and to the world and we are also witness to just how easily this power can be taken away.
In our Unitarian Universalist tradition we are a witness to what women can achieve when they enjoy equal access to education, fair employment practices and equal pay for equal work.
But we are also a witness to the oppression that still holds women back in so many professions.
Therefore let us recommit ourselves to supporting women of all faith traditions in their quest to be recognized as having equal stature with men.
For as the poet Judy Chicago has written:
Then, and only then, will all that has divided us merge and softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind; and then both women and men will be gentle; and then both women and men will be strong; and then no person will be subject to another's will; and then...and then healing will begin.
Amen and blessed be
And then all that has divided us will merge† Create inclusive and accountable church