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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Processing the Papers of Women Religious Figures: The Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship (AWTS) Project
by Claire McCurdy, Leslie Reyman, and Letitia Campbell
On a hot July 29, 1974, eleven Episcopal women known as the "Philadelphia Eleven" were "irregularly" ordained to the priesthood by three retired bishops at the Church of the Advocate in innercity Philadelphia. This controversial ordination was not authorized by the Episcopal hierarchy. Gathered from the fringes of society, women, African-Americans, and supporters of human rights and women's ordination, the crowd of 2,000 waited in expectation. As the laying on of hands was carried out, the crowd burst into cheers.
Philadelphia Eleven Ordination Services, Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia, PA, July 29, 1974. Photograph from the Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
However, not everyone in the Anglican Communion was overjoyed. The ordination set into motion a series of events that would transform the official policies of the Episcopal Church-but after an intense struggle. It was not until the General Convention in 1976 that the Episcopal Church voted to officially open the priesthood and episcopate to women, after having first attempted to declare the Eleven's ordinations invalid and having prohibited the newly ordained priests from exercising their priestly functions.
Several of the Philadelphia Eleven have published recollections of the 1974 ordinations. The Suzanne Hiatt Papers and the Carter Heyward Papers, both collections of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission-funded Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship (AWTS) Project of Union Theological Seminary's Burke Library, are richly informative about the weeks and months leading up to the ordinations, the service itself, and the ensuing controversy.
It was Philadelphia Eleven ordinand Carter Heyward whose face made the cover of Ms. magazine as "Woman of the Year." Upon being denied her priestly rights, Heyward remarked "When you admit women into the mysteries-into the holy places-of a society, you have posed to men's traditional superiority the ultimate threat. You have invaded the last refuge. And they fight back. . . . we didn't anticipate the level of the anger. We didn't dream, I suppose, that we would seem such a threat."1
Suzanne Hiatt was the chief architect of the Episcopal women's ordination movement. A close friend commented, "Without Sue Hiatt, there would have been no Philadelphia ordination, and perhaps no ordination of women in the Episcopal Church for many years to come. If modern church history does not disregard the lives and well-being of women, Sue Hiatt will be remembered as the 'bishop to the women,' consecrated by her sisters' strong need to be taken seriously and by her own remarkable pastoral gifts."2
Hiatt says that the Philadelphia ordination was intended to make it more trouble not to ordain women than to ordain them. "In retrospect, to have been ordained 'irregularly' is the only way for women to have done it," reflects Hiatt. "Our ordination was on our terms, not the church's terms, it was not accepted as a gift from the church but taken as a right from God."3
Carter Heyward and Suzanne Hiatt, Philadelphia Eleven Ordination Services, Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia, PA, July 29, 1974. Photograph from the Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
A number of AWTS collections contain materials related to the Philadelphia Eleven, the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church, and the ecumenical impact of the event. In addition to the Suzanne Hiatt and Carter Heyward Papers, these collections include the Patricia Wilson-Kastner Papers, the Patricia Donohue Papers, and the International Association of Women Ministers Collection.
Among the AWTS collections that form a useful contrast to those of the 1970s struggle for ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven is the records of the International Association of Women Ministers (IAWM), the world's oldest organization for ordained women. Organized in 1919 in St. Louis as The International Association of Women Preachers, it is the only national, interdenominational professional organization of clergy that has ever existed in the United States. Until the 1970s, when women clergy began to organize more actively within mainline Protestant denominations, the IAWM was the primary source of support for isolated women ministers. An April 1923 issue of the organization's periodical, The Woman's Pulpit, explains the IAWM's mission:
The original purpose was to bring women who preach into fellowship with each other, and this has been most happily accomplished in many, many instances. . . .
Another purpose . . . was to secure equal opportunity for women in the ecclesiastical world. Our Association can honestly claim the obtaining of the license for women to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church as a direct result of its work. . . . [Furthermore,] Through the publicity man of one denomination . . . thousands of items concerning women's preaching have been published. None of us had intended this publicity but 'it has fallen out to the furtherance of the Gospel,' as all such notions accustom people to the idea and this breaks down prejudice, our greatest hindrance.
The third purpose as stated in our constitution is to encourage young women whom God has called to preach.4
Additional materials related to the IAWM are found in the papers of Barbara Brown Zikmund, who researched the group and acted as its archivist, and those of Joan Brown Campbell, a member of IAWM.
What is the AWTS Project? The Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship (AWTS) Project at Union Theological Seminary, funded by the NHPRC from June 2000 through November 2001, has as its mission to collect and make available for research precisely the kinds of collections mentioned above-"to serve as the living memory/documentary repository for materials pertaining to Christian women's contributions to, and movements for, progressive religious and social change by identifying, preserving and making available for use the movements' permanently valuable records."
Ordination of Jeannette Piccard, Philadelphia Eleven Ordination Services, Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia, PA, July 29, 1974. Photograph from the Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
The primary objective of the AWTS is to collect and provide physical and intellectual access to the personal papers and unpublished scholarly works of leading women in theological scholarship and the records of related organizations. As a result of the Project, descriptions of the collections will be available to the research public through the AWTS web site, http://www.uts.columbia.edu/projects./AWTS/index.html, and through the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN).
Why is such a documentation strategy needed? There is nothing like the Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship available in the United States to researchers or the church at large-not in repositories of women's history, in seminaries, nor in denominational archives. The context of the AWTS is partially rooted in the legacy of historical events such as the secular women's movement. The story of Christian women's contributions to progressive religious and social change must also be documented. The AWTS will provide an effective opportunity to redress an imbalance in archival collections, not only of the lack of records concerning the lives of women, but of progressive Christian women whose lives have yet to be chronicled.
The documentation strategy project of the AWTS began during the 1997-98 academic year. The first year was made financially possible through funding from the E. James Rhodes and Leona M. Carpenter Foundation, an allocation from the Friends of the Burke Library, a donation from the Chair of the Union Theological Seminary Board of Directors, and gifts from several philanthropists.
The second and third years, generously funded by the NHPRC, have resulted in the survey, appraisal, and accessioning of 22 collections. Within this group, 12 have been arranged and described, with finding aids for each collection. The processed collections include those of:
- Catholic religious educator Mary Boys
- Baptist ecumenical leader Joan Brown Campbell
- Catholic ethicist Christine Gudorf
- Episcopal priest and theologian Carter Heyward
- Episcopal priest and scholar Suzanne Hiatt
- the International Association of Women Ministers, an international ecumenical organization
- Episcopal priest and scholar Patricia Wilson Kastner
- writer and reporter Patricia Konstam
- the Re-Imagining Community, a national ecumenical organization
- Baptist Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible
- Episcopalian professor of psychiatry and religion Ann Ulanov
- and seminary president and United Church of Christ historian Barbara Brown Zikmund.
Themes addressed in these collections include feminist interpretation of the Bible; the Jewish-Christian dialogue; the interconnection between psychiatry and religion; the effort to establish Christian unity towards justice and peace; the relationship between ethics, religion, and development; theological education; the ecumenical dialogue between Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and Methodists; the ordination of women; and the status of women in religion as a whole.
Accessioning and processing of additional recently accessioned collections will continue through 2005 under the Burke Library's newly received Lilly Endowment grant to revitalize the Library.
Claire McCurdy, Leslie Reyman, and Letitia Campbell are the staff of the Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship (AWTS) Project of the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York City.
Notes:
- Frances Moore. "Carter Heyward: one year after the ordination . . . " Charlotte Observer, 30 July 1975. Carter Heyward Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
- "The Reverend Dr. Suzanne R. Hiatt/primus inter pares." Forward, The 1994 Kellogg Lecture Planning Committee, 6 May 1994. Suzanne Hiatt Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
- Suzanne Hiatt Interview. Philadelphia Eleven Papers. Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
- The Woman's Pulpit, April 1923, p. 3. International Association of Women Ministers Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary.
