Chalice Art by Selma Blackburn

These women made a big difference in Little Rock, though their names may not have become widely known. I hope that this church will never forget them or what they did. I hope that there will be other women to rise up when other crises arise.

Other women who were Unitarians or Universalists were changing the world long before the Little Rock school crisis, while others are changing the world now or will be changing the world far ahead in the future. The following women are probably fairly familiar to most of us. Did you know they were Unitarians or Universalists?

Susan B. Anthony, was born in 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, and later lived near Rochester, NY. She was an advocate of Temperance, the abolition of slavery, as well as being one of the leading voices calling for Women’s Suffrage. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment finally gave women the right to vote.  

Elizabeth Cady Stanton(1815-1902) is believed to be the driving force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and for the next fifty years played a leadership role in the women's rights movement. Somewhat overshadowed in popular memory by her long time colleague Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was for many years the architect and author of the movement's most important strategies and documents.

Lucy Stone, on the radical edge of women's rights at the beginning of her speaking and writing career, she's usually considered a leader of the conservative wing of the suffrage movement in her later years. Her speech in 1850 converted Susan B. Anthony to the suffrage cause. The first woman from Massachusetts to earn a degree, a graduate of Oberlin college, when she married she kept her own name.

Mary Livermore was born in Boston on 19th December, 1820. As a tutor on a Virginia plantation observing the way that slaves were treated turned her into a strong opponent of slavery. She later married Daniel Livermore, a Universalist minister. A writer and editor, she did relief work during the Civil War, joining the U.S. Sanitary Commission in Chicago. Along with Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, Livermore co-edited The Women's Journal (1870-72). A founding member of the American Woman Suffrage Association, Livermore was president of the organization between 1875 and 1878. Livermore was also one of the leaders of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).  Mary Livermore died in Melrose, Massachusetts, on 23rd May, 1905.

Julia Ward Howe was an ardent feminist, abolitionist, and mother of six children. She was a founder of the New England Suffrage Association. She was one of the leaders of the American Woman Suffrage Association. She wrote the poem, which later was set to music, Battle Hymn of the Republic, and was president of the American branch of the Women's International Peace Association. She first proposed Mother’s Day as a day for women to join in opposition to war.

Florence Nightingale, born May 12, 1820, was a lifelong Unitarian. She revolutionized the care of the sick and the wounded. Because of her efforts to reform hospitals, nursing became an honored calling.

Universalist, Clara Barton was born on Christmas day, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts. She began teaching school at the age of 16 and in 1852 founded the first free public school in the state of New Jersey. In 1864 she was appointed Superintendent of Nurses for the Army. After the war, she established an office that located 25,000 missing soldiers, living and dead. She worked with the International Red Cross during the Franco‑Prussian War and then came home and campaigned long and hard to have the U. S. become a signer of the Geneva Convention to establish the American Red Cross. Congress finally signed the Convention establishing the Red Cross in 1881, and Clara Barton ran the organization until 1904, when she was 83 years old.

Born in 1821, Elizabeth Blackwell served as a teacher in Kentucky and the Carolinas as she sought to fulfill her dream. After many rejections, she was accepted and graduated first in her class from the Geneva, New York, Medical College in 1849, the first modern woman doctor. She died in London in 1910, where she had served as professor of gynecology for over 30 years.

Dorothea Dix  was born April 4, 1802. a Unitarian known for her work to improve conditions for prisoners and the mentally ill. She began teaching school at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1816, at the age of 14. At the age of 33 her health failed, and so she was forced to stop teaching. In 1841 she went as a volunteer to teach a Sunday School class in the East Cambridge Jail. There she was horrified to find the prisoners and the mentally ill all housed together under inhuman conditions. That experience launched her into campaigns which resulted in a complete revolution in the care of the men­tally ill.

Mary Woolstonecraft, a Unitarian born in 1759, has been called the "mother of feminism." Her book-length essay on women's rights, and especially on women's education, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a classic of feminist thought.

Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, became the first female foreign correspondent and the first book review editor in the U.S. under Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune.

Emily Dickinson born in 1830, was an American lyrical poet, and an obsessively private writer -- only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of 23 and devoted herself in secret into writing. Her writing deeply influenced modern style.

Louisa May Alcott, beloved author of Little Women and various other books, was born November 29, 1832 and died March 6, 1888

And in more recent days, do you remember Samantha Smith, the young UU girl who wrote a peace letter to Andropov and visited the USSR, then died in a tragic plane crash in 1985at the age of 12?

Any astronomers or astrophysicists out there?   Did you know that a Unitarian woman was the 1^st person – man or woman – to earn a Ph.d. from the Harvard College Observatory?

She achieved this amazing feat in 1925.

Her name was

CECILIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN.  (1900-1980)

 ( from article by Heather Miller, Author and Editor)

We’re told that when Cecilia Payne was five years old, she saw a meteor and immediately decided to become an astronomer: "I was seized with panic at the thought that everything might be found out before I was old enough to begin," wrote Payne-Gaposchkin at the end of her life.   

Mrs G’s (that’s what she was called) enthusiasm for science and math was not in keeping with her English upper-class girl's education, which strongly favored literary interests. In her autobiography The Dyer's Hand, she recalled that "When I won a coveted prize ... I was asked what book I would choose to receive. It was considered proper to select Milton, or Shakespeare. . . .I said I wanted a textbook on fungi. I was deaf to all expostulation: that was what I wanted, and in the end I got it, elegantly bound in leather as befitted a literary giant.

She studied at Cambridge, but realized that her career, as a woman, of course,  opportunities in England were going to be limited to teaching… so we’re told:

After completing her studies at Cambridge, Payne became a doctoral student at Harvard in 1924. The rich store of astronomical records at the Harvard Observatory, and the presence of a community of astronomers, created a nirvana for Payne from which she would never leave. In 1925, a brisk two years after her arrival in the United States, she became the first student, male or female, to earn a Ph.D. from the Harvard College Observatory.   

We’re told that Mrs. G was a many-sided personality known for her wit, her literary knowledge, and for her personal friendships with individual stars. She became the first woman in the history of Harvard University to receive a corporation appointment with tenure, and the first woman department chair in 1956.

A September 1956 article in The Christian Register published by the American Unitarian Association, announced her appointment and described her as a member of the denomination's First Parish and Church in Lexington, Massachusetts.

In her autobiography, The Dyer's Hand, she describes a career marked with slow promotions and low salaries. What sustained her were her intellectual interests and the rewards of her work. She wrote, "I simply went on plodding, rewarded by the beauty of the scenery towards an unexpected goal."

                   Her words to scientists of her time, I believe has much to say to us today – as we think about how we might live our lives.    She says this:

 "Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other."

          Now,  just one more woman, who I, personally consider a personal hero…a great friend of the planet, and not all that different from you and me.  I hope many of you have heard of,  have read her books – or have actually heard her speak in person at the 2003 General Assembly:

Frances Moore Lappé is author or co-author of fourteen books, including the three-million-copy bestseller Diet for a Small Planet. The co-founder of two national organizations that focus on food and the roots of democracy, in 1987 she became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award. Her most recent book is You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004).

Frances Moore Lappé grew up in the 1950s in Fort Worth, TX, a proud child of UU parents. Upon returning home from attending a bible class in a local Baptist Church one day, she asked her parents, "What does hell fire and damnation mean?" Her parents answered, "It means it's time to start a Unitarian Fellowship." And they did.

She says this:

”As a young woman in the 1960s, I awakened to the tragedy of global hunger. I was determined to share my startling discovery that hunger is needless. There is more than enough food in the world for all to thrive; and, since hunger is made by human beings, we have the power to end it. With this message, my first book, Diet for a Small Planet hit the stands in 1971, and I quickly learned I had a lot of company. Millions of others were seeking ways to link their lives, their everyday choices, to create the world we want.

She says:   “We all share this small planet whose fate is in our hands. Do we choose life or do we choose death? Do we choose fear or do we choose hope? Given the choice, no one would choose fear.”

          And she continues:

 “I’m now re-writing The Quickening of America – to help people fight despair and learn from living democracy emerging in America. It will be published with a new title by Jossey-Bass in 2005. Working alongside me on two critical chapters is my daughter Anna Lappé and helping overall is TeamDemocracy, young researchers exploring together the most vital examples of citizen problem solving. Once the book is out, we will make our TeamDemocracy research easily accessible on our website.

Over these 30-plus years I have experienced our world moving rapidly in two directions at once. In one direction I see heightened violence, polarization, environmental devastation and fear. In the other, people are manifesting cooperation with each other and with nature in ways so rich I could never have imagined them possible when I began my journey. As never before on our small planet, we humans can see a clear choice. Choosing hope to me means choosing to act. One thing for sure I’ve learned in these three decades is that hope is not what we find in evidence; it is what we become in action. “

I want to repeat that:

“hope is not what we find in evidence; it is what we become in action."

          … A contemporary example of a UU woman quietly using her own gifts and talents to contribute to the health and healing of our planet.

          She also says this:

Hope is another word for the divine. It is contagious. Our planet needs it.

These Unitarian, Universalist, and UU women we have remembered today are an inspiration for all of us, male and female alike. These women each had a vision of a better world and they sought to make it a reality. Some did not live to see the fruition of their dreams, hard work, and tears; but the world did change for the better because of what they did. The world we live in still provides plenty of challenges for us. In our nation, and around the world, there are gaping chasms between rich and poor, there remain all too frequent occurrences of racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism. There remain huge ecological problems yet to be addressed around the world.  All these challenges remain for this and future generations.

These and so many other women pioneers have helped to build greater equality, to move us closer to a world in which all persons will be recognized for their inherent worth and treated with dignity. These women and so many others suffered much on the course of their life journeys as they sought truth and meaning in a world dominated by the old boys networks. They have broken down barriers for women and minorities and have helped to create a greater level of justice, equality, and compassion in the world. Was their Unitarian and/or Universalist faith a motivating factor for their exception contributions?

We live in difficult times, and there are many in our society and around the world who would curtail the rights of women and minorities. We live in a world ever more aware of our interconnections and interdependence, and yet there are those who would force us back under the control of antiquated and oppressive religious ideas, who would breach the separating barrier between church and state. Just as our Unitarian women took the lead in Little Rock when the schools were closed, again and again strong creative women have helped move society forward. As we affirm our Unitarian Universalist Principles, especially our belief in the inherent worth of all human beings, may we women and men alike, be inspired and challenged to use our own individual talents and gifts to create a better world.

Blessed Be!

Information compiled from multiple books on UU History, and websites including UU historical sites accessed through UUA.org,  Harvard Square Library 2, National Park Service sites, Women’s History Project, etc.