Features: December 2006

Reflections from the Past on Division, Unity, Property, and Vows by Vernon Broyles

Women in the Church: The Story Goes On by Presbyterian Historical Society staff

Blame and Excuse by Cathy Ulrich

Good Days and Bad Days by Joan Gray

Human Rights Day 2006 by Presbyterian Peacemaking Program

Christmas Message 2006 by World Council of Churches

Past Issues

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Women of the Church: The Story Goes On

by the Presbyterian Historical Society Staff

As we close out the year in which we celebrated 300 years of Presbyterian history, let us remember that 2006 also marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the ordination of women as deacons, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first women elders, and the fiftieth anniversary of the first woman ordained to the ministry of the Word and Sacrament . Initially, women held no official position in the young American Presbyterian church. But women found a way to serve, and we honor those women who have followed God’s will and shared their time, talents, and lives with others.

A small sampling of these individuals includes Isabella Marshall Graham, an eighteenth-century pioneer in female and childhood education. Married at age twenty-three, widowed and pregnant at age thirty-one, Graham soon turned to teaching as a way to support her family. From Antigua to Scotland, and finally in New York, Graham, and later her daughter Joanna Bethune, formed schools for female education.

By the 1830s and 1840s, women began serving as missionaries for the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) in foreign countries and in the American west. Louisa Lowrie (1809-1833), an early missionary to India, stated in her journal, “It is now my purpose, if the Lord permit, to go to heathen lands. This undertaking does not appear distressing to me, but awfully responsible.”

Born to missionary parents in Syria, Mary Pierson Eddy (1864-1923) decided that “my chosen life work at twelve years of age was that of a medical missionary.” After her medical training in Philadelphia and New York, Eddy applied for appointment as a PCUSA medical missionary in 1892. A year later, she became the first woman certified to practice medicine in the Turkish Empire.

For missionaries on the home front, life on the frontier was lonely, spartan, and often dangerous. Narcissa Whitman (1808-1847), with her husband Marcus and others, traveled across the continent to serve as missionaries in Oregon. In 1847, Native Americans killed the Whitmans and several others, blaming them for a measles epidemic that decimated the native population, but left white missionaries untouched.

As Presbyterians moved into the Southwest, they found two distinct communities, Native Americans and Roman Catholic Mexicans. By 1878, the Woman’s Executive Committee of Home Missions of the PCUSA dedicated its efforts to financing and overseeing mission schools among what they called “exceptional populations.”

As these women missionaries traveled across the country, they faced different languages, foreign traditions, and hostile religious leaders. One example is Alice Hyson who in 1884 traveled to Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. Initially sent to teach for a short term, she served the Spanish-speaking mission field for thirty-two years. Later, Presbyterian missionaries such as Donaldina Cameron (1869–1968) reached out to newly arrived Asian immigrants by organizing mission churches, settlement houses, and Sunday schools. Cameron worked for almost forty years at the Presbyterian Mission House in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

In the late nineteenth century, the role of women in society began to change, as did the role of women in the church. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church led the way with the 1889 ordination of Louisa Woolsey as the first woman Presbyterian minister, although the Cumberland General Assembly refused to recognize her ordination for two decades.

In 1930, the General Assembly amended the PCUSA’s constitution to allow the ordination of women as elders. In 1956, Margaret Towner became the first ordained woman minister in the PCUSA; in 1965, Rachel Henderlite became the first in the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

The way was not easy for these trailblazers, as it was not easy for their missionary forebears. “I have met those who ignore the validity of my calling and those who ridicule,” June Kathryn Stansbery stated in her 1982 interview for the Oral History Program for Clergywomen, “yet among all the naysayers, there are those who offer the blessing and the encouragement…. These are the gifts that keep me going. The story goes on.”

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