Attention all campus ministers,
youth workers, student chaplains, and assorted colleagues who work with young
people: A number of leading women in the Protestant world began their work in
and around the student movements. Their lives show that your work lasts
forever!
Sara M. Evans’ edited volume Journeys that Opened Up the World: Women,
Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1855-1975, (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003) includes many of their stories.
It is dedicated to Ruth Harris who was its “organizer and cheerleader” when the
authors met in person and on the phone to reflect on their lives. Ruth
Harris, a longtime feminist colleague who worked very effectively in the
United Methodist Church, died recently well into her 90s. Looking at her life
and her impact on others made me think about how early influences endure
through a lifetime. For many women in religion, experiences in various student
movements were formative in ways that shaped their careers and contributions to
the world.
Ruth was born in Nebraska in 1920.
She studied music, and then applied to the Women’s Division of the Methodist
Board of Missions to become a teacher. She trained at Scarritt College, a
women’s school in Nashville that prepared students for domestic and foreign
church work. Her church work began in China in 1947 and continued through
active participation in the civil rights movement.
She served the United Methodist
Church both in the Women’s Division on student issues and later for the Board
of Missions as first executive secretary of University World. She was a tireless
supporter of the World Student Christian
Federation (WSCF) and one of the guiding forces behind the development of
the Methodist Mission Intern Program. Countless young people got their
ecumenical starts in programs and projects in which she was active.
Ruth Harris was a modest giant
among women at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City, the Interchurch Center,
where many of the mainline Protestant churches had their headquarters for
decades in the twentieth century. Some are still there. The stories of the
early women in those bureaucracies deserve a book that I hope someone will take
on soon while there are still people to interview.
The great United Church of Christ
leader Valerie Russell,
Executive Director of the United Church of Christ's Office for Church in
Society and former head of the City Mission Society of Boston, got her start in
the YWCA. She became the assistant to Dorothy Height who was
head of the National Council of Negro Women. They and many other YWCA women put
eradicating racism at the top of their agenda. Val Russell, a lay leader like
Ruth Harris and so many others before the ordination of women really caught on,
died at age 56 after a career fuller than many who live to riper ages. She
touched many young women’s hearts and minds. Her story is in the book thanks to
Letty Russell’s writing.
Margaret
Flory was a Presbyterian wonder who has written books
of her own. She worked in that church’s bureaucracy starting the Junior
Year Abroad, Frontier Internship in Mission, and Bi-National Service groups.
Her ecclesial offspring are legion, her influence profound around the world
which is more tightly connected because of her work. I met her when I was
appointed to the Frontier Internship Program in the late 1970s. Ruth Harris was
the Methodist funder of that “experiment in mission” which sent so-called “creative
young Christians” (we FIs debated each term!) to places where the Protestant
churches did not have missions. Margaret liked that I was the first Catholic
participant. My years as an FI in Argentina turned me into a global citizen and
an ecumenical, later interreligious, stalwart.
I thought of these women when I
attended a recent SCM-USA 2013 National Leadership Conference in Chevy Chase, MD (suburban Washington, DC).
Young colleagues came from around the U.S. and abroad for a long weekend of
training and strategizing. One SCM colleague from India shared her region’s
work. These seminary and college women and men are revitalizing that movement
in ways that I predict will catch fire. Professor Rebecca Todd Peters led off the speakers with a presentation on
contemporary ethical challenges.
Senior Friends of the WSCF met together and with the students over the same
weekend to talk about ways of supporting this important work. One concrete expression
was the donation of copies of the Journeys
book to each student so that they could link their own journeys with those
who went before them. Several Senior Friends, notably Alice Hageman, a retired feminist
minister and lawyer, and Jim Palm, retired longtime director of the Stony Point
Center, told poignant stories of own rich histories of involvement in this
movement for peace and justice and how it shaped their lives
I was struck by the comments of one young gay man who spoke of problems
in a local student group over his sexuality. I was happy to point out to him
that of sixteen authors in the Journeys book
I could assure him that at least five, and probably more, were lesbians. They
include the incomparable Charlotte Bunch, who
cut her justice teeth on the student movement in the 1960s, founded the Center
for Women’s Global Leadership, and went on to receive the Eleanor Roosevelt
Award for Human Rights from President Bill Clinton. I alerted this young man and
the rest of the group to the fact that they follow in the large footsteps of
powerful, many of them ‘out’, women.
Read the book to see how many of the women pioneers trace their roots to
Ecumenical Student Conferences in Athens, Ohio, or to YWCA sponsored antiracism
events. Lots of links to Duke University in the 1960s and 1970s make clear that
some campus pastors there were on the job. Duke alum Nancy D. Richardson tells
about the influence of the YWCA and related progressive groups on her
formation. She became involved in campus ministry and student services at
Boston and Harvard Universities. She was one of the founding co-directors of
the Women’s Theological Center (WTC), which in turn shaped dozens of women in
the field into feminist activists/academics.
The threads are interwoven as people meet one another, begin to read and
discuss the same authors, take courage and example from one other’s activism.
Today’s dynamics are similar. Plus, we have technological possibilities our
foresisters never dreamed about. One especially fun, creative example was the
thirtieth birthday conference (yes a real conference) that my friend Emily Goodstein, held
at Hillel at George Washington University. It was informative, imaginative, and
did I say fun with extra funds and donations going to Planned Parenthood of
Metropolitan Washington, DC on whose board the celebrant serves.
Take heart that today the digital, Skype, Webcast, and even in-person
meetings that religious leaders develop for and with young people are shaping
lives for the long run. If they are half as successful as the amazing people
and events that preceded them we are in good shape as a world.
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