YOURS FOR THE GOOD CAUSE
Jan. 13, 2008 Summit UU Fellowship
Rev. Kathleen A. Green
“It was late afternoon and the little lighthouse of Fort Point was in sight. With a south wind blowing, strong and steady, it was the best of combinations for travel up the treacherous river. The young girl had shrunk deeper into the heavily curtained window seat where she had curled up with a book. Old far beyond her years, she was fully aware of the tensions in her family. “I never knew childhood,” the young girl was known to say.
Dorothea Dix was born in a tiny village of Maine in 1802. Her family was dependent on the scant donations from her father’s itinerant preaching and the proceeds from sales of his printed sermons and tracts. He produced these endlessly. Dorothea had to sleep on the attic floor of their small cabin. From the time she was old enough to hold a needle; Dorothea had to sit all day pushing a difficult needle through heavy folded paper, stitching the religious tracts for her father to sell.
Her father was thought to be an alcoholic and away from home most of the time. Her mother suffered from depression, unable to cope with the daily problems of an impoverished existence; creating a dismal home for little Dorothea and her younger brothers.
Dorothea made the decision to leave home at the age of twelve, to live with relatives in Massachusetts. At just fourteen years of age, Dorothea Dix opened her first school for young children. It wasn’t long after that she became involved in the Unitarian Church. She was a close friend of famous Unitarian Boston minister, William Ellery Channing.
A young John Nichols, studying for the ministry at Harvard Divinity School, was one of a group of students who had assumed the Sunday instruction of inmates of the East Cambridge jail. To his dismay, all the women, twenty of them, had been assigned to him. He came to Miss Dix, upon the advice of his mother, to see if Dorothea might know of someone who could take over the class. After just a few moments of consideration, Dorothea spoke. “I will take them myself. I shall be there next Sunday.”
She was nearly 40 years old by this time and had reached a turning point in her life. As she taught the Sunday school class for women in the East Cambridge jail, Dorothea realized that a number of the inmates had committed only one “crime”: they were mentally ill. Since that day in the jail, she had visited other institutions and found mentally ill persons herded indiscriminately with criminals or isolated in cramped filthy cells or individual cages. She saw men and women chained to walls, underfed, brutalized, given no heat and nothing more than a handful of straw to sleep on. At once, she started a campaign to have stoves placed in the cells and to have the inmates fully clothed. Providing a little warmth for victims in one jail was a hard-won triumph, but nothing more than a first halting step up a mountain.
Dorothea Dix was on a crusade. To cover the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to visit every city, town, village, and hamlet, to discover the existence and investigate the conditions of the mentally ill in every jail and prison in the area of over 8,000 square miles – it was a Herculean task in the year 1843. She delivered a lengthy and dramatic report to the state legislature. She had established relationships with influential people both in the US and abroad. Dorothea traveled and sought to improve conditions for the mentally ill in 14 different countries. In fact, after meeting with Pope Pius IX, in Rome, the pope expressed appreciation for her work and compared her to St. Theresa.
Dorothea’s skills as a lobbyist made her the most politically active woman of her generation, but there were failures as well as successes in her efforts. With the question of slavery, she chose to ignore it. With the issue of suffrage, she chose to never become a part of it. In fact, she would have heartily disclaimed the title of feminist. For Dorothea Dix “women’s rights” and “men’s right” were far less important then human rights.
It certainly wasn’t an easy life for Dorothea. Her health began to fail and by age 76 she had outlived all of her family and all of the women she had come to know as mentors and friends. The traveling ended. At 85, she slipped from unconsciousness to death. She was buried, as she had wanted, in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. It was just as she would have wanted it, as simple as the bonnet and shawl, the unadorned dark dress with its fluff of white at the throat which she had worn entering cells and dungeons, palaces and halls of state, which had absorbed the dust and mud and cinders of the length and breadth of two continents. The marble marker erected later would bear neither epitaph nor date, only the words: Dorothea L. Dix”
Both Jane Addams and Dorothea Dix had companions on their journey. I’m not talking about persons, but qualities. Along with faith and commitment (which I mentioned last week) they also had compassion and courage attending them. It is these qualities that helped to shape the heroes we would know as Addams and Dix and Brown. Olympia Brown.
A woman of ‘firsts’: born in 1835 to Universalist parents, the first of four children. It was in 1863 that Olympia Brown became the first woman to graduate from a regularly established theological school. She was ordained a Universalist minister, the first woman in this country to achieve full ministerial standing recognized by a denomination. She said of the first time she heard a woman preach, “the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.” While ministry was the first objective in her life, finding a theological school that would admit her would not be easy as such schools did not welcome women.
The Unitarian School of Meadville, Pennsylvania replied to her request for admission saying that “the trustees thought it would be too great an experiment” to admit a woman. Oberlin replied that she could be admitted but could not participate in public exercises. Finally, President of the Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University offered her admission but added that he “did not think women were called to the ministry. But I leave that between you and the Great Head of the Church.” When Olympia arrived at the school, she was told she had not been expected. The president was certain she would not come as he had written so discouragingly.
Despite considerable opposition, Olympia Brown prevailed in becoming ordained and being called to parish ministry. Brown had served a couple of New England congregations, when The Universalist Church of the Good Shepherd in Racine,Wisconsin, came into her life. The church was having trouble paying its bills and keeping its ministers. Many thought the church was lost. A lay leader, Abner C. Fish, put his last hopes in a call beyond the accepted norms of the day: that a minister should be male and not too politically radical. He wrote to the Rev. Olympia Brown, the fiery suffragist and the first woman minister ordained by the Universalists. Soon the Racine church received the following letter:
Bro. Fish,
Yours just rec. I infer that there is no objection to a Sunday’s service in Racine, therefore I shall be there one week from next Sunday, Feb. 24th.
You will oblige me by giving the proper notice. I will preach morning, afternoon, or evening or all three as the people may desire.
Yours for the good cause.
Olympia Brown
She came, preached morning and evening, brought in the suffragist spirit, won the hearts of the congregation, and had a very successful ministry. A call outside the norms paid off. And, the Church of the Good Shepherd now bears her name.
But at age 53, Olympia Brown decided to make a career change; leaving full-time ministry to become an activist for women’s rights. She joined in many of the demonstrations organized by the Woman’s Party. In freezing rain, in bitter cold, in spite of dangerous confrontations and little police protection from hecklers, the octogenarian minister, wife, and mother was there. During one memorable demonstration, protesting Woodrow Wilson’s turning his back on the suffrage amendment, she publicly burned his speeches in front of the White House. When the suffrage amendment was finally passed in 1919, Brown was one of the few original suffragists who was still alive to savor the triumph. She voted in her first presidential election at the age of 85. She died in Baltimore just 6 years later.
At the time of her death, The Baltimore Sun captured the independence, fearlessness, and passionate commitment to justice of the Rev. Olympia Brown by stating: “Perhaps no phase of her life better exemplified her vitality and intellectual independence than the mental discomfort she succeeded in arousing, between her eightieth and ninetieth birthday, among the conservatively minded Baltimorans.”
A purpose-driven life. It’s been a catch phrase in today’s society. Dorothea Dix and Olympia Brown led purpose-driven lives. It would have been easier, I am sure, to have given up during the difficult struggles. Dorothea suffered from intermittent attacks of what was termed “lung trouble” and depression. Olympia suffered from constant rejection and criticism of her actual womanhood. But both of these women, as well as other heroes in our religious history, had discovered their calling, their purpose, and it would not, could not, be ignored. Dorothea Dix has been quoted as saying, “In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must something for me to do.” It wasn’t that Dorothea Dix needed to do everything. She didn’t need to save the world. She needed to fulfill her purpose as best she could.
How often do you consider your purpose? You see, we don’t need to do everything. We don’t need to save the world. Each one of us needs to find our own purpose and fulfill it as best we can. Even when the struggle becomes arduous and the naysayers seem to appear at every turn.
In 1837, the Reverend Nehemiah Adams was so appalled at the prospect of a woman on the speaker's platform, or worse yet in the pulpit, that he felt it incumbent upon his august personage to deliver the following warning to the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts:
"There are dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury." He then proceeded to denounce the behavior of females who "so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers."
Women, and the Reverend Adams apparently had this on good authority, should "abide by appropriate duties and influence as stated in the New Testament.” He then assures us that a woman's strength derives from her dependence and weakness.
"But when she assumes the place and tone of a man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary...and her character becomes unnatural. If the vine, whose strength and beauty is to lean upon the trellis work and half conceal its clusters, thinks to assume the independent and overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but will fall in shame and dishonor into the dust."
Because of presumptuous women like Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Susan B. Anthony, and Mary Livermore, danger was lurking everywhere. Apparently, nobody had ever told these women about the joys of being a vine. They wanted to be an elm, or an oak.
In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we do not have saints. We have a history of women and men who worked with perseverance and determination of the soul, to make a difference in this world; who displayed through their lives the qualities of commitment and faith, as well as compassion and courage; believing that the possibility of heaven is in this life – here on earth.
Let us not forget the heroes who have cleared the way, marked the path, and offered guidance to us - Unitarian Universalists of the 21st century. We surely would not be where we are as a religious community if it where not for the struggles, successes, failures, and lives of those who’ve gone before us.
May we honor the gifts of our religious ancestors by speaking their names with reverence. May we honor their memory by sharing their stories. May we honor their dedication by continuing the hard work. May we honor their commitment to religious values by committing ourselves to live our faith every day, as best we can.
As Unitarians and Universalists, as social activists and reformers, as strong women, these heroes are models for all of us. They are ‘ours for the good cause’.
So be it.
