The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

Let's journey now

to the other kind of time

where we've known each other

for centuries, beneath our names,

where we can stop to listen

the way fox listen to the night.

 

Come with me out of the cold

where we can put down the

notions we've been carrying

like torn bags into battle.

 

We can throw them to the earth

or place them in the earth, and ask,

why these patterns in the first place?

If you want, we can repair them, if

they still seem true. Or we can

sing as they burn.

 

Come. Let's feel our way beneath the noise where we

can ask what it means to be alive

and lift our chins from the stream

like deer who've outrun all the hunters.

Come, let us worship together.

Have any of you ever been to the doctor? Do you know his name? (What? You have a doctor who is a woman? Are you sure? Are there any doctors here who are women?) 

 

Did you know there was a time when women were not allowed to become doctors...? Or ministers, for that matter...? 

I thought I would tell you today about a Unitarian who was the first woman to openly practice medicine in Canada.   Her name was Emily Jennings Stowe. I have these books about her[2]. There’s a lot to tell, and I can’t tell you everything about her today, but maybe you’d like to borrow a book and read more about her later.   But how about you just meet her in person...I invited her to be with us today...Emily...? Are you here? (A woman, dressed in period costume, enters here, and comes to stand in by the storyteller. She reads the parts highlighted.)

 

Emily was born in 1831 really not that far from here…her family lived on a farm near Norwich, Ontario, which in those days was about six hours away from Toronto. (Today Norwich is much closer to Toronto than that…what do you think happened? Did the town move?)

 

Emily’s family were Quakers. Do you know anything about Quakers? They are a religious movement that believes that the seed of God is inside all of us, and today, they are very active in the peace movement. Even then, Emily’s family helped during the Rebellion of 1837 by hiding reformers in their barns and by giving them food. Emily’s great-uncle was jailed for this.

 

Emily had five sisters and her family believed that women could do anything. But this was not true for everyone. For most people, there were strict rules about what a girl could and couldn’t do. Unless they were rich, most girls didn’t go to school. They were expected to stay home and sew and cook and clean. Emily’s mother had gone to Quaker school in America, and she home-schooled all six of her daughters.   Emily had a real passion to learn; she wanted to go to university, but the only college that accepted women was a teacher’s college, so she left home, went to Toronto, and learned to be a teacher. 

 

Emily got really good grades, and when she graduated, a school hired her, not as a teacher, but as a principal, and she became the first woman principal in Canada. She worked and taught school for a while, but it made her angry that she got paid about half of what the male teachers were paid. Then, when she met John Stowe and got married, she lost her job because married women weren’t allowed to have jobs. 

 

When her husband got sick, Emily needed a job, and she realized more and more how unfair the laws were for women. She wanted to be a doctor (this is probably because her mother had kept an herb garden and made homeopathic remedies…do you know what those are?) So, she applied to medical school! The Toronto School of Medicine had never had a female student…and they were shocked that she even asked! You know what the president of the University said? He said… “Never in my day, Madam. The doors of the University are not open to women and I trust they never will be.” 

 

"Then I will make it the business of my life to see that they will be opened, that women will have the same opportunities as men."

 

Can you imagine! That was 1865…One hundred and forty five years ago. 

Emily was so determined that she found a medical school in that United States that would accept her, and went off to New York.

 

After she graduated, she returned to Toronto and practiced medicine although she wasn’t able to get a license for another 13 years. As I said, she was the first woman to openly practice medicine in Canada…   (I said ‘openly’ practice medicine because apparently there WAS a woman doctor who was the Inspector General of Military Hospitals…but she dressed like a man, called herself “James” and no one knew she was a woman until after she died!) 

 

Emily was an incredible woman. And here are a couple of other quick things about Emily:

-          She started the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Club and fought for women to be able to vote.   When she addressed the Ontario Legislature in 1889, she said:

“As educated citizens, as moral and loving women,[we] desire to be placed in a position to impress directly our thought upon our nation and time."

-          She joined the Toronto Unitarian Church in 1879, saying:

“I have outgrown all religious creeds; [I am] a truth-seeker, [and I desire] knowledge from the interior life and that truth which alone makes one free."

 

Emily was definitely a great influence on the life that is available today for girls and women. I wanted to tell you about her today so that you know that what you do, especially when you take a stand for something that matters to you, can change the world!

This appeared in the May 1916 edition of Maclean’s magazine, and was written by Nellie McClung, one of the five women who fought to obtain ‘person’ status for women. 

Men and women have two distinct spheres, when considered as men and women, but as human beings there is a great field of activity which they may—and do occupy in common. Now it is in this common field of activity that women are asking for equal privileges. There is not really much argument in pointing out that women cannot lay bricks, nor string electric wire, and therefore can never be regarded as man's equal in the matter of citizenship. Man cannot live by bricks alone! And we might with equal foolishness declare that because a man (as a rule) cannot thread a needle, or "turn a heel," therefore he should not ever be allowed to vote. Life is more than laying of bricks or threading needles, for we have diverse gifts given to us by an all-wise Creator!

The exceptional woman can do many things, and these exceptions simply prove that there is no rule. There is a woman in the Qu'Appelle Valley who runs a big wheat farm and makes money. The Agricultural Editor of the Manitoba Free Press is a woman who is acknowledged to be one of the best crop experts in Canada. Figures do not confuse her! Even if the average woman is not always sure of the binomial theorem, that does not prove that she is incapable of saying who shall make the laws under which she shall live.

But when all other arguments fail, the anti-suffragist can always go back to the saintly motherhood one, and "the hand that rocks." There is the perennial bloom that flourishes in all climates. Women are the mothers of the race—therefore they can be nothing else. When once a woman has a child, they argue, she must stay right on the job of raising it....From observation and experience, I wish to state positively that children do grow up—indeed they do—far too soon...And when they have gone from their mother, she still has her life to live.

...if a woman has had the narrow outlook on life all the way along—if her efforts have been all made on behalf of her own family, she cannot quickly adjust herself to anything else, even when her family no longer need her....

...It was a daring woman who claimed that she had a life of her own; and a perfect right to her own ambitions, hopes, interests, and desires.

Part of the process of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister includes attesting to having read and studied a list of books about an mile long...books on theology, and education, and pastoral counselling...on all the areas of proficiency expected of a minister. Some of the books are required reading; others are on short lists from which a ministerial candidate chooses, for example, which three of the five to read. On one such list of choices is the book “Unitarians in Canada” written by Rev. Phillip Hewett, Minister Emeritus to the Unitarian Church of Vancouver. 

 

When in the fellowshipping process I first encountered the required reading list, “Unitarians in Canada” did not even make it onto my radar screen. At the time I was actually making my way through that required reading list, I had not yet come to terms with the fact that I might actually become a minister in a congregational setting, let alone one in a Canadian setting. And so, it wasn’t until I was in my second year in Thunder Bay, well on the way to parish ministry, but as yet not on my way to Peterborough, that I picked up that book and read it. You might do the same; we have several copies in our library here.

 

Still, I don’t have a great predisposition to history, and I have to admit that I skimmed the surface of the rich material contained in this book. Not true for another “American in Canada” (oh, why didn’t Gershwin write a song for us?)   The Rev. Kathy Sage, minister to the Kingston Unitarian Fellowship, took note of, and was greatly influenced by, two sentences contained in Hewett’s book. It reads:

“Though Universalist ministers were usually ill-paid and often poorly supported, some of them made important contributions to the life of the wider community. Fidelia Gillette, who served the Bloomfield church in 1888 and 1889, may have been the first ordained woman minister in Canada.”[3]

 

That’s it. That’s all it says.

 

Bloomfield is in Prince Edward County...not too far from Kingston, and this brief comment sent Rev. Sage, accompanied by two others, on a fact-finding mission to the Picton archives. There, they were able to confirm that Fidelia Gillette had indeed served the Bloomfield Universalist Church. A short notation in a book. A short trip. A spark of an idea. A huge influence.

 

Invisible Influence. The title of today’s service comes directly from a project initiated by three modern-day Unitarian women...the already-mentioned Rev. Kathy Sage, Rev. Heather Fraser Fawcett of Montreal, and Dr. Jean Pfleiderer, past president of the Canadian Unitarian Council, also of Kingston.   The project is called “Invisible Influence: Reclaiming Canadian Unitarian Universalist Women’s History” and dreams of bringing together scholars, writers, storytellers, archivists, genealogists, and hard working volunteers to build an accurate history of the contributions Canadian Unitarian Universalist women have made to our communities, our culture and [our] faith.[4] It is a work in progress...work you are invited to participate in. They have received several grants, presented their ongoing work at two or three annual conferences of the CUC, and continue to do research and to gather materials. The project builds upon a book published earlier[5], documenting the lives and influence of fifteen women...thus moving their contributions from the invisible realm to the visible one.  

 

One of those women is poet Dorothy Livesay, who was a member of the Vancouver congregation. When I began planning today’s service, I had thought we would present a reader’s theatre piece that has been written about Livesay’s life and poetry, but discovered that it was really too long to include on a Sunday morning; hopefully we’ll have a chance to present it in another way soon.

 

Another one of those women, of course, is Rev. Fidelia Woolley Gillette. Gillette has become a special project of Dr. Jean Pfleiderer. In 2008, she presented a lecture at Queen’s University where she is on staff in the Human Rights Department, a sessional lecturer, and a member of the Queen’s University Association of Queer Employees...another great Canadian Unitarian Universalist woman. Dr. Pleiderer graciously shared a copy of her unpublished lecture with me...and I am almost completely relying upon the information contained in that lecture to very briefly re-cap Fidelia’s life for you.

 

Lucia Fidelia Woolley was born on April 8, 1827.   Sometime after her birth, her father, another Quaker,[6] had a conversion experience that brought him to Universalism, a religious movement which had begun in North America in the late 1700’s and whose principle theological doctrine said the “all souls will ultimately be saved.” Fidelia’s father became an itinerant preacher, which was very common at the time; her mother, however, was often physically ill and emotionally unreliable. So, Fidelia frequently traveled with her father, and he encouraged her study and her writing. In 1851, the same year her parents were divorced (!), Fidelia married and settled with her husband in Rochester, Michigan, and it wasn’t until 1870, when her daughter Florence was grown, that Fidelia became a public speaker, writer and minister. Clearly, she was an independent woman...she bought her own home on a property adjoining her husband’s and apparently lived separately from him for the rest of her life. 

 

Fidelia lectured publicly on suffrage and temperance, sometimes giving those lectures in churches. She was both well-accepted and well-thought of, and in 1877 was ordained by the Michigan Universalist Association. Her ministry, like her father’s, was mostly itinerant, except that, right after ordination she took a post as pastor in Iowa. (Iowa was for some reason particularly receptive to female ministers; a number of Unitarian churches in Iowa had women in their pulpits at about this time, forming was has become known as the Iowa Sisterhood.)

 

Anyway, it was said of Fidelia that “she won and held her audiences with undiminished and increasing numbers, and won for herself a host of friends.” Upon her farewell sermon at that Iowan congregation in 1879, the newspaper there noted that she had built up the church organization and got them out of debt. 

 

Tiny Bloomfield, Ontario, had a disproportionately strong Universalist community, built up over a period of fifty years on faith and the will of a single man, the Rev. David Leavitt. While we don’t know how they came to know each another, it appears that upon his illness, Rev. Leavitt sought out Fidelia Gillette to take over his church. And so she did, for two years, becoming, as far as is known, the first ordained woman to serve a church in Ontario, maybe even in all of Canada. 

 

Why she left Bloomfield is unclear; from there, Fidelia Gillette worked as a missionary, sometimes preaching several times a week, right up until near her death in 1906. 

 

Now, as I said, I am not much of a history buff. I know, however, that many of you are. Doing a service with an historical focus forces me to look at the importance of knowing our history, naming how our history has shaped us, and offering gratitude for those who have helped to bend the arc of the universe toward justice and who have led us toward increasingly wider circles of diversity and acceptance. But a historical topic also leads me to the question...so what? What does this have to teach me? How can I best honour the contributions of those who have changed our world for the better?

 

There’s actually quite a bit to consider in the title “Invisible Influence”. I don’t doubt that none of us question that certain individuals have played a huge role in social change, and so at first I wondered how “invisible” this influence could actually be. Surely we swim in the sea of these changes on a daily basis. But, for example, just a few months ago I watched a few episodes of Mad Men for the first time. It is a television series set in the 1960’s, at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, and tells the story of the advertising executives, male of course, and the women who support their lifestyles. Watching it, I experienced a visceral awareness of how much a woman’s world has changed just in my lifetime. I was raised in this era, and was uncomfortably familiar with the overt sexism that the series portrays. We all know that true gender equality does not yet exist, yet this TV series shocked me into an acknowledgement of how far we have come in not so many years, changes that are, on a daily basis, invisible to me. 

 

I almost told the kids this morning, and will tell you now, that when I was in seventh grade, in public school, girls were not allowed to wear pants. And not only were we not allowed to wear pants, we were not allowed to wear anything that was ‘like’ pants. I rebelled, and I sewed myself a skort. Remember those? Rather like a tennis skirt, they were loose fitting shorts with a front flap of fabric so that, from the front, it looked like a skirt. But from the back, it did not. I can remember walking down the school hallway in a near sidestep, to keep my backside hidden from the teachers serving as hall monitors. Did this tiny act of rebellion bring about change? 

 

Certainly nothing of note. Yet I want to believe that just maybe a few other girls were encouraged to their own small acts of rebellion by witnessing mine, just as I most certainly had been so encouraged by others. I was never caught in junior high, but I was called into the principal’s office in high school for wearing overalls. By that time, there was no rule against pants, but overalls seemed to go beyond the proper decorum for a girl. 

 

Overalls on a girl in high school. Go figure. There is a book about the historical presence of women in the Methodist faith called “Petticoats in the Pulpit.” Go figure. There was most certainly a time when this was so improper as not to be allowed, under any circumstances. Yet someone, at some time, was bold enough to break the rules in the name of justice and equality.   We do well to recognize those bold contributions.

 

I love a story that I’ve heard here at the synagogue. Those of you who have participated in a Passover Seder know that in that ritual, there is a plate that contains all the elements...sweet herbs, bitter horseradish, a lamb bone, an egg, etcetera...and during the ritual the symbolism of these elements is explained. Well, at one meal I attended, no one explained the presence of an orange on the plate, so I asked about it. Here’s what I was told: In conservative congregations, women are not allowed on the bemah (up here where I am) let alone to read from the Torah.   Apparently, one rabbi was quoted as saying that “women would not be allowed on the bemah until there was an orange on the Passover plate.” Rather like saying, when hell freezes over. And so, those who insist that women have a right to be full participants in services, place an orange on their Passover plates. A small, but significant, act of rebellion. 

 

You know, we have this great bit of theology with an accompanying great bit of imagery, about the interconnected web of all existence....which insists that we are all connected and that the actions of one has an effect on the whole. Imagine that web. Now, this is not quite ‘string theory’...we can call it ‘web theory’...but it stands to reason that when one point on that interconnected web moves, or pulls, or tugs, or steps out of line in any way, it puts pressure on the rest of the web, pulling it along with it, changing its shape. Everyone and everything else feels it, even if it is a seemingly most insignificant movement. 

 

I read recently, a blog entry by Scott Berkun, the author of Making Things Happen. He writes about influence, and how to have it, and concludes that the more aligned your actions are with the things you care about, the bigger the difference you make. Or, to put it differently, to make a difference, you need to question the value of what you’re doing and then do something about your answers.[7] 

 

What did Laura Secord (not a Unitarian or a Universalist) care about? The wellbeing of soldiers she loved...and so her actions were a response to the values she held. What did Nellie McClung (also not a UU) care about? The obvious inequity of women not having a vote and not being recognized as persons. And so, her actions were a response to what she most cared about.   What did Emily Stowe care about? [8] Her passion for medicine and her belief that she could be a good doctor. And so, her actions followed that passion to places no woman had gone before. What did Fidelia Gillette care about? Her faith, the rights of women...and her life then bore out those beliefs.   What did Kathy Sage care about? A small reference to a woman whose influence she felt but whose life story was invisible. And so, she followed that spark to learn more, and in turn has shared that learning with us. 

 

What do you care about? If Scott Berkun is right, if you align what you do with what you care about, then you cannot help but be influential. It is important that we make visible the contributions of Canadian Unitarian and Universalist women. But, you don’t have to be a Unitarian, or even a woman, and you don’t have to make a big splash. We all know it only takes a spark to get a fire going. May the spark that is your life make itself known for all to see. 

 

Amen. 

 

Please remain standing for our closing words. I share this poem by Joanne Seltzer. 

Seven women

Sing the Chanukah blessings

The seventh night,

Light two menorahs

Each one candle on each.

 

Speaking out by turns

Each of the seven women

Describes and praises

A woman mentor

From her past

While the candles drip

Onto a little tray.

 

Suddenly

we are fourteen women

In a double circle,

Spirits connected

By stories we tell

Or stories told about us,

Witnesses

To the great miracle

Of remembrance.

 

And so we remember, and we tell stories. May we join hands and spirits with those mentors who inspire and lead us, so that we in turn may lead and inspire those whose hands we hold right now. It is in these connections that we find our power and have our influence. 

Ever may our flames be lit by the fires of those who have gone before, and ever may the lights of our lives burn brightly. Shine on. Go in peace.  

 

 

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