An Extra Quote From The Saints

This week's Celebration of Saints was from women who were pioneers in the work of equal rights. I found an extra quote from one of them that seemed to me to more than appropriate for some of the conversations we have been seeing in the country these past months. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought for rights and change and freedom for more people, she made the following powerful observation as a note to those who don't want to see things change. Heed this. Please.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Calendar of Saints: Women Pioneers for Equal Rights (2)

Twice a week I post a quote from saints from the Episcopal Calendar of Saints that week. They are to be meditative and mindful, playful and thought inducing. I hope they are helpful in your spiritual journeys.


Women Pioneers for Equal Rights
July 20

The Episcopal Church has added to its Calendar four American women who were pioneers in the struggle for black emancipation and for women's votes. The date chosen for commemorating them is the anniversary of the Women's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, 19-20 July 1848.

Harriet Ross Tubman was born in 1820 in Maryland. She was deeply impressed by the Bible narrative of God's deliverance of the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and it became the basis of her belief that it was God's will to deliver slaves in America out of their bondage, and that it was her duty to help accomplish this. In 1844, she escaped to Canada, but returned to help others escape. Working with other Abolitionists, chiefly white Quakers, she made at least nineteen excursions into Maryland in the 1850's, leading more than 300 slaves to freedom. During the War of 1861-5, she joined the Northern Army as a cook and a nurse and a spy, and on one occasion led a raid that freed over 750 slaves. After the war, she worked to shelter orphans and elderly poor persons, and to advance the status of women and blacks. She became known as "the Moses of her People."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in 1815 and reared in the Presbyterian Church. She found the Calvinist doctrine of predestination dismaying, and rebelled against it. She denounced the clergy of her day for not upholding women's rights, but as she travelled giving speeches on the subject, she found no lack of pulpits available to her. She undertook to write what she called a Women's Bible. It never got beyond a series of notes on selected Biblical passages.

-Link

Calendar of Saints: Women Pioneers for Equal Rights (1)

Twice a week I post a quote from saints from the Episcopal Calendar of Saints that week. They are to be meditative and mindful, playful and thought inducing. I hope they are helpful in your spiritual journeys.


Women Pioneers for Equal Rights
July 20

The Episcopal Church has added to its Calendar four American women who were pioneers in the struggle for black emancipation and for women's votes. The date chosen for commemorating them is the anniversary of the Women's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, 19-20 July 1848.

Sojourner Truth, originally known as Isabella, was born a slave in New York in about 1798. In 1826 she escaped with the aid of Quaker Abolitionists, and became a street-corner evangelist and the founder of a shelter for homeless women. When she was travelling, and someone asked her name, she said "Sojourner," meaning that she was a citizen of heaven, and a wanderer on earth. She then gave her surname as "Truth," on the grounds that God was her Father, and His name was Truth. She spoke at numerous church gatherings, both black and white, quoting the Bible extensively from memory, and speaking against slavery and for an improved legal status for women. The speech for which she is best known is called, "Ain't I a Woman?" It was delivered in response to a male speaker who had been arguing that the refusal of votes for women was grounded in a wish to shelter women from the harsh realities of political life. She replied, with great effect, that she was a woman, and that society had not sheltered her. She became known as "the Miriam of the Latter Exodus."

Amelia Jenks Bloomer was born in New York in 1818, reared as a Presbyterian, and as a young woman became an activist for the anti-slavery, anti-alcohol, and women's votes movements. Mrs. Bloomer and her husband eventually settled in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where she worked to promote churches, schools, libraries, and progressive and reform movements. On one occasion she said:

The same Power that brought the slave out of bondage will, in His own good time and way, bring about the emancipation of women, and make her the equal in power and dominion that she was in the beginning.

-Link

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