Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

Lydia Maria Francis Child, Maria Mitchell, Julia Ward Howe and Margaret Sanger

March is Woman’s History Month and we have two wonderful groups of girls from our congregation who received special Girl Scout Awards today. Therefore, I am highlighting these women who had some important things in common. All were all born in the 1800′s when women faced significant cultural challenges that we in the United States no longer encounter. Of course, there are other significant challenges that we all continue to face.

Lydia Maria Francis Child, Maria Mitchell, Julia Ward Howe and Margaret Sanger all did some impressive things in their lifetime. What, other than having been born in the 19th century and being famous, do these four women have in common? First, three of them knew each other well and all four shared a supportive community of Unitarian and Universalist friends. They are all our spiritual ancestors.

Their impact on our world says a great deal about them, about the Unitarian and Universalist community and values they found nurturing, which we affirm and promote in ourselves, in our children and for the larger world. Their liberal religious ideals aided these women in their willingness to take significant risks – those that many of their non Unitarian Universalist contemporaries feared. They felt called, moved and pushed by their sense of justice, equity and compassion. I could have chosen many Unitarian Universalist women who have similar things in common. There is the Reverend Mary Livermore, Susan B Anthony, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, Louisa May Alcott, Beatrix Potter, Margaret Fuller and many others, all of whom are our courageous spiritual ancestors.

Few know about Lydia Maria Child today. In her day, she was well known and famous as a novelist and as a radical abolitionist. Ironically, we remember her for her famous Thanksgiving poem, “Over the River and Through the Woods.” That was the least of the things that she valued, except for the income it helped generate.

Lydia’s brother was a Unitarian Minister. She had an extensive understanding and appreciation of many different religions. Yet, Lydia was lonely within her personal religion. She was always a bit restless with the institutional church and wanted more from her church. As close as she was to her religious home, she criticized Unitarianism from within.

As a very young woman, she taught in Gardner, Maine. She wrote to her brother, “I am more in danger of wrecking on the rocks of skepticism than of standing on the shoals of fanaticism. I am apt to regard a system of religion as I do any other beautiful theory. It plays round the imagination, but fails to reach the heart. I wish I could find some religion in which my heart and understanding could unite; that amidst the darkest clouds of this life I might ever be cheered with the mild halo of religious consolation.”

Lydia wrote three volumes called The Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages. Her wanted to remove “the superstitious rubbish from the sublime morality of Christ” and to show a more respectful view of other world religions.

Lydia wrote the first historical novel, Hobomok: A Tale set in 1824. A colonial New England girl’s fiancé went missing at sea. She found solace in the arms of Hobomok, a Native American. Together they had a son. The fiancé came back. Her lover Hobomok encouraged her to go back to her fiancé. She did, they were married and adopted her son. That successful novel made Lydia famous. She wrote additional novels and stories. She became the editor of The Juvenile Miscellany, a children’s magazine and later editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard.

Lydia married David Child, a lawyer and journalist. Unfortunately, David was an idealist. He accumulated many debts and drained his wife’s income, bringing him to court and landing him in prison. Never the less, he and Lydia had a loving marriage, agreeing on both political and social matters. Lydia even used their experience of debt to her advantage and wrote The Frugal Housewife. describing creative ways of making do with very little money. Later in life, she discovered that New York state law, allowed her to separate her income from her husband’s protecting herself from his debts.

Lydia became a strong abolitionist. She helped encourage William Ellery Channing, the father of American Unitarianism, to embrace abolitionist views. She supported and collaborated with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. She wrote that he had “got hold of the strings of my conscience, and pulled me into reforms…Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new.”

In 1833, Lydia wrote an outspoken condemnation of slavery called, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans. Imagine, this was three decades before the Civil war. She risked pointing out slavery’s contradiction with the teachings of Christianity, writing about the moral and physical degradation of slavery. She included the issue of interracial marriage, and did not exclude criticizing the North. In the book’s introduction she wrote that she was aware of the unpopularity of the task she had undertaken, “Though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” It proved risky, her book sales dropped sharply and her publishers stopped accepting what she wrote. She lost her position as editor of The Juvenile Miscellany.

Yet, at the age of 59, she wrote that “When there is anti-slavery work to be done, I feel as young as twenty.” After the Civil War, she went on to found the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. She also spoke out on behalf of Cherokees, fighting the government’s efforts to push them off their tribal lands. Two years before she died, she edited Aspirations of the World, her “eclectic Bible” that included quotations from the world’s religions.

Let us remember, we too are part of a religious community that affirms and promotes justice, equity and compassion. Also, we are called to consider how willing we are to publicly promote the ideals and values that we affirm. Lydia Maria Child was willing to take significant risks that many of her contemporaries were too fearful to even entertain. She felt called, moved and pushed to take risks because of her religious principles. It literally changed her life and the course of history.

The Provost of the Meadville Lombard Unitarian Universalist Seminary, Sharon D. Welch, wrote the book, A Feminist Ethic of Risk. She calls for a “reversion of values.” Welch writes that we need to reexamine our present culturally learned and accepted desires to be good (in culture’s eyes) as the chief motive by which we live our lives. She warns that what we learn culturally as “responsible actions” for ourselves as individuals can have disastrous consequences.

The women I feature today, were not thwarted by the realization that they were flying in the face of what was considered culturally acceptable by their peers. They did not give up because they could not change everything right away. They, unlike the majority of people, were not paralyzed by the huge and seemingly intransigent problems they faced. They revised what their culture defined as virtuous behavior based on compassion.

Maria Mitchell was born in 1818, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. She had an interest and an aptitude for science and astronomy abetted by her astronomer father who taught her. She wrote, “We especially need imagination in science. Question everything.” She urged people to, “Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

Maria grew up a Quaker, but left the Quakers at 24 because she felt that she could not belong to a religion if she could not agree in all matters of doctrine and dogma. She learned to apply the rigors of science to the world around her and saw no reason why she should not apply the same rigors of science to religion. “We have a hunger of the mind,” she wrote, “which asks for knowledge of all around us; and the more we gain, the more is our desire. The more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.”

On October 1, 1847, Maria excused herself from a family gathering to watch the skies with the telescope. She saw a new comet above the North Star. Discovering a new comet was very special then, resulting in a prestigious prize from the King of Denmark. Maria was both the first woman and the first American to win that prize. Maria was not only concerned with science. She was anti slavery and in protest gave up wearing clothes made of cotton. She was also a strong supporter of women’s rights.

Maria Mitchell had no college education, yet became the first professional woman astronomer in the United States. In 1848, she became the first woman permitted to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. No other woman could join for more than a hundred years.

Maria became an astronomy professor at Vassar College (1865-1888). She enjoyed opening the minds and imagination of the young women she instructed. She not only taught them science, but also introduced them to some of her influential women friends sush as Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Julia Ward Howe. Maria Mitchell shaped and influenced literally hundreds of young women with her brilliant mind and strong character. She treated her students as friends.

An unusual thing Maria did at Vassar was to offer “Dome parties” every year. She wrote out nonsense rhymes and placed them in a wagon that was symbolically hitched to a star. These are said to have been hilarious occasions.

At Vassar, everyone was expected to attend the college chapel. Once, when the service interfered with her observation of Saturn, so she asked the President to shorten his prayer. Baptist members of the trustees tried to have her dismissed. Her principal foe, called her a “rank Theodore Parker Unitarian.” Indeed, she was friendly with many Unitarian ministers. At her funeral it was said that, “she fulfilled the exhortation of her friend Dr. Channing, ‘Worship God with what He most delights in, with aspiration for spiritual light and life.’”

Please remember, you too are part of a religious community that affirms and promotes justice, equity and compassion. You are also called to risk publicly promoting the ideals and values that you personally affirm. Maria Mitchell took risks that many of her contemporaries were too fearful to even entertain. She was willing risk because she felt called, moved and pushed to do so by her intellectual and religious principles. It literally changed her life and the course of history.

Julia Ward Howe, born on May 27, 1819, is known for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She was born into a strict Episcopalian family. Her mother died when Julia was young and later when her father died, she was raised by a liberal-minded uncle.

Julia married the social reformer Samuel Gridley Howe. He was the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. In addition, he was a radical Unitarian; attended Theodore Parker’s church and was part of the Transcendentalist group. Julia herself became a religious radical who did not see her own belief as the only route to salvation She believed that religion was a matter of “deed, not creed.”

Samuel and Julia volunteered with the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, a medical corps founded by Unitarians Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, with Dorothea Dix as the head of nursing, and later Universalist Clara Barton. President Lincoln, in 1862, invited Samuel and Julia to Washington. They visited a Union Army camp in Virginia and heard the men singing “John Brown’s body lies a’mouldering in his grave,” which she disliked.

Her friend, James Freeman Clarke, a Unitarian minister, urged Julia to write a new song to replace John Brown’s Body. She said, “I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning …, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain.” She completed writing and fell back asleep. In February 1862, the Atlantic Monthly, published it and called it Battle Hymn of the Republic. It became the best-known Civil War song of the North.

Distressed by her experience of war, she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all forms. She issued a declaration, hoping to gather together women to observe an annual Mother’s Day for Peace. She knew Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who tried starting what she called Mothers’ Work Days to improve sanitary conditions for both sides of the Civil War. Anna Jarvis’ daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, was the one who managed to get the first such Mother’s Day celebrated in 1907.

After the Civil War, Julia’s reform interests shifted to the area that was most important to her, equal rights for women. This was personal for Julia, because her own domineering husband had restricted her strength and independence. Someone wrote that, “From the moment when she came forward in the Woman Suffrage Movement … there was a visible change; it gave a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner, made her calmer, firmer; she found herself among new friends and could disregard old critics.”

Meanwhile, Julia started to preach in Unitarian and Universalist churches. When Julia Ward Howe died in 1910, an overwhelming four thousand people attended her memorial service. Samuel G. Eliot, head of the American Unitarian Association, gave the eulogy at her funeral at the Church of the Disciples.

Remember, you are part of a religious community that affirms and promotes justice, equity and compassion. Like the wonderful religious community that brought together reformers like these women and Theodore Parker, William Ellery Channing, Susan B. Anthony and so many other leading lights of the 1800′s, you too are called to publicly promote the ideals and values that you personally affirm. Julia Ward Howe was willing to take significant risks that many of her contemporaries were too fearful to even entertain. She was willing to take risks, because she felt called, moved and even at times shoved by intellectual and religious principles and that literally changed her life and the course of history.

Margaret Sanger was the most recent for the four women. She was born Sept. 14, 1879 and lived to 1966, the year I went off to college. Margaret was a nurse who worked with poor women on the Lower East Side of New York. She saw the pain and death caused by numerous and unplanned pregnancies among the women she served. She had seen her own mother’s health suffer from having eleven children.

Poor women often begged Margaret to tell them what they could do to prevent having another baby. She did not know for sure and the doctors would not help. One night, she and a doctor were called to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sachs, poor Russian immigrants. They found a distraught husband, three crying children and their mother, unconscious from a do-it-yourself abortion. They were able to save the woman. Mrs. Sachs asked Margaret to tell her the secret that would prevent another pregnancy.

Margaret asked the doctor who just laughed and said: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.” Margaret promised to come back, but she put it off and the next time she was called to their home, she found Mrs. Sachs in a coma. She died within minutes.

After that, Margaret Sanger said she walked the streets of New York for hours coming home as the sun was rising. In her autobiography, she wrote, “I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky.”

She did what she vowed to do. In 1912, she stopped her nursing work and dedicated herself to making birth control information available to everyone. Of course, it was illegal to distribute birth control devises and even birth control information.

In 1916, Margaret opened the first family planning and birth control clinic in the United States in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Following that, she was arrested for violating postal obscenity laws. She was sent to the workhouse for “creating a public nuisance,” and arrested many times. Her activities and agitation slowly led to changes making it legal to provide birth control information and later for doctors to provide birth control devises. Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, the precursor to the Planned Parenthood Federation.

When I started this sermon, I assumed Margaret Sanger had been a Unitarian because we have claimed her as one of us. Yet, there is no record of her ever having become a member of one of our congregations and we seem to be stretching facts when we claim her. Never the less, she spoke in many of our Churches, had many close Unitarian Universalist friends, and a large number of Unitarian Universalist congregations and members supported her cause then as we do now.

Please remember, you too are part of a religious community that affirms and promotes justice, equity and compassion. Please remember that you are also called to publicly promote the ideals and values that you personally affirm. Margaret Sanger, Lydia Maria Francis Child, Maria Mitchell, and Julia Ward Howe were willing to take significant risks that many of their contemporaries were too fearful to even entertain. They were willing to take risks, because they felt called, moved by their intellectual and religious principles and that literally changed their lives and the course of history. Please remember that you are also called to publicly promote the ideals & values that you personally affirm. If you do, it will literally change your lives and the course of history.