(Image: Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh. Photo by Timothy Neesam, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license.
By Audrey Greaves
On July 29th, 1974, eleven women walked into the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia and, in defiance of their denomination, became ordained priests. It would take another two years for the Episcopal Church to sanction the ordination of women, but their bold action was a catalyst for the accomplishment of an objective that generations of women had hoped for.
Although women have long held roles in the Episcopal Church, among the first formal roles they were allowed to hold was as members of the deaconess order, which the church sanctioned in 1889. Deaconesses were women who committed their lives to work as service members for the church. They were trained and consecrated in ceremony, and performed services which carved out a new path for women, separate from both lay members of a congregation and clergy. Most of these women did not view their role as step on the way to ordination or an inferior version of deacons; rather, they were women who found a formal place to execute duties which they were better trained and more qualified for than any other role in the congregation[i]. In 1922, deaconesses put before the General Convention of the Episcopal Church the question of their ability to officiate a service when given permission. While this motion failed, the convention conceded that a deaconess could preach in the absence of a priest[ii]. This signaled for the first time that women had the ability and expertise to preach within the institution of the church, even if their role was deferential.
In 1941 Florence Li Tim Oi, an ordained deaconess, was providing ministry to the Anglican congregation in Macau. While the war raged, no priest was able to travel from Japanese occupied territory to administer the Eucharist, so she did it herself. This caught the attention of Bishop R.O. Hall who presided over Hong Kong. In January of 1944, he ordained her as a priest. In the post war years following her ordination, she was the subject of much controversy within the Anglican Communion at large and the Episcopal Church. In 1946 she retired her priesthood license with the purpose of diffusing controversy, but she nevertheless ignited fresh debate about women’s ordination.
In 1970 in Houston, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church gathered, and the issue of women’s ordination was put before them for the first time. They voted to allow women to become deacons, placing them on equal footing in the eyes of the institution. Another resolution would have allowed women to become bishops and priests in addition to deacons, but it failed to pass. However, the unexpectedly large amount of support encouraged women that a 1973 resolution could pass[iii]. As women were allowed into the diaconate alongside men as equals, the arguments against their ordination into the priesthood grew weaker. They organized to push through another resolution.
In 1973 this was proposed at the meeting of the General Convention in New Orleans. The House of Bishops approved the ordination of women, but the resolution lost the vote by orders a few months later. In 1974, just before the ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, the women of the diaconate were incensed. They protested their lack of ordination by voicing their pleas at ceremonies to ordain men of the diaconate as priests[iv]. Women with calls to the priesthood were not willing to wait for an institution of men to affirm what they already knew, that they could be priests.
It is from this backdrop that the Philadelphia Eleven were ordained. The eleven women, Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig were each deacons. Tired of not fulfilling their calling, they banded together with retired bishops Daniel Corrigan and Edward R. Welles II, resigned bishop Robert L. DeWitt, and acting Bishop of Costa Rica, the Rt. Rev. Antonio Ramos, to perform their ordination ceremony. In front of a crowd of 2000, they became the first Episcopal women to be ordained to the priesthood. It was a bold and momentous step.
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church at the time, the Rt. Rev. John M. Allin responded swiftly that the ordinations were “contrary to the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church.” Unfortunately, his sentiment was shared by the House of Bishops who declared the priesthood of the women invalid. In their deliberations, they tellingly refused to meet with the newly ordained women to hear their perspective. Many of those opposed believed that the ordination of women, while an eventual certainty, was not a pressing enough matter for such drastic action. Their opposition was answered by four more women who were ordinained in 1975 in Washington DC against the wishes of the church. These women, too, were declared invalidly ordained. In response to growing pressure from those opposed to women’s ordination, the Bishops involved in the ordinations in Philadelphia were censured.
In 1976 at the General Convention, the opposition was loud, arguing that the priesthood was the defined by its maleness, as impossible for women to achieve as motherhood was for men. Heard over the opposition, however, were the passionate arguments of women who were called to the priesthood. The ordination of women passed, and the fifteen women who were ordained before the resolution were able to have their ordinations upheld, at the discretion of their bishops, without needing to be re-ordained.
After the vote, women of the diaconate became ordained with increasing frequency, although not without backlash. The first of these women, the Rev. Jacqueline Means, faced statements calling her ordination heresy, and across the nation women faced similar objections. Once ordained, women also faced problems in hiring and underrepresentation which remains today. From 2015 to 2017 women made up just 36.9% of clergy in the Episcopal Church, and just 33% of pastors[v].
Despite remaining issues of sexism and discrimination, the holiest glass ceiling of the Episcopal Church has been broken. Today, the Philadelphia Eleven have gone on to pursue varying careers, but nearly all concede that there is still work to be done. When asked what advice she would give to women in the church today, Emily Hewitt responded “From the point of view of the church, I cheer on the women, without whom the church, living as long as it is, would barely be able to go on.” The fight for women’s ordination took time and faced heavy opposition, but through the strength of women’s conviction to dedicate themselves to their callings, from the order of the deaconesses to the 1976 vote, the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church was passed.
[i] Jenny Wiley Legath, Sanctified Sisters (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 5.
[ii] Legath, 153.
[iii] Heather Huyck, “Indelible Change: Woman Priests in the Episcopal Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, December, 1982, Vol. 51, No. 4, Special Issue: Episcopal Women’s History I (December, 1982): 153. Accessed March 15, 2021, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42973918
[iv] Sonja K. Foss, “Women Priests in the Episcopal Church: A Cluster Analysis of Establishment Rhetoric,” Religious Communication Today, September, 1984, Vol. 7. (September, 1984): 2.
[v] Eileen Campbell-Reed, “The State of Clergy Women in the US: A Statistical Update, October 2018.” (October, 2018): 5.