City: Freeport, Maine
Title: “Mainline Women in Campus Ministry, 1950-1975”
Abstract:
In the middle of the twentieth century, women of the American Protestant mainline were serving in church roles on the margins of ministry that enabled their later entrance into the formal, ordained ministry in greater numbers. They were minister’s wives and teachers of religious education and professors at theological schools. And they were also ministering to young adults on campuses. Between 1950-1975, mainline denominations sent their young, unmarried women to campus, where many of them dreamt of ordained ministry. On campus (a newly recognized “mission field” for the mainline), women got their feet wet counseling students, leading worship, and administering foundations. The turbulence of campuses in the ‘60s and ‘70s changed the trajectory of women’s activism surrounding formal leadership rights in their churches. And women’s presence in campus ministry during these decades connected the small vanguard of mainline women in ministry in the ‘50s and early ‘60s to the generation of young women who would go on to ordination en masse in the 1980s.