sff_corgi_lj | Women's History Month 2004

Anna Garlin Spencer

Anna Garlin Spencer icon

Anna Garlin Spencer, April 17 1851 - February 12 1931. She was: the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island (an "independent" minister serving an independent chapel), the first woman to serve as a leader in Ethical Culture, a pioneer in the social work profession as a college teacher and author, an early expert on the family, a much-published author in magazines of the early 20th century, peace activist, woman's rights reformer, temperance worker, seminary professor, child labor reformer, founder of the NAACP and an officer or member during most of the years of the Free Religious Association. ¹

Reverend Anna Garlin Spencer was a native of Attleboro, Massachusetts. Her parents were Francis L. Garlin and Nancy Mason Carpenter Garlin, of old New England stock. ^{3, 7} She spent her youth in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In 1869 she began to write for the Providence Journal, as well as teach in the public schools. Perhaps inspired by the examples of her abolitionist mother, Nancy Carpenter Garlin, and her aunt, Sarah Carpenter, a missionary who worked with homeless women, Anna dedicated her life to social reform. She continued journalistic writing until her marriage.⁶

Although she associated with such greats as Jane Adams and Susan B. Anthony the general public probably doesn’t recognize her name. Unitarians know her better, as they prefer her rendition of the Christmas story in particular, as it is more humanist than most and fits well with their modern idea of celebrating the life of a Jesus. ²

It is important to note that like many folks from her time (late Victorian through the Great Depression) she considered herself a unitarian with a small ‘u’. Very early in her twenties, Garlin Spencer left her Congregational origins and associated herself with what was then called Radical Religion, or Free Religion -- those who saw themselves as not really part of the Christian Church any longer. She became active with an independent lecture league on [free religious] topics, and eventually helped found Bell Street Chapel in Rhode Island. She said at one point, "I am too radical for the theists and too theistic for the radicals." She was the first minister of Bell Street Chapel and was, in this role, the first woman ordained to the ministry in the state of Rhode Island in 1891. She married the likewise Reverend William H. Spencer in 1878, a fellow Unitarian (or unitarian) minister. ^{2, 3, 6}

A successful woman preacher was once asked "what special obstacles have you met as a woman in the ministry?" "Not one," she answered, "except the lack of a minister's wife." ⁴

In the 1890s, while she was at Bell Street, she served as the president of the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association. ⁶ In 1903 she left Bell Street to become the first woman associated leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture -- a post she was to have for six years, 1903-9. At the same time she was associate director and staff lecturer of the New York School of (Civics and) Philanthropy (1903-13), and concurrently a special lecturer on social services and education at the University of Wisconsin. ^{2, 3}

At age 52 she left all that and became a professor of sociology and ethics at the Theological School in Medville, Pennsylvania (later named Medville Theological Seminary). Her most powerful and visible work in sociology occurred during her years at Medville. There she organized students into social service and sponsored lectures with the most noted thinkers of the day. She was so successful, that the more conservative faculty and administration increasingly opposed her work and influence. In 1914, she proposed abolishing the undergraduate program and moving the entire institution to Chicago (where it is today) to coordinate the seminary’s work with that done at the University of Chicago. As one author succinctly notes: "Her plan worked so well that by March of 1917 the trustees decided that a full time professor of social ethics was not longer needed." Spencer was fired. "Clearly," says Reverend Foli, in a sermon delivered at Bell Street, there may be more to the story, probably rooted in Anna Garlin Spencer’s successful reorganization of the institution, her charismatic effect on the students, and her notoriety as a pacifist during wartime. ²

One of the books she edited is titled The Care of Dependent, Neglected and Wayward Children (1893, with Charles Wesley Birtwell). She believed that society had a responsibility towards children. Her analysis of the structure and dynamics of the family was one of her most important contributions. She emphasized the family as the basic unit of the democratic society and saw it as the critical element in teaching democratic ideals. She believed a family that was not democratic in its dynamics could not fulfill its responsibilities to the country. She held the "fundamental belief in the worth and dignity of every human being and the equal right of each and all to personality." No one was to be solely in the service of another or to have their value estimated along such lines; instead each person should seek perfection as an individual by making a contribution to the common life. According to Garlin Spencer, "the essence of democracy" began and was put to the test in the family unit. ²

Unlike other radicals of her time she was not ready to do away with the institution of marriage and the family. She agreed with many that the economic dependency of women often wrongly channeled their energy, aborted human growth and generally prevented creative and transcending work. She sensed that in order to change the working and home conditions of women, "a higher value had to be placed on both women and the family." ²

"The greater tenacity of life among women, however, their greater resistance to disease, their larger capacity for continual, sustained effort if that is varied in form and not too severe, are ample proofs that women need not be invalids or "weak," and that it is a social mistake or a social crime, or both, if they are so in any prevailing numbers at any period of life.

[T]he care-taking of the weak and ignorant and undeveloped, the moral protection of children and youth in recreation and in labor, the succor of the needy, and the general expression of social control and social uplift, these are woman's special functions in the social order and have ever been her peculiar responsibility.

The significance of the woman suffrage movement is twofold: it is a response to the general movement of democracy toward the individuation of all members of all previously subjected or submerged classes of society; and it is also a social response to the new demands of citizenship which have followed inevitably the new and varied increase in the functions of government." ⁴

A strong voice for all women’s issues, Rev. Spencer was active in the National American Women Suffrage Association, the Women’s Council of the USA, and the National Institute of Social Sciences. ² Her writings during this time include Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1913) and The Family and Its Members (1922). ³

The United States Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom originated in January 1915 as the Woman's Peace Party. At a conference in Washington (DC), called by Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt, approximately 3,000 women approved a platform calling for a conference of neutrals to offer continuous mediation as a way to end war, the extension of suffrage to women, and the establishment of the Woman's Peace Party (WPP).

In November 1919 the WPP voted to change its name to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Section for the United States. Anna Garlin Spencer was selected as national chairman. ⁸ An early participant in the National Council of Women, Anna Garlin Spencer was president of that organization in 1920. ⁶ She died at her home in New York in 1931. ⁶

One could make a career of researching all the organizations she belonged to and the connections she made. But she was not uncritical of those organizations. As was evident in the reading this morning. She was one to see the need for not only individuals, but also organizations to be watchful of their growth and development. ²

"Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age." ⁵