Anna Garlin Spencer

By Jone Johnson Lewis, Leader, Northern Virginia Ethical Society From the Anna Garlin Spencer Award Ceremony American Ethical Union Assembly, 2009
(c) 2009 Jone Johnson Lewis, used with permission I am honored to have been asked to share with you this morning a little bit about Anna Garlin Spencer, one of my favorite figures in American progressive and religious history. I've been asked to speak for 10-15 minutes it's difficult to tell you in that short of a time about this remarkable woman. At the time of her death, one obituary stated that she was certainly one of the ten, and perhaps one of the five, most influential women who ever lived. Yet she is nearly forgotten today partly because she was never #1 in an organization, and history likes to tell the story of the #1 person, and often forgets those who work in other ways, often in dozens of organizations and not just one. Anna Garlin Spencer 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, among the early leaders of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom woman's rights reformer and considered by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others, to be a key woman suffrage leader temperance worker theological school professor child labor reformer founder of the NAACP an officer or member during most of the years of the Free Religious Association

I first became acquainted with Anna Garlin Spencer or, rather, since she was born almost exactly 100 years before I was, with her story when a group of students at Meadville/Lombard Theological School advocated for getting her portrait on the wall of our school. Why? At that time, in the late 1980s, she'd been the only, not just the first, woman on the faculty of that school. And so when I was to write a research paper on some woman in religious history, a year or two later, I picked Anna Garlin Spencer in part, because of her connections to both Unitarianism in which I was raised and Ethical Culture I was exploring becoming a leader myself in the movement at that time. I thought she would be interesting to learn about. And, I admit that my other motivation in picking her was that I had five papers due the same week that quarter, and I thought that I'd pick someone about whom there was little written, so the paper would go quickly. Oh, how wrong I was not about her being interesting, but about there not being much to find about her. Nothing much had been written organizing the massive amount of details that I could find but she was so involved in so many different areas in which I was interested, that she kept popping up as I dug deeper and deeper.

As one man once commented after I gave a platform address on Spencer, her life wouldn't make a TV movie of the week. It was her activism, not her life that was dramatic. She was born in 1851 in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and was raised in a family in New England that had roots in America on both sides back to the first half of the 1600s. Her father fought in the Civil War, and her mother was an abolitionist. She had a maiden aunt who was a woman's rights activist. Anna's education was "largely private" like that of most women of the time. By the age of 18, she was lecturing about education, and she became a newspaper writer and teacher. She, like many women of her time, made the choice that she would remain single so that she could dedicate herself to making a difference in the world. She became involved in woman suffrage, in issues of racial justice, in education reform, and in liberal religion. She became associated with the Free Religious Association or FRA an organization founded in 1865 by a second generation of Transcendentalists, interested in moving religion further from its traditional roots, and also interested in social justice work. It was at one of the annual conferences of the FRA that Anna met one of the other speakers at that year's conference, William H. Spencer, and he convinced her that she need not remain single to be active in the world and after a very quick courtship, they married, to the astonishment of Anna's many friends. He supported her work and activism all their years together. In 1876, Felix Adler someone many of you may have heard of succeeded the founding president of the FRA, Octavius Brooks Frothingham. (Some claim that I'll do anything to work the name of Octavius Brooks Frothingham into a talk, so there it is.) Felix Adler introduced, in 1878, some proposals to make the FRA more organized and not merely an annual conference with speeches. He proposed regional organizations, to which independent societies like the Ethical Culture Society could become related, and he also proposed a plan of active social reform work. Adler, a young man of 27, had as floor leader for these proposals a young woman also 27 years old, Anna Garlin Spencer. Their plan failed, and Adler stepped down as president of the FRA in 1882. After the failure of his plan at the FRA to build a network of independent religious societies, Adler began organizing other Ethical Societies. Spencer and Adler remained in contact, though their paths would diverge for a few years. Anna Garlin Spencer continued speaking, including filling pulpits at independent religious societies and her husband's Unitarian congregations William Spencer moved around a lot, perhaps explained by the fact that sermons from Spencer in the 1870s already often had the word "agnosticism" in the title. The Spencers had a daughter, then a son who died at birth. When it became clear that William Spencer's radical views made it difficult to retain a ministry position, the Spencers moved to Wisconsin, where William Spencer joined a family real estate business. But Anna was called back east within months when a family friend, James Eddy, died, and the trustees of his will asked Anna to help them fulfill the terms of that will to set up an independent religious society in Providence, Rhode Island. So she returned, thinking it was for a few months, and the organization she helped found Bell Street Chapel had soon talked her into staying as their first minister. At her ordination, she became the first woman to be ordained a minister in the state of Rhode Island. Her husband and daughter joined her in Rhode Island he eventually became minister of the Fourth Unitarian Society of Providence and she continued her social reform work as well as working hard to build a religious community. She had what we'd call a street ministry for sailors; she helped to found a Providence coalition of charitable causes; she continued her work with the woman suffrage movement on a local, state, and national level; she was key in founding a state organization to work for reforms in child labor practices and laws; she gave or organized addresses at Bell Street and often traveled elsewhere to speak in pulpits and at colleges; she continued her work with the Free Religious Association nationally; she was active in the temperance organization locally and nationally (she described herself as "a heretic among the evangelicals"); she held national offices in the social purity' alliance; she supported schools for freedmen in the Sea Islands; she wrote many articles published in newspapers and journals some in the popular press, some in liberal religious publications, some in publications of the various social reform organizations -- I could continue naming many more of her many activities.

Two I'd like to highlight one, her participation in the 1893 Columbian Exposition, where she headed up a section at the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, the highest such position held by a woman at that event. At that 1893 Chicago exposition, she also spoke at the World's Parliament of Religions, at the Woman's Conference, at the Unitarian conference, and at the Ethical Culture conference. Second, she spoke in the late 1890s at a scholarly conference on social reform and philanthropy, at the invitation of Felix Adler, with other luminaries such as then-professor Woodrow Wilson. She left Bell Street Chapel after 18 years, announcing that my flesh is gone,' and moved to New York to join a new venture, a School of Philanthropy at Columbia University, where she became a director of the program and also taught courses. She also rejoined her old friend, Felix Adler, as his associate leader, and was an active speaker and organizer for the Ethical Society. She and Felix disagreed on a few things woman suffrage, whether divorce should ever be permitted (Anna thought it should be relatively easy to divorce if there were not children, while Felix opposed divorce in any case), and a few other issues and she gradually moved to working for the national movement. She organized the American Ethical Union (which began meeting and had by-laws long before its formal incorporation in the 1920s). She headed up the AEU's summer school for ethics program which was held in Wisconsin and evolved into the University Extension division of the University, still a lively institution today. She even helped found an Ethical Society in Milwaukee during those years. She continued to publish, as well as to teach, and her special expertise was on the family. She published more than 100 articles in those years in popular magazines. Several of her books, including her history of Bell Street Chapel and feminist classic Woman's Share in Social Culture, are available online now thanks to the Google Books initiative. Spencer eventually moved on from her Ethical Culture involvements, continuing her teaching. Spencer became active in the growing peace movement. She helped to found the Woman's peace party in 1915, and was the first to chair the national board of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In her 60s Spencer took a position with the Meadville Theological School, then in Pennsylvania, and organized a summer study program in the city for ministry students, on the principle that the future of religion was in urban areas and in social reform. She was key in getting Meadville itself moved to Chicago which was rich in professors on reform issues, so she had worked herself out of a job. And her husband, who had headed up the New York parole system, died after a long illness. Anna returned to the New York area, and to teaching. Her book, The Family and Its Members, was the first textbook written for high school students on the family. She continued her various reform causes, now also including active work on peace. Spencer was one of the founders of the NAACP she always considered work for racial justice the most important that she could do, inspired profoundly by a childhood memory of seeing captured escaped slaves being returned to the South and slavery. At a League of Nations dinner in 1931 that she had organized, Anna Garlin Spencer collapsed with a stroke or heart attack, and later died. She was in the middle of her semester of teaching social work at a local college. Her memorial service was held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. There were representatives present from 31 organizations in which she'd been actively involved. Mrs. Felix Adler, as she preferred to be known, delivered the eulogy. It is appropriate to name our AEU service award for this woman who, from the age of 18 until her death at 79, was active in so many different organizations for social justice, human rights and dignity, and for reform in both the social fabric and religion. She was key in getting the AEU itself organized, and through her informal and formal ties to the Ethical Culture movement helped to connect this movement to so many other causes and people and organizations.

In April 1908 in a platform address at the Philadelphia Ethical Society, Spencer spoke on the relationship between personal and social ethics. I close with these words from that address:

....Every human being may be better ... We know it, because we -- the human
beings we know best -- could be better than we are. Every human being should take advantage of his opportunity, however poor. We know this because we feel that we have failed to make the best of our opportunities. Every human being can... become a larger, finer, and fairer specimen of the human race. This is the gospel of religion and this is the gospel of personal ethics. "To put forth all one's strength" as the Psalmist says, to become that better creature one sees in vision -- this is to "verify one's credentials" as a spiritual being. For this end of spiritual appeal and stimulation, for this end of daring uplift even from the dregs of circumstance, the church has existed and societies like this been formed. This high function of religion has been justified by human experience. It was never more needed for conscious leadership than now.... ... Be and do the best you see and can gain strength to realize, wherever life has placed you and at whatever cost of struggle!

(c) 2009 Jone Johnson Lewis, used with permission