Women, Words and Change

Opening Words and Chalice Lighting

Words bring light into our world.
Until we name an idea, it is difficult if not impossible to see it.
Words cast attention onto things. Some words mislead us.
Our words are powerful.
May the words spoken here today be spoken with love, positive intent and sensitivity to all those around us.

Address

Elaine:

This morning in the midst of International Women's Week, I want to tell you a story about some UU women who made a difference.

The process to revise the Unitarian Universalist Principles in the 1980s was a touchstone in my development as a person, a woman and a Unitarian. The process was more important to me than the principles themselves. Before the revision took place, no one I knew, including me, had ever read the principles, buried as they were in the by-laws of the Association. That's hard to believe given the respect they now receive, how often we refer to them in our community and how often I refer to them in my own life. It was not, however, the first time the statements of our underlying principles had been changed. Hear this: the purpose of the American Unitarian Association when it formed in 1825 included this statement:

"The objects of this Association shall be to diffuse the knowledge and promote the interests of pure Christianity throughout our country.......

The Universalists earliest declaration, in 1790, included the following:

We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works, for these things are good and profitable for men.

But let me set the context for this story - which is all mixed up with my personal journey.

I was not always a feminist. I graduated from high school in 1952 at age 17. I was a "fifties" woman. It was a time when very few professions or occupations were open to women - only the female professions - nursing, teaching or secretarial work. I was a member of the first physical therapy graduating class at the U of A and we were the first women ever taught in the Anatomy Department. There were no women in medicine then. It was a time when women were marrying young and the preferred number of children was four. If a married woman worked outside the home and became pregnant, she had to leave work before she started to "show". Heaven forbid that she should go to work looking pregnant! Maternity leave? What's that? When my first child was born in 1960 I never expected to work outside the home again!! In the 50s world, husbands were the head of the household and wives looked after the home and the children. Although I lived with the cultural expectations laid on women, there was often a small voice inside questioning them, which I quickly quieted and tried to ignore.

I really liked being at home with my kids, but all that other stuff - cleaning house, doing laundry, shopping and cooking - oh and volunteering at the school was, for me, was not enough. By the mid-sixties when both my children were in school, I was ripe for reading Betty Friedan's shocking book, The Feminine Mystique.

Christine reads from The Feminine Mystique:

Page 15....
One April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development, say in a tone of quiet desperation, "the problem." And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone."

"Page 44...
In 1956 the bored editors of McCall's ran a little article called "The Mother Who Ran Away." To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run. "It was our moment of truth," said a former editor. "We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy."

Elaine:

Well, was I surprised or what - there were lots of us unhappy fifties wives out there!

Not all my unhappiness was with my role as a woman, my marriage was not going well and in 1971 I left it, taking my children with me. Not long after, I took out a subscription to Ms. Magazine and a host of feminist writers entered my world and opened my eyes. Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms., was one of them.

Christine reads Gloria Steinem quotes:

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority-men.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'

Elaine:

By now I am a confirmed feminist and a member of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton. At a regional UU gathering here in Edmonton, one of the workshops, led by Beth Hone from the Regina congregation, was on feminist thought. Beth introduced me to more ideas and some of the history of women's oppression. You may have met Beth at the annual Women's Gathering in Lumsden. In Western Canada we speak of her as our foremother. We were beginning to understand the power of language, of words - how words shape our thoughts - and that our language was sexist.

And then in 1977 the Unitarian Univeralist Association passed the Women and Religion resolution at their annual meeting. The gist of it was that the association and all member congregations were to examine their language and practices - everything - for sexism. The Sexism Audit was one of the resources made available. The intro to this document says, "......(it) will enable UU congregations to examine the inner workings of their committees, religious education programs and worship services in the light of the Women and Religion Resolution." I was excited. I approached the minister, Rob Brownlie, showed him the Audit and said, "We need to examine our by-laws." To my surprise he said, "Already done". At his request the Board had reviewed the by-laws and excised the offending language . Rob was one of the few men I knew who considered himself a feminist. It took several hours for some feisty feminists in the congregation to exorcise the hymnal, crossing out all references like "the brotherhood of man" and replacing them with "humanity", and making a list of hymns we would no longer sing, like Worship the Lord etc. etc. Our current de-genderized hymn book, Singing the Living Tradition, was commissioned as a result of the Women and Religion Resolution. Our religion was in the vanguard on this issue. And I was and am proud of that.

Christine:

I am proud of it too. People grew up with male terms being used for both sexes in those days. It wasn't easy for some people to see the importance of changing our language. They didn't see the problem of using words like "he", "him" and "man" both as gender specific words such as "I will interview him in the morning" and as a gender-neutral word such as "man is primate" or "if someone knocks at the door, let him in" .

The lie, that these terms can be used in a gender-neutral way is revealed when there is no doubt that a gender neutral meaning is intended. For example:

Man has two sexes: some men are female.
Man breastfeeds his young
Ask the person about his husband or wife.

What in fact these so-called gender-neutral terms do is contribute to women feeling invisible. They obscure women's importance, and distract attention from their existence. Fighting for the visibiltiy of women (normal whole women, I have to add, women as sexual objects are only too visible!) is an important feminist project in many areas.

Elaine:

Incidentally, about the time we were purging our hymnal of bogus gender-neutral terms it was announced that the Museum of Man in Ottawa was getting a new building. There was a mammoth virtual protest across the country - mostly silent, mostly by women, by mail. Thousands voiced their opinion and you know this place as the Museum of Civilization.

In 1980, Beth suggested that some of us go to a continental gathering of UU women in Lansing, Michigan, and I signed up, I and six other women, from other Western Canadian congregations. It turned out to be a momentous occasion - for me. Women in the Women and Religion group at the UUA had been busy. They came to the gathering prepared with a revised version of the Principles, eliminating the sexist language. Aha - she finally got to the principles, I hear you say. And they had a plan.

Let's back up. The UUA is the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and until 2002 the continental body of Unitarians and Universalists in North America so Canadian congregations were affiliated with them as well as with the Canadian Unitarian Council. Most of our services came from them. In 2002 the CUC assumed responsibility for most congregational services but back in 1980, the UUA was our main squeeze!

And these were the principles embedded in the by-laws of the Association in 1961 when the Unitarians and Universalists merged to become one denomination.

(responsive reading)

In accordance with these corporate purposes, the members of the UUA, dedicated to the principles of a free faith, unite in seeking:

1. To strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship;

2. To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to man;

3. To affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships;

4. To implement our vision of one world by striving for a world community founded on ideals of brotherhood, justice and peace;

5. To serve the needs of members churches and fellowships, to organize new churches and fellowships, and to extend and strengthen liberal religion;

6. To encourage cooperation with men of goodwill in every land.

Elaine:

Clearly, there needed to be some changes! The women with a plan had prepared a new statement of principles which they knew was only a first draft. They also knew that we had to get the change on the agenda of the annual meeting. You have a better chance of getting something on the agenda if the request comes from more than one congregation. So, they distributed a document with the proposed by-law amendment and asked us all to go home and ask our Boards to submit the request for a by-law change AS IS, to the annual meeting planners.

14 active member congregations made that request - one of them was the Unitarian Church of Edmonton, because I came home, all fired up, went to a Board meeting and asked them to send the proposed by-law change. They did. And in June 1981, it was on the annual meeting agenda.

A commission was established to develop a process for congregational consultation. We, here at Westwood, had our own congregational consultation - as you can imagine, the turnout was small but we made our submission as did UCE. I think it might have been a joint submission in fact. John Sworder and I were both at the gathering and those of you might remember that John and I had a running battle over him calling me a girl - it took John a long time to hear what we were saying about language, but he finally got it!!

At one of the UUA annual meetings where the bylaw change was up for discussion, the whole assembly, numbering more than 2000, was broken up into small groups. People who were there told me groups sitting at picnic tables all over the university campus, in the sunshine, hashed out the language to be used. More revisions and suggestions were made and finally in 1985 the by-law change became final. The result? Our beloved principles.

So what's the big deal? Well, there are 3 of them for me: