President Summers, Dean Graham, esteemed colleagues, honored guests, students and graduates of the Divinity School, new and old. It is a great pleasure to address you on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Divinity School. I am particularly honored by the presence of those of you who were here in 1955 when women first enrolled as students.¹

For some of us who were not, 1955 may seem long ago—part of an archaic past of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and racial segregation, when women were welcome in few professional settings and ordained by few denominations.

But for those who remember 1955, or for any who take a long historical view, these 50 years may seem short indeed—just more than a quarter of this school's life. The fact that women have been admitted for such a brief period might easily cause embarrassment or amusement, rather than celebration. Of course, women have always been here—that is, since the founding of HDS in 1816—as staff, family members, and supporters they have cleaned the toilets, run the library, edited manuscripts, donated money, and done a hundred other things. But only in 1955 did women join the School's reason for being—matriculated students.

Harvard Divinity School was hardly a pioneer in this regard. Some of our peer institutions have admitted women for 100 years and more. Even at Harvard, the Divinity School was among the last graduate and professional schools to open its doors, though able Radcliffe students, I hasten to add, found their way into HDS classes one way or another.²

When it finally occurred, the admission of women as degree candidates was unremarkable. I asked one of the earliest women students how she learned that HDS admitted women. She said, “I assumed they did. I never gave it a thought.” While women's admission to the school may appear a non-event in and of itself, it advanced the plot of a larger story, a story going back to Harvard's origins, when, as Peter Gomes has observed, the crisis of authority caused by Anne Hutchinson's theological perspicacity added urgency to the magistrates' concern to educate a cadre of men learned enough to best her intimate knowledge of the Bible and defeat her agile antinomianism.³

The story goes back still further, when, as Karen King observes, the men who hoped to hold tight the reigns of authority in the emerging structures of early Christianity discredited women apostles and leaders whose teachings and existence called for more inclusive notions of sacrality.⁴ And the story continues today, when America's largest religious groups, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, continue to view women as disqualified by nature or by scripture from the most important religious roles. Indeed, it is this longer, larger story that made women's admission to HDS so difficult and so long in coming, and that makes its jubilee worthy of celebration. In this longer view, Harvard's decades of delay seem briefindeed, and may even serve to clarify the significance of women's presence in a way that can help us become the School we strive to be.

To sharpen our focus on the significance of women's presence, let us revisit three moments in our history: one before women were admitted and one after, as well as the day 50 years ago when women first sat among the students assembled at this convocation. At each point, I'd like to explore with you what the presence or absence of women tells us about the perennial question at the heart of this School's identity: the appropriate relationship between the academic study of religion and the professional training of religious leaders. During my relatively brief tenure on this faculty, I have variously heard this issue referred to as a subject for healthy intellectual exchange, as a somewhat contentious debate, and as a crisis. I was much reassured to find heated discussion of this topic going back over one hundred years. Today, I'd like to explore how debates about the presence of women at Harvard Divinity School, and debates about the mission of the School and the content and goals of its curriculum shed light on each other. Let us look through the lens of gender at the School in which all of us have chosen to pursue our various vocations to see what it can tell us, both about our past and about our future.

The first moment I'd like to explore occurred in 1893. This was a heady year for religious liberals. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago attempted to realize incipient ideals of pluralism and progress, with all their nineteenth-century limitations. Down the Midway, the University of Chicago, with a divinity school at its center, had just opened as a fully coeducational university. Alumni of Harvard Divinity School chose this moment to petition the Board of Overseers to admit women as students. Individual women had petitioned to enroll earlier, but this is the first proposal I know for institutional change. A near neighbor, Hartford Seminary, was well into its first decade of coeducation and released an upbeat report entitled, “Theological Training for Women.”⁵

The Harvard committee charged to respond to the alumni petition noted that “There are many women now preaching in various denominations and it is clearly of importance that such women should receive adequate instruction before entering the ministry.” Nonetheless, they found it “unwise and impracticable” to grant the petition because “in many courses graduates and undergraduates of the college outnumber the Divinity School men—in some courses forming a very large proportion of the class.”⁶

In 1893 this was enough to doom the proposal, because the undesirability of women in Harvard College courses was the pillar of Harvard's policies toward women's education. It dictated the novel form of the “Harvard Annex,” later known as Radcliffe College, in which women heard the same lectures delivered by the same faculty as Harvard men, but at different times and places.⁷

Charles William Eliot, the President who transformed Harvard from a strong regional college into a world leader, was firm on this issue. While we here are beneficiaries of President Eliot's wisdom, his attitudes toward women demonstrate its limits. He opposed the presence of women in Harvard classrooms precisely because he wanted to broaden the pool of men available to the academic meritocracy, including (with limits) the sons of immigrants, non-Christians, and Catholics. “Co-education does very well in communities where persons are more on an equality,” he told the wife of a founding trustee of Johns Hopkins, “but in a large city where persons of all classes are thrown together, it works badly, unpleasant associations are formed, and disastrous marriages often result.”⁸ Coeducation might be all right where students shared a single faith, as at Methodist Boston University, but not at an institution where, thanks to the elective system inspired by Eliot's Unitarian rationalism, young minds were free to explore. Broad and Emersonian in outlook, Eliot made Harvard one of the first universities to abolish mandatory chapel and helped the Divinity School live up to the nonsectarian principles on which it had been founded.⁹

President Eliot unburdened himself on the topic of women's education at the inauguration of Caroline Hazard as president of Wellesley College. M. Carey Thomas, the Quaker president of Bryn Mawr, sat in the audience, bedecked in academic regalia. Eliot's speech, she recalled, “made me hot from head to foot.”¹⁰

He described the education of women as an experiment, wondering aloud about women's intellectual capacities and about the ability of women's colleges to inculcate good manners while providing an education that would not injure women's “bodily powers and functions.”

When gender entered the picture, Eliot's views of the role of religion in education changed entirely. Harvard men, Eliot believed, in both the College and the Divinity School, should be free to worship or not as their conscience dictated and should take a historical approach to the study of religion. The University should impart knowledge and foster moral development so that the individual could choose the right. Wellesley women, in contrast, should have their “religious motives and aspirations” shaped by the college, and particularly by the “simplicity, dignity, and intellectual strenuousness of Congregational worship … where … ‘vain repetitions’ are avoided, and the gregarious religious excitement so unwholesome for young women finds no place.”¹¹

This gendered dynamic, in which the practice of religion, the continuity of tradition, and the benefits of religious authority are associated with women for whom higher education may be injurious, and the critical study of religionis associated with men for whom its practiceis a private matter, provides an important backdrop for understanding what would transpire in subsequent decades. In addition, as we move on in our history, let us note a buried insight in President Eliot's anxieties about class-mixing and “unpleasant associations.” His fears suggest that the admission of women connected in complicated ways with religious and ethnic diversity and had the potential to increase its impact on the School.

It would take sixty years and many ups and downs in the life of the Divinity School for the alumni proposal of 1893 to be accepted by the Harvard Corporation. We now leap to the Convocation of 1955, when women first sat as students in this assembly. The eight women degree candidates in the audience were a remarkable group. They included Letty Russell, who would go on to be one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and one of the first Christian feminist theologians, and who would serve for over 25 years on the faculty of Yale Divinity School. They included Constance Parvey, who would be one of the first women ordained in the Lutheran Church and would produce the famous Sheffield Report on the Community of Men and Women in the Churches for the World Council of Churches,¹²

and who would serve for many years as chaplain at MIT. The group included Judith Hoehler, ordained as a Unitarian Universalist, who would become one of the first denominational counselors at HDS. The brilliant Marianka Fousek, who would distinguish herself as a scholar of the Roman world, was the only candidate for Doctorate of Theology (Th.D.) in the group. The inimitable Elinor Bunn Thompson came as a student and then virtually ran the school when a succession of deans relied on her experience as an editor and administrator. Emily Thornton Gage, a transfer student from Union Theological Seminary, would be the first woman to receive an HDS degree, graduating in 1957.

At that Convocation, the newly appointed Dean, Douglas Horton, chided the school for its tardiness in admitting women by remarking at the “mumbling and head shaking” that had accompanied the admission of Anna Maria Shuman to study theology at the Frisian University in Holland 300 years before. He noted that Harvard Divinity School, in 1955, was adopting the thesis Shuman had developed in her seventeenth century dissertation: that “the study of letters is becoming to a Christian woman.”¹³

Trained at the coeducational Hartford Seminary, Douglas Horton, following the death of his first wife, wed the 45-year-old president of Wellesley College, Mildred McAfee, a prominent lay leader in the Congregational Church. Many early women students lived with the Hortons on the third floor of Jewett house. If any of them wanted a model for breaking gender barriers, Mildred McAfee Horton specialized in just that. During World War II, she took leave from her presidency to become the first woman commissioned officer in the Navy as director of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). She excelled in electrical engineering, serving as the first female member of the boards of directors of both the Radio Corporaton of America and the National Broadcasting Corporation. She also broke barriers in religion, where she served as the first woman vice president of the Federal Council of Churches. When asked her husband's opinion at a committee meeting, she replied: “I really don't know what it is. He is at home doing the breakfast dishes so that his wife can attend this meeting.”¹⁴

In this environment, the admission of women could hardly be questioned. The Dean's Report of 1955 states only that the corporation accepted the recommendation of the faculty. One suspects that the faculty might have recommended it long before that—if there had been one. But in the 1940s HDS was struggling, with a part-time dean and a limited curriculum delivered primarily by members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Interestingly, keeping women out in the 1940s merited more attention in the Dean's Reports than did letting them in during the 1950s. Indulge me, if you will, while I quote from the 1949 report of Dean Willard Sperry.

“The question of the admission of women,” he wrote, “is one that has come up often over the past 25 years and is sure to be reopened in the future, particularly in view of their recent admission by the Law School and the Medical School.” Defending Harvard's standards of excellence, he observed: “Most women divinity students devote themselves to the field of religious education, presumably proposing to become employed in Sunday schools. We have no department of religious education as such, and there is at this moment no inclination to organize such a department, even had we the means to do so.” Further, he noted, “One cannot wholly escape the rather ungenerous suspicion that many a young woman enters divinity school with the unsuspected hope that she may become a minister's wife.” “Whether or not women are going to be welcome and effective as parish ministers is not a problem which we can decide. That decision will have to be made by trial and error in the churches.” Dean Sperry concluded with remarkable candor, “I have no convictions and no wisdom on this matter.”¹⁵

While President Eliot feared that coeducation could cause poor marriages, Dean Sperry feared it might lead to good ones, at least by the standards of his day. His comments recall the binary association of women with religious practice and men with religious ideas. Sperry's dismissal of women's place in theological education mirrored a view of the School's mission as merely academic. The Divinity School of his day offered no professional training in ministry, or even academic training in the fields of theology or ethics in the modern world. The School was not viewed as having a transformative or leading role in religion or society, or even in theological education. Rather, it provided a service to religious groups who needed leaders educated in Bible and in Christian History and doctrine. It was not a place where new questions could be raised about the future or the past and where the tools of critical inquiry could be used to answer them.

This latter view of the School, in which faculty modeled intellectual innovation and its application after national and international conversations and professional contexts, would come to the fore in the 1950s when the Divinity School was reborn under the presidency of Nathan Pusey, the deanship of Douglas Horton, and the financial support of David Rockefeller. In 1955, women entered a School staffed by a youthful cadre of brilliant international scholars who felt the full support of their Dean and President. By the end of the 1950s, three changes marked the beginning of the Divinity School's modern history: the admission of women, the founding of the Center for the Study of World Religions, and the establishment of the Department of the Church, which eventually became today's Office of Ministry Studies. Apparently unconnected, each marked a stream in the intersecting intellectual currents that would shape the School we now attend.

The women joined in the excitement of the revitalized School. They were inspired by the leadership of their professors in encouraging a social role for the churches, as well as by their professors' participation in the international ecumenical movement that would train a key generation of leaders in civil rights and social justice. But the women soon disappeared from the Dean's Reports. While Douglas Horton atleast spoke appreciatively of wives of students and faculty who had formal roles in a number of school activities in the 1950's, in the 1960's women are not mentioned at all.

The School had done an about-face since the nonactivist days of the 1940's. New departments of theology, ethics, and comparative religion brought stringent moral analysis to contemporary social issues. The school courted controversy with conferences on sexual ethics and abortion and conducted a colloquium in Washington, D.C., where students participated in a debate over black power between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and attended congressional hearings on the Civil Rights Act. While a summer program began to encourage able African American undergraduates to enter the ministry, a faculty report found that “white concerns, attitudes and habits” pervaded the life and curriculum of the School, and the Black Caucus found the faculty report to be based upon “racist paternalistic assumptions.”¹⁶

Harvey Cox published the proto-feminist Secular City in 1965¹⁷ and Joseph Fichter, the Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, offered the School's first course on women in the Church in 1967, before blurbing Mary Daly's 1969 book The Church and the Second Sex¹⁸ as “the most sophisticated, the most progressive, and the most honest of all the works that have attempted to deal with women in the church.”

Harvard Divinity School was, in the words of one alum, “a happenin' place,” yet it consisted almost exclusively of men, with no women on the faculty and only two or three graduating each year. Then, in 1970, the tide began to turn. Thirty-five women enrolled, almost as many as had graduated during the previous fifteen years. The catalog of that year read:

“The Divinity School considers it important to encourage women to seek theological education, including preparation for the ordained ministry…. Justice as well as the need for a wider spectrum of human experience in the leadership of the churches calls for an increased number of women at all levels in theological education…. Further developments,” the catalogue explained, “depend upon the availability of women prepared for a pioneering service.”

The following year fifty-six women enrolled, most in the new Master of Theological Studies degree, a number in doctoral programs, but with a critical mass in the Master of Divinity.

At this moment, when feminism arose as a major force in American society and thought, three conditions made the Divinity School fertile soil for its flourishing and for the establishment of the University's first women's studies program: 1) the deanship of Krister Stendahl, 2) the presence of a talented and astute group of women students who founded the Women's Caucus, and 3) the mission and structure of the School itself, with its combined commitments to the critical study of religion, to multicultural education, and to putting theological analysis to work in social settings. Here was a place where scholars were accountable to the living communities from which students came and to which they returned. And in every one of those communities, the religious leadership of women was far more than a matter of access to education. It required a fundamental rethinking of the meaning of texts, doctrines, practices, and history in a way that was not required by women's entrance into most professional schools. The feminist assertion that the personal is political echoed through the curriculum, as students and faculty sought to understand the nature, content, and repercussions of faith commitments and practices, their own and others.

Dean Stendahl, affectionately known as “Sister Krister” by women students, was already on record supporting the ordination of women as a biblical scholar before coming to Harvard from Sweden in 1954. He had married not a college president, but another theological scholar Brita Johnson, whose father had introduced the motion for the ordination of women in the state church of Sweden to the Swedish Parliament. Against the consensus of biblical scholars, Krister Stendahl argued that the New Testament did not speak to the issue directly, in a piece that was instrumental to the successful vote in the Swedish parliament. While the Hortons provided support for women's leadership in unconventional arenas, the Stendahls were the right people at the right time to support a new innovation arising from women students: the use of gender as a category of analysis in scholarly research—women's studies.

In the fall of 1971, the Women's Caucus, consisting of women students, staff, and wives of faculty and students, began meeting weekly. Two students from the caucus responded to an assignment in Harvey Cox's course “Eschatology and Politics” with a proposal to devote two weeks of the course to women's liberation and to halt the use of the masculine pronouns “to refer to all people or to God” in class discussions. Professor Cox submitted the proposals to the class. The 80 students voted to focus both readings and discussion on women's liberation and to try the experiment with language. The instructional budget paid for the kazoos class members blew when they heard gender-exclusive language. “We chose kazoos because it made the class as a whole responsible,” one student recalled. “Nobody wanted to be the language police and everyone loved the phallic symbolism.” Newsweek¹⁹

picked up on the story after class member E. J. Dionne reported on it on the front page of the Crimson.²⁰ HDS students, trained in the analysis of texts, rituals, and doctrines, were attuned to subtle and not-so-subtle repercussions of naming, classification, and symbolic action. When they turned their analysis to gender, the School would never be the same, and neither would the world.

That same term, women students invited Mary Daly to Linda Barufaldi's dorm room to discuss the invitation Daly had received to be the first woman ever to preach at Harvard's Memorial Church. It was there that Daly, with the students' encouragement, conceived the walkout from patriarchal religion that she led on November 14. When Daly descended the pulpit and invited others to join her in walking out, some Divinity School women followed her out of the church never to return, some followed her in an act of love and anger that would make it possible for them to walk back in on their own terms, and others remained inside, committed to using what they learned to reform institutions to which they remained loyal. Differences fueled passionate arguments among allies. Roman Catholic women studied together with women who could be ordained, those committed to ordination studied with those who rejected it as patriarchal, and those who came to the school to study religion but not to practice it confronted the value of faith in the lives of other students. “Somehow,” one student recalled, “what everybody was bringing was combustible.”

Lack of difference also proved to be combustible. The Women's Caucus modeled itself on the Black Caucus. Participants were conscious of both the similarity of the groups' agendas and the possibility that they could be used against each other. In 1971, women and African Americans each comprised approximately eleven percent of the student body. One student recalled that the Black Caucus was all male and the Women's Caucus all white because there were no African American women students at HDS. This was not quite true. The handful of black women who began to matriculate in the late 1960's usually identified more with black students than with other women, even though many black male students opposed the ordination of women. One of the first African American women to receive the Master of Divinity degree, Bobette Reed Kahn, had been the first black woman to graduate from Williams College and would be the second ordained in the Episcopal Church. After one year of doctoral study in Hebrew Bible, she left Harvard never to return. “I loved the Old Testament,” she told me, “but I never wanted to be another first. You have no idea how hard it is.” Rena Karefa-Smart, who I believe was the first African American woman to earn a Doctorate of Theology in 1976, had also been the first black woman to graduate from Yale Divinity School some 30 years before. During the 1970s, the percentage of women students at HDS would increase yearly until they became a majority in the early 1980's and stayed that way, while the percentage of African American students leveled and sometimes declined.

Dean Stendahl provided funds for a number of women students to travel to annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion at which they helped found the Women and Religion Section. A number of their term papers were published in anthologies produced by that group, including Emily Culpepper's essays on menstrual taboos in Leviticus and Zoroastrianism.²¹

Realizing that she could spend the rest of her life analyzing negative attitudes toward menstruation, Culpepper decided to explore the subject from a positive point of view in her M.Div. thesis. Graduation requirements called for either a private examination or a public disputation of the thesis. Culpepper chose the public disputation. Her thesis consisted of a ten-minute color film entitled “Period Piece,” intended to provide an alternative to President Eliot's notion that a conflict existed between the demands of higher education and women's “bodily powers and functions.” The Sperry Room was packed. One student recalled sitting between two professors chattering away in German, forgetting that they had required her to learn the language. “My mother would roll over in her grave,” one professor said to the other as the film alternated images of women divinity students engaged in serious intellectual activity with images of those same students inserting tampons and performing self-examinations.²²

The Dean's Report of 1972 indicates that Jean MacRae, a second year student who would soon found New Words, a feminist bookstore, was appointed as the first coordinator of women's programs. When I mentioned this to Jean, she said, “I guess my name was the one that was put down. This was a collective effort.” The position of coordinator of women's programs, which would later be filled by another Women's Caucus participant, M. Brinton Lykes, was located in the recently established Office of Ministerial Studies. The first director of the Office of Ministry Studies was Patricia Budd Kepler; most of her successors would also be women. Excitement about path-breaking women's ministries enlivened the project of professional formation. In response to a proposal from the Caucus, Alice Hageman came to the school in 1972 as the Lentz Lecturer on women and ministry, and together with students, published a volume entitled Sexist Religion and Women in the Church: No More Silence!²³

based on fourteen guest lectures that took place that year. Rosemary Ruether also came to HDS as the Stillman Chair professor and offered the first course on feminist theology. Out of these experiences came a successful proposal from the Women's Caucus for what would eventually become the Women's Studies in Religion Program (WSRP).

Initially known as the Research-Resource Associates in Women's Studies, the program brought five scholars to the school each year with the modest assignment of transforming the sources, methods, and conclusions of the fields of study comprising the curriculum. The initial student proposal, authorized by faculty vote 16 February 1973, provided that “the group will be interracial in order to represent the experience of both black and white women.” Not yet attentive to religious diversity, the program in its early years nevertheless brought a stream of African American scholars including Jaqueline Grant and Katie Geneva Cannon. These formative figures in womanist theology helped attract a dynamic cohort of students who would make black women an important presence during the 1980's, including Karen Baker Fletcher, who delivered the 2006 William James Lecture, and Chandra Taylor Smith, the most recent president of the HDS Alumni/ae Association.

But now I have entered the 1980's and wandered beyond the story I promised to tell. History teaches that I ought not exceed the allotted time. Thus I shall have to forgo speaking of the first women faculty, historian Caroline Walker Bynum and Islamicist Jane Smith, of the remarkable contributions of Associate Dean Constance Buchanan, of the first woman to receive tenure, theologian Margaret Miles, in 1983, or of the conference Diana Eck convened in the same year, “Women, Religion and Social Change,” in which 70 women from around the world gathered at the Center for the Study of World Religions. Nor can I speak of the first woman appointed to a named chair in 1988, when the feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza became Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity. Today is the jubilee of women students, so they have been our focus. It is because of their imagination, intelligence, and hard work that women's studies came to this school. Now a third of our faculty teach and publish in the field of gender, many of them graduates of the school or former advisers or scholars of the women's studies program.

Perhaps the most important lesson of viewing the history of our school through the lens of gender has to do with the intellectual benefits of being an outsider. If you feel like an outsider to this august institution, you are in very good company. Almost everyone I know feels like an outsider here, either because of their religious commitments or their lack of them, because of the particular background and vantage point from which they approach the study of religion, their disciplinary commitments, their national origin, their race, or their sexual orientation, or all of the above. Participants in the Women's Caucus wore their outsiderhood proudly, they trumpetedit from kazoos, displayed it on panels in the hallways, and projected it on the screen in the Sperry Room. Certainly, the critical mass of women students enabled them to overcome the most painful aspects of isolation—their path may not, or may not yet, be open to all students. Yet their sense of outsiderhood enlivened conversations, fueled creativity, and engendered a profound level of commitment to the school. They proved many times over Virginia Woolf's observation about the admission of women to British universities, that it is better to be locked out than to be locked in. This is a sentiment with which any intellectual can agree, but it has particular salience for this school, which makes the audacious claim to study religion from a nonsectarian viewpoint, a mission that challenges us daily to consider the ways in which we may still be locked in.

Every religion accounts for gender as part of a created order, and we all live with the repercussions. Religion's role in constructing, maintaining, distorting, and subverting gender is played out every day in headlines and in homes and schools throughout the world; in debates over birth control, abortion, and family violence that spill into both domestic and foreign policy; in debates about the Iraqi constitution and the American invasion of Afghanistan; about the nature of marriage; about health, law, development, and globalization. We at Harvard Divinity School have chosen to be actors rather than bystanders in this drama by taking gender as an arena for critical investigation rather than as a given. While we have much left to do, we pause today to celebrate what we have accomplished in this short half-century.