Philadelphia Eleven

The “Philadelphia Eleven” (or “Philadelphia 11”) are eleven women who were ordained as the first female priests in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974, two years before General Convention authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood.

Background

Episcopal women ordained to the diaconate, first of the three Holy Orders of Deacons, Priests and Bishops, were regarded differently from their male counterparts because of their habit-like attire and the fact that by custom they could not marry, and they were often not recognized as fully ordained deacons, even though the title "The (or the) Reverend" or "The (or the) Rev." preceding their names indicated their professional status as clergywomen. Blame for this misunderstanding, which fostered discrimination against them and inequality in their professional positions, can be traced directly to the canon laws regarding them which used the gender-identifying language suffix "-ess" added to the non-gendered, neutral word "deacon" with reference to them, even though for over a hundred years they had been ordained by laying-on-of-hands within the Apostolic Succession linking back to Christ in the same way that male deacons in the Episcopal Church had been ordained deacons. The inequity regarding women's participation in policy-making was changed only in 1970, when for the first time laywomen were seated and given voice and vote in the triennial General Convention, the bicameral legislative and policy-making body of the Episcopal Church patterned after the United States Congress.

Following the successful Revolutionary War for Independence, the Anglican Communion in the United States changed its name to the Episcopal Church, in conformity with the former colonies' distinguishing new name of the United States of America. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. remains an Episcopal Church body, in keeping with the majority of founding fathers and mothers having been members of the Anglican Communion in the United States, now known as the Episcopal Church. This was to show distinction from the Church of England in England, in harmony with its new and independent American identity, though the Episcopal Church remains part of the Worldwide Anglican Communion, co-equal with the Mother Church of England.

Within its legislative body, the General Convention, the House of Deputies consists of four clergy and four lay deputies (representatives) from each diocese, and the House of Bishops is comparable to the Senate. The word "Episcopal" derives from the Greek word which translates as "bishop," indicating that governance in each diocese rests with the bishop of that diocese, whose authority derives from mandated legislation within the diocese which is patterned after that of the national church, convening annually instead of triennially. Nationally, the House of Bishops must have the concurrence of the House of Deputies (whose delegates are elected by their various diocesan conventions) to create or change canon law or church policy. Resolutions to make such changes may originate in either House. Larger states may have more than one diocese.

In secular society, American women had exercised their right to vote for fifty years under the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified on August 18, 1920, and in some states prior to that, before they were granted that same right in the Episcopal Church. Discrimination lay within the House of Deputies because of the way language was interpreted concerning the definition of a delegate. For nearly two hundred years, "clergy" was interpreted to mean priests. The word "laity" had been interpreted by male Deputies to mean lay men. Therefore, deacons of both sexes and all women were excluded from policy-making, including policy which might affect them. Lay women had been petitioning to be members of the House of Deputies for over three decades when the doors of General Convention were finally opened to them in 1970. When at last they could be heard, they called for a vote on a resolution to eliminate the sexist canons (church laws) regarding women in the diaconate. This resolution easily passed both the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops. The women then called for a vote on a resolution to affirm the ordination of qualified women deacons to the priesthood, and by implication, of women priests to the episcopate as bishops. That vote did not pass, though many Yes votes were counted. Surprised by how close the vote really was, Episcopal women began to take heart that the reality of their desire for representation in all three orders of ordained ministry was possible in their lifetimes. The vote again came to the floor in 1973, and that time it lost by a greater margin. In general reflection, it was perceived that in 1970 the subject of women priests and bishops so took the deputies by surprise that there was a spontaneous, though not uniform, positive response, but by the time three years had passed, the opposition had campaigned in preparation, and hostile anti-women deputies were elected in enough conservative dioceses that deputies promoting equality were defeated. This defeat was possible because of the Vote by Orders, a vote counting method separating the four clergy and four lay deputies within a delegation from the same diocese, and counting their single majority votes by lay and clergy orders separately, overriding the one-person one vote method, with a tie being counted as a No vote. This procedure was customarily called for by someone on the floor as an effective way to quash controversial resolutions. A group of laywomen and ordained women deacons discussing the powerful, in fact the determining, political side of the issue realized that the Vote by Orders would be used to defeat the resolution to ordain women deacons as priests for many years to come.

But there were qualified women who were called to the priesthood and were ready in 1970. Indeed, some of them had been preparing themselves for priestly ministry since childhood. The Rev. Dr. Jeannette Piccard, who out of respect for her age was the first of the Philadelphia Eleven to be ordained a priest on July 29, 1974 in the Church of the Advocate, had told her bishop that she had been aware of a powerful call to be a priest since she was eleven years old. On the day of the Philadelphia Ordinations, she became a priest at the age of 79. She was already famous as the first woman in space for having piloted the hot air balloon which she and her Swiss scientist husband, Jean Piccard, co-invented. In 1934, with Jean down in the gondola giving instructions and Jeannette above at the controls, human beings ascended into the stratosphere for the first time. The historic event with Jeannette Piccard as the pilot earned her acclaim as the first woman in space, an achievement for which she was given a lecturer position at NASA in her final decades. As recorded by her Diocese of Minnesota Philadelphia Eleven sister priest, the Rev. Dr. Alla Renée Bozarth, in Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, of her ordination to the priesthood forty years later Dr. Piccard said, "That day, I flew higher." Jeannette Piccard became one of the Philadelphia Eleven. They were honored as a group in the 1975 first English Edition of The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, by Bernard Grun.

By July, 1974, the ordination of women deacons to the priesthood had been in planning for four years, since the near-passage of the vote for women priests in 1970. When the defeat was stronger in 1973, it became clear that loss in legislature would be ongoing by use of an unfair voting procedure. Since there was no canon law prohibiting the ordination of women to the priesthood, many women deacons, no longer called deaconesses, who had been ordained both before and since the ousting of the sexist canons in 1970, concurred with a few bishops that there was nothing to prevent their ordination to the priesthood. Only the fact that it had never been done, that sexist policy had been the custom in the Episcopal Church as in most areas of society until the 1960s, made it seem a daunting reality. It became increasingly clear that the only way to make it happen was to make it happen.

Some women and bishops among those discussing strategies became convinced that only a fait accompli that created the reality and simply presented women priests to the Church could have the power to throw open the doors. And so, it happened. In the Philadelphia inner city Church of the Advocate on the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha of Bethany, July 29, 1974, eleven women became ordained priests in the Episcopal Church. And in 1976 at the next scheduled General Convention following the second defeat of 1973, women priests were present, not only from among the Eleven, but also from among the second wave Washington Four, women who were ordained as priests in the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C. on September 7, 1975. With women priests right in their midst and before them, the House of Deputies passed the resolution which affirmed women in all three orders of ordained ministry. The resolution also passed in the House of Bishops and was thus confirmed.

Episcopal bishops first began ordaining and setting apart women for ministry as deacons, referred to as deaconesses, in the mid-nineteenth century. During the first half of the twentieth century, as women’s rights expanded in secular society, women in the Episcopal Church began exploring ways to increase their participation in the life of the church. Aside from serving as ordained deacons, many women became church workers or directors of religious education.

No path to ordination to the priesthood presented itself for women until Bishop James Pike of California recognized the Rev. Deaconess Phyllis Edwards as a deacon in his diocese in a service on September 13, 1965. This led to the General Convention of 1970 passing a new canon that eliminated the distinctions between male deacons and female deaconesses, allowing women to begin seeking ordination without the burden of the confusing term, "deaconesses," and thus to be recognized, without impediment of misinterpretation, as deacons. Since in many cases the diaconate was a transitional stage of ministry on the path to priesthood, the Episcopal Church was then presented with the question of whether to ordain women as priests and bishops. The resolution that was put forward at the 1970 General Convention to approve women’s ordination to the priesthood and episcopate had failed to pass the House of Deputies. In an effort to prepare for the next General Convention, a group of female professional church workers, deacons, seminarians and their supporters began the Episcopal Women’s Caucus in 1971, a national coalition to plan future advocacy work for women’s ordination. Similar legislation had failed to pass at the 1973 General Convention because of a parliamentary technicality. Some of the women began to plan new strategies, feeling that they could not wait another three years for women’s priesthood to be approved. The Rev. Deacon Suzanne Hiatt stated a shared sentiment among these women that their “vocation was not to continue to ask for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest.”

In November 1973, several women deacons met with bishops who supported their cause, only to find them unwilling to ordain women to the priesthood until General Convention had settled the issue. And on December 15, 1973, when five women deacons presented themselves at an ordination to the priesthood service in New York, Bishop Paul Moore allowed them to participate but declined to lay hands on their heads at the moment of ordination. The women and a large part of the congregation walked out of the service in protest.

By July 1974, as supporters of women’s ordination to the priesthood grew restless, an ordination service was scheduled to ordain eleven women deacons to the priesthood by three retired bishops: Daniel N. Corrigan, retired bishop suffragan of Colorado, Robert L. DeWitt, recently resigned bishop of Pennsylvania, and Edward R. Welles II, retired bishop of West Missouri.

Ordination service

The ordination service was held on Monday, July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha, at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, where the Rev. Suzanne Hiatt served as deacon, and whose rector was civil rights advocate the Rev. Paul Washington. Beginning at 11 o’clock in the morning, the service lasted three hours. The eleven women deacons presented themselves to Bishops Corrigan, DeWitt, and Welles, who ordained them as priests. The women who became known as the “Philadelphia Eleven” (or “Philadelphia 11”) were Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig. Harvard University professor Charles V. Willie, who was also the vice president of the church’s House of Deputies at the time, preached the sermon during the service, in which he declared, “As blacks refused to participate in their own oppression by going to the back of the bus in 1955 in Montgomery, women are refusing to cooperate in their own oppression by remaining on the periphery of full participation in the Church.” The crowd numbered almost two thousand supporters and a few protesters. In the middle of the service when Bishop Corrigan said, “If there be any of you who knoweth any impediment or notable crime (in these women), let him come forth in the name of God…,” several priests in attendance proceeded to read statements against the ordination. Once these statements had been made, the bishops responded that they were acting in obedience to God, noting that “hearing his command, we can heed no other. The time for our obedience is now.” And they proceeded with the ordinations.

Bishop Antonio Ramos of Costa Rica was also present at the service but did not participate in the act of ordination due to his young and active episcopate. Barbara C. Harris, who was senior warden at Church of the Advocate and would later become the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church on February 11, 1989, served as crucifer for the service. the Rev. Patricia Merchant Park, one of the leaders of the Episcopal Women’s Caucus and the second woman to be regularly ordained as a priest in 1977 after General Convention had given its endorsement, served as deacon.

Aftermath

Two weeks after the ordination service had taken place, on August 14–15, Presiding Bishop John Allin convened an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. At first, the House declared the priestly ordinations of the eleven women to be invalid, stating that “we express our conviction that the necessary conditions for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church were not fulfilled on the occasion in question, since we are convinced that a bishop’s authority to ordain can be effectively exercised only in and for a community which has authorized him to act for them…” Then Bishop Arthur Vogel of the Diocese of West Missouri raised his objection. He was considered the most theologically astute of the bishops, and told his colleagues that they had no theological grounds for declaring the ordinations invalid because they were performed by bishops in good standing according to the Ordination Rite in the Book of Common Prayer and by laying-on-of-hands within the Apostolic Succession. To declare the ordinations invalid would be to flaunt hundreds of years of orthodox definition for the criteria of valid ordination. The House of Bishops listened and changed its position, declaring the women irregularly ordained instead. The irregularity involved was one of protocol. The women had completed the normal pre-ordination process of theological education, examinations and meetings, and most had gained the necessary signed lay and clergy testimonials vouching for their character and preparation, but their local standing committees were timid about aftermath and refused to give their endorsement. This was the detail in every case and the one breach of canon law requirement that could make them be regarded as irregular. Through no fault or lack of effort of their own, they were unable to fulfill a canonically required point of protocol. Despite their anger, the bishops listened to Bishop Vogel, a highly respected theologian, and they conceded the point. The bishops also advised Episcopalians not to recognize any of the eleven women as priests until the next General Convention could decide on their ecclesiastical status.

When the House of Bishops met again at its regularly-scheduled meet in October in Oaxtepec, Mexico, however, the body endorsed “in principle” the ordination of women to the priesthood, which it had assented to as well at its meeting in New Orleans in 1972. This was in no way an overturning of its decision that the priestly ordinations of the Eleven had been irregular, and the body further urged its bishops to refrain from ordaining more women to the priesthood “unless and until such activities have been approved by the General Convention” meeting in 1976.

Meanwhile, three of the first women priests took opportunities to celebrate the Eucharist against orders from their bishops. The Rev. Alison Cheek, the Rev. Jeannette Piccard and the Rev. Carter Heyward celebrated communion together at an ecumenical service at Riverside Church in New York City on Reformation Sunday, October 27, 1974. A couple of weeks later on Sunday, November 10, 1974, the Rev. Alison Cheek celebrated the Eucharist at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. This first public celebration of the Eucharist in the Episcopal Church by a woman priest was permitted by the church’s rector, the Rev. William Wendt. The following month, the Rev. Alison Cheek and the Rev. Carter Heyward were invited to celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday, December 8, at Christ Episcopal Church in Oberlin, Ohio, by the rector, the Rev. Peter Beebe. These events didn’t go unnoticed by the larger church, and in the summer of 1975 both Wendt and Beebe were brought to ecclesiastical trial by their dioceses and convicted of disobeying a “godly admonition” from their bishops against permitting the women to celebrate the Eucharist.

Not all Episcopal Church institutions were against the priestly ordinations or the women, however, and in January 1975 the trustees of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offered faculty appointments with full priestly duties to the Rev. Suzanne Hiatt and the Rev. Carter Heyward. Both women began celebrating the Eucharist in the seminary chapel in March 1975.

In February 1975, advocates of women’s ordination to the priesthood and episcopate formed an organization called Women’s Ordination Now (WON) to support the Philadelphia Eleven (and later the Washington Four) women as well as the bishops who had ordained them and the Rev. William Wendt and the Rev. Peter Beebe. At the 1976 General Convention, WON worked to see that the irregularly ordained women priests were fully recognized as priests and allowed to function as priests without any penalties.

Washington Four

As supporters of women’s ordination to the priesthood continued to organize and plan for the 1976 General Convention amid all of this turmoil, the Church was surprised by a second ordination service, this time held in Washington, D.C. On Sunday, September 7, 1975, at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Bishop George Barrett, retired from the Diocese of Rochester, ordained four more women deacons to the priesthood. The four women were the Rev. Lee McGee, the Rev. Alison Palmer, the Rev. Betty Rosenberg, and the Rev. Diane Tickell, who became known as the “Washington Four” (or “Washington 4”). A fifth woman, the Rev. Phyllis Edwards, who had been recognized as a deacon by Bishop Pike back in 1965 (creating a corrective precedent for the many women who had been ordained to the diaconate long before who were still called "deaconesses"), had originally planned on taking part in the ordination but withdrew the week before. Over 1,000 people attended the service including the rector William Wendt, Peter Beebe, several of the Philadelphia Eleven priests, and Bishop Robert DeWitt. The Rev. Lee McGee’s husband, the Rev. Kyle McGee, an Episcopal priest and chaplain at Georgetown University, preached at the service, stating that “today we are engaged in a prophetic act. I pray that our actions will help enable us who are present and the church universal to reexamine our beliefs and practices of priesthood so that we may include all Christians in the ministry of our Lord.”

Presiding Bishop John Allin again spoke out against this second set of ordinations, declaring that Bishop Barrett had defied canon law (without citing what that law might be or where it was prohibited), the Bishop of Washington, and “the rights of the entire membership of the Episcopal Church.” While noting that such “destructive and divisive acts may be beyond prevention amid this age of confusion and turmoil,” he added that “the tragedy is that so much done in good conscience for the sake of renewal can so frequently prevent that needed renewal.” While none of the bishops who had participated in the irregular ordinations were called to ecclesiastical trial, they were censured by the House of Bishops and their actions decried.

Women’s ordination to the priesthood and episcopate approved

The 1976 General Convention met in Minneapolis on September 15–23, 1976. On September 15, the House of Bishops voted 95 to 61 to change or eliminate ambiguous places in canon law that seemed to prevent the ordination of women— and to clarify matters by creating a canon to affirm the ordination of women as priests and bishops. Because of the two-house structure of the General Convention, the House of Deputies had to vote on the matter the following day. After much deliberation in that House, the clerical order voted 60 in favor, 39 opposed, and 15 divided, while the laity voted 64 in favor, 36 opposed, and 13 divided. Women’s ordination to the priesthood and episcopacy was approved, and the vote meant that women deacons could be canonically ordained to the priesthood as early as January 1,1977, by authorization of a specifically affirming canon for that purpose. Later in the week, on September 21, the House of Bishops voted to require a “conditional ordination” for the fifteen women who had been irregularly ordained, much to the disappointment of the women and their supporters. The next day, however, the bishops reversed their decision and instead, in keeping with the status of "irregular" which they had imposed on the women, they voted to allow the individual diocesan bishops of the Philadelphia Eleven and Washington Four priests to “regularize” them in a form of their own discretion, with the option of a “public event” that would allow the people of their dioceses to welcome and celebrate the priestly ministries of the women. These services were held for the priests beginning in January 1977.

The first female deacon canonically ordained to the priesthood on January 1, 1977, was the Rev. Jacqueline A. Means, ordained by Bishop Donald J. Davis of Erie in the Episcopal Church of All Saints in Indianapolis. By the end of January 1977 about forty women had been ordained priests and an additional sixty by the end of the year. By 1979 almost 300 women had been ordained to the priesthood, and the total increased to more than 600 by 1985.

Women involved

The eleven women deacons who were ordained as priests in 1974 and are known as the Philadelphia Eleven are:

1. Merrill Bittner was born in 1946 in Pasadena, California. A graduate of Lake Erie College and Bexley Hall Seminary, she was ordained as a deacon on January 6, 1973, in the Diocese of Rochester, where she served at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Webster, New York. She was 27 when she was ordained to the priesthood in 1974. Like many of the other Philadelphia Eleven women, it was hard for her to find support and employment as a priest in the Episcopal Church following her ordination. Instead she worked in prison ministry and found herself roaming the country in a van working odd jobs before later becoming a career counselor. In 2001 she reentered parish ministry and has served as a priest at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Rumford, Maine.

2. Alla Renée Bozarth (Bozarth-Campbell) was born in Portland, Oregon in 1947. Her father, René Malcolm Bozarth, was a classical radio station program manager and broadcaster at the time of her birth, and in 1950 he was ordained to the diaconate, followed in 1951 by his ordination to the priesthood. Her mother, Alvina (Alla) Heckel DeGolikov Bozarth, a Russian émigrée, was an artist who worked as a volunteer for Church World Service, resettling hundreds of refugee families in the 1950s and 60s. Later she was a volunteer for the United Nations People to People Program. Alla prepared for ordination to the diaconate and priesthood in the Episcopal Church at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, overlapping with earning her B.S.S. (1971) degree at Northwestern University in Interpretation, after which she was ordained deacon and served as staff minister at the Northwestern University congregation of St. Thomas à Becket from 1971 to 1973. She earned her M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1974) degrees at Northwestern University in Interpretation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Performing Arts (School of Speech and Drama). Her doctoral dissertation, "The Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation,” was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1979 and by the University Press of America, Rowman and Littlefield in 1997. She was certified in Gestalt therapy in 1978. She was the first woman to be ordained as a deacon in the Diocese of Oregon on September 8, 1971. Four days later on Sunday, September 12, she married Episcopal seminarian Philip Ross Campbell (Bozarth-Campbell), who was ordained as a deacon in 1973 and as a priest in 1974. In 1975, while the Bozarth-Campbells lived and ministered in Minnesota, Alla incorporated Wisdom House as a 501(c)3 non-profit religious corporation of the State of Minnesota (from 1985 onward registered in the State of Oregon). Wisdom House is an ecumenical spirituality center where she has continued to serve as priest-in-charge, offering inclusive language services, soul care, mentoring and feminist spirituality focusing on the arts and justice and peace activism. Alla discontinued travel and public speaking in 1994 following a health crisis but was able, with help, to attend the 25th anniversary celebrations in Philadelphia in 1999. In 2004 she retired from her counseling practice and regular celebrations of the Holy Eucharist at Wisdom House, but she continues to write and offer prayers and poems on meditation blogs, celebrate the Eucharist for special occasions and provide pastoral care when asked, mostly by telephone or mail. Her husband, Phil, died unexpectedly on December 9, 1985 at the age of 37 from undiagnosed genetic Factor V Leiden clotting disorder. After his death, Alla returned to Sandy, Oregon at the foot of Mt. Hood and moved Wisdom House to the home she had purchased for the couple in 1983 with her inheritance after her father's death in 1982. Her mother had died in 1972, six months after her daughter's wedding. At the time of his death in 1985, Phil had been planning to move to their house in Oregon with her and serve in the Diocese of Oregon.

Both Alla and Jeannette Piccard were canonically resident in the Diocese of Minnesota in 1974, and as Jeannette was eldest of the Eleven, Alla was youngest. She wrote about Christian Feminism, difficulties around her ordinations, her travels to the Vatican to obtain permission for Roman Catholics to join her in the creation of an ecumenical community which evolved into the worshiping congregation at Wisdom House, and her other relevant life experiences, with poems inspired by the Philadelphia Ordinations in Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, Paulist Press 1978, revised edition Luramedia 1988. (See Further Reading.) She has written two books on grief, Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello~ Grieving Well through All Kinds of Loss (1982, revised edition 1988) and A Journey through Grief (audiotape 1989, book 1990) and various meditation and poetry books. Her poem "Transfiguration," published in the book, Stars in Your Bones: Emerging Signposts on Our Spiritual Journeys, with Julia Barkley and Terri Hawthorne, North Star Press of St. Cloud 1990, and paintings of the Dragon of Compassion for the Grief of the Soul (Chingon) by her colleague, Julia Barkley, were presented to the Mayor of Hiroshima in May, 1980, and they became the first works by foreign women artists to be in the permanent collection of the Peace Memorial Garden. Her writings have been put to music and performed variously by secular and religious groups and artists. "Call," written for the Philadelphia Ordinations, was performed as a cantata by Aurora Women's Chorus of Portland, Oregon. "Belonging" was put to music composed as a commissioned cantata by Steve Heizeg in 2000 for a gathering of the people of Grand Forks, North Dakota, to help them heal in the years following the massive destruction of the Red River Flood of 1997. Alla's 10th anniversary poem for the Philadelphia Ordinations, "Passover Remembered," commissioned by Robert DeWitt and Mary Lou Suhor for The Witness Magazine, has become a touchstone for women and men in leadership in Roman Catholic religious communities and others. With the founder, Sister Margaret Ellen Traxler of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Alla has lectured for the Institute of Women Today in Chicago and several other cities, including Mankato, Minnesota at the Mother House, where she also gave a keynote address with the Rev. Jean Audrey Powers, National Methodist Church executive, at the first annual Women and Spirituality Conference in 1981. To view Time Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The National Catholic Reporter photos and archival color pictures of the ordinations, later anniversary celebrations and people involved, and to read her first hand account, see External Links, The Philadelphia Ordinations and the Philadelphia Eleven. Note the link to "Judy Chicago's 'The Dinner Party and the Philadelphia Ordinations.' "

3. Alison Mary Cheek was born in 1927 in Adelaide, South Australia, where she graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1947 and married her economics tutor, Bruce Cheek. The couple moved to Boston for his fellowship at Harvard University and then back to Australia two years later. They returned to the United States in 1957 when Bruce was hired by the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Cheek had become active as a lay leader at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia, when her rector encouraged her to take some classes at Virginia Theological Seminary because she was increasingly being asked to lead programs at the church. She was admitted into the seminary’s B.D. program in 1963 with no intention of seeking ordination, but suddenly felt a call to become a priest while on a retreat. With four young children at home, her bishop dissuaded her from considering ordination, and it took her six years to complete her degree part-time. Following graduation from the seminary, she was hired as a lay minister at Christ Church in Alexandria, where she was in charge of pastoral ministry and allowed to preach a few times. She then began training and working with the Pastoral Counseling and Consulting Centers of Greater Washington and the Washington Institute for Pastoral Psychotherapy, returning to St. Alban’s to continue pastoral ministry as a laywoman. Eventually, however, her rector encouraged her to enter the ordination process in the Diocese of Virginia, and she was ordained as the first woman deacon in the South on January 29, 1972. When the House of Deputies voted against women’s ordination in 1973, Cheek was motivated to work with other women and supporters to change the church’s mind. After the Philadelphia Eleven ordinations, Cheek accepted a number of invitations to celebrate the Eucharist although her ordination had not been approved by the wider church. She also became active in marginalized groups such as the gay movement, black movement, and women in poverty, sticking to the margins of the church to exercise her ministry. In 1976 Time magazine named her as one of twelve women of the year for her advocacy and action on behalf of women’s ordination. She was hired as an assistant priest at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., and later Trinity Memorial Church in Philadelphia before going back to school at the Episcopal Divinity School, where she was hired as the Director of Feminist Liberation Studies in 1989 and earned her D.Min. degree in 1990. In 1996 she joined the Greenfire Community and Retreat Center in Tenants Harbor, Maine, where she served as a facilitator, teacher, and counselor, and later became active with St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rockland.

4. Emily Clark Hewitt was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1944. After earning a degree from Cornell University in 1966, she served as an administrator of the Cornell/Hofstra Upward Bound Program at the Union Settlement House in East Harlem from 1967–1969. Called to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church, Hewitt was ordained as a deacon on June 3, 1972, in the Diocese of New York supported by St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Manhattanville, New York. Hewitt co-authored the book Women Priests: Yes or No? with fellow Philadelphia Eleven priest Suzanne Hiatt in 1973. While serving as assistant professor of religion and education at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, from 1973–1975, she was ordained to the priesthood in Philadelphia at age 30 in 1974, and received her M.Phil. degree from Union Theological Seminary the following year. Finding it hard to practice her priesthood in the Episcopal Church, Hewitt continued her education, earning a J.D. from Harvard University in 1978. That same year she began practicing law at the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow, where she was elected a partner in 1985 and served as chair of the real estate department from 1987–1993. In 1993 she became the General Counsel of the United States General Services Administration, where she served until being commissioned as a judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims by President Clinton in 1998. Hewitt married former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Eleanor D. Acheson in 2004. In 2009, President Obama designated Hewitt to serve as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

5. Isabel Carter Heyward was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1945. She earned a B.A. from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1967 and then moved to New York to begin a B.D. at Union Theological Seminary. Finding that she wasn’t sure where she stood regarding her involvement in the church, she left Union after a year and moved back home to Charlotte to work at her home parish, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, as a lay assistant, doing all the duties except those reserved for priests. In 1971 she returned to New York and pursued an M.A. in the comparative study of religion at Columbia University before completing an M.Div. back at Union in 1973. She later went on to earn a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union in 1980. Feeling a call to the priesthood, Heyward was ordained a deacon on June 9, 1973, in the Diocese of New York and ordained to the priesthood in Philadelphia at age 29 in 1974. Following this ordination, Heyward and fellow priest Suzanne Hiatt were hired as assistant professors at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in January 1975, where she received tenure in 1981. Heyward’s teaching at EDS focused on 19th century Anglican theology, feminist liberation theology, and the theology of sexuality. She has published numerous books on these topics during her tenure, including A Priest Forever, an autobiographical account of her ordination published in 1976. Heyward retired from teaching in 2005 and moved back to North Carolina.

6. Suzanne Radley Hiatt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1936. As a child she dreamed of entering the ordained ministry of the church, but dismissed the thought as impossible before feeling a call to ordination again in her twenties. She attended high school in Edina, Minnesota, and then one year of college at Wellesley College before transferring to Radcliffe College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in American history in 1958. After graduation she worked for two years as a Girl Scout professional in Hartford, traveled around Europe, and taught high school. Feeling her call to ordination return, she entered the Episcopal Theological School (ETS), where she received her M.Div. in 1964. She completed an M.S.W. from Boston University the following year and moved back to Minnesota where she worked with the Presbyterian Church in “ghetto ministry” for a couple months. She soon moved on to Philadelphia where she helped start the Welfare Rights Organization. After being fired from her job at the Health and Welfare Council, however, she was hired by the Diocese of Pennsylvania as a Suburban Missioner to organize suburban Episcopalians around social issues in the city. She left that position in 1972 to become a consultant for the Episcopal Consortium of Theological Education in the Northeast, where she taught classes in women’s studies. After General Convention failed to approve women’s ordination to the priesthood in 1970, Hiatt became active in working to achieve approval at the 1973 convention, and she was ordained a deacon on June 19, 1971, in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. That same year, she published Women Priests: Yes or No? along with Emily Hewitt. With opposition to women’s ordination growing, Bishop Robert DeWitt proposed ordaining Hiatt as a priest at ETS in December 1973 without the church’s blessing. While the ordination was called off and other events were taking place, Hiatt decided to organize separate actions with a few sympathetic bishops and other supporters. On July 10, 1974, Hiatt helped to organize a meeting in Philadelphia to plan an ordination service for women at the Church of the Advocate, where she was serving as a deacon. Because of her role in planning and orchestrating this service, Hiatt has become known as the “Bishop of the Philadelphia Eleven.” After her ordination as a priest, Hiatt was hired along with Heyward Carter as a professor at Episcopal Divinity School, where she received tenure in 1981. Hiatt was the John Seely Stone Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology at the seminary from 1993 until her retirement in 1999, also becoming the Acting Director of the Congregational Studies Program in 1997. Hiatt died of cancer at the age of 65 in 2002.

7. Marie Moorefield Fleischer was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1944. She received a B.A. from Wake Forest University in 1966 before attending Union Theological Seminary and Vanderbilt University, where she received her M.Div. in 1970. She was ordained as a deacon on June 9, 1973 in the Diocese of New York. Following her ordination to the priesthood, like many of the other women she found her priesthood rejected by many. For fear of being defrocked she left the Episcopal Church in 1975 and became a minister in the United Methodist Church. She served as the chaplain at the United Methodist Retirement Home in Topeka, Kansas from 1973–1975 and the chaplain supervisor at Richmond Memorial Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, from 1977–1979. Moorefield returned to the Episcopal Church in the 1980s, serving at churches in Maryland and West Virginia. She served as the Canon for Ministry in the Diocese of Western New York from 1992–1996, interim minister for a number of years, and Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of North Carolina from 2001–2006. In 1980 she married astronomer Robert Fleischer who later died in 2001.

8. Jeannette Ridlon Piccard was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1895. At eleven years old she told her mother that she wanted to be a priest when she grew up. She received a B.A. in philosophy and psychology from Bryn Mawr College in 1918 followed by an M.A. in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1919. That same year she married one of her professors, Jean Felix Piccard. The Piccards taught at the University of Lausanne from 1919 to 1926, when they returned to the United States. Jean had invented cluster high-altitude balloons, and together they invented the plastic balloon which would rise into the stratosphere. Because her husband suffered from acrophobia, he remained seated in the gondola from where he advised Jeannette as she piloted their plastic high altitude hot air balloon into the stratosphere in 1934. Together they ascended above Lake Erie to a height of l0.9 miles. Jeannette Piccard became the first woman licensed as a hot air balloon pilot in the United States and the first woman to pilot a stratosphere-capable balloon to that height, and thus she has been called "the first woman in space." After her husband's death, Jeannette worked as consultant to the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center for a number of years. She was posthumously inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1998. In 1942, Piccard earned her Ph.D. in education from the University of Minnesota and began serving as the executive secretary of housing for the Minnesota Office of Civil Defense. Later she would serve as an aeronautical consultant to General Mills and NASA.On June 29, 1971, Piccard was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. She completed a certificate of study at General Theological Seminary in 1973, and became the first woman ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church at the service in Philadelphia in 1974 at age 79. In the Episcopal Church, Piccard served as a priest associate at St. Philip’s in Saint Paul, Minnesota and on her death bed was made an honorary canon of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis. Piccard died of cancer in Minneapolis in 1981.

9. Betty Bone Schiess was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1923. She earned a B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1945 followed by an M.A. from Syracuse University in 1947. She also married her husband William Schiess in 1947. Ordained a deacon on June 25, 1972 in the Diocese of Central New York, Schiess served as curate at Grace Episcopal Church in Baldwinsville, New York, from 1972–1973. She served as executive director of the Mizpah Educational and Cultural Center for the Aging in Syracuse, New York, from 1973–1984. Following her ordination to the priesthood in 1974, she filed a lawsuit with support from assemblywoman Constance Cook against Bishop Ned Cole of the Diocese of Central New York, charging him with sex discrimination for refusing to recognize her ordination and preventing her from serving as a parish priest in the diocese. The suit was dropped when General Convention approved women’s ordination in 1976. Schiess then served college ministries and churches in Syracuse, Ithaca, and Mexico, New York, retiring in 1990. She was the adviser to Women in Mission and Ministry in the Episcopal Church beginning in 1987. She was the recipient of the Governor’s Award for Women of Merit in Religion in 1984 and of the Ralph E. Kharas Award for Distinguished Service in Civil Liberties of the Central New York Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union in 1986. In 1994 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for her efforts in making it possible for girls and women to serve in all levels of the church.

10. Katrina Martha van Alstyne Welles Swanson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1935, the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Episcopal clergy. She earned her B.A. in sociology from Radcliffe College in 1956 and married Episcopal priest George Swanson in 1958. The family spent a year in Botswana through an exchange program in 1966, where her witness of the inequality between the sexes in the church led her to become a champion for women’s leadership and ordination. She returned to the United States determined to become a priest. Swanson was ordained as a deacon in the Diocese of West Missouri on September 19, 1971. She served as a deacon at her husband’s parish in Kansas City until her ordination to the priesthood in 1974 by her father, when she was suspended by her diocese and her husband was forced to fire her. St. Stephen’s, a poor parish in St. Louis, decided to hire her as an assistant for a dollar a year in 1975. In 1978, Swanson became the first female rector in the tri-state New York metro area when she was hired as the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Union City, New Jersey, where she served until retiring in 1995. She died in 2005 from colon cancer.

11. Nancy Constantine Hatch Wittig was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1945. She earned a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969 followed by an M.Div. from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1972. She married Methodist minister Richard Wittig in 1971 and was ordained a deacon in the Diocese of Newark on September 8, 1973. She served in parishes in New Jersey until her ordination to the priesthood in 1974 when she resigned because of a lack of confidence in her and the church’s inability to affirm her priesthood. She spent several years raising her family before reentering parish ministry in New Jersey, serving as rector of St. John the Divine Episcopal Church in Hasbrouck Heights from 1982–1988. She taught as an adjunct professor of pastoral theology at General Theological Seminary from 1988–1990. From 1992–2006 she served as rector of St. Andrew’s in the Field in Philadelphia, and has been rector of St. Peter’s in Lakewood, Ohio, since 2006.

The four women deacons who were ordained as priests in 1975 and are known as the Washington Four are:

1. Eleanor Lee McGee-Street was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1943. She earned a B.A. from Maryland State College in 1965 and an M.A. from Yale University in 1969, after which she moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as chaplain at American University. McGee was the first female chaplain and assistant director of campus ministry at American University’s multi-denominational Kay Spiritual Life Center from 1972–1980. She was married to Episcopal priest Kyle McGee in 1968 and ordained as a deacon in the Diocese of Washington on October 27, 1974. While working at American University, she earned an M.S.W. from The Catholic University of America in 1980. The family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1981 where she worked as a priest and social worker with the chronically mentally ill, a private practice psychologist, an associate chaplain at Trinity College, and a part-time professor at Yale Divinity School. In 1987 McGee was hired as rector of St. Paul’s & St. James Episcopal Church in New Haven as well as assistant professor at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. She was divorced from her husband Kyle in 1993 and later married Episcopal priest Parke Street in 2000. Since retiring from Yale in 1997, she has lectured and led conferences on preaching, discernment, and Christian spirituality.

2. Alison “Tally” Palmer was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1931. She earned her B.A. from Brown University in 1953, after which she worked as a writer for The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. Palmer began working for the State Department as a clerk typist in 1955 and was appointed as a Foreign Service Officer in 1960, working in Ghana, Congo, Kenya, British Guiana, Ethiopia, Angola, and Vietnam. In 1965 she was refused appointment as an ambassador to Tanzania or Uganda due to being a woman, so she filed a grievance with the State Department for sex discrimination which was found in her favor in 1969. In 1970, Palmer completed an M.A. in African Studies from Boston University. She continued fighting against sex discrimination in the State Department, receiving retroactive pay and a promotion in 1975 and finally winning a class-action lawsuit against the department in 1987. While serving in the Belgian Congo in 1962, Palmer underwent a religious conversion and became a Christian. She later felt a call from the Holy Spirit to become a priest while working in Vietnam in 1969. Palmer did her theological training at Virginia Theological Seminary and was ordained as the first female deacon in the Diocese of Washington on June 9, 1974, after which she served at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church until being ordained as a priest the following year. Since retiring from the State Department in 1981, Palmer has served as an associate at the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and later at Church of the Holy Spirit in Orleans, Massachusetts. Palmer was the first female priest to celebrate Holy Communion in the Church of England in 1977.

3. Elizabeth “Betty” Powell Rosenberg was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1945. She attended Mount Holyoke College and the University of Delaware, where she received a B.A. in 1967. She continued her education at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington where she received an M.S. in 1969 and started to explore a call to ordained ministry. She entered the ordination process and graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary with an M.Div. in 1972. Active in the struggle for women’s ordination, Powell helped form the Episcopal Women’s Caucus. She was ordained as a deacon in the Diocese of Washington on June 22, 1974. After her ordination to the priesthood in 1975, she served as a chaplain at Georgetown University before becoming an assistant at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Laurel, Maryland, followed by Grace Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. Powell was the first Episcopal woman to earn a D.Min. from an Episcopal seminary at Bexley Hall in 1975. She left parish ministry for a number of years to specialize in pastoral counseling before joining the staff of Christ Church in Sausalito, California, where she served from 2000–2004.

4. Diane Catherine Baldwin Tickell was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1918. She received a B.A. from Smith College in 1939 and moved to southeast Alaska after marrying Albert Tickell in 1944. She served as a social worker in Juneau before attending seminary at the Episcopal Theological School where she graduated in 1973. Tickell was ordained as a deacon in 1973 in the Diocese of Alaska. She served as an itinerant deacon at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Wrangell, Alaska, until her ordination to the priesthood in 1975. After becoming a priest she continued to serve the church in Alaska for many years. Tickell died at age 84 in 2002.

• Phyllis Agnes Edwards had originally planned on being ordained along with the Washington Four in 1975. Edwards was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1917. She earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in education from Black Hills Teachers College in 1951 and 1956 while teaching elementary school and raising four kids. After the death of her husband Thomas Edwards she entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary to become a deaconess, having wanted to be a priest since the age of 13. She graduated and was ordained and set apart as a deacon(ess) in 1964 in the Diocese of Olympia. The following year Bishop James Pike of California recognized her as a deacon, setting a precedent of recognition for the many women who had been ordained to the diaconate long before who were still being called "deaconesses," five years before General Convention eliminated sexist canons on women in the diaconate so that the one canon on the diaconate presupposed the inclusion of deacons of both sexes in 1970. Pike also sent Edwards to join Martin Luther King, Jr. in his civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Edwards later served as the acting vicar of St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco from 1969–1970 and as an assistant at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois, a hospital chaplain, and a campus minister at Northern Illinois University. She was ordained as a priest in the Diocese of Newark on June 29, 1980, where she worked as the director of the diocesan summer camping program. Edwards later moved to Washington state where she served as an assistant at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Bremerton. She died at the age of 92 in 2009.

References

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• Alison Palmer Papers Ms. 90.6, Brown University Library, retrieved 08-30-2013
• Alison Palmer Papers, 1971–1978, MC 390, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., retrieved 08-30-2013
• Ann Robb Smith Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York, retrieved 08-27-2013
• “Betty Bone Schiess,” National Women’s Hall of Fame, retrieved 09-30-2013
• Betty Bone Schiess Papers, 1965–1991, #4468, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, retrieved 08-27-2013
• “Bishops Urged to Reconsider Ordination Plans,” Diocesan Press Service, 07-25-1974, retrieved 08-26-2013
• “Books and Author Interview with Alla Renée Bozarth, 2004,” Alla Renée Bozarth: Welcome to My World, retrieved 09-22-2013
• Carter Heyward Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York, retrieved 08-27-2013
• “Chief Judge Emily C. Hewitt,” U.S. Court of Federal Claims, retrieved 09-08-2013
• “Class Notes 1960 to 1969,” Cornell Alumni Magazine (Mar./Apr. 2006, Volume 108 Number 5), retrieved 09-08-2013
• Episcopal Clerical Directory 2005 (Revised Edition), New York: Church Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0898695341
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• “History of Christ Episcopal Church,” Electronic Oberlin Group, Oberlin College, retrieved 08-30-2013
• “Irregular” Ordinations At St. Stephen’s, St. Stephen and the Incarnation Wiki, retrieved 08-26-2013
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• “Obituary: Robert Fleischer, 1918–2001,” SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, Harvard University, retrieved 09-30-2013
• “Ordination Services for Four Women Deacons Held,” Diocesan Press Service, 09-11-1975, retrieved 08-26-2013
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• “Ralph E. Kharas Award,” Central New York Chapter, New York Civil Liberties Union, retrieved 09-30-2013
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Further reading

• 25 Years Ago - The Struggle to authorize women’s ordination, Women’s Ministries, The Episcopal Church
• George Barrett Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York, retrieved 08-27-2013
• “Religion: The Women’s Rebellion,” Time Magazine (08-12-1974), retrieved 09-08-2013
• Agonito, Joseph A. (1985), Womanpriest: A Portrait of the Rev. Betty Bone Schiess [VHS], Syracuse, N.Y.: New Future Enterprises
• Bozarth, Alla Renée (1988), Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey revised edition, San Diego: Luramedia ISBN 0-931055-51-2; distributed by Wisdom House, 43222 S.E. Tapp Rd., Sandy, Oregon 97055.
• Bozarth-Campbell, Alla (1978), Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, New York: Paulist Press ISBN 0-8091-0243-9
• Darling, Pamela W. (1994), New Wine: The Story of Women Transforming Leadership and Power in the Episcopal Church, Boston: Cowley Publications, ISBN 1561010944
• Hamilton, Michael P. & Nancy S. Montgomery (1975), The Ordination of Women: Pro and Con, Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse Barlow Co. ISBN 0819212040
• Hewitt, Emily C. & Suzanne R. Hiatt (1973), Women Priests: Yes or No?, New York: Seabury Press, ISBN 0816420769
• Heyward, Carter (1976), A Priest Forever: One Woman’s Controversial Ordination in the Episcopal Church, New York: Harper & Row, ISBN 0060638931
• Huyck, Heather (1981), “To Celebrate a Whole Priesthood: The History of Women’s Ordination in the Episcopal Church,” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota
• Oppenheimer, Mark (2002), “Episcopal Priestesses,” Christian Century 119, no. 1 (2–9 January 2002)
• Oppenheimer, Mark (2003), Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, pp. 130–171, ISBN 0300100248
• Schiess, Betty Bone (2003), Why Me, Lord?: One Woman’s Ordination to the Priesthood with Commentary and Complaint, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, ISBN 081560744X
• Schmidt, Jr., Frederick W. (1996), A Still Small Voice: Women, Ordination, and the Church, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press
• Trott, Frances, Marjory Keith Quinn, et al. (1973), Our Call, Wayne, N.J.: Sheba Press

External links

• The Philadelphia Ordinations and the Philadelphia Eleven
• Katrina’s Dream, organization founded in memory of the Rev. Katrina Swanson
• Church of the Advocate
• St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church
• Wisdom House
• Blogger User Profile for Alla Reneé Bozarth, listing of Alla Bozarth's blogs
• Alla Bozarth Words and Images, Alla Bozarth’s personal poetry blog
• Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and the Philadelphia Ordinations