This is the Reverend Margaret E Howland being interviewed by Alice Brasfield on October 2nd, 1985, at Princeton Seminary. Would you begin by giving just in general, background information where you were born when your parents were your family, brothers, sisters, that sort of thing? I was born and grew up in Philadelphia in 1933, and I am the second child, the oldest daughter of five. My father was a lawyer. Is is now retired and has had a stroke. And my mother was a homemaker, a very active community person. They were both active in the Methodist church. And I have an.

Older brother and two younger brothers and a younger sister.

Would you talk about that early religious experience? I was very interested in, you know, just as a child, I was interested in everything. And I was interested in Sunday school and was very disturbed by Sunday school because so many of the children in the class wouldn't pay attention. And at an early age, when I was about ten or 11, I went to a different church. We had moved out of the community where our church was, and I was so distressed by boys and girls or girls in the class, and we were all girls class who would not listen to the teacher. Then I decided I wanted to go to Sunday school with my own friends, and I went to Girl Scouts in a methodist church nearby. So I ask permission from my parents to go visit the Sunday school. And I started going to Sunday school there when I was about ten or 11 and had a Sunday school teacher that. This little class of girls dearly loved. And in order to please her, I started going to church and I sat in the front row of the very front pew, far in front of the rest of the congregation every single Sunday and joined that church. I was 12 years old in a preparatory membership class with 14 year olds. Who thought I was a terrible little brat because I was so interested. I studied everything I learned and always got 101 tests. And here they were, 14 year olds who are being forced to come to this class by their parents who are making them come. And but I was I wanted so much to be a Christian and to I was so interested in love. I still remember the sermons that the pastor preached. He was doing a series of sermons on the Apostles Creed, and he was on the second one, the first Sunday I attended. So went through that whole Apostles Creed. And I was just so fascinated. I, I wanted to be there and to hear the sermons. I wanted to read the Bible. I wanted to find out what the Bible meant. It was a time when different translations of the Bible were coming out. Modern translation. And I saw different translations and they had different words. And I wondered what it really means, you know, which what is really the right Bible? And about that I had to study the Greek in Hebrew to find out what was the real Bible. And I, I did study Greek people in college before I had any thought of being a minister. I'm curious if you have reflected back on these early years and as to what the source of your great curiosity about it. I just think if I was that way too. And but it's not too often the.

Children in that way have.

Well, I'll tell you that I was a perfectionist. I my parents expected perfection from me and. I believed, therefore, that I was an extremely wicked sinner because I couldn't live up to that perfection and therefore the love of God became a very, very important thing to me. This amazing, marvelous love of. That could actually forgive this terrible, wicked sinner who did not live up to the best that she was able to be. Wonderful story. Who were some of the important persons who influenced.

You the most as a child? And as a teenager.

I dearly loved my fourth grade teacher. She was very, very special. And I can't really tell you why. I just. I just loved her and. For years, I took flowers to her on her birthday, which was January 31st. So I went to look for Cynthia in a couple weeks before her birthday. And by her birthday, it was blooming flowers on January 31st. That Sunday school teacher was a large influence, as was the minister. Thomas Butler from the Trinity Methodist Church was a big influence. My Aunt Helen, I think, you know the women who were important in my life. Where my mother and my two grandmother, who were both step grandmothers, my parents have both lost their children. I had my parents had both lost their mothers when they were young and their fathers remarried. So both of my grandmothers were women who had worked and had a career before they got married to my grandfathers. My Aunt Helen, who was the other close person to me that I looked up to, also had a career because she and my uncle had married very late and never had children. So except for my mother, the three women closest in my life where women who did not marry at the normal age and never had children of their own and went out and worked and and did things in addition to later getting married to this powerful man. Yes. And I was aware of that at a fairly young well, as a young woman thinking, what has happened to me? Why haven't I still fulfilled my mother's expectations and gotten married and presented her with children? My mother expected me as her oldest daughter to be the one who was going to present her with her first grandchild. And I will never present it with a grandchild now. And I think she's gotten over those years later, grandchildren. And would you reflect on your ideas about ministry? At what point in your life did you begin to think about it for yourself? Well, as as a young person, about the age of 14, 12, 13, 14, in that area, I knew I had made a conscious decision, a verbal decision. I wanted to be a Christian, and I was involved in Christian endeavor as a youth organization and the church and many churches in northeast Philadelphia, where I grew up and. I had been the Christian River rally where we had been invited to say yes to Jesus by raising her hand as well in my head. There have been your eyes closed and I had been honest and I raised my hand. And this is a very important thing to me that I, I said yes to Jesus. And I, I felt it was an important decision. And from then on, I wanted to be really committed to Jesus Christ. I worded it this way. I want it to be 100% Christian and part of my perfection, I guess. And later that summer, at a Christian Magic Christian Endeavor conference that we had a week long conference where we all went to a camp and had Bible studies and a lot of good fun. I decided to go into what in those days we call full time Christian service. Because for two wrong reasons, I decided I was going to be a missionary. The first wrong reason was I thought that if you wanted to be 100% Christian, you had to go into full time Christian service. It was just the mathematics of it. Yes, I realize that was wrong, but nevertheless that was what I decided. And I also thought, well, men could be ministers or missionaries and women could be missionaries. So I was going to be a missionary because I didn't know that there was anything else that could be done. It was a long time before I had the courage to tell this to my mother, who was absolutely horrified by this. And I thought I would go to Africa because I really wasn't aware that you were there anywhere else except Africa, if you were a missionary. And and and I also had a good friend who had become a little bit of a role model. I had met him. He was a seminary student who was a counselor at a camp. I went to the site of a Presbyterian Camp Dale Steakhouse, who now works in support agency and who was a missionary to Africa. Who was going to be a missionary to Africa, where I met him. And I think that was one of the reasons why I thought I would be a missionary to Africa, because I was very impressed with him and wanted to do what he was doing when. When I first said to my mother I wanted to be a missionary, she was so upset because that meant leaving family at home and going far away. At one point she said to me, You could be a minister. And I said, That's ridiculous. One of our ministers. And she said, Well, you could be a minister. My mother believed me. What it said on the front of the Ladies Home Journal, which she read every month. And I saw it and it said on the front of dinner, Never underestimate the power of a woman. Even though my mother thinks women's liberation has a lot to be desired. And she says she says women's liberation. Because I think she finds it a rejection of herself as a homemaker. She always taught me, never underestimate the power of a woman and that a woman could do anything she wanted. And my mother was very active in women's clubs and in the community. And she doesn't know it. But she's the one who taught me that women could do whatever they wanted to. She was the first one who suggested the master, but I thought it was very conservative people. And eventually I got in with fundamentalists and adopted a fundamentalist way of thinking, which is rather a closed system. And I didn't know if I approved of women being minister, and I didn't think I had proved to be equal rights for women. But anything you I was I'm saying high school and doing high school and college in college, they tried to attract me into the Young Republicans club by saying we're in favor of equal rights for women. But Republicans changed the law for them. But I and I said to them, well, I'm not in favor of equal rights for women. So they are Freedom Club. And it was. It was a difficult time because I was in such a lockdown system where I was listening to what the men were teaching me, the Bible said. And actually Princeton seminar. It was a great help. I wanted to go to four seminary before seminary was not accredited and I would train within the new ministers. I wrote to Dallas Seminary and they weren't interested in having any women there. I wrote to Union Seminary in Virginia and they said, You've written to the wrong place. You should write to the assemblies, training school across the street. That's where the women go. I finally left the principal seminary. I Oh, I got a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship to consider the ministry, the chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania, who was an Episcopalian, who later became dean of the Theological Seminary there. I think the selective head, any school he was the second one who suggested to me about being a master. Now I am here in the University of Pennsylvania and oh, and I still was planning to be a missionary. At that point, I had decided I was I had an interest in two areas. One was in linguistics and the sort of thing the work of Bible translators was doing. The other, which was really my most my biggest interest was that I had decided that the church overseas needed to be its own church and have its own leaders in other countries, and that the function of missionary should be in leadership training to train people in those countries so that they could be their own leaders. And therefore, I thought I would be a seminary professor, and particularly the Old Testament was my interest. And I chose when when I was offered this possibility, when the chaplain said to me, Would you consider being a minister? I said, no. We still sometimes fight over it for women or for. Yes, I could. Well, I couldn't imagine. I didn't think I would want a woman minister. So I always tell people, I always tell women and the others in the church. I understand they believe that, too. And I know why they don't want women ministers is because they like them. But I've discovered that women like women, too, we get along very well together. But I didn't I didn't think I would want a woman minister. I didn't know what a woman minister was like. And I had one role model for this woman. Role model. Unfortunately, a woman who was a had been a the director of a settlement house for the Methodist Church in Philadelphia, was hired by the church that I was a member of to this was that my family forced me to leave the church that I had joined. When I was a little girl and to come back to their church and it was in this much larger church or further away from our community where they had hired this woman to be a parish visitor. On the staff of the church and she was an ordained minister in the Methodist Church, although at that time the Methodist Church didn't do not grant full clergy rights to women. They could not have conference status, so they weren't guaranteed a job. If you are if you're a member of the conference, ordained as a member of the conference, you're guaranteed a job in the Methodist Church. But women were not until a month after the Presbyterian Church gave final approval to the ordination of women in May 56. Annapolis. Grand Forks is famous for conferences. Two women ministers in June have. She was visible in the church school and I would see her in Sunday school walking through. She had a dress with a long. Like a. But when she sailed through the Sunday School Fast Club, the store would fly out behind her in the breeze. And which seemed very funny to me, seemed strange. I could not identify with her. And when she stood up in the church that the pastor wore a suit when I was a child, there were mourning culture, along with the grace of her tales in the bank. But by the time she was there, the pastor who conducted the service just wore a business suit and a vest, I guess. But he required her to wear a choir robe. And she wore the choir robe, which obviously showed that she was quite different and not quite as good as a man dressed up in his suit who did not need a choir robe. She also had a very high pitched voice. All the stereotypes that they say about women. She had a high pitched voice which was grating. And when she prayed, it sounded to me like a junior high school prayer. It was not a mature. Prayer was a sort of a bless the missionaries current prayer, which didn't seem to me to be a grown up. It didn't seem like a minister to me, and it was not a good role model and I could not imagine myself being like her. I didn't want to be like her, and she was very timid about it. And as a matter of fact, years later, oh, when I graduated from seminary, I was invited to preach at that church and I wear my robe. And I think at that time she told me how the minister had made her wear this choir robe, and she was so pleased to see me in the robe I was wearing that really look like a minister.

Women put up a fight. How were.

You? You started to say, did you have a fellowship? Well, I the chaplain asked me what I consider going into ministry, and I said no. Well, then he told me about it. The Rockefeller brothers had established with the Association of the Lack, of course, I feel on a fellowship forum for a trial year. They felt that the ministry needed to attract. Qualified and good college graduates. Superior students enter the ministry the same way that business and industry and science try to attract the best. Potential into their field. And this is the kind of people they were looking for. And they were giving this these fellowships. It was a trial. Your fellowship for one year of seminar. They pay all your expenses. They really didn't want you to do any fieldwork that first year either, because they want you to give full attention to your studies. I trial your fellowship, and if you decided to enter the ministry at the end of the year, then you were on your own for the rest of your seminary. But then you decided not to. They thought it would not be a loss because some people in other fields with some theological education would be on your plus for the church with having a more integrated learning. And you had to be not already committed to enter the ministry and to be eligible for this fellowship. And from as a woman, you had to be in a church that would ordain women. So as a methodist, I qualified. I would not have qualified if I had been a Presbyterian at that time, even though Methodist didn't grant full status to women. Yet they still ordained women and have for many years. So and I was the first woman in the program, the first year that they had the program in full operation was the year that I was like, Oh, this is what this was 1955, 56. And I came to Princeton Seminary because not only was it nearby and I knew about it, but it had in the Presbyterian Church, everyone was required to take Hebrew. And I thought if there were more people taking Hebrew, that would be better courses in Hebrew and religious studies than I wanted, and I wouldn't be wasting my time going there because that was my main interest. I really wanted to go on to graduate, to get my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in or out of the department in the Near East, which is why I did my undergraduate major. I majored in the ancient Near East in the Oriental Studies Department at University of Pennsylvania, because that was the time the lands of the Bible. And I wanted to learn the history and art and archeology and language and civilization of the Bible. That was my burning, consuming interest. And I wanted to go either the pen or if those are going to drop in college because it was free and you could take courses with an associate you appeared in. But I couldn't afford to do it. And I thought about joining the Marines in two years to earn money to go to graduate school. That was my other alternative. And then this came along and it was a chance to go to a seminary, right. To do the vocal studies. And I never, never thought I would ever be a minister. I felt a little guilty accepting the fellowship because I was perfectly willing to consider entering the ministry, which is the stipulation of the program. But I was so sure I would never be a minister that I felt a little guilty accepting it. Do you think your resignation was because you're a woman or because you thought you'd rather do something? I could not imagine myself being a minister, and I didn't think I would like having a woman minister. You still feel and I have. There were no role models. I could not imagine a woman minister and didn't think I'd like one. So how can I imagine myself being more. But the game any opportunity to study some of the things I studied. I was pleased to come to seminary when I came to Princeton, so when I thought I was going to a hotbed of liberalism because I was such a fundamentalist and they weren't going to teach me anything, unfortunately, they might venture broke my shoulder in the very beginning. They surprised me at the orientation a week before seminary began, where I learned that there was an atmosphere in which people of differing theological opinions could have love for one another. And that surprised me. And Princeton was the right place for me to go because it allowed me the space to move out of my very rigid theological system and to throw it away. And it was a safe place. For me to start building archeology. And I found it in biblical studies itself because.

The backbone of fundamentalism have been. That the Bible.

Is the drama. It's part of the God. No mistakes, no errors. And when I found in biblical studies, I began to see the truth about the Bible just from really getting into it. And so my system, the pieces and I made a conscious decision at the end of my freshman, my junior year and my first year, that I would no longer seek to uphold a theological position, but within the church, wherever it led me. And if it was the truth, it couldn't be against God. So I didn't have to be afraid of it. I threw out everything I believed except God and I. I thought everything I believed about God. And I thought, Oh, my God is God. I don't know what God is. Starting from scratch as now, at that time, at the end of that first year, I went off to British Columbia and Western Canada to work as a lawyer under the Department of Home Missions of.

The Presbyterian Church in Canada for four months. In summer.

And V the Presbyterian Church in Canada was very against the ordination of women, so they considered me a student deaconess, although I sort of thought of myself more as a student minister. But I had the opportunity to work in the church out there in a variety of different things. And I. At first I decided I wanted nothing to do with any kind of church occupation because of some of the guys I encountered, I think. But then suddenly, one day in August, I was working on preparing a sermon to preach in the church, and Prince George was probably away on a real frontier territory. And I was reading James Smart's book on the teaching mastery in the church and all that he had to say about the Bible. And it was so exciting to me. And I was I was in the process of introducing the new Christian faith, the life curriculum in that church. That was my job at that point. And preaching the Sunday morning sermon was something the pastor there wanted me to do. And while I was reading James Smart's book and. And getting ready to do that. So I suddenly. That afternoon. Bright sunlight. No, but that was what happened. And it's true. And I immediately I told the pastor of the church there and he said two things to me, which horrified me. He said to me, Well, you're certainly going to be a pioneer. And that to me was a terrible thing. I did not want to be a pioneer. I didn't want that burden. And and the second thing he said to me, well, do you think this requires celibacy and that rather apparently. And but those two things keep coming back to me all the time. But but I knew. I knew this was where God had been. And I immediately wrote to the Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship people and told them I had decided to enter the ministry at the end of the year, just a couple months before. I said I hadn't made up my mind yet, but I was going to continue in seminary. I knew I wanted to do that. And I also wrote to the pastor of the Presbyterian Church that I wanted to join. And told and said that I had and to the pastor of the Methodist Church. Well, I guess I just wait and do it. I spoke to him when I got back. I didn't write him a letter. I wrote a letter to the Presbyterian Church that I wanted to join that church and I wanted to become a Presbyterian. And I wanted to be received as a candidate for the ministry. And this was was now the beginning of my second year and. Seminar. And when I went back and spoke to my mother, this pastor. He said to me. That he was pleased that I wanted to be a minister. He was sorry that I was leaving the church, but that in the Philadelphia conference of the Methodist Church with the bishop there.

I would never get to be a minister. So he knew that I couldn't become a minister in the Methodist Church in Philadelphia.

But you didn't know that? No, I knew that. I didn't know it. But I was already at Princeton Seminary, and I. I was. I had gone to Youth Fellowship for a number of years in the Presbyterian Church that was there where undergrads and friends. So I was very interested in becoming a Presbyterian. But and this was the it was in May of 56 that the fight with the second General Assembly and the Presbyterian that all voted the General Assembly confirmed it in in May of 56, and it became the law of the church that women could be ordained. And this was on August 26. So I. I couldn't have done it in the Presbyterian Church before that. And so it just all seemed to work together when I appeared before the Presbytery of Philadelphia. To tell them why I wanted to be a minister. I said there were three reasons. One, I was convinced. I had an overwhelming conviction of the tremendous love of God for me and for all people. And the second was I had a desire to share that love with others. And if there was the belief that God had led me to this place. And I assure you, it wasn't my idea for a kind of response that you get. Oh, very good response. You see, in those days, they didn't have so many college and seminary students coming to be taken under care. Know mostly high school students. They took people into care very early in those days. And when you had somebody who was starting well, by the time I finished the months that I had to be a member of the church and under the care of my session before it was about February or so of 57, I was halfway through seminary, halfway through my middle year, and to have someone at that stage come and give reasons for entering the ministry. I was obviously so much more mature and so much more sure of what I wanted to do than the statements of these high school kids. But I was well received. I went in with a minister for his response. But when you wrote him and told him that you wanted to join his church and oh, be what ministers and delighted to have someone like that join the church. Well, if you got a very good job. Well, I'm going to give Jerry Ellis. And I think it was Terry Ellison, I think. When he was a member of Philadelphia Presbyterian, Philadelphia Presbytery had voted for the ordination of women. Although the candidates committed to a person was also a trustee, was opposed to the ordination of women. And they gave me a very hard time. You won't talk about that. I still have a nervous hostility to personal activity for what he did to me on the floor of Presbytery. He made the charges that me when I came before the committee. There was a change that occurred in this country, in this period. And that was the new church. The Presbyterian Church had been the present person. So if you had been the Presbyterian Church USA, and then there was a merger coming about in 1958. Just before I was ordained, the merger I was held in October 58. In May or June of 58, the merger took place with the Presbyterian Church, the United Christian Church of North America. I was in Preston, USA and about that time, and I suppose now that it was a change in the Book of Order that I associate with the new church. But it may have been just such a change that they were making. They used to license candidates for the ministry as a normal step in the process. And you were licensed maybe around your second or beginning your third year of seminary. Well, they had just changed that. So that licensure and this became this was true for the United Presbyterian Church in the USA for all its years. From 58 up until the till 83. Licensure was something you did if you didn't have a call. If you were prepared and ready for the ministry. But we're still waiting for your call you to get licensed. And so it became a different thing. So instead of they had, they felt they needed to do something instead of licensure. So they instituted in the Baltimore Order a miller appearance before the presbytery. But there was no description of what that level or appearance should be. And predators were free to do what they wanted. The Presbyterian Philadelphia made it into something almost as big as in our nation exam. I had to write papers for them on several subjects. I had to do a Bible for Jesus. I had to write a theological paper. I remember it was on the Atonement. And I had to take a Bible examination of 100 questions on which I got 93 and a half because I really knew my Bible from my father was dead. And then there was an appearance before the presbytery at which you were asked a lot of theological and other questions. The questions asked were asked by the chairperson of the Candidates Committee, rather than coming from the four others who had had in or appearance at the normal time, which would have been maybe the beginning of their second year. We're all together and questions were asked of all of them and anybody who wanted to answer would. But since I was a little late in the process, by the time I got to my Miller appearance, I was the only one being questioned and the chairperson tried to back me into a corner. On the ordination of women and the fact that he believed it was not biblical. And he did it by asking me about and Timothy, he said if the Presbyterian if the General Assembly impressed you in church, made a decision that you didn't agree with, that you didn't think was in agreement with the Bible. Who would you believe? The Presbyterian Church in the Bible. And I told him about, of course, although I take seriously anything that the General Assembly said. And he said in one or two of these letters, it says, there's one girl and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Do you believe that? I said, yes. They said, Well, in the same letter, Paul says, If any man desires the office of a bishop, he desires a good thing. And he says, I suffer, not a woman to teach you sort of authority over men. What do you believe that? And this was at the conclusion of a long theological examination where I had been asked all kinds of questions for which I could answer some I couldn't specific theological questions like describe Rudolf Otto's idea of the holy or something like this. And he and I told him that I thought that in the Greek, if any man deserves the Office of Bishops really could be an American or fragment of any one. As the Bishop, I was just guessing. But I was right, because I knew the Greek words and and and I said, as far as you serving authority, I was not seeking to usurp authority any over anyone. If I had any authority, it would be given me by this presbytery. And I was not usurping anything. And I believed that a Saint Paul would here today, he would not deny to God the right to call a woman to preach. And the presbytery didn't applauded and somebody recommended that the examination be arrested. And Presbytery voted. And but there was the candidate's committee told me, we do not approve the one. And so when I got my first job a year later in Brooklyn. I had in those days. It was in the back of order that candidates were to be ordained in the church where they were called. The fact that the Corps had a great deal to do with the fact that you were ordained meant that you didn't get ordained as the result of having achieved everything through college and seminary and passing ordination terms. But you got an ordained because you had a call, a call from a church that confirmed the call of God that you felt in your own heart and that the presbytery saw in you by approving you, but that a congregation believe that God, he called you also, and therefore they want to call you. And so you were normally ordained in the place of your call. And I jumped at that chance and had my papers all transfer, my Kennedy candidacy transferred. I joined the church that I was going to serve in Brooklyn, and my Cantor's candidacy transferred to the Presbyterian, Brooklyn, Nassau. And it was like a breath of fresh air because. They said they welcomed me and they gave me opportunities to grow. They did not think they were pleased to have their first woman, the first and only woman ever or date of birth. And that's all because they only existed for four years after that until they merged with New York City Presbyterian, dismissed Sullivan Church of the Wild Things. So your ordination date and some of the people that took place October 19, 1958 and from counting from reading all statistics box and counting up these those the dates of all ordinations, I know that they still do. I discovered from the list that I was the 12th one. Ordained 12 woman. Yes. Just two years after. You remember some of the people who took part in my ordination at Golden for the seminary here, Bill Beavers.

From the center, both professors at Princeton Center. They'll be preaching the sermon Ed Gordon gave the.

Charge to the pastor. Church to the minister. I was the assistant.

Pastor of the large church. In the church. An image of.

I have applied for that job. And one other job, one was a director of Christian education or mom was an assistant pastor job. But there was another woman who was a director of Christian education who had applied for both jobs as well. And. We determined between ourselves that the church in Bay Ridge, really in Brooklyn, really was looking for an assistant pastor rather than a DCE. And the church she went to was really looking for a DCE rather than an assistant pastor. And so we decided that we would each refuse the other job and accept them. So we worked it out among ourselves. Christian The senior pastors didn't know we did that, but we, we, we had figured out that's what they really wanted. So that's what we did. How long were you in the print venture? I was there for four years. And the senior pastor made it really tough near the end because he wanted.

Me to move. He said there was no place for me to go.

In that church and I should go somewhere else anyway. And I think he couldn't take the competition. When I began to be when the congregation liked my sermons, I began to preach less and less. And when I was not. When people came to me for counseling. I think you found that threatening. Was there sort of a star quality around your ministry? Because star quality because you were one of the early women or was really difficult on the level. There were people who didn't think women should be ministers and people had a lot of growing money and that nobody had ever seen a woman before. I was the only woman ever. And the only one I knew. And. I remember the senior pastor had a lot of vacation time there, about eight or nine weeks vacation a year. And he took off about six weeks in the summer and he would go. And in the hot weather, the old folks will die. There's a large church around now. And people and I remember once, right during I had two weeks of vacation, church, school, and during that same two weeks, there were six deaths. And I have I have all these funerals myself. And I remember vividly my first funeral. But one of the things that happened was that the old folks who weren't sure whether they wanted whether a woman should be a minister or not, they are the ones who went to the funerals and they found themselves being minister. And then they knew I was a minister and this is the way it always was at seminary doing what I did. Some supply pre-check, which was very difficult, certainly wouldn't send me out, which I have learned. I can tell you about homeland security and how I personally changed what goes on some American to see that briefly and yes. But what I learned both in and what I did supply preaching where I was the first woman minister that people had ever met. And when I had funerals in my church or when I had a wedding, which would always be people coming who were outside the church, where new people would always see you at weddings and funerals, people who had. I was the first woman they'd ever met. These people always said, I never thought a woman should be a minister. I didn't think I'd like a woman minister. I didn't know a woman could be a minister. But it's okay because and you see, for all these years, it is thought it was the men ministers who couldn't believe that women could be ministers because they could not imagine women doing what they did, partly because they have a weird masculinity type occupation. But but the laity are the people who know when they're being ministered to. They recognize the validity of a minister. And immediately the minute you begin working with them, they know if they're being ministered to or not. And it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, black, white, green, purple, whatever. They know if you're being a minister and it's right. In seminary when I was there, there were gospel teams that used to go out. It would be for men or couples. That is, male seminary students and their wives could go on gospel teams that would go out for a week in churches. And there is so much would be paid for them. This was a kind of field work and they would go out and have some kind of activity with the young people on Saturday, this visiting with the youth. They would be involved in Sunday school and participate in the Sunday morning service in the youth group. And we visited some homes in the afternoons. And in the evening they would conduct and preach at the Sunday evening service of that church all around this area. Many of them have shown up here. And but they would not allow a woman student to be on a gospel team only wives of students, because it was where you couldn't have male and female go places together. You weren't married or. Absolutely. So my second year here at seminary, I organized a women's gospel team, all women for students, and I had my own church invite us for the first, what do you call him? The one who? The Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. And we went to one or two other places, and the director of field work came down to listen. And I preached the sermon in the Sunday evening service, and the director of field work came and saw and realized, Hey, she can preach. It's all right. And he saw that it was okay. From then on, he was well, we had that that first year that only that one year didn't have women's gospel games. The next year, they allowed women students to be on gospel teams with men students. So there was no need for all women's gospel teams anymore. So but then I had the problem during my senior year of preaching. The Director of placement was the one who took care of seeing your preaching because this was supposed to how to get jobs. And he came to the senior class at the beginning of the year and pleaded with seniors to sign up for preaching because he had all kinds of requests for preachers just for a Sunday or two. Here they are, different places and take a service. And I thought it would be a good experience for you as well. You know, fill all these requests we get. And I signed up and every time he came back all year long and said he needed more seniors to sign up for senior briefing. I would go and sign up, but he never, ever assigned me anywhere. Now, the director of field work who had seen me with the gospel teams knew that I was a priest. So he would have he would send me out when when there was a student church, send a student who had a a church all year long, who went home on vacations during vacation times. I got to preach because the field work would send me as a substitute for one of the other students, but the placement director would never send me. Finally, it was March all the way through the year when the president of the senior class, Fred McCracken, went to the director of placement and said to him, There was a member of our class not getting equal treatment. And if you do not get some senior preaching places for Marvin Howard, I am going to the president of the seminary and he didn't like that threat. And so he said he couldn't send me out unless a church asked for a woman to preach and no church ever asked for a woman to preach. So he couldn't send a woman to move ahead. They asked for a woman. So he certainly was great trepidation to a church to preach. And lo and behold, they asked to have me back a second Sunday. And after that I preached every single Sunday, every single church. He sent me to ask to have me back a second Sunday. What an hour. And it was it was a great experience, but it open things up for him and for all the other people. I was a fourth mother, a pioneer. He really was one of his friends. That is different because you were there. They didn't even know it, but you knew it. I know God having her way. Where did you go? After Brooklyn, I. I went to an inner denominational, nondenominational church in Wayne, New Jersey, that really had a Presbyterian flavor. But it was founded by a minister in a community that had no other churches when it was founded. And that's why they felt it should be sort of interdenominational. It was a very large church. And I went I decided I really wanted to specialize in Christian education. I went as the minister of Christian Education and the church with 650 members of 900 church school. And a lot of people and I did not like being outside of the Presbyterian Church because we really weren't kind of outsiders with things going on at Presbyterian. But I had a lot of good experience there and learned a lot. And this is in the early sixties. This was from 1962 to 1965. The two other pastors left and I was alone managing that whole church for three months. Coming they call a new pastor. And when the new pastor came, I realized that he was not one that's going to work well. And I had already told them that I would leave. One of the first two came unless the senior pastor, the church council and I, all three agreed that I should stay. And but I had I left.

And went back to graduate school and.

I got a Jessie Smith Noise Parish Ministry Fellowship to study at Union Territory of New York and a program for Nigerian religion. And I got my STEM Master's degree theology colony in psychiatry and religion from from a and that was 60. I had become very much interested in counseling and. And I took this was not counseling courses such as the poetry and religion, but it was I took all the clinical courses that they offered. This was 1956 that I had my. Graduate degree. And then went off to Europe where I thought I could get student fares for four months, had wonderful experiences with another, went with a woman who was just finishing with.

Her bid to be a minister.

And in New York, we traveled all over Europe with a tent and a Volkswagen. And this was before the green. The migration of college students.

All over Europe. So. There weren't nearly as many Americans as they were in later years.

But I came back very convinced that the Holy Spirit had worked for me to do it. Now, being in the ministry eight years, I had good experience and my first two churches I learned a lot and believed that God had a place for me and work for me to do that. I was ready to be a pastor and I read through the entire statistics book on the church and found out that there were almost no pastors among men and women could be an assistant, anything but not a pastor. And there also were almost no women in parish positions at all. There were very few assistant pastors and associate pastors, and I felt that it was up to me to open the pastor to women by doing it. And I was at a much better position than a woman just fresh out of seminary for the first time. And I spent two and a half years unemployed. Because I could not. It took me more than two years to get my first interview on the pastoral nominating committee. I knew all along if I could get an interview. I went around in the beginning. I took my dossier. I went around the presbytery executives. I talked with them. I went after the job. And the presbytery executives, who are all male ministers, would say to me, Well, now I think maybe there might be one church that might be a possibility. But of course, it never was. And the real problem was that they, as executives, were unwilling to present my dossier or to suggest me as a possibility to a pastoral nominating committee, because they were afraid that they that the lay people in the church would think that they were trying to pull something go wrong by suggesting a woman and the presbytery executive in my own presbytery, which in those days was powerful. Future. Said to me in so many words, quote unquote.

A woman's place is in the home.

Why did you respond? And do you remember it? Yes. I said something about the. Probably so. Was that a proposal or something? Or is that something about trying to get married? So how did you finally get a position, your next position? I, I kept it up. I, I related to the union seminary community. I did supply preaching and a little church in Brooklyn for a year and a half. I did other jobs in churches that I could get a part time job during parish visiting while they had those. While there was a vacancy or I taught a confirmation class for a church in New Jersey, I did different things like that. I worked in the seminary library and related to the Anthony community, which gave me some background. And from the Union Seminary community, I kept up, I had interviews with people I interviewed for a shopping center ministry and what some of the boring national missions of our church was. And I finally said to them, Would you consider a woman as the director of the shopping center ministry? And he said, No, maybe the assistant director, if you can imagine the shopping center. He couldn't see that a woman minister could do a job for all women or shopping. But but I work through the placement office and I met George Morgan, who was in. Comedy presenter. He was the executive who'd come here looking for some people at Union Seminary for opening for the have there. He suggested my name to the chairperson of the nominating committee in the Woodside Presbyterian Church in Troy. They were at that time they decided to go into a shared ministry with four churches working together. And the reason George Morgan suggested my name to the chairperson was that each church was going to would still have their own pastor, but there was a try to complement one another. And this man had decided that this the pulpit committee chairperson had decided that they need somebody who had some good expertize in Christian education. That's what our church could contribute to the church shared ministry. And that was why George had suggested my name to him. And he said, Would you consider a woman? Now, this man, racy, was the manager of the Ford plant in Greenisland, and the Ford Company had just had all their managers over to Detroit and had indoctrinated them in the fact that women could be executives and that women had a lot to offer and they ought to hire women. And so he brought that into his being chairperson of the nominating committee there in the church. And when they said, would you consider a woman, he said, oh, yes, we would consider a woman. So I came up there and preached in a neutral pulpit and they liked my sermon. It was the sermon on the B attitude, and it was a good biblical sermon and really applying it to life. And they liked that. And they interviewed me and then they asked me to come to Kennedy. And you? I did. And here was the first church that interviewed me. And I could not get interviews before. Ashley could not get an interview. And I knew and that was and it was from then on that we began working to get presbytery committees on ministerial relations to adopt equal opportunity guidelines that said that we will not we will not approve a call if a pastoral nominating committee has not heard that is heard preach and interviewed at least one woman or one minority candidate. Now, the first one that I knew of that did that was Tennessee Valley Presbyterian. And they did one woman, one minority candidate or one minister over 50. So that was easy to get it through the pressure of Albany, we did one woman or one minority candidate, not one easy for them to find those. And so it meant that we were going to have token interviews, but that was the price that had to be paid. And I remember having a token entity with I got very serious when I realized that these people had not even seen my dossier. And here they are interviewing me and they weren't serious at all. But I realized that was a price that had to be paid to get interviews, because interviews were the only way that women were going to get jobs. So you were the first woman pastor of any Presbyterian and. Okay. And that was which I was there for nine years and we're doing right now this. I went there the 16th of December, 1958, 68. Ten years after I'd been out and it was my installation was in January.

59 after Christmas.

And I was there until 19. 77. I was there almost nine years.

And then I served as pastor of a church. In her presbytery. And I am now in vice pastor of a second church.

And. I have been a pastor in three churches in that one presbytery. No first church was in Albany Press Gallery and now two in a Presbyterian. I'm like the moderator of Albany Presbyterian and I've been vice moderator of the Senate. Maybe that and yes, the gears are grinding. And I'm saying this is tape one, you know, and we're going to have more of it. But I know I think we have I'm feeling comfortable with going another 15 minutes of it, but I don't want to have to feel nervous. He wants to be up to the airport by 230. Okay. But.