Tag Archives: women

1974

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  • The Rev. Mark Harvey began his jazz ministry and founded the Jazz Coalition (later the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra), which sponsored concerts, liturgies, and festivals here over the next four decades.
  • March 3.  As our sponsored seminarian, Pauli Murray preached from our pulpit her inaugural sermon on a passage she had selected (Isaiah 61: 1-4), entitled ” Women Seeking Admission to Holy Orders: As Crucifers Carrying the Cross”.* Saying that Emmanuel “sent me forth as a member of your congregation with your blessings and prayers to begin my training for the Sacred Ministry”, she asked:

Why in the face of the devastating rejection at the Louisville General Convention of last October, 1973–a rejection which Bishop Paul Moore of NY has called the violation of the very core of their personhood–[have the women seeking ordination to the priesthood] only increased their determination to enter the higher levels of the clergy?

Then paraphrasing Isaiah 53:3, she prophesied:

I believe that these women are in truth the Suffering Servants of Christ, despised and rejected, women of sorrows and acquainted with grief.  They are answering to a higher authority than that of the political structures of our Church, and in the fullness of time God will sweep away those barriers and free the Church to carry forward its mission of renewal as a living force and God’s witness in our society.

* Reprinted in Daughters of Thunder:  Black women preachers and their sermons, 1850-1979, Bettye Collier-Thomas (NY: Jossey Bass, 1998),  pp. 240-44.  Please see also About Pauli Murray and our Timeline entries about her:  1951,1970, 1973, 1977, 1985, 1987, 2012 & 2015.

1978

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  • Pauli Murray, who was a vestry member, entered the General Theological Seminary. The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw had helped her discern a call to ordination.

Once I admitted the call of total commitment to service in the church, it seemed that I had been pointed in this direction all my life and that my experiences were merely preparation for this calling.  In spite of my own intellectual doubts and the opposition to women’s ordination which was widespread within the Episcopal Church at the time, I took the fateful step of applying to The Rt. Rev. John Melville Burgess, Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, for admission to holy orders. (Autobiography, 1989, p. 427)

  • Organ built by James Ludden, given by Priscilla Rawson Young in 1973

    4 Nov. Priscilla Rawson Young gave a portable pipe organ, built by James Ludden, which is still used for rehearsals in our Music Room.

See also:

  1. Pauli Murray and Timeline entries:  1970, 1977,1985, 1989, 2012 & 2015.
  2. Priscilla Young:  Timeline entries: 1909, 1939, 1942, 1971, 1994 & 2000.

1959

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The Business & Professional Women’s Guild (formerly Club) had 98 members.  Its officers were Miss Lydia LeBaron Walker, President; Miss Caroline G. Whitney, Vice-President and Recording Secretary; Miss Margaret A. Cooke, Corresponding Secretary; Maude D. Gowen; Treasurer.  Our archives has its membership directory for that church year. The Guild was active for another decade.

1949

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  • 13 October. After its Planning Committee led by Misses E. Louis Seymour and Elsie L. Jones had laid the groundwork, the Business & Professional Women’s Club held its first meeting.  Alberta Pond and Adele Herrick became its first president and secretary, respectively. They held monthly suppers after which members worked on projects or enjoyed entertainment.

1917

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  • President Theodore Roosevelt came to Emmanuel for his son Archie’s wedding.  See a Library of Congress clip of their arrival on Newbury Street.
  • Emmanuel organist Lynnwood Farnam designed and supervised the installation by Casavant Frères of a 137-stop pipe organ, which was the third-largest in N. America.  See also Timeline entry 1918 about its dedication &  2007 about its sale and restoration.

Casavant567

1914

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See also World War I Memorial and Katharine Lane Weems.

The Students’ House Corporation, under the direction of Mary S. Holmes and Charlotte Upham Baylies, built at 96 The Fenway a home for our Students’ House, which had been in rented quarters since its inception in 1899. They engaged architects Kilham & Hopkins, raised a large portion of its construction cost ($124K), and secured a mortgage for the remainder.  The building is now Kerr Hall, a Northeastern University dormitory.

Gardiner Martin Lane from Harvard College Class of 1881 biography of him in the papers of Katharine Lane Weems at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.

 

October 6.  About a thousand people attended the funeral service for financier, philanthropist, and parishioner Gardiner Martin Lane (born 1859).  The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester, The Rt. Rev. William Lawrence,  The Rev. John W. Suter of Winchester, and The Rev. Prescott Evarts from Lane’s Harvard Class of 1881 officiated.  Pallbearers included President  A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Francis Adams, and several of his partners from Lee Higginson & Co.. Lynnwood Farnum played a Tchaikovsky funeral march and “Dead March” from Handel’s “Saul”. The boys choir sang “Abide with me” and “The strife is over”.

As treasurer of the New England chapter of the International Red Cross, Lane collected and distributed relief funds for the Salem fire (1914), the San Francisco earthquake (1906), and other disasters.  Appointed trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1906, and elected its president in 1907, he oversaw its move from Copley Square to the Evans Building on Huntington Ave., which was designed by Emmanuelite Guy Lowell.  Spearheading the Museum’s fundraising effort for the new facility, Lane said, “A mere collection of beautiful objects is of little value unless seen, appreciated, and understood by many.”

His widow, Emma Louise Gildersleeve Lane, and daughter, Katharine Lane Weems, were parishioners for years after his death and generous benefactors to Emmanuel.

The Lanes’ home at 53 Marlborough is now the French Cultural Center.

The Lanes’ summer house, The Chimneys, in Manchester by the Sea, MA was designed by Emma G. Lane’s brother Raleigh C. Gildersleeve.

1899

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  • The new sanctuary was dedicated.

  • Fay Cottage @ 216 Elm Rd., Falmouth MA was built c1740 by David Butler. 1916 photo thanks to Woods Hole Historical Archive

    A cottage overlooking the Vineyard Sound in Falmouth was provided for a summer-long series of 10-day seaside sojourns for women and children of the Church of the Ascension by Emmanuel parishioners Mr. & Mrs. Henry B. Fay.  A piazza and bathhouses along its beach were constructed with Emmanuel funds.  Sarah M. Gay assisted Clara M. Carter, the Diocesan Deaconess, in managing the retreat at Fay Cottage for the first of 25 years to come.  See also history of Fay Farm.

  • The Students’ House was rented at 21-23 St. James Ave.  It housed about 20 young women and maintained a club for 150 others for more than a decade.
Club Room at Students House, 21-23 St. James Ave.

Club Room at Students House, 21-23 St. James Ave.

 

1898

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  • Henrietta Sargent, daughter of our benefactor Mary Robeson Sargent (1847-1919) and Charles Sprague Sargent, married architect Guy Lowell at Emmanuel.  CSS has a botanical legacy in the Professor Sargent camellia, which was released in 1908.
  • April 19. Francis R. Allen‘s plans were approved and work began on the expansion.

 

 

 

  • Florence R. Rhodes rented a cottage on Sandy Pond in Lincoln MA as a summer camp for girls of Church of the Ascension, which was run by Deaconess Henrietta Goodwin and Helen E. Moulton, intern from the NY Training School for Deaconesses.

1897

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October 28. Rector Leighton Parks set up the Emmanuel Club to give young men of the parish a venue for fellowship.  Samuel Taylor was its first secretary.  They met several times a year for dinner with speakers or entertainment at the newly formed University Club at 270 Beacon Street.   Fitz-Henry Smith Jr. was secretary during its last year in 1911.  A member of the Harvard College Class of 1896, he went on to write these works about Boston:

  • The story of Boston light, with some account of the beacons in Boston harbor (1911).
  • The French at Boston during the Revolution : with particular reference to the French fleets and the fortifications in the harbor (1913).
  • Storms and shipwrecks in Boston and the record of the life savers of Hull (1918).

November.  The Rev. Henrietta Rue Goodwin began her service as deaconess at Emmanuel, which included distributing clothing, monitoring the Mothers’ Meeting, helping to fund choir vestments, and overseeing a Bible class and the Students’ Club.  Her reports in our Yearbooks (1897-1906), give her accounting of Special Funds for distribution of aid to the poor and her other activities, which included thousands of visits to the sick and needy.

Children of Anne & Benjamin Rotch (clockwise): Aimee, Edith, Arthur & Lawrence

Work of Emmanuel House in the South End was transferred to our mission there, Church of the Ascension.

Edith Rotch, the younger daughter of Anne Bigelow Lawrence & Benjamin S. Rotch died at the age of fifty.  She was memorialized by her sister Aimee R. Sargent in our Rotch reredos.

1896

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  • Leighton Parks rejected a call from a Brooklyn parish.  The Vestry quickly began work on a larger church, which would add forty pews.
  • The Ascension Chapter (#1407) of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew was organized by the Rev. Edward Atkinson.

  • Harriet Dexter Lawrence Hemenway, 1890, by John Singer Sargent. Credit: WikiCommons

    Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and her cousin Minna B. Hall founded the Mass. Audubon Society.  For some time they had fought against the slaughter of egrets and other birds for their plumes by organizing women to stop wearing feathered hats.