Posts from the ‘Women’s Alliance’ Category

Women's Alliance

Brief History of the Women’s Alliance

Taken from a sermon by Olive Hoogenboom, Church Historian, given in the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, on March 13, 2005 Our church's first women's group, our Female Samaritan Society, was founded in 1838. In 1844, when our church was being built, this women's society gave an elegant fair and tea party to furnish the high and low pulpit areas. Founded to help "the sick and suffering poor," our Female Samaritan Society became our church's main service organization. From 1840 to 1851, it collected and distributed $2,721. Three hundred of these dollars went to victims of the September 10, 1848, Brooklyn fire, which left hundreds of people homeless. During the Civil War, our Samaritan Society made 5,235 garments for sick and wounded Union soldiers and spent $3,628 for their care. Also interested in social events, the Society held fortnightly entertainments for church members. The Sunday school started on December 17, 1865. After moving about, it settled on Willow Place, where it ministered to the families of charwomen, sailors, and longshoremen, becoming one of the earliest settlement houses. During the sixty-two years this largely secular ministry lasted, our Samaritan Society provided a large portion of its yearly budget, and in times of special need gave its families fabric for clothing, shoes, and coal. In December 1897, our Female Samaritan Society anticipated its sixtieth birthday by uniting with our newer Women's Alliance to form our Samaritan Alliance. Carrying on our church's social, charitable, and proselytizing work, it was our church's most active group. From 1888 until 1943, first our Female Samaritan Society, and then our Samaritan Alliance, working with the Fresh Air Fund, provided summer vacations for Brooklyn children. That first year, 50 settlement children spent two to eight weeks in private homes in the country, and by 1940 the number of children reached 631. During World War II, church women, organized by our Samaritan Alliance and our Pierrepont Tuesday Club, sewed endlessly for members of the armed forces and refugee children in England. They helped equip a hospital ship and set aside an area in our Church to make surgical dressings. To attract passersby to join in their activities, they flew a Red Cross flag when work was in progress. While remnants of our church's women's organizations continued to function throughout most of the 1960s, none of them made it into the 1970s. With these organizations becoming moribund at the very moment the women's liberation movement gained momentum, Katherine Lazarus was moved to action. At a Sunday afternoon gathering in the spring of 1973, she launched a new organization "for women of all ages and interests." Participants decided to affiliate with the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation, to revitalize our old Women's Alliance, and to retain its name, which our Samaritan Alliance had used occasionally since 1963 and consistently beginning in 1965. Lazarus became our church's first woman deacon in 1974 and is still part of our congregation. Our new Women's Alliance did not give church teas and suppers, but supported workshops, reading groups, seminars, and meetings, focusing on the needs of women in our congregation. Its members frequently travel to Washington and Albany to lobby for freedom of choice in the abortion controversy. For nearly two decades, from 1981 to early 1999, Marge Odessky compiled and published Women's Work, a beautifully edited, in-depth, tri-yearly journal, which kept its many readers aware of the happenings in the women's liberation movement. From 1977 to 1979, our Alliance hired three women theological students to work with Donald McKinney and to minister particularly to the women in our church. From 1985 to 2007, it was the chief financial supporter of our church’s female chaplain.. The Women’s Alliance presently supports the presence of female ministerial seminarians.