Episcopal Press and News
Lueta Bailey honored as pioneering Episcopal Church woman
Episcopal News Service. November 15, 2010 [111510-08]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Lueta Bailey, the first woman to address the General Convention of the Episcopal Church and among the first women seated as members of the House of Deputies, was honored Nov. 12 during the Diocese of Atlanta's annual council.
"I would not be here today, and many of you would not be here today, without the courage and determination of Mrs. Bailey and her colleagues who worked so hard to get the church to understand that its discriminatory policies were men's will, and not God's will," Bonnie Anderson, House of Deputies president, said before presenting Bailey with an award.
Bailey, 89, is also a veteran in the campaign against racial discrimination. In the mid-1960s, she and her husband, Seaton, along with fellow parishioners at St. George's Episcopal Church in Griffin, Georgia, played a key role in desegregating two lunch counters in Griffin in the face of Ku Klux Klan opposition. During her leadership in the Diocese of Atlanta, she also helped achieve racial integration of the diocesan camp and conference center.
Bailey went on to serve nine years on Executive Council and was the first woman to chair the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance.
According to a story written by Jim Naughton for the Diocese of Atlanta's Pathways publication, Bailey was first introduced to the issue of women as deputies in 1955 at General Convention in Honolulu, when she was first a delegate to the Triennial Meeting of the Women of the Church (now known as the Episcopal Church Women).
"I heard my first debate about women being seated as deputies and walked out because I was so angry I didn't know what to do," she said.
In 1967, Bailey was the presiding officer of the women's gathering and the convention, meeting in Seattle, was again debating the issue of female deputies.
She became the first woman ever to address the General Convention when she spoke in both the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops after each had passed the resolution to permit women to serve in the House of Deputies.
"There had been a great debate over whether I would go if the vote was no," Bailey said in a 1983 interview for the Archives of the Episcopal Church. "My feeling had been yes, I go no matter what … I was not going to be ungracious. It didn't mean that I had to go in there and say beautiful things to them. I had two speeches."
"I decided early that morning to wear a red silk suit and announce that to the whole Triennial meeting that if they voted no I was dressed properly for the martyr and if they voted yes I was dressed properly for the celebration."
As it happened, Bailey was dressed for the celebration. "As I walked down the aisle [in the House of Deputies] I'll never forget the mass of men snapping pictures of me going down … it was a great day in the life of the church," she said. "And it was not Lueta Bailey; it was all the women walking down that aisle."
Because the legislation to seat women as deputies amended the church's constitution, it had to be passed at two successive conventions, so Bailey and her colleagues were not seated until 1970.
"The debate had been so ugly and so long in the church that there had to be a moment of reconciliation," she said of the House's formal recognition of the new deputies. "Let's forget all of those bad words, and they had hurt. You know, stand there and be a woman."
Anderson told the Atlanta council meeting that the seating of female deputies "did not happen by accident and it did not happen simply because time marched on."
"It happened because Mrs. Bailey and her peers worked tirelessly for decades to organize, to advocate and to insist that our remarkable Episcopal polity, rooted in our belief that the Holy Spirit works through laypeople, clergy and bishops alike, needed the voices and wisdom of women."
During the 1967 convention, on the same day the convention was debating the seating of women as deputies, Bailey also faced a second issue with the role of men and women in the governance of the church.
Then-Presiding Bishop John Hines proposed that the women's organization contribute a third of a $9 million "Crisis in America" initiative, which he said would allow the Episcopal Church to "take its place humbly and boldly alongside of, and in support of, the dispossessed and oppressed peoples of this country for the healing of our national life." The money would come from the United Thank Offering.
"We had another plan" for the money, Bailey recalled to the Atlanta council meeting, and so a week's worth of debate ensued.
The Triennial Meeting was scheduled to vote on the issue before General Convention considered it and some deputies complained that the women were exercising too much authority.
"We were constantly -- harassment is not a good word but you never walked anywhere that some man who was a deputy didn't bring up the subject," Bailey said. "Some were encouraged but others were not and that's why we kept the doors locked, because I knew some of those prominent men and they could come in and influence us."
ECW voted to give Hines what he had asked for.
"Mrs. Bailey knew when to keep the doors locked, but she also knew when to fling them wide open," Anderson said, adding that Bailey exercised that knowledge when she and her other female colleagues stopped the men on the Executive Council from retiring to a bar on a men-only floor to discuss each day's decisions. Instead they had the bar moved downstairs and everyone participated in the conversation and the drinks.
Audio files of Anderson's remarks in Atlanta and Bailey's response are here.