Ida+Hultin+and+the+Moline+Unitarian+Church

Original Author: Hayley Zertuche Revision Author:
 * Ida Hultin: Reverend of the Moline Unitarian Church from 1891 to 1898**

Reverend Ida Hultin was a prominent Unitarian minister in nineteenth century America who unwittingly found herself ministering at the Moline Unitarian Church from 1891 to 1898 (Tucker 237). During this time she was also engaging in the national and global discourses about religion, women’s rights and suffrage, and ethics (Sillari). She presented several addresses during the course of her career in the Unitarian ministry. Likely one of the most important addresses she gave, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, was during the seven years she lived in Moline. Hultin’s time in Moline could be considered among the peak years of her ministry, during which she became visibly active on a national scale.

Taking cue from the liberating Transcendentalist philosophies popularizing in nineteenth century America, which “not only saw the divine as androgynous and present in all humanity but expected that women would be prophets of the future” (Tucker 2), women began entering the ministry in Unitarian and Universalist churches. The doctrines of these two churches were more liberal in their beliefs than most other churches during this time and effectively “released women from their inferior station and cleared the way for their ascent” (Tucker 2) into leadership roles. Though Unitarian and Universalist churches offered a gateway to this “ascent,” there was “no great rush of females into the ministry in the late nineteenth century” (Tucker 3). It was more like a trickle; only five women were in the ministry in 1870. In the 1880s and 1890s a group of “twenty or so” (Tucker 3) women in the Unitarian ministry formed a sisterhood of sorts, dedicated to fostering and promoting the role of women in leadership and religion while it was still in its infantile state (Tucker 34). Ida Hultin was a member of this “Iowa Sisterhood.”

Hultin was born in Michigan in 1858 and graduated from Michigan University. After graduating from college, Hultin did some teaching, then moved on to public speaking, and eventually began serving “several independent liberal churches in Michigan” (Sillari). One such Michigan church, located in Sherwood, was led by Rev. M.V. Rork, who was “expelled from the Methodist church for heresy” (Association) associated with his own liberal ideals. Hultin made a name for herself as an extraordinary minister “who preaches with marked effect” (Association) while serving with Rev. Rork. She was later asked to relieve Mary Safford of her ministry in Algona, Iowa in 1882, and Hultin seized the opportunity to prove herself even further in ministry (Tucker 31).

Mary Safford had big shoes to fill, so to speak. Safford and Eleanor Gordon had established their own church in Hamilton, Illinois in 1879 and, within a year, gained a weekly attendance of 150 to 200 people (Tucker 21 - 22). Safford was then requested to minister in a new church in Humbolt, Iowa, and became ordained in Humboldt’s Unity Church in 1880 (Tucker 24). Soon after, the demand for Safford’s ministry was so great, she began serving in Algona, Iowa on alternating Sundays (Tucker 26). Safford had quickly established a hotbed of activity for women ministers in the Midwest, having also become president of the Iowa Unitarian Association, and Hultin benefited greatly from the alliance (Tucker 34).

After Hultin made the move to Algona to take over the ministry for Safford, Algona began “sprouting growth of its own for the sisterhood’s future expansion” (Tucker 34). Hultin’s focus was on youth programs in the Unitarian Sunday School and Young People’s Club, which “promoted egalitarian principles and reformist ideals” (Tucker 34), and she was able to bring in such inspiring speakers as “Ralph Waldo Emerson [i], Frederick Douglass, Anna Dickinson, Clara Barton, Amelia Bloomer, and Carrie Chapman Catt” (Tucker 34).

Several years after accepting the ministry in Algona, Iowa, Hultin was called to minister in Des Moines, Iowa. It was in Des Moines that she was ordained in 1886 (Tucker 237). Upon noticing Hultin’s extraordinary talent and leadership capabilities, the Western Women’s Unitarian Conference – committed to supporting female ministry – gave Hultin a stipend to take college courses (Tucker 121), something she had found difficult to finance herself. She later became president of the Western Women’s Unitarian Conference (Sillari). Being continually prominent in national Unitarian discourse and activity, she also later became vice-president of the Central States Conference of Unitarian Churches (Sillari).

Following the time she served as minister in Des Moines, Hultin found herself in Moline in 1891 as the first woman minister of the Moline Unitarian Church (Collins et al. 34). Prior to her arrival, the church had been home to a cooking school that “served as the forerunner of the home economics class taken over by the Moline public school system several years later” (Collins et al. 34).

Two years after assuming the role and while still serving as reverend of the Moline Unitarian Church, Hultin presented an address entitled “The Essential Oneness of Ethical Ideas Among All Men” at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in which she spoke of “the universality of the ethical sense” (Barrows). The Parliament was held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Hultin presented with three other Universalist speakers: Augusta Chapin, A. J. Canfield, and Olympia Brown Willis (Richey).

Hultin’s Parliament address, challenging in its tone with such statements as “churches and creeds have never done the world’s best work” (Hultin, “The Essential”) and “pity the man whose moral nature is not a law unto itself” (Hultin, “The Essential”), illustrates her beliefs as an ethical-basis Unitarian and her alignment with the Free Religious Association, “a group who defined themselves beyond or outside traditional Christianity and focused on a religion of humanity or ‘rational religion’” (Sillari). In this same address, she approaches women’s rights by exclaiming:

Try to evade the truth if you will, you must face it at last. No creedal church and no form of ecclesiasticism has ever lent itself to the emancipation of the woman-half of humanity. She has suffered, and still suffers, because of the results of dogmatic beliefs and theological traditions. But the ethical sense of the humanity of which she is a part is lifting her out into the fullness of religious liberty. […] By demanding morality for morality, purity for purity, self-respecting manhood for self-respecting womanhood, she will help remove odious distinctions on account of sex, and make one code of morals do for both men and women. (Hultin, “The Essential”)

Hultin’s entire Parliament address seems worthy of emphatic quotation. She further criticizes the role of churches in attending to the world’s hungry, sick, and destitute, claiming these churches instead “unite to stay the atrocities of legalized cruelty” (Hultin, “The Essential”). Hultin focuses her panegyric instead on those “men and women belonging to all countries and all races who perhaps have not had time to formulate their beliefs about humanity, [but] are busy working for it; who have never known how to define God, [and yet] are finding him in their daily lives” (Hultin, “The Essential”). Hultin beseeches churches “to learn humility… we are only beginners after all, all of us” (Hultin, “The Essential”).

In another address given while she was reverend of the Moline Unitarian Church, Hultin focuses more closely on the issue of women’s equality and its particularities in regard to religion. This address, entitled “Woman and Religion,” was given at the Congress of Women in Chicago in 1893. She illustrates her belief in unity and equality when she opens the address with: “Let me say first that I deplore, as much as anyone can, the necessity for dividing humanity” (Hultin, “Woman” 788). In regard to women’s place in religion, Hultin states that “religion shall not mean to her the imposed or borrowed theories of masculine authority, but the progressive enunciations of her own personality; her own thinking, loving, living self; a manifestation of her own spiritual life in vital relationship with the Infinite life” (Hultin, “Woman” 789). If the “religious life of the world” (Hultin, “Woman” 789) can rise to this standard of “sainthood, which recognizes no sex in the realm of religious experience, [it] will come the divine brotherhood of the human race” (Hultin, “Woman” 789) . Hultin’s inspiring words caught the notice of a well-known figure for women’s suffrage: Susan B. Anthony. An address of Hultin’s, this one entitled “The Point of View” and given at the twenty-ninth annual convention for the national Woman Suffrage Association in Des Moines, inspired a lengthy description in a book on women’s suffrage edited by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Harper. Anthony and Harper called this address a “masterly effort” (284). Part of the quoted address in the anthology is as follows:

Before any woman is a wife, a sister or a mother she is a human being. We ask nothing as women but everything as human beings. The sphere of woman is any path that she can tread, any work that she can do. […] The principle of coequality is recognized in all of God’s kingdom. We are beginning to find in the human race, as in the vegetable and the animal, that the male and the female are designed to be the equals of each other. […] We want to be women, womanly women, stamping the womanliness of our nature upon the country, even as the men have stamped the manliness of their nature upon it. […] Give woman a chance to do her whole duty. What is education for, what is religion for, but as a means to the end of the development of humanity? If national life is what it ought to be also, a means to the same end, it needs then everything that humanity has to make it sweet and hopeful. Women have moral sentiments and want to record them. That is the only difference between voting and not voting. The national life is the reflected life of the people. It is strong with their strength and weak with their weaknesses. (qtd. in Anthony and Harper 284-285)

Hultin’s public addresses that focused on the inequality between men and women seemed to gain the most national attention, as nearly all her published addresses were of this nature. It is clear why Hultin was often invited to be a visiting guest speaker for other congregations as well as for conference sermons, as her addresses broached these important and controversial topics and were presented with a “rare and prophetic” (Sillari) talent.

Following a request for her to speak before the Women’s Suffrage Convention at All Souls Church in Washington D.C., many individuals of the congregation attempted to bring Hultin to All Souls Church as its reverend. This was incredibly significant; though women ministers were accepted in Unitarian and Universalist churches, they were not typically found in the East (Tucker 4). In fact, “the Unitarian’s East Coast bureaucracy, while forced to admit that the women had built an impressive record in church expansion, was nonetheless adamant that their presence was doing the cause more harm than good” (Tucker 5). This fact paired with the prestige of All Souls Church made Hultin’s nomination a significant event for women in the nineteenth century. Though the subsequent vote for Hultin did not end in her favor, the fact that she was considered “created a sensation in Washington and in the Unitarian denomination as a whole” (Sillari).

Another address of Hultin’s, published in a collection of women’s addresses given in the late nineteenth century, was given she was living in Moline. This address focuses on the subject of women as an instrument in promoting religion, but it makes a subtle transition into the definition of religion itself:

What is religion? It is not a theory; it is not a creed; it is not a gathering of certain formulas. Religion is the underlying current of human life which carries it upward. It is the science of the highest development of humanity. It is that something which makes life worth living. It is that something which puts the key in the gate and lets us into the so-called heaven. It is that which saves you and me, and forgives the universe. It has to do with the morning, noon, and night of life. […] It sees God in the clouds as well as in the stars, and makes us know that in every atom we shall find a divine purpose and a divine inspiration. There is no place where God is not. (qtd. in Sewall)

Indeed, this idea of religion informed her beliefs in every pertinent area on which she spoke. Ministers like Ida Hultin attempted to take religion out of the church and place it in everyday experiences. This is how the traditional dogmas inhibiting women’s equality became questioned and how the revolutionary change in favor of women’s suffrage occurred (Tucker).

Hultin made a career with her inspiring words and revolutionary role as a woman in ministry. Following the seven years she served as a minister in Moline, Hultin went on to minister in two parishes in Massachusetts. While in Massachusetts, Hultin continued to give addresses to national organizations that called for a new, liberal way of thinking in terms of women, religion, patriotism, and ethics (Sillari). It was in Massachusetts she eventually retired from the ministry in 1916 (Tucker 237). Hultin spent her remaining years on a Massachusetts farm before passing away from a “prolonged illness” (Sillari) in 1938 (Tucker 237).

Anthony, Susan B., ed., and Ida Husted Harper, ed. //History of Woman Suffrage: 1883-1900//. Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902. Print. Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians, Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants’ Association, and Canadian Union of Public Employees. //Unity, Volumes 7-8//. 1881. //Google Book Search//. Web. 07 Dec. 2010. Collins, David R., Johnson, Rich J., and Bessie J. Pierce. //Moline: City of Mills//. Charleston: Arcadia, 1998: 34. Print. Hultin, Ida. “The Essential Oneness of Ethical Ideas Among All Men”. //The World’s Parliament of Religions//. Ed. Rev. John Henry Barrows. Chicago, 1893. //Google Book Search//. Web. 26 Oct. 2010. Hultin, Ida. “Treatment of the Destitute Classes in the United States”. //The International Congress of Women of 1899//. Ed. International Council of Women. Hultin, Ida. “Woman and Religion”.//The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893//. Ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle. Chicago: Monarch Book Company, 1894: 788-789. Print. Richey, Darrel. //Universalism History Timeline//. //Pacific Unitarian Universalist//. Rev. Alicia McNary Forsey, 2006. Web. 30 Nov. 2010. Sillari, Christina. “UU Women of Note: Ida C. Hultin”. //The Steeple Biweekly// 26 Feb. 2008. Web. 01 Dec. 2010. Sewall, Mary Wright, ed. //World’s Congress of Representative Women, Volumes 1-2//. 1894. //Google Book Search//. Web. 07 Dec. 2010. Tucker, Cynthia Grant. //Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880 – 1930//. Bloomington: Indiania University Press, 1994. Print.
 * Works Cited **

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