The "Vida Dutton Scudder: Woman, Author & Saint" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading the weekly email that I get from my church, St. James Episcopal, in Lancaster, PA.   A portion of the email is to present a weekly "Saint in the Spotlight" that will be celebrated at Wednesday's Evening Prayer.  Many of the saints I have never heard of before while others bring back memories of past Bible readings or sermons given in the church.  Today's saint is a woman by the name of Vida Dutton Scudder who was born in India on December 15, 1861.  Her parents were Congregationalist missionaries David and Harriet Scudder.  A year after her birth her father accidentally drowned so she and her mother returned to Boston where her mother's home was located.  Sometime in the 1870s she and her mother were confirmed as Episcopalians.  

Photograph of Vida Dutton Scudder

Vida entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts where she studied English Literature.  She was one of the first American women admitted to the graduate program at Oxford University and she eventually taught English Literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts; becoming an associate professor in 1892 and a full professor in 1910.  She became involved in social activism and was one of the founders of the College Settlements Association and a member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross which was a group of Episcopal women dedicated to intercessory prayer and social reconciliation.  While teaching she helped establish the Church of the Carpenter in Boston.  This church sought to promote the cause of economic justice in the labor movement.  In 1911 she co-founded the Episcopal Church League and joined the Socialist Party.  The following year she supported striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  The following was part of a well-known speech she gave that year:  I would rather never again wear a thread of woolen than know my garments had been woven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and known past the shadow of a doubt to have existed in this town....If the wages are of necessity below the standard to maintain man and women in decency and in health, then the woolen industry has not a present right to exist in Massachusetts.  Vida Dutton Scudder was a supporter of World War I and eventually joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1923 and became a pacifist in the 1930s.  She was said to have been at the epicenter of advanced thought in the church and society.  Upon retirement she began authoring books and became the first woman published in the Anglican Theological Review.  A few of her most famous quotes are: 

• It is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.
• Luxury, like a minimum wage, is a relationship; it changes as we change.
• The worst danger of the mystic is as always a quest of spiritual privilege leading to aloofness from the common lot.
• The suppression of war is not the equivalent of peace.
• War to win peace is at best a dangerous illogical method.
• Reality, like beauty, is in relationship and there only.
• An element of abstention, of restraint, must enter into all finer joys.

Vida Dutton Scudder died October 9, 1954.  She was thought of enough that she made the list of "Saint in the Spotlight" at St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  She is one amongst many great people who have gone down in history as gaining enough passion and sisterhood to be called a saint!  I would have loved to have met her and heard her speak about her passions and feelings.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.