BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

DURHAM — Today Duke Divinity School has 12 female faculty members and three assistant adjunct professors. Of the 559 current students, 221 are women. But it was a much different situation in the 1970s, when faculty women totaled one, and female student enrollment grew from a handful to dozens as the decade progressed.

Jeanette Stokes was there, part of the women’s movement wave of female students going to graduate school. There were about three dozen women in her class of 1977, in a three-year program to earn a master of divinity degree. Stokes, who received her bachelor’s degree from Smith, applied to Duke Divinity School even though she was Presbyterian and “even though I knew the Divinity School at Duke was primarily white married Methodist men,” she said.

In classes, Stokes repeatedly raised the same question: “What about women?” The answers, she said, were usually a blank stare or suggestion to do research and a write a paper, which she did.

Stokes said men at Duke were open to the analysis of women and theology, but women Divinity students were still oddities. She recalls rousing arguments about women as preachers. She was the second director of the school’s Women’s Center, founded in 1976 and celebrating its 35th anniversary today and Friday. When she led the center, it hosted events for faculty about using inclusive language and assigned center students to meet individually with faculty. When she visited female students at their summer placements, they told her they were dismissed because of their gender or sexually harassed in church settings. Stokes was surprised, and realized it was important to pay attention to safety as well as the women’s professional needs. The center also hosted services, support groups, potlucks and events that included men as well.

Wesley Brown received his master of divinity from Duke in 1976 and is now the associate dean for external relations. Women have always been a part of the Divinity School, he said, including his own mother, Charlotte Churchill Brown, who graduated with a master’s degree in religious education in 1949. But offering the master of divinity to women saw a real jump in enrollment, he said. Brown said he and other male students had women in their classes in undergraduate school, so it wasn’t unusual to have women classmates in graduate school.

Brown doesn’t recall seeing any mistreatment or sexism, but acknowledged that older male faculty may have been resistant to change.

“It was a time when women were preparing for ordained ministry and struggled with Divinity School professors not accustomed to women in Divinity School,” he said. He remembers students learning to be sensitive to sexist language, particularly in worship, and using inclusive terminology.

“At the time there was a real energy in the Divinity School, a time of becoming a much more inclusive community,” Brown said. Women were still a minority, so that generation were really the pioneers, he said, so they lacked many older role models.

Stokes said the Duke Divinity Women’s Center began addressing the personal needs of women and went on to education of faculty and on to curriculum needs, starting classes about women in pastoral care and women in ministry.

Those needs she learned about at the Women’s Center led Stokes to found the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, located in Durham.

“I made it my life,” she said.

Stokes sees the Divinity School today as friendly and neo-conservative. Conservative meaning to the right of center of mainline Protestantism, she said, not fundamental evangelical conservatism.

Diane Weddington graduated from Duke Divinity in 1976, though she now says she never should have gone to seminary for several reasons. A devout Episcopalian, Duke was oriented to preparing Methodist men for ministry in small North Carolina parishes, she said. She wasn’t there to find a husband, either, and the courses didn’t compare to those she took as a Duke undergraduate studying religion, she said.

As a female student at Duke Divinity, she and others took on “sexist language, sexist professors, bad field education placements, the stained-glass ceiling — women placed in the smallest churches and not given any high offices — male peers who thought women belonged barefoot in a kitchen, and sometimes even the right to have the education.”

Over her years at Duke, Weddington developed ties with other like-minded women as enrollment increased and their collective voice was heard, she said. It was also during her time at Duke that she saw Episcopal women gain ordination as priests. She met women at the first Women’s Interseminary Conference, held at Yale. Women who attended the conference, including Sally Campbell, organized the second interseminary conference, held at Duke in 1974. It brought a newfound sisterhood for those who sought it, Weddington said.

The school’s first female faculty member, Jill Raitt, will speak at events today. Raitt is the Missouri University Emerita Professor of Religious Studies, and now holds The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet Endowed Chair in Catholic Thought.

Weddington, who now lives in California, is originally from North Carolina and returns to Duke annually for a summer public policy professorship.

“I’ve watched the Divinity School grow physically, its student body come to include women, its women go on to hold high church offices and lead bigger parishes,” she said. “But I’ve also watched some of the same issues continue to roil — language, homophobia, ingrained resentment of women, lesser regard for female scholars, and to my personal discomfort, an increasing evangelical tone and student body makeup.”

After Duke, Weddington became a writer, professor and national parks artist, among other jobs.

“The Divinity School has inched onward, also, but I think still has a long way to go. The traces of homophobia, sexism and cultural exclusion still arise, and still cloud the vision of what could be,” she said.

Jean Rodenbough entered Duke Divinity School in 1977, after Stokes and Weddington graduated. A Presbyterian, she commuted daily from Madison. She didn’t use the Women’s Center, but remembers taking a seminar taught by Raitt, still the only female faculty member at the time.

“My efforts to find a call in a Presbyterian church after graduation from Duke were futile, because women were not being considered in my area — Rockingham County,” Rodenbough said. “My first call was to pastor a 20-member chapel affiliated with First Presbyterian in Reidsville. Eventually I spent most of my active ministry in non-parish work, which I loved.”

She directed a telephone crisis center, served with hospice in Greensboro and Eden, and taught college English when a church position wasn’t unavailable. She also served as interim pastor at several churches. Rodenbough is now president of the North Carolina Council of Churches and, volunteers as parish associate at two churches. She lives in Greensboro.

“Today I see a wonderful change in acceptance of women pastors in senior positions as head of staff. The United Methodists paved the way for many of us by sending women into churches, and other congregations would witness their good ministries and then were willing to consider calling a woman as pastor,” Rodenbough said.

While at Duke, she saw, for the most part, female students accepted without discrimination.

“I think the most pronounced hurdle in applying to the Divinity School was given me by the faculty member who interviewed me, when he said, ‘Why don’t you stay home and be a good church member?’ with the implication that as a woman I would be in my accepted role,” Rodenbough said. “Fortunately, I didn’t take him up on that.”

Of 5,797 living Divinity School graduates, 1,688 are women.