Peacemaking Women: May Sewal, a Mentor
© 13 April
2005
This is one of the readings given at The Fifth Annual Tea
Celebrating Margaret Fuller hosted by Georgia Mountains Unitarian
Universalist Church of Dahlonega Georgia
 Researching
May Wright Sewall and the times and people that fueled her
passions I newly recognize that whatever is unique that I
have brought to my life I was not fully equipped at birth
the quantum of pride in my womanhood I hold today. Confidence
in my rights and capacities to fulfillment has in large measure
been endowed through many passages of the baton by my foremothers.
No better example than Indianan May Wright Sewall Academic,
Feminist, Suffragist, Pacifist and Internationalist -- She
was yeast in the ferment of two great causes evolving amidst
the Industrial Revolution. A ferment that inspired and impelled
my grandmother and her sisters to pursue higher education,
"career," and lifelong social awareness. In the case of my
grandmother it led her to the career of educator and the cause
of suffrage in the freshly opened Oklahoma Territory. For
her younger sister, my Aunt Harriet mentor and emotional companion
for 25 years it was to the bloody battlefields of France in
1918, and later the miners' hospitals in Lynch and Harlan
Counties of Kentucky.
May Sewall's close Colleagues and friends
comprise the Whose Who of female activists and include S B
Anthony, Jane Addams, Lucia Mead, Frances Willard -- Such
UU women as E C Stanton, Antoinette Blackwell, Ada Bowles,
Julia Ward Howe, and on. Her Leadership affiliations extend
from her succeeding Eliz. Cady Stanton as President of the
Executive council of The National Women's Suffrage Assoc.(1898)
to being most prominent among the small group of women who
founded the International Council of Women in the following
year.
Early on, the Council adopted a resolution
committing its members to non-violence and arbitration as
the means for resolving disputes. UU Biographer Dorothy May
Emerson comments "They took this commitment (to non-violence)
seriously" At the beginning of armed conflicts leading to
of WW 1 The Council gathered over 1500 women at The Hague.
Some represented nations at war with each other. Nevertheless
In an attempt to prevent the slaughter and ruin of a generation
they adopted a plan calling for continuous mediation.
Through and after the ending of armed hostilities
this pacifist and internationalist legacy was matured and
carried over Europe by the rising generation, which you shall
soon know more.
Born in1844 in Greenfield near Milwaukee
Wisconsin, May Sewall lived most of her adult life in Indianapolis
working at her day job at the Girls Classical School, founded
by her husband Theodore in 1882.
She died in 1920 a few weeks short of receiving
the dignity of the vote. The International Council of Women
endures today in consulatative status to every organism of
the UN and its Permanent representatives to WHO, UNDP,UNEP,
UNESCO, UNICEF, etc. . oath -- may the reverse be my lot.
Home page of The International Council
of Women http://www.icw-cif.org/
History of The Intenational Council of Women http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss96_bioghist.html
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