Women Chapel Speakers for 1996-2006

One of the important ways that women have been given minority status has been in their representation in arenas of power and authority. One such arena is chapel. Those who speak in chapel are implicitly individuals viewed as spiritual guides, spiritual leaders. To have no women in this group undermines the very goals we are trying to help our students reach.
During the 2001-2002 academic year, a group of representatives from the Women’s Studies Steering Committee met with the Provost and the Vice President for Spiritual Affairs to speak about the low representation of women in chapel. Equally important, we raised the issue that previous solutions to this problem had been solutions brokered with the particular individual responsible for chapel rather than formalized into some institutional policy. When the previous head of chapel died, quite unexpectedly, we found ourselves back to square one because nothing had become school policy.

When the Vice President pointed out how difficult it was to find competent women speakers with spiritual depth, we remarked that there were many such women on the faculty. Since most of the chapel schedule for 2002-2003 had already been established, the full change was not seen until 2003-2004. Since then there has been a noticeable effort to have a larger number of women speak in chapel and to use the women who are on the staff or the faculty. Perhaps the most significant comparison would be between the 1996-1997 academic year and 2005-2006. In the former year only 3 women spoke in chapel and none were faculty members. In the latter year, 14 women spoke and 2 were faculty and 2 others were staff.