Densho Digital Archive - Mary Blocher Smeltzer Interview (denshovh-smary-01-0015)

<Begin Segment 15>

RP: You mentioned earlier that you helped set up, in the Church of the Brethren, this Womaen's Caucus?

MS: Yes.

RP: What motivated you to do that?

MS: Well, that was in the '70s, and we were still... we stayed in Elgin. Ralph finally got the job to be the Washington representative, and he moved, we moved to Washington, D.C. in '71, and we lived there from '71 to '76. Well, I guess it was after we lived in Washington, D.C., that we started working on the caucus. There was a woman called Mary Kline Detrick, and she and her husband were pastors of a church up by Baltimore, and we were living in Washington, D.C. And Mary Kline Detrick and I got together, and we decided that we ought to work with the church and try to have 'em get women hired more. And I don't know if we had any women pastors yet much or not, but I know we had an annual conference at Fresno, and we had a, what we call an insight session every night for the women. And we had a lot of people coming, and we started the Womaen's Caucus about '71 or '72, I don't know just exactly which year. I've got a thing in the bedroom, I think it says '72. But we just started to help the women get represented on the board, or to get hired in executive positions. And Mary Kline Detrick and I started it, and it's still going. They still have what they call the Womaen's Caucus. And we spell it "womaen," we don't spell it just like "women," we have A-E, (...) A for one woman, and E for more than one woman. We call it Womaen's Caucus and we spell it that way. And we hire a caucus worker, we still do. And the woman that's now working for the caucus lives in Portland, Oregon, and I was just reading some of the stuff last night. We get out a paper called "Femailings," and we send it to certain (people) that want it.

[Interruption]

RP: So was your Womaen's Caucus successful in getting women into higher-ranking positions in the church?

MS: Oh, yeah, we've had a moderator. I mean, last year, we had a black woman who was the... well, I think they call it the moderator. I think she's the head of the church as far as the laypeople go. But she was a minister, too, but she hadn't been trained, really. But I was reading something she wrote just last night, too. And just, I think, yesterday was the last, we have a shorter annual conference now, we used to have longer. And our church (staff) kind of split up, they had caring ministries and then they had others that ran the annual conference and then they had others that had the general offices in Elgin. We built new ones, they had a new big office in Elgin. But it changed; it doesn't stay the same. Now they're gonna put 'em back in together again. Of course, I thought they were cuckoo to divide 'em all up like that.