Anna Spencer

From Philosopedia.org

Spencer, Anna Carpenter Garlin (1851–1931)

A Unitarian, Spencer was the first woman ordained in Rhode Island. However, she associated with Unitarian, Universalist, and Ethical Culture congregations and, rather than considering herself a “member,” identified with the broder “free religion” of the Free Religious Association.

A social philosopher, she was a professor of sociology and ethics at Meadville Theological School. After marrying the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878 and becoming ordained in 1891, she held a pastorate in Providence, Rhode Island. Later, she was an Ethical Culture Leader from 1904 to 1913 in New York, then moved on in feminist protest to teaching.

Her Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1913) advocates not only equality for women in the masculine world but also the evolution of new ethical and social positions based on women’s perspectives and insights. She also wrote The Family and Its Members (1922).

Spencer was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One of her popularly sung hymns included

Hail the hero workers of the mighty past

They whose labor builded all the things that last. . . .

Hail ye, then, all workers, of all lands and time,

One brave band of heroes with one task sublime!

Spencer was the anthropologist who suspected an antomist - not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - was behind the 1912 hoax involving the Piltdown Man. Piltdown, a Scientific Forgery (1990), established that the scientist with the most to gain from the Piltdown discovery was Sir Arthur Keith. He allegedly provided the technical expertise and possibly the bones, which were stained to look prehistoric, and Charles Dawson then planted them in the gravel pit where he then led others, including Dr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, on fossil hunts. When the fraud was discovered in 1953, numerous explanations were given, but it was Spencer’s work and that of Dr. Ian Langham in Australia which solved the mystery.

(See entries for Ethical Culture and Piltdown Man.)

{The New York Times, 3 June 1999)}