Dorothy Grant
From Philosopedia.org
Grant, Dorothy Sweet (1905 - 2006)
For half her lifetime, Grant, a centenarian in 2006, has been active in Unitarian Universalist activities.
She was one of four who organized the Cedar Falls, Iowa, Unitarian Fellowship in 1950, serving in several offices of that Black Hawk County organization and being its Director of Religious Education for nine years. During the 1950s, she organized seventeen new Fellowships and became the chairperson for the ninety-seven other Fellowships in the Midwest district.
In 1985 and in 1986, she was named the Prairie Star District’s “Unsung Unitarian Universalist.” Grant has written a number of works: Symbols and Golden Rules (1960); Universalism in Iowa: 1830—1963, Symbols and Golden Rules of World Religions, a manual for religious education directors (1960); Record of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Black Hawk County 1962—1980; Excerpts from the Histories of Churches, Fellowships, Societies in the Prairie Star Unitarian Universalist District (1987); Thumb Nail Histories of Churches, Fellowships, Societies in the Prairie Star Unitarian Universalist District (1987); A Religious Journey (1992); A Lay-Woman’s Unitarian World (1992); and The Supper Club (1993).
In 1994 when she was eighty-nine, she wrote The Unitarian Universalist Society of Black Hawk County, a 131-year history (1863—1994) of the group and which includes a descriptive inventory of its acquisitions. A Lay-Woman’s Unitarian World (1992) is autobiographical, telling of her father—a streetcar conductor in Minneapolis who was half-Swedish and half-Yankee and not into churchgoing—and her mother, a Norwegian immigrant.
Although as a youth she had been a Presbyterian, Grant and her mother became interested in the views of Dr. John Dietrich, who spoke at the Shubert Theater in Minneapolis, and she enjoyed the lectures in such “sacrilegious” surroundings, the silent meditation rather than a vocal prayer, the absence of collecting money during the service, and the fact that printed leaflets of previous sermons were sold in the lobby, all characteristics of a different kind of religion and one which she joined and never left.
At a Halloween dance in a young adult meeting of the Plymouth Congregational Church, she met Martin Grant, a botany grad student at the University of Minnesota. His father was a Congregational minister in Indiana. By Valentine’s day the two were engaged, attended Unitarian services, and on one occasion listened to a Unitarian-sponsored lecture by Margaret Sanger “on the taboo subject of birth control.” The work tells how with John Cowley, another professor at the University of Northern Iowa where both taught, a Humanist Club was formed at which the most active student was Warren Allen Smith and at which spoke the Rev. Kenneth Patton from Boston, the Rev. Edwin Wilson from Antioch, Ohio, and the Rev. Grant Butler from Des Moines. That club was to become the Cedar Falls Unitarian Fellowship.
For thirty-seven years of their marriage, she was secretary and assistant for Martin L. Grant. The first year of their marriage was spent in Tahiti, where she was initiated into doing botanical work for Martin. When they were in Hawaii (1934), she continued working for him, in the Bishop Museum. Later, when he worked for the government in Colombia during the war, she continued doing secretarial and botanical work. When they lived in Iran for two years while Martin taught at Pahlavi University, she went on all the field trips as log-keeper and assistant in the drying process of the ten thousand plants they collected. In Shiraz, she mounted one complete set of two thousand plants to give to Pahlavi, then made a similar set for the University of Northern Iowa.
After thirty-seven years of marriage, she divorced Martin, charging cruelty. At the age of sixty-two, needing to earn her own living, she became a classroom teacher at Head Start and, after a semester at the University of Nebraska, was made the Supervisor of Education for the Head Start program in Black Hawk and Buchanan counties, in charge of fifty adults and three hundred children. After four years, she did Early Childhood Education research for the next four years. Part-time for fifteen years, she worked for the Museum of the University of Northern Iowa.
At the age of seventy, she resigned from Home Start and, at 80, retired from the Museum. Grant in 1996 finished My Norwegian Heritage, a story principally about her mother who was born in Norway. Martin and Dorothy had three children - Gordon, Barbara Jean, and Lois - all of whom earned doctorates in astronomy, nursing, and anthropology, respectively. Although the Grants were both humanists, once playing host when Edwin H. Wilson visited the University of Northern Iowa campus, friends have suggested that Martin was the theoretical, Dorothy the applied humanist.
