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Mary, thank you so much
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for being interviewed.
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If you could just say your name.
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Sure, Mary,
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my middle name is Elizabeth,
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and Hunt, H-U-N-T.
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Thank you.
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And are you lay or clergy?
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Well since I'm a Catholic woman,
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I am like all Catholic women, lay.
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Yes, yes.
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Even those who are nuns are lay.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Where did you go to school?
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Graduate or Divinity School?
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Initially I went to Marquette University
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undergraduate,
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and then I went to Harvard Divinity School
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for a Masters in Theological Studies.
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I went to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley
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for a doctorate,
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and I went to the Jesuit School of Theology
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at Berkeley for an MDiv.
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Wonderful. Very good.
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What work or ministry were you doing at the time of
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Reimagining?
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The same I'm doing now.
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I am the co-director of WATER,
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the Woman's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual,
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which is a small non-profit inside the beltway
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in Washington D.C. area.
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We're actually in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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And we work on feminist issues in religion.
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And I started WATER along with Diann Neu
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in the early 80's,
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so by that time, perhaps the mid 80's.
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But we were at WATER at the time of
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the Reimagining Conference.
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Yes, and still are.
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That's great.
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When and where were you born, Mary?
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I was born in June 1951 in Syracuse, New York.
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Okay, great.
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How and when did you first become aware
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of Feminist Theology?
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Well I was a student in a Catholic school
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in high school in Syracuse,
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and I became aware not of Feminist Theology,
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but of feminist issues in religion then.
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I remember distinctly a priest telling me
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with great conviction
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that women couldn't be priests.
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And I think that sparked my interest in how wrong he was
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and so that was in the mid 60's.
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When I went to college at Marquette,
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there were,
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as far as I recall,
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no women faculty,
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maybe a couple of, there were women graduate students,
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maybe one of whom became a faculty member eventually,
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but, there were no women faculty in the Theology Department.
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And there was no talk of Feminist Theology,
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but I finished Marquette in 1972 and then went to
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Harvard Divinity School,
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and it was there in 1972
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that I met Rosemary Radford Ruether,
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who was the still then professor for a year at
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Harvard Divinity School
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and she was working on feminist issues in religion
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and so that was my entry.
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Mm hmm.
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And from what you said it sounded like you resonated with it
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immediately?
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How did you react?
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No, I didn't actually.
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I was, there were a number,
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my cohort at Harvard Divinity School in the early 70's
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was the first cohort of appreciable numbers of women
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and there had been women students of the Divinity School
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before that,
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but in terms of appreciable numbers together,
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kind of a critical mass,
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my group, my incoming class,
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maybe the following class,
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maybe the class behind us,
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that cohort formed the first critical mass of women
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at Harvard Divinity School.
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And so, I was initially skeptical.
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First of all, I was Catholic,
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so I hadn't really thought about ministry,
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as an option.
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I had always thought about the study of Theology as a
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kind of academic project that one did
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because it was interesting,
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not because it had any practical value,
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although I was very interested in social justice issues.
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But I just hadn't made the connection.
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And then, then at Harvard Divinity School,
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the women, including people like Emily Culpepper
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and Linda Barrett Fall,
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and some of the really wonderful pioneer women,
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and of course we had Mary Daly over at Boston College
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at that time,
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began to try to school the professors in how to
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use inclusive language.
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It was a famous,
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I think it was written up in Time Magazine,
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it was before my time,
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but, the year before,
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but I think there was a famous incident when they
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threw M&M's at Harvey Cox to get him to use
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inclusive language.
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If he got it right,
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he got an M&M,
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and if he didn't, he didn't get an M&M.
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So, there were these tactics, these guerrilla tactics,
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and I was rather put off by it initially.
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I thought it was all nonsense
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and went back to the dorm and put a dress on
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and went back to class.
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That lasted about a day
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and then I began to see how wrong I was
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and how right they were.
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And from then on,
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of course, I was quite a committed feminist.
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And that would've been 72, 73.
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Yeah.
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Oh that's a great story.
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Well before-
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I missed the end of it,
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well before?
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Well before Reimagining.
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Well before Reimagining, yes.
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The internet connection seems to be a little bit iffy.
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Are you having any problems at your end?
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I'm not, but I can imagine we are.
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If it turns out to be iffy, we can just go the phone.
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Good. Good.
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I'll keep monitoring it.
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Thank you, Mary.
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If it's not working, let's just go to the phone.
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It's not worth, you know,
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it's not worth,
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if you don't get what you need it's not worth it.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well you know, just to be safe,
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maybe we should do that.
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Do you mind if I,
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do I call you at your WATER number?
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Is that correct?
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Sure.
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Okay, good.
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Then I'll call you right back.
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Because I don't want to miss any of this.
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Thank you.
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Alright, bye-bye.
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Bye.