The Woman's Hour Has Struck (John 4:5-30)

March is Women’s History Month and in just a few weeks we’ll hold a concert here called “Satin Dolls: Unsung Women of Jazz” celebrating the voices of female jazz singers who, although well-known in their day, have faded somewhat from the popular consciousness.

In that same spirit, I want to begin this morning by highlighting the cultural contributions of a woman who played a pivotal role in the movement for women’s voting rights, but about whose legacy I, admittedly, know next to nothing.

I’m talking about Carrie Chapman Catt who lived here in Westchester County and who toiled alongside fellow suffragettes like Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Together, the risks they took, the case they made, and the small steps and victories they won along the way, led a movement from Seneca Falls, NY to Capitol Hill and state houses across the country.

Catt was a passionate and effective leader of the suffragette movement. She was even serving as president of their national organization in 1920 when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “the right…to vote shall not be denied or abridged…on account of sex,” became law.

In the final push for ratification, Catt wrote an open letter to Congress that she copied and shared with politicians all across the country. That’s the part of her legacy I want to focus on for a moment. [Read the full text of Catt's address here.]

Catt wrote her open letter shortly after New York State granted women the right to vote, an accomplishment that really put the wind in the movement’s sail. She wrote with confidence and a sense of how far they had come and how close they were to victory.

The opening line pulls no punches.

“Woman suffrage is inevitable. Suffragists knew it before [New York granted us the right to vote]; opponents afterward.”

This confidence guided Catt throughout her message, as she expounded upon a basic point–we’re going to win, here’s why we’re going to win, and you should give us our win right now.

But near the end of the letter there’s a tone change. It’s not that she was wavering, she just remembered. She remembered the barriers the movement faced and the indignities of disenfranchisement, and she was a bit weary.

Catt writes,

In conclusion, we know, and you know that we know, that it has been the aim of both dominate parties to postpone woman suffrage as long as possible. A few men in each party have always fought with us fearlessly, but the party machines have evaded, avoided, tricked and buffeted this question from Congress to Legislatures, from Legislatures, to political conventions. I confess to you that many of us have a deep and abiding distrust of all existing political parties - they have tricked us so often and in such unscrupulous fashion that our doubts are natural.

These are the words of someone who has been lied to and dismissed one too many times to put on rose colored glasses.

Catt had seen some things and learned some hard truths about the world and its ways.

So she continued,

Do you realize that in no other country in the world with democratic tendencies is suffrage so completely denied as in a considerable number of our own States?...

Do you realize that when you ask women to take their cause to State referendum you compel them to do this; that you drive women of education, refinement, achievement, to beg men who cannot read for their political freedom?

Do you realize that such anomalies as a College President asking her janitor to give her a vote are overstraining the patience and driving women to desperation?

Do you realize that women in increasing numbers indignantly resent the long delay in their enfranchisement?

Of course, they all realized that what she was saying was true.

They knew it, she knew it, and she knew that they knew it, but she also knew that just knowing the right thing to do was no guarantee that politicians would do the right thing, so she ended her letter with a wise flourish.

Getting them to do the right thing because it was the right thing was probably a bridge too far, so Catt urged Congress to do the right thing because failure to do so might cost the members to lose their power.

"There is one thing mightier than kings and armies"--aye, than Congresses and political parties-- "the power of an idea when its time has come to move." The time for woman suffrage has come. The woman's hour has struck. If parties prefer to postpone action longer and thus do battle with this idea, they challenge the inevitable. The idea will not perish; the party which opposes it may. Every delay, every trick, every political dishonesty from now on will antagonize the women of the land more and more, and when the party or parties which have so delayed woman suffrage finally let it come, their sincerity will be doubted and their appeal to the new voters will be met with suspicion. This is the psychology of the situation. Can you afford the risk? Think it over….Woman suffrage is coming--you know it. Will you, Honorable Senators and Members of the House of Representatives, help or hinder it?

In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul wrote, “So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9)

Of course, the fact that Paul had to offer the people this bit of encouragement shows that even those who are most ardently committed to doing good and doing what is right can grow weary.

I think Carrie Chapman Catt proves Paul’s point.

Weary and tired, she did not give up and her movement did not stop, until women were seen and heard in ballot boxes all across this country.

We’ve read this morning Saint John’s account of Jesus’ encounter with “the Woman at the Well” and it makes me wonder.

Would Carrie Chapman Catt have clicked with her?

I think she would have and that they would’ve had a lot to talk about.

John tells us that on one occasion when Jesus and the disciples were travelling through Samaria, while the group went to town to buy food, Jesus sat down beside a water well to rest.

That’s where he met a woman who had come to draw water from the well.

Their conversation, which broke all sorts of customs and taboos, revealed the women to be sharp witted and a deep thinker. It also revealed that she had been married five times and was currently with a man who wasn’t her husband.

Men have pounced on this detail of the conversation for centuries to make all sorts of wild and harsh judgements about the woman’s character, but I think Rev. Nadia Bolz Weber’s insights are closer to the truth.

She writes,

We don’t know why she’d been married so often – maybe she was a teen bride widowed and passed along through a line of her elderly husband’s elderly brothers or maybe she was divorced for being infertile. The least likely thing is if she lured men into her trap, killed them after a year of marriage and just kept getting away with it. But who knows? All I know is that no matter if the wound was self-inflicted or inflicted by others or some combination of the two, she had a wound. Like we all do. (“Wounds and Wells; A Sermon on The Samaritan Woman”)

And that’s the point.

Our point of connection to the woman isn’t that she was some sort of super sinner, some sort of extreme moral failure.

She was wounded.

She was weary. This much treasured promise centers our worship today upon Jesus and the gracious way in which he seeks and receives all who would come into his presence. It’s an invitation at the heart of the Gospel, the idea that God loves and accepts us just as we are, that a person’s worth and dignity is never conditional upon the way in which they carry or present themselves, or how well they “keep it all together,” or what they’ve been through or lived through. And that’s good news because it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to put our best foot forward when we’re straining under the weight of life’s heavy burden.

Like the woman at the well, like the Church to whom Saint Paul wrote, like workers for justice in every age, we grow weary and long to know that we are seen and heard for who we really are.

Set against the backdrop of a rigidly patriarchal society, Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well brings to mind a variety of issues including the way in which shame, shunning, and silence were then and are now used as weapons of oppression, especially of women.

But in seeing and hearing her, Jesus smashes these weapons with compassion, connection, and conversation, meeting the apparent inflexibility of every moment with transforming grace and demonstrating how God’s love can make a new way forward where such progress was once thought to be impossible.

And he promises to do the same for you and me.

Weary and tired, we are seen and we are heard.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Image: Malczewski, Jacek, 1854-1929. Christ and the Samaritan Woman, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59732