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The Program for the Study of Women and Gender is an integral part of the
academic program and the support services offered by the divinity school
to its students, faculty, administration, staff, alumni, churches, and to
the wider community. The program is multicultural and multifaceted in its
structure, staffing and activities.
The goals of the program are:
- to provide a program of rigorous
critical studies focused on issues affecting the lives
and work of women in church and society, and on analysis of gender,
race, class, age, and sexual orientation, in solidarity with communities
of women worldwide;
- to advocate and to provide methods and resources for the incorporation of these
critical studies into all areas of the divinity school curriculum and services;
- to provide personal and institutional support for women in ministry in multiple settings,
including the seminary, churches, and the community at large;
- to work in mutual cooperation with the Program of Black Church Studies at
the divinity school; and
- to participate in related studies programs and disciplinary and ecclesial
discussions nation- and world-wide.
The programmatic focus on Women and Gender Studies represents a new faithfulness to a
long-standing legacy integral to the unique character and calling of the divinity school,
and most specifically to the agreement made when the Baptist Missionary Training School,
a training school for women founded in 1881, came to Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1961.
The agreement called upon Colgate Rochester, "To provide and furnish Christian young women
opportunity for higher education...so that Christian young women may receive instruction on
a graduate level." Thirty years later, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender was
inaugurated and began to extend this legacy of training women for ministry with an
unprecedented intentionality.
The vision of the program embraces not only the inclusion of women into already extant offices and orders of ministry, but also the cultivation of women's uniquely creative gifts for ministry. Taking these gifts seriously offers the opportunity to address fundamental questions about the nature of ministry in church and society, as well as about the person of minister. The program as it is developed through curricula, colloquia, and collegial support groups attends to the implications of women's uniquely creative gifts for the practice of ministry, for pedagogy, and for understanding what it means to be church in and for the world today. The program is therefore carried out in close cooperation with laywomen leaders and clergy women in Greater Rochester. An advisory committee is composed of divinity school faculty and students and Rochester area women in ministry.
Since 1995, the program has sponsored annually the Helen Barrett Montgomery Conference on Women in Church and Society, to address contemporary issues. Topics have included violence against women; women as partners in the churches' dialogue about sexuality; women and a livable economy; women, health, and healing; Womanist-feminist conversation; and women in religious leadership. Prominent national and international keynote speakers have been Rachael Adler, Mary Daly, Toinette Eugene, Marie Fortune, Yvonne Haddad, Aruna Gnanadason, Beverly Wildung Harrison, Rosemary Haughton, Musimbi Kanyoro, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Mercy Oduyoye, Ofelia Ortega, Kwok Pui-lan, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell, Jane Smith, Renita Weems, Delores Williams, and Miriam Therese Winter.
The Program in the Study of Women and Gender is integrated into the Master of Divinity curriculum. Doctor of Ministry students may focus their studies on Women in Religious Leadership.
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