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.Disappointed, Mary then setup household in Paris.She was shocked by the failures of the FrenchRevolution when she saw the Reign of Terror at firsthand.She be-came involved romantically with Gilbert Imlay and became pregnantby him but refused to get married.Although she loved her daughter,she became emotionally and financially dependent upon Imlay andher isolation led to two failed suicide attempts.In 1796 she started arelationship with the English novelist William Godwin.They mar-ried, but she died 10 days after childbirth.Her second child, anotherdaughter, Mary, grew up to be Mary Bysshe Shelley, the authorof Frankenstein.Wollstonecraft lived a remarkable life of indepen-dence and experimentation in an era when women were allowedlittle of either.She has been described as abrasive with no sense of 526 " WOMEN AND RELIGION RESOLUTIONself-restraint, but she had the most difficult task of creating howwomen could independently fashion who they would be in the world.Her book on women s rights is sometimes considered the foundingdocument of the feminist movementWOMEN AND RELIGION RESOLUTION.The Unitarian Univer-salist Association (UUA) officially called attention to the relation-ship between religion and sexism when the General Assembly (GA)unanimously adopted the Women and Religion Resolution in 1977.Proposed by the Joseph Priestley District and a group of women fromthe First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts, who were UnitarianUniversalist Women s Federation members, it called upon religiousleaders to put traditional assumptions and language in perspectiveand to avoid sexist assumptions and language in the future. This im-petus for change grew out of the feminist movement of the 1970s andfirst surfaced in efforts to change the language in the original UUAbylaws, where all the officers were referred to as he. The UUApublished a meditation manual in 1974 that featured the work ofwomen.One result of the resolution was a radical rethinking of theUUA Principles and Purposes.This proposal developed out of aContinental Conference on Women and Religion held in Loveland,Ohio, in 1979.Then UUA President Paul Carnes appointed a Womenand Religion Committee.By 1981 a draft set of principles was presented to the General As-sembly with inclusive and nontheistic language.While a majority ofUnitarian Universalists seemed to favor the changing of languagefrom exclusive male terms such as mankind and Lord or Father tomore inclusive words such as humankind to represent the whole hu-man race and either gender neutral terms for God or equal affirma-tion of female attributes for God, many of the Unitarian UniversalistChristians feared that the word God would be dropped from the Prin-ciples when they saw the draft.The final version proposed in 1984represented the UUA s pluralism but also included God and was fullyinclusive.Two major changes occurred as result of the Women and ReligionResolution.First, most of the barriers to women s full participation inthe power structures of the church were dismantled.Working with theUnitarian Universalist Women s Federation was an organization of WOMEN S RIGHTS " 527women ministers called the Ministerial Sisterhood (MsUU).Thenumber of women clergy increased dramatically, until by the turn ofthe century, women were the majority.All of the moderators of theUUA since 1985 have been women, and there have also been threewomen presidential candidates since 1985.Second, the UUA becamecommitted to moving beyond gender in liturgies and celebrations ofworship.The UUA established a goal of an inclusive, nonsexist lan-guage as an outgrowth of the Unitarian Universalist heritage of af-firming the worth and equality of all.The 1980 General Assembly re-solved to urge all congregations to provide opportunities tounderstand the sexist nature of our religious heritage and urged theUUA to develop materials to understand this heritage and change itto bring about full equality and participation.Religious educationmaterials were developed including the popular Cakes for the Queenof Heaven, which helped people examine biblical sexism.In 1981the UUA published Readings for Common Worship, which elimi-nated sexist references in responsive readings.A UUA Commissionon Common Worship developed changes in hymns as well and in1982 published Hymns in New Form for Common Worship.Thisbooklet was later enlarged to include 50 hymns.These languagechanges and the commitment to complete equality and the elimina-tion of sexist language were continued with the preparation and thepublication of the most recent hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.By the turn of the century feminism had affected the UUA in manyways.Ways of worship, usages of language, the ministry, and reli-gious orientations were all transformed as a result of addressing thehistoric inequalities and discriminations in religious traditions.WOMEN S RIGHTS.Unitarians and Universalists were early leadersin the women s rights movement in the United States and elsewhere.Believing that women were created men s equals, women and menfrom the 18th century onward were active in reform efforts to changesociety and as authors of many kinds of literature.Abigail Adamswas one of the first to make the connection between the freedom therevolutionaries were contending for and the freedom of women.Sheadvised her husband to be more generous to them than your ances-tors. Adams and Judith Sargent Murray both pleaded for moreeducational opportunities for women.Perhaps the most important 528 " WOMEN S RIGHTSpublication supporting the women s movement was written by Mar-garet Fuller.An article of hers was reprinted in 1845 as Woman inthe Nineteenth Century. This advocated the abolishment of the lawsthat gave men total rights over women and children and said thatevery occupation should become open to women
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