The Philadelphia Eleven (Time Travel Productions, Good Docs, WHYY, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, March 11) I looked up the KPBS schedule and found a fascinating program which I wanted to watch – and which, because my husband Charles was getting off work early, he could watch it with me. The film was called The Philadelphia Eleven and told the story of 11 women who challenged the Episcopal Church in 1974 over its refusal to admit women as priests. It was produced and directed by Margo Guernsey and began the story in 1970, when the U.S. Episcopal Church debated at their triennial convention whether to ordain women priests. The church’s organizational structure required that the proposal win approval from both the lay people at the convention and the church’s existing bishops, all of whom were men. The proposal to ordain women was narrowly defeated at the 1970 convention and advocates for women’s ordination made plans for the next church convention in 1973 in Louisville, Kentucky – where the proposal was defeated by a wider margin than it had lost by in 1970. By that time, women were already serving in the church as deacons, the next step before an actual ministry, and though the documentary doesn’t mention it, the late Bishop James Pike of San Francisco (one of the most amazingly progressive officials in the church’s history; it was he who in the early 1960’s started the “Council on Religion and the Homosexual” to debate whether the church should support Queer rights and admit Queer people to worship on an equal basis with everyone else) had insisted on ordaining the first woman deacon. Before 1965, women had been admitted to the title of “deaconess,” under which they had to wear blue habits that made people think they were the Episcopal version of nuns. They were also expected to remain sexually celibate.

In 1965, Pike ordained Phyllis Edwards as the first Episcopal woman deacon and insisted on giving her the full title instead of the inferior and insulting “deaconess” name and the restrictions that went along with it. This opened the door to other women who wanted to be Episcopal deacons, including the members of the Philadelphia Eleven themselves. After the major setback at the 1973 convention, they pulled together under the leadership of Suzanne “Sue” Hiatt and sought out retired bishops who would be willing to ordain them whether the church sanctioned it or not. According to the Wikipedia page on the Philadelphia Eleven, “By July 1974, as supporters of women’s ordination to the priesthood grew restless, three retired bishops stepped forward and agreed to ordain a group of qualified women deacons. The bishops were: Daniel Corrigan, retired bishop suffragan of Colorado; Robert L. DeWitt, recently resigned Bishop of Pennsylvania; and Edward R. Welles II, retired Bishop of West Missouri. Eleven women who were deacons presented themselves as ready for ordination to the priesthood, and plans for the service proceeded. The women who became known as the ‘Philadelphia Eleven’ were Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig.” The actual ordination of the Eleven took place at the predominantly African-American Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia on July 29, 1974, and was followed by a similar action involving four women deacons in Washington, D.C. who were ordained as priests a year later.

Speakers at the Philadelphia event specifically made the connection between the African-American civil rights movement and the struggle of women within the Episcopal Church for full equality, including access to the priesthood. Though the original plan had been to keep the event secret, someone leaked the news to the local media, and by the time the ordination rolled around TV crews from the three major networks of the time as well as plenty of print journalists were there to cover it. The documentary includes a fascinating shot of a local Philadelphia newspaper the next day that had three big headlines: the House Judiciary Committee’s passage of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon for “abuse of power,” the ordinations of the “Philadelphia Eleven,” and the death of singer “Mama” Cass Elliott at age 31. The film also includes actual recordings of the debates over women’s ordination at the time – and, all too predictably, they sound like particularly incendiary fiction writers coming up with insane caricatures of sexism. One especially nasty bishop said he was going to respond by ordaining the horse Secretariat, who, he said, at least had the right equipment, and he compared the women who’d been ordained at the Church of the Advocate to the horse’s posterior.

The big bozo-no-no came over whether the women priests had the right to lead the service of the Eucharist, which they were finally allowed to do at the Riverside Church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City. The Riverside Church already had a reputation as a politically and socially liberal one where Martin Luther King, Jr. had given his famous speech in which he said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” They still have that reputation today: their Web site (https://www.trcnyc.org) proclaims, “We are an interdenominational, interracial, international, open, welcoming, and affirming church and congregation. Whoever you are: You are safe here. You are loved here. You are invited into full participation in our life together. We welcome, affirm, and celebrate all God’s children, LGBTQIA+. We actively work to become an anti-racist congregation.” Among the most moving parts of this film were the sequences of women actually leading the Eucharist as part of various church services and it not being a big deal, despite the insistence of more socially retrograde members of the church that because Jesus Christ was male, and the standard depictions of God also show a male, therefore all priests must be male. The usual comeback from the supporters of women’s ordination was the quote from St. Paul that in the Christian church there was no longer a difference between Jew and non-Jew, between free and enslaved people, and between women and men. In 1975 the two male bishops who had allowed members of the Philadelphia Eleven to lead Eucharist ceremonies at their churches, William Wendt of the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. and Peter Beebe of the Christ Episcopal Church in Oberlin, Ohio, were prosecuted by the male Episcopal establishment in what amounted to a heresy trial, though the official charge against them was violating church policy. Finally, at the next Episcopal Convention in 1976, held in the friendlier environment of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the church voted specifically to allow the ordination of women as priests.

While my husband Charles and I attend services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the Banker’s Hill section of San Diego, where the head of the church is a woman and nobody makes a great deal about it, it’s also clear this story “plays” a lot differently in the current Right-wing political climate in the U.S. Many Fundamentalist Christian churches claim that their ranks are growing, while the ranks of mainstream Protestant denominations are shrinking, precisely because they still cling to old-line interpretations of the Bible that forbid women from serving as priests and also oppose any outreach to Queer people except on the basis of so-called “reparative therapy.” Though a number of the Philadelphia Eleven were, or had been, married to men and some of them had had children, one of the accusations against them is they were all Lesbians. One of the Eleven, asked point-blank if she were Lesbian, said, “Thank you!,” mystifying the person asking the question who’d obviously expected a yes-or-no answer. Merrill Bittner, one of the Eleven, later quit the priesthood and lived out the rest of her life in an off-the-grid cabin with a female partner. With all the political, economic and social gains from the 1930’s on under mortal threat right now from the second Donald Trump administration and the Right-wing fanatics with which he’s staffed his government, The Philadelphia Eleven is a story that “plays” quite differently than it would have if the nominal – and, in some cases, real – gains in social recognition of “diversity, equity and inclusion” were continuing instead of being actively and aggressively rolling back not only in government but in private companies and in the religious community. Still, The Philadelphia Eleven is a moving story of social change and how it can sometimes happen even in the seemingly most retrograde areas of society.