A web search for quotations on waiting, part of my topic for Sunday’s sermon, led me to a philosopher named Anna Callender Brackett who has now grabbed my interest. Brackett was a teacher, educator, traveling lecturer, and translator, and her area of philosophy was one of my passions, philosophy of education. She was also an early feminist, promoting education for girls and women, becoming the first woman appointed principal of a secondary school in the United States, and reinterpreting Hegel to value a life of the mind for women as well as for men (interesting to see that turn-of-the-century St. Louis had a Hegelian school–or am I just revealing my “everything intellectually interesting happens on the coasts” bias?). Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry on her–yet.
According to Women-Philosophers.com, Brackett had a female life partner (Ida Eliot). Not only did they run a girls’ school together, they also adopted two children, the first in 1873. Cool. I’m expecting to discover any moment now that she was a Unitarian too.
I kid, but seriously, how does one discover such a thing? The compilers of the Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary could give me some tips, no doubt. Search the archives of the churches in the places she lived, sure, but I’m looking for something I can do from my desk chair. She gave a lecture on Margaret Fuller and wrote an obituary for Maria Mitchell, but so many prominent women of the 19th century were Unitarians that that’s barely suggestive. Brackett’s own obituary doesn’t mention her religious affiliation, if any; her funeral was held in Linden Park, New Jersey, where we may have had a congregation once, but don’t today. “Was she or wasn’t she?” would be a fun detective project, and along the way I could learn more about her philosophy and see what I think of it, but I will probably just do the latter without fussing about whether she was a sister Unitarian.
At the moment, I’m not even sure how she spelled her middle name; the Times says -der, the Women Philosophers site says -dar but is very typo-ridden. But thanks to Google Books, I’m reading her The Technique of Rest under the rationalization “context for Sunday’s reading.”
Sermons in Stones 
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August 12, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Susan Zucker
If anyone can find the answer, it will be you. There are so many wonderful knowledgeable people out there that can assist you in your quest.
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August 20, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Dan
OK, so you got me interested in this, and I have way too much time on my hands….
A search of Google Books shows that in _America’s first women philosophers: transplanting Hegel, 1860-1925_ (2005), Dorothy G. Rogers says that Brackett met and impressed Emerson, confirming her intellectual alignment with Transcendentalism. However, Rogers does not say that Brackett had any connection to Unitarianism, while with two other women she covers (Eliza Sunderland and Lucia Ames Mead) she points out explicit Unitarian connections. Also on Google Books, you can look through old Unitarian Yearbooks — no Unitarian church in Linden, N.J. Also from Google Books, George Willis Cooke included her in his 1903 anthology of Transcendentalist poets, which makes sense given both her poems and her Hegelianism.
I think this is one of those cases where you’d have to look through physical documents,i.e., her private papers, to see if she ever attended a Unitarian church (chances are she didn’t become a member, because lots of Unitarian churches in those days allowed only men to become members). So while a Web search lets us safely call her a Transcendentalist (she was a Hegelian, wrote Transcendental poetry, connection with Emerson, etc.), I can’t find any Unitarian connection on the Web.
Like I said, I have way too much time on my hands….
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August 20, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Susan: Yep, and one of them is the second commenter.
Dan: I wrote, “‘Was she or wasn’t she?’ would be a fun detective project . . .” and could have finished it, “. . . and now that I’ve dangled the bait in front of his nose, maybe my history-junkie colleague will find the answer.”
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