The Women Speak

Let your women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak . . . And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

--I Corinthians: 14: 34, 35

That part of St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians was a dead letter last week in Milwaukee, where the United Council of Church Women was holding its fourth biennial assembly. The Sunday before the assembly began, in 45 of Milwaukee's Protestant churches women delegates preached the sermons. Next day, into the red brick Milwaukee Auditorium poured 2,500 churchwomen from every state in the Union (plus Hawaii, Canada, the Philippines, China, Japan, South America, India, Germany).

The delegates, for the most part smartly dressed, ranged from brides to grandmothers. They ran through four hard days of day & night sessions that began with hymn-singing and continued through votes and resolutions to speechmaking by such notable male guests as Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam of New York, President Henry P. Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary, and Editor Henry R. Luce of TIME.

Sparkplug of the United Council is Mrs. Harper Sibley, 61, of Rochester, N.Y., an Episcopal grandmother with sparkling blue eyes and considerable executive force. Georgiana Sibley today is probably the world's best-known U.S. churchwoman. President of the interdenominational United Council of Church Women for the past four years, she was re-elected last week for another two-year term.

For three months this year Mrs. Sibley toured Germany under the auspices of the U.S. Military Government, surveying the country's religious and cultural needs. What she saw forced a readjustment in her thinking. Said she last week:

"I have been a pacifist all my life ... I am still a personal pacifist, for any individual has the right to choose the martyrdom of pacifism for himself. But I do not believe the state has a right to inflict martyrdom on its own citizens . . . We in America must be strong ... I hope we shall not be called upon to use that strength. Some day, when the United Nations is more mature, I hope our military strength will be turned over to it as a police force."*

-For news of another ex-pacifist, see PEOPLE.

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