Lydia Ann Moulton Jenkins
Dates: 1824/5 - May 7, 1874
Occupation: minister
Known for: first US woman minister ordained by a denomination (see note)
Little is known of Jenkins, especially her early life. Sometime in the late 1840s or 1850 she married Edmund Samuel Jenkins and the two became a ministerial team, preaching Universalism. Lydia Jenkins also spoke on women's rights.
In 1858, the Ontario Association of Universalists (Geneva, New York) gave a letter of fellowship to Lydia Jenkins, recognizing her authority to serve as a Universalist minister. In 1860, according to an unpublished paper by Charles Semowich (summarized in David Robinson's The Unitarians and the Universalists), Jenkins was ordained in 1860 by the Ontario Association along with her husband. Unfortunately, the 1860 records of the Ontario Association are lost.
Just a few years later, Jenkins left the ministry, became a physician and with her husband opened a medical office in Binghamton, New York.
Note: Jenkins' claim to ordination (in 1860) is not documented as well as that of Olympia Brown (in 1863), and was mostly forgotten until Charles Semowich's research and paper written in 1983. Brown was apparently unaware of Jenkins' ordination. The ordination may have been unpublicized at the time in order to avoid controversy.
Lydia Ann Moulton Jenkins
- Lydia Ann Jenkins - from the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography
About Lydia Ann Moulton Jenkins
- Categories: Universalist minister, speaker, physician
- Places: New England, New York, United States
- Period: 18th century
- Religious Associations: Universalist
Also on this site
Bibliography
- The Unitarians and the Universalists. David Robinson, 1985.
- Universalist and Unitarian Women Ministers. Catherine Hitchings.
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Text © 1999-2006 Jone Johnson Lewis.
