Woman Moderator

In Boston last week the toastmaster of the 99th Annual Unitarian Festival Dinner rose to introduce an honored guest. "There are two things one should see on a trip West," he declared, "the Grand Canyon and Dr. Reinhardt." That was not the only compliment paid to Dr. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt in Boston last week. She was also elected Moderator at the General Conference of U. S. Unitarians, to succeed famed Penologist Sanford Bates. At 63, tall, big-boned, deep-voiced, Dr. Reinhardt thus became the first woman moderator of a large U. S. church.

Unitarians could point to a long tradition of outstanding women--such suffragettes and reformers as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Dorothea Dix, Louisa May Alcott. That Dr. Reinhardt capably upheld that tradition, few Unitarians doubted.

Of Colonial descent, educated at the University of California, Yale, and Oxford, San Francisco-born Dr. Reinhardt had to resume teaching after the death of her husband in order to support her two small sons. In 1916 she was elected president of Mills College, Oakland, Calif, (second oldest U. S. women's college, founded in 1852, for the daughters of newly rich gold miners). While her sons grew up (one is now a doctor, the other is in the U. S. Foreign Service), she made Mills one of the top-ranking women's colleges, worked hard in a dozen educational and political organizations, including the Institute of Pacific Relations, Association of American Colleges. In off hours she collects books, studies birds and animals. At teas for upper-classwomen, she is affectionately addressed as "Pres." As unpaid Moderator of U. S. Unitarians she takes on no mere honorary title but a job that comes close to being that of a super-public-relations woman.

Levelheaded, unassuming, tireless, Dr. Reinhardt thinks she has done nothing out of the ordinary. "The reason I'm not interesting," says she, "is that everything comes naturally to me. I've faced no great crises or conversion religiously [her mother was a Quaker]. To me religion is a part of living. And it's the only way I know to remove egotism."

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