Through the Eyes of a Woman

  Hidden Figures As news editor of the eudwomen.org website, I have been posting articles about Adventist women during Women’s History Month. I have also shared these stories here on my private blog. I hope that it has been an interesting journey of discovery to the beginnings of the Seventh-Day Adventist church in various parts of the world. Once more, together with a group of women, I watched “Hidden Figures,” a movie that always impresses me. The three highly qualified, extremely talented black women faced so much discrimination despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn managed to make a difference, patiently waiting for their chance to show the world that women, black women at that, must be taken seriously. It was a learning process for the scientists at NASA. These women mathematicians before the time of computers helped to make the US space program a success and get the first man on the moon. For about 50 years they were hidden

Women’s History Month 2023#9 Who was this Pioneer Adventist woman? Sarah was born on April 14, 1832, to Noah (1812-1894) and Hannah Hallock (1813-1895). Her paternal grandfather had fought in the War of 1812, and her parents had moved to Ulysses, Pennsylvania, where she was born. She came from a staunch Seventh Day Baptist family where she attended Alfred University (1851-52). [3] In later years she traced the beginnings of Adventism to their area to a tour by J. N. Andrews and Hiram Edson around 1851. [4]  By the summer of 1857 R. F. Cottrell would conduct evangelistic meetings in Ulysses where he baptized four people, possibly including Sarah, for their “deep conviction of the truth.” By Dec. 11, 1857, Sarah sent her first note to the editor of the  Review and Herald  about her newfound faith: “I feel grateful … that the light of his glorious gospel now illumines this once benighted heart of mine.” [5] By late 1859 she responded to a challenge to women “lacking in that hear

  Women’s History Month Petra Tunheim was born on February 18, 1871, in the town of Hatteland, Norway. [i]  She was the youngest of 10 siblings in a family of farmers and spent most of her childhood “herding sheep and reading her Bible on the lonely hillsides” of her native country. [ii]  In 1892, after the death of her father, she emigrated to the United States along with her mother and four brothers. There she learned about the Adventist faith and enrolled at  Union College , where she also worked as a teacher. [iii] For a time, she devoted herself to canvassing, until she read in a magazine the need that the church had for missionaries abroad. In 1903 she traveled to Australia, where she worked as a literature evangelist with great success. [iv] In 1906, during the annual meeting of the Australasian Union, Miss Tunheim offered herself as a volunteer to go to Java as a missionary. [v]  Her work initially focused on the city of Surabaya. There a Protestant Dutch woman invited he

women’s history month #7 We owe the discovery of this amazing woman to the research done by Stephan Laub who presented the information at a History Workshop of the Baden-Württemberg Conference, Germany Dr. Emmy Behn was probably the most important Adventist woman in Europe in the first half of the 20 th  century. Certainly the first female SDA doctor in Europe at that time. She was a pioneer and exception compared with the many doctors of our day. She was a student at Battle Creek College under Dr. John Haravey Kellog, and was accepted at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia in 1906. It should be noted that women of the time were only grudgingly tolerated in German universities as guest students. Emmy Behn, born in 1872, obtained her medical degree in Philadelphia in 1908 with a dissertation as "Dr. med." She was the first German to graduate from this university. In the U.S., female students like Emmy had access to research, teaching and license to practice m