Empowerment of the women of India is one of the major purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program. Supported by trusts established by the late Jonathan Holdeen, the Holdeen India Program supports human rights organizing, especially on behalf of women among the most marginalized and oppressed groups. One example is the long-standing Holdeen partner group, SEWA. This is the Hindi word for "service," but it also stands for the Self-Employed Women's Association. SEWA has now organized over 220,000 women in the state of Gujarat alone.

First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea visited SEWA on their visit to India in 1997. SEWA provides women with cooperatives, micro-credit lending, leadership training, and more. One SEWA project, for example, helped to organize the 17,000 banghi women of the city of Ahmedabad into a union. Banghis, also known as scavengers, are forced to live by doing such tasks as cleaning the latrines. In Ahmedabad their union now has a contract to provide the city with recycling services and the banghis with a living wage.

The program aims at training people to get the government to provide what all Indians are guaranteed: access to clean water, education, and better police response to atrocities perpetrated by the powerful against dalits. Navsarjan activists have been so successful that from 1994 to 1999, the program expanded from 50 villages to over 2,000. Working in the Thane District near Bombay, two UU Holdeen partners have succeeded in freeing over 15,000 tribal people from indentured servitude to wealthy landlords. Their union for former bonded laborers and its associated social agency, Vidhayak Sansad, also sponsors a training center for organizers at Usgaon that has become known as "the Highlander Center of India." This past January the entire Board of the UU Holdeen India Program traveled to Usgaon to meet with representatives of the more than 30 partner groups. I appoint the UU Holdeen India Board, and have twice previously visited the program partners, and have visited Usgaon.

I brought with me a story that neither I nor anyone else associated with the program had known before: the story of Mary Carpenter, a British Unitarian woman who became passionately concerned about the women of India as long ago as the 1830s and who traveled to India four times in her later years on behalf of women' s education and social reform. Mary Carpenter (1807-77) was the daughter of Dr. Lant Carpenter, distinguished minister of the large Unitarian congregation in Bristol, England at Lewin's Mead. Her commitment to women in India began with a visit to her father's congregation by the great Indian leader Ram Mohun Roy (1772-1833). A Bengali Brahmin educated at a Muslim school, he had so emphasized an ethical and monotheistic interpretation of all religion in discussing Christianity with British missionaries in Calcutta that he actually persuaded a member of the Baptist mission, William Adam, to become a Unitarian! Ram Mohun Roy died in Bristol. His spirituality, his mission, his death, and especially his funeral service, conducted by her father, all affected Mary Carpenter deeply.

In order to come to England in 1830 Roy had defied Brahmin caste rules about traveling overseas. He was motivated by the opportunity to be an advocate for India in the midst of the great debates in England over the Reform Bill. In particular, Ram Mohun Roy spoke out in favor of efforts to abolish suttee, the practice of widow suicide, as an exception to the supposed British principle of noninterference with religious and social customs. In this sense he was an early advocate of universal human rights. Shortly after, the Carpenters received another important visitor in Bristol: the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman of Boston, founder of the Ministry-at-Large to the Poor which later became known as the "Benevolent Fraternity" and is known today as the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry in Boston.

Tuckerman was arguably the first professional social worker in America. His ministry to the urban poor inspired Mary in the same way that Ram Mohun Roy had, but with the prospect of being able to make a difference much closer to home. Using Tuckerman's suggestions about methods, Mary plunged into the issues raised by the conditions faced by poor and homeless children, both in the streets and in the jails. By establishing both decent reformatory schools and by focusing public attention on prison conditions and child welfare, Mary Carpenter established a reputation as one of England's leading figures in those fields. She spent thirty years leading and promoting schools for children in trouble with the law, organizing social science research, testifying before Parliamentary committees, and the like. Much child welfare work had been neglected because of the lack of cooperation between the established Church of England and dissenting (evangelical) approaches.

Carpenter directed attention beyond those issues, toward root problems and solutions. Along the way, however, she maintained a steady interest in the conditions suffered by women and children in British India. An increasing stream of Indian nationals came to Britain for study and examination to enter the India Civil Service. Carpenter was the organizing spirit behind the National India Association for Social Reform, which helped brilliant young Indian leaders from Keshub Chender Sen through Mohandas K. Gandhi to find lodging, tuition, and connections in England. Through them, she experienced a renewal of her sense that the spirit of Ram Mohun Roy was calling her to India on behalf of the subcontinent's women. In particular she was concerned about the failure of the government of India to provide for female education. Legislation had been passed in 1854, but there were no training academies for women teachers. By 1866, Mary Carpenter determined to go to India herself to help establish such institutions.

Her work took hold institutionally in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Ahmedabad and Pune. Interestingly enough, today many of the UU Holdeen India Program's partners are in these cities and their surrounding regions. She brought the cause of women's education in India to the attention of Queen Victoria herself and brought gifts from the Queen to the schools she began. Mary Carpenter was, as one might expect in an unmarried Victorian woman reformer, sometimes shocked at India and its social customs. Never having married herself, she felt strongly about a society in which unmarried women had no status and in which all women were oppressed. Her reports to British authorities on prison reform and female education in India were undergirded with firm reminders that Britain had taken India by aggression and had moral obligations to fulfill in ruling there. Mary Carpenter, early Unitarian advocate for the empowerment of the poor, both in her own country and in India, did not seek to have her work remembered. She does have a marble monument in Bristol Cathedral, however. Perhaps another memorial, however differently begun, is our continued work in India through the UU Holdeen India Program and its partners.