# Winnifred Wygal

Winnifred Crane Wygal (August 25, 1884 – July 8, 1972) was an American theologian, writer, and YWCA national staff member from 1919 to 1944.

## Early life and education

Wygal was born in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of Frank Wygal and Katie A. Bigelow Wygal. Her father was a wagon maker. She graduated from Drury College in 1906, and pursued further studies at Columbia University and the University of Chicago Divinity School; she completed a master's degree in history and economics in 1912. She studied with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Theological Seminary.

## Career

Wygal was a founding member of the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, along with her YWCA colleague Rose Terlin. She worked for the YWCA from 1911 to 1944, and was a member of the YWCA's national professional staff from 1918, when she joined the War Work Council. She was national executive of the YWCA's Student Council from 1922 to 1935. In 1935 she joined the Laboratory Division, and co-chaired the Fletcher Farm Seminar on Religion with Gregory Vlastos. From 1939 to 1944, she was Secretary for Religious Resources in the Division of Community YWCAs. She toured as a lecturer and community organizer in her retirement, and chaired the editorial board of The Intercollegian, the national magazine of the YWCA's Student Council.
Wygal traveled across the United States and internationally in her work. She met Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore in India, and was a delegate to the World Student Federation Conference in Mysore, during a year of sabbatical travels in 1927 and 1928. In 1928 she was in the Middle East, and in 1937 she went to England to attend a World Council of Churches conference at Oxford. "You intoxicate yourselves when you keep saying how busy you are," she told an audience of Canadian clubwomen in 1949.

## Authorship of the Serenity Prayer

While the well-known Serenity Prayer is often attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, it has also been attributed to Wygal. In 2014, Fred R. Shapiro wrote an essay crediting Wygal as "a highly plausible disseminator" of the prayer's gist in the 1930s. By 2021, Shapiro concluded in The New Yale Book of Quotations that "The demonstrable facts point to Winnifred Wygal as the coiner who combined pieces apparently drawn from Niebuhr with important other pieces of her own devising."

## Publications

* "Bapuge" (1928)
* "Christmas Eve" (1934)
* "The Discipline of the Cross and the Beloved Community" (1936)
* "What it Means to Live" (1937)
* Our Religious Vocabulary: A Glossary of Terms in Current Use (1939)
* We plan our own worship services: Business girls practice the act and the art of group worship (1940)
* "The Act and the Art of Worship" (1940)
* "Registration of Women: I Expect to Register" (1943)
* "These Tackled Problems" (1945)
* "We Declare Our Faith in God" (1946, with A. T. Mollegen)
* Reflections of the Spirit (1948)
* We the Peoples of the Ecumenical Church (1949)
* "Fears in an Age of Anxiety" (1951)
* How to Plan Informal Worship (1955)
* "What Shall We Do with Lent?" (1955)

## Personal life

Wygal had romantic relationships with women, including her travel companion Ruth Fertig, and a longterm but not exclusive connection with Frances Perry. Wygal died in 1972, at the age of 87, at her home in New York City. Her papers and diaries are in the Schlesinger Library, and at Smith College.