On May 23, within the picturesque church, a symbolic moment in a revolution of a cultural kind will take place in this community just west of Boston. Rebecca Cohen will be ordained a minister in the Unitarian Universalist church that her mother, the Rev. Helen Lutton Cohen, serves as pastor. Afterward, the younger Ms. Cohen will seek her own pulpit in the small Unitarian Universalist Association, which has about 200,000 members. For one generation in a family to follow another into the ministry is an old story, which can be told with reference to men like Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards and Martin Luther King Jr., sons following their fathers. But for a daughter to follow her mother in this way represents a new trend emerging in American religion, and striking evidence that the movement of women into positions of religious authority is entering its second generation.
Statistics suggest that the wave is still building.
The number of women studying in Christian seminaries for a master of divinity degree increased eight-fold since 1972, to 8,203 students in 1997, the last year for which figures are available. Among denominations, the Episcopal Church did not ordain women as priests until 1977. But now women make up nearly one in seven of its clergy members. They also make up about one in six pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, formed from the merger of three churches, none of which ordained women before 1970. The Jewish Theological Seminary's rabbinical school, which serves Judaism's Conservative movement, graduated only men until 1986.