Aurelia Henry Reinhardt

Yesterday’s woman was expected to have individual interests, caring for the brightness of the hearth fire and the comforts of the family group. Today she has inherited the community and the community’s welfare. Civics, religion and education have become her field of activity. She is homemaker and citizen.

Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt (April 1, 1877 - January 28, 1948) was an educator, activist, and prominent member and leader of numerous organizations. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, completed her doctoral dissertation at Yale, and studied as a fellow at Oxford. After teaching at the University of Idaho, the Lewiston State Normal School, and with the Extension Division of the University of California, she was elected president of Mills College in 1916, and held the position until 1943, making her the longest serving president in the history of the school.

She was a peace activist during the First World War, was an active member of the Republican Party, and supported the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, and the formation of the League of Nations. She wrote on and spoke extensively throughout the US and Europe, to a range of social, political and business groups, on topics including the education of women, women's suffrage, world peace, and international cooperation. She was president of the American Association of University Women, and a prominent member of the American Unitarian Association, serving for two years as its first female moderator, as the only female member of its Commission of Appraisal, delivered the Ware Lecture in 1932, and was briefly a minister in Oakland, California. She was a director of the Starr King School for the Ministry, and was a delegate at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in 1945.

Quotes

You felt that she cared greatly about you as an individual. She believe in you and what you could become, and her faith in you, like her optimism, was contagious, giving you self-confidence and power so that you could not doubt yourself. She had a strange capacity for making you feel capable of anything.

• The future of our country depends on our educational institutions. They will be kept democratic.
  • In Henry Reinhardt, Aurelia (April 23, 1920). ""Keep Our Colleges Democratic" Plea of Noted Woman Educator". Madera Mercury. Retrieved on 3 July 2018. 
• Let us not forget that the future includes more women in the ministry than we have ever known before.
  • In Emerson, Dorothy May; Edwards, June; Knox, Helene (2000). Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776-1936. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. p. 565. ISBN 978-1-55896-380-1. 
• Yesterday’s woman was expected to have individual interests, caring for the brightness of the hearth fire and the comforts of the family group. Today she has inherited the community and the community’s welfare. Civics, religion and education have become her field of activity. She is homemaker and citizen.
  • Writing in Mills Quarterly in 1917, as quoted in Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt (1877-1948). Unitarian Universalist Women's Heritage Society Archives. Retrieved on 3 July 2018.
• Religion and education meet in their responsibility to make possible the abundant life—the terms are intellectual and spiritual, rather than material. Humane living is assured only to those ... who have disciplined themselves to choose and who have the ardor to strive for the excellent “with heart and soul and mind.”
  • Address at Ohio State University, 1940, as quoted in Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt (1877-1948). Unitarian Universalist Women's Heritage Society Archives. Retrieved on 3 July 2018.
• [E]ducation in a democracy, in our democracy, must use all the instruments of civilization, home, church, community, as well as school, for the adequate, suitable development of each child. This means that character and imagination, as well as heart and hand, are developed together.

Education in a democracy must consciously direct reading and observation, principle and practice to the happiness, the responsibilities, and the participation of group living. Government in a democracy is not “they,” it is “us.”

• • Speech given to the Unitarian Radio Hour, reprinted in McKanan, Dan (2017). A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism, Volume Two: From 1900 to the Present. Skinner House Books. pp. 105-7. ISBN 978-1-55896-791-5. Retrieved on 3 July 2018. 
• Horace Mann said that one former was worth a thousand reformers. And if you are going to keep justice and liberty alive, you lawyers, we teachers will try to become what we were meant to be, the formers of the character of our citizens.
  • Speech delivered in 1917 to the California Bar Association, in California, State Bar of (1917). Proceedings ... Annual Convention, California Bar Association. pp. 170-172. 
• Today in a land where all women inherit civic responsibility, where professions and business are open to all comers without distinction of sex, leadership through direct influence is woman’s unchallenged heritage.
  • Speech delivered in 1922 to the American Association of College Women, in Western Journal of Education. Harr Wagner Publishing Company. 1922. p. 8. Retrieved on 3 July 2018. 

Quotes about Aurelia Henry Reinhardt

• She is a life member of more literary organizations than probably any other woman of California.
  • Lyons, Louis S. (1922). Who's who Among the Women of California: An Annual Devoted to the Representative Women of California, with an Authoritative Review of Their Activities in Civic, Social, Athletic, Philanthropic, Art and Music, Literary and Dramatic Circles : Profusely Illustrated. Security Publishing Company. p. 604. Retrieved on 2 July 2018. 
• You felt that she cared greatly about you as an individual. She believe in you and what you could become, and her faith in you, like her optimism, was contagious, giving you self-confidence and power so that you could not doubt yourself. She had a strange capacity for making you feel capable of anything.
  • Evelyn Steel Little, in Harris, Mark W. (29 July 2009). The A to Z of Unitarian Universalism. Scarecrow Press. p. 393. ISBN 978-0-8108-6333-0. Retrieved on 3 July 2018. 
• as distinguished a Unitarian as there is in the land
  • Frederick May Elliot, in Emerson, Dorothy May; Edwards, June; Knox, Helene (2000). Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776-1936. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. p. 563. ISBN 978-1-55896-380-1. 
• There are two things one should see on a trip West: the Grand Canyon and Dr. Reinhardt.
  • The toastmaster introducing Reinhardt in 1940 at the 99th Annual Unitarian Festival Dinner, quoted in Religion: Woman Moderator. Time (June 03, 1940). Retrieved on 19 November 2018.