Dorothy M. Emerson

The Rev. Dr. Dorothy May Emerson was born on November 20, 1943, in Long Beach, California. She graduated from Pomona College in 1965 with a B.A. in German literature, earned an M.A. in psychology and education from the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco in 1974, and worked for some years as a consultant before turning to the ministry. She took her M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School in 1988.

She was ordained on September 25, 1988, by the First Universalist Society of Wakefield, Massachusetts, where she began her parish ministry. After two interim ministries she was called to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford, which she served from 1992 to 1998, helping to start community groups including the Friends of the Mystic River and the Community Cupboard Food Pantry. During that pastorate she earned a D.Min. at Andover Newton Theological School in 1997 with an anthology of historical writings by Universalist and Unitarian women, published in 2000 as Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776-1936. She founded the Unitarian Universalist Women's Heritage Society and long served as its executive director, and she also edited Glorious Women: Award-Winning Sermons About Women (2004). As a community minister she led seminars for Rainbow Solutions, a socially responsible investing firm in Medford.

From August 15, 2008, she served for two years as interim minister of the First Parish in Billerica, the Unitarian Universalist congregation on the Common.

In her later years she sat on the board of UU Class Conversations, leading workshops on class issues for congregations and ministers, and gave the last year of her life to the UU Rainbow History Project, recording the stories of clergy on LGBTQ+ concerns. Her memoir, Sea Change: The Unfinished Agenda of the 1960s, told of a young life lived "on the edge of hope, change and possibility" in 1960s California. Days before her death she delivered forty-four boxes of her professional papers to the Harvard Divinity School archives. She died suddenly on May 13, 2019, and had a green burial on May 18 at the Cedar Grove Burial Ground in Limington, Maine.

References

1. UU Retired Ministers and Partners Association obituary of the Rev. Dr. Dorothy M. Emerson (1943-2019)
2. UU Rainbow History Project: Dorothy M. Emerson (1943-2019), education, Medford ministry, Women's Heritage Society, publications
3. UUA Bookstore author note: Dorothy May Emerson, community minister and editor of UU history volumes
4. ATLA: Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, D.Min. project, Andover Newton Theological School
5. Pomona College Magazine, Winter 2019: Sea Change: The Unfinished Agenda of the 1960s by Dorothy May Emerson '65