Deaconess Profiles

Each of nearly 700 United Church of Canada Deaconesses has a unique story of ministry and service to tell. At the bottom is a listing of all the women identified to date. There are still more names to come, especially from the period after 1964.   Keep checking or send us an email to inquire about someone in particular.  Clicking on the name will take you to a page of information about her. Each page includes: a resume of her work (appearing very soon); and where available, a picture, biography, and links to other documents such as newspaper clippings, writings, videos or additional pictures.

This resource of diaconal history will evolve as more information is collected. If you have additional material of any kind about any of the women, please contact info@uccdeaconesshistory.ca so it can enrich the record.

Some women were disjoined before they joined the Order.  Faced with a decision to marry or pursue their church vocation, they married.  Comprehensively identifying these women would be difficult, yet some stories are known.  A few biographies of women in this category appear in Disjoining Affected Profiles. 

Birth and Married Names

Tracking women’s stories is complicated by name changes.  In the early records, when there was more formality in discourse, women may be referred to simply as ‘Miss Smith’.  Later, the same woman might be ‘Mrs. George Jones’!  Nearly all of the Deaconesses who married changed their names. In the list of women below, the women appear alphabetically by their most recent surname, when it is known.

Can’t find a woman?

If you can not find a Deaconess, it could be because:

• the complete list is not yet online, contact us to inquire about someone particular
• you are using her birth name, not her most recent name.  Try the SITE SEARCH engine to see if you find her.
• she may not have been a Deaconess.  Sometimes a woman assumed to be a Deaconess was instead a Woman Worker.  There were three categories of professional work for women in the United Church: a designated, or set apart Deaconess; a commissioned Woman’s Missionary Society employee; or, a lay worker.  This project focuses on the women who were Deaconesses.  (see a few other biographies under the Disjoining tab)

Please, contact us if you are unable to locate the woman you are interested in, or have information about someone not on the list.  Perhaps you have “found” a Deaconess lost in the records!, or we might be able to verify her status as a church worker and redirect your inquiry.

Women’s Stories

Gayle Letherby points out that “studying women is not new, yet studying them from the perspective of their own experiences so that women can understand themselves in their social world has virtually no history at all.  The first step, then is to make women’s lives visible.”[1]

Often women feel that their lives are not of much interest to historians.  It is no different for women church leaders. Disbelief would frequently describe their response to the idea that their lives are noteworthy. This tendency is exaggerated in many women who trained to be Deaconesses. They were taught to be self sacrificing, behind the scenes, assistants to the men.  Even women who did not conform to these expectations can be reluctant to think their stories are of worth. These Profiles record the activities of the women along with some reflection on their work and lives.  Some of the stories are autobiographies, others are biographies, sometimes it is a combination of both.  Efforts have been made to verify the content with the woman if she is still alive.

1 Gayle Letherby, Feminist Research in Theory and Practice. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003) p 73.