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Elisabeth Anthony Dexter was a social historian who contributed the longest-lived service in southern Europe on behalf of Jewish refugees of any American churchwoman during World War II.
Elisabeth Williams Anthony was born on April 7, 1887, in Bangor, Maine, the oldest child of Harriet Angell and the Reverend Alfred Anthony. Among her prominent Anthony relatives in Rhode Island was Elisabeth's grandfather, Lewis Anthony, who was a cousin of Susan B. Anthony and of Henry B. Anthony, who had served as President ‘’pro tempore’’ of the U.S. Senate. Lewis Anthony had made a fortune as a shoe wholesaler and had endowed the historic black college at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, Storer College. When she was twelve, her mother, Harriet, drowned, and Elisabeth was cared for by aunts. Elisabeth was a good student and finished at or near the top of her class when she earned her degree in Philosophy from Bates College in 1908. She subsequently received a Master’s degree in Sociology at Columbia University. During her graduate studies, Elisabeth started to identify with the feminist movement and decided to join the Unitarian Church, leaving her father’s liberal denomination of Free Baptists. In 1914, she married Robert Dexter, a social worker, and they had two children, Lewis and Harriet. At the end of the war, Elisabeth and Robert studied for doctorates at Clark University and completed their degrees in 1927: Elisabeth in history and Robert in sociology. Elisabeth eventually published her dissertation, a social history of 17th and 18th century America, ‘’Colonial Women of Affairs: Women in business and the Professions in America Before 1776,’’ Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931. Elisabeth and Robert then accepted positions on the faculty of Skidmore College.
In 1927, the Dexters moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Robert assumed a position with the American Unitarian Association. Although Elisabeth worked as a tutor for a time at Radcliffe, her academic career began to fade. In the spring of 1941, Elisabeth Dexter joined her husband at the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon Portugal. Neutral Lisbon was an important haven and port for refugees who had escaped from Vichy France. In Lisbon, she assumed increasing responsibility for refugee assistance and she maintained a program to assistant refugees with the paperwork they needed to emigrate. She would remain in Lisbon for most of the remaining years of the war and by 1944, she was European director of the Unitarian Service Committee, which added offices in Geneva and Paris later in the war. In Lisbon, she oversaw a relief program to sustain Jewish refugees who were stranded in Portugal in ‘’residence force’’ as they awaited opportunities to emigrate.
In 1942, she accepted a major role with the Office of Strategic Services to help pass information to the OSS and to recruit Spanish and other refugees to participate in various missions. Her code name was Cornette, and she reported to OSS officers in Lisbon, London and New York. She was said to have been one of the few people in continental Europe to have been briefed on the precise timing of the Allied landings in North Africa in 1942.
Elisabeth and Robert Dexter resigned from the Unitarian Service Committee in late 1944 and worked for a time with the Church Peace Union. After the war, Elisabeth continued with historical research and published her book, ‘’Career Women of America: 1776-1840’’. She also worked on a memoir of their work during World War II, “Last Port of Freedom,” but the manuscript was not completed. She died in Belmont, Massachusetts, in 1972.
Czechoslovakia: Knight of the Order of the White Lion (1946) [1] 
Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was an very important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States. Addams co-founded Chicago, Illinois' Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature. A prominent member of the Blue Stockings Society and a "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career that spanned more than half a century.
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough analysis to women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her "a born lecturer and politician... less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation."
Marge Piercy is an American progressive activist, feminist, and writer. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller and a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, Communist social and political activism, and feminist ideals.
Edward Everett Hale was an American author, historian, and Unitarian minister, best known for his writings such as "The Man Without a Country", published in Atlantic Monthly, in support of the Union during the Civil War. He was the grand-nephew of Nathan Hale, the American spy during the Revolutionary War.
Elizabeth Jesser Reid, forename sometimes spelled Elisabeth, was an English social reformer, anti-slavery activist and philanthropist. She is best remembered as the founder of Bedford College.
Noel Haviland Field was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD. His name was used as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia. Much controversy surrounds the Field story. In 2015, the historian David Talbot reignited claims that Field was set up by Allen Dulles in order to create paranoia designed to undermine the Soviet Union.
The First Unitarian Church of Rochester is located at 220 Winton Road South in Rochester, New York, U.S. The congregation is one of the largest in its denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association. The non-creedal church conducts programs in the areas of spirituality, social concerns, music, and arts. This church is one of two Unitarian Universalist congregations in Monroe County, the other being First Universalist Church of Rochester.
Martha Ingham Dickie Sharp Cogan was an American Unitarian who was involved in humanitarian and social justice work with her first husband, a Unitarian minister, Waitstill Sharp, and others of her denomination, and so helped hundreds of Jews to escape Nazi persecution, through relocation and other efforts. In September 2005, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were named by the Yad Vashem organization as "Righteous Among the Nations", the second and third of five Americans to receive this honor. The subsequent ceremony involved the presentation of a medal and certificate of honor to the Sharps' daughter, Martha Sharp Joukowsky, amidst a large audience that included one of the children that her parents had helped get out of France, Eva Esther Feigl.
The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) is a non-profit, nonsectarian associate member organization of the Unitarian Universalist Association that works to provide disaster relief and promote human rights and social justice around the world.
Waitstill Hastings Sharp was a Unitarian minister who was involved in humanitarian and relief work in Czechoslovakia and Southern Europe during World War II. In 2005, Sharp and his first wife Martha were named by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations, the second and third of five Americans to receive this honor.
María Aline Griffith (y) Dexter, Countess of Romanones was an American-born Spanish aristocrat, socialite, and writer who worked in the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and later for the CIA as a spy. The spouse of Luis Figueroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, a Spanish grandee, she was a close friend to world leaders and celebrities including Nancy Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Audrey Hepburn.
Amelia Jenks Bloomer was an American newspaper editor, women's rights and temperance advocate. Even though she did not create the women's clothing reform style known as bloomers, her name became associated with it because of her early and strong advocacy. In her work with The Lily, she became the first woman to own, operate and edit a newspaper for women.
Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt was an American educator, activist, and prominent member and leader of numerous organizations. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, 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, Reinhardt 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.
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which the Declaration of Sentiments was written.
Robert Cloutman Dexter was the founder of the Unitarian Service Committee, which worked during World War II to rescue and assist Jewish refugees and other victims of Nazism in Europe.
Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson worked as a bobbin doffer in a Massachusetts cotton mill and was involved in a turnout, became a poet and author, and played an important role in the women's suffrage movement in the United States.
Rosalyn Baxandall was an American historian of women's activism and feminist activist.
Rose Laub Coser was a German-American sociologist, educator, and social justice activist. She taught sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1968 until her retirement in 1987. She was interested in the effect of social structures on individuals, and much her work fell within medical sociology, role theory, and sociology of the family.
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