Frances Benedict Stewart
Chilean born American sociologist, pacifist, feminist, teacher and Bahá′í missionary From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frances Benedict Stewart was a Chilean-born American citizen. She was a sociologist, pacifist, feminist, teacher and Bahá′í pioneer. From the late 1920s to 1958, she was the spokesperson for the Baháʼí Faith in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, northern South America and in Central America. She performed missionary work throughout the region for nearly 40 years and established numerous assemblies for the faith.
Frances Benedict Stewart | |
|---|---|
Frances Benedict Stewart in 1950 | |
| Born | Chile |
| Occupation(s) | sociologist, pacifist, feminist, teacher and Bahá′í pioneer |
| Organization | Women's International League for Peace and Freedom |
Biography
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Frances Benedict Stewart was of Chilean birth[1] and was born to pioneer parents of the Bahá′í Faith.[2] She was a sociologist[3] and as a native Spanish speaker, served as liaison and translator for several feminist and pacifist organizations.[4][5][6] As early as 1928, she was serving as a missionary and teacher in Latin America[7] and in 1936 she was a delegate at the Baháʼí annual convention in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After the convention, she traveled on to teach in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil.[8]
She was teaching abroad again in 1937[9] and by 1938 she was secretary of the Bahá′í Inter-American Committee—tasked with coordinating Bahá′í activities related to the Ten Year Crusade in Latin America[10]—and a spokesperson for the faith in all Latin American centers of the West Indies, all of northern South America and in Central America.[6] In 1939, Stewart was working to establish a Baháʼí Spiritual Assembly in Argentina[11] and from there she went to Montevideo, Uruguay[1] where she was interviewed by Uruguayan feminist Paulina Luisi on Radio Femenina, the first all-woman radio format in the Western Hemisphere.[3]
She was active in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in the late 1930s[12] traveling to Mexico City to attend an educational conference for WILPF and assess the possibility of re-establishing the organization in Mexico with feminists there.[4] She was also a delegate for WILPF at the Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres, held in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1947.[13]
In 1940, Stewart left the US to spend a year in South America,[14] beginning in Mexico and continuing on to El Salvador,[15] Guatemala,[16] and Honduras,[17] returning to Utica, New York, in October 1941 where she prepared translations of the Tablet of Ahmad and the Prayer Books into Spanish.[5]
Throughout the 1950s, Stewart continued her missionary teaching[18] in Puerto Rico in 1951,[19] on Juan Fernández Islands, Chile in 1955,[20] and various other locations until 1958, when her administrative rights as a member of the Baháʼí Faith community were removed.[21] In 1961, Stewart was living in Argentina and was declared a Covenant-breaker—a form of excommunication in the Baháʼí Faith—by the Hands of the Cause of God, then the temporary leaders of the international Baháʼí community.[22]
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