Frances Benedict Stewart

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.

Biography[edit]

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]

See also[edit]

• List of peace activists

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Ehrick, Christine (23 July 2015). Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930–1950. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-07956-4.
• Khan, Janet A. (2009). Heritage of Light: The Spiritual Destiny of America. Wilmette, Illinois: Baha'i Publishing Trust. ISBN 978-1-931847-73-5.
• Threlkeld, Megan (2014). Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4633-9.