Scudder, Vida Dutton

SCUDDER, VIDA DUTTON (1861–1954). Born in Madurai, India of missionary parents, Vida Dutton Scudder attended Smith College and Oxford, where John Ruskin taught her to look unblinkingly at the injustices of modern civilization. An avowed socialist, she modeled her life on the conviction that Christians should support and foment radical social change. Scudder’s center of gravity remained her Anglican (Episcopalian) faith, and she served her church by acting as an agent provocateur for Christian socialism. At age ninety she was still insisting in her final published work, My Quest for Reality (1952), that Christians dare not obfuscate reality with euphemisms.

For Scudder, two forces persisted in constant tension within history—continuity and revolution. “Did either prevail, excluding the other, Christianity would, I think, lose all dynamic power; the Church, which is a profound though partly hidden fact in Western civilization, would either fade into a formal relic or lose all general communal importance to be reckoned with. Would you like me to substitute the word ‘Progress’ for ‘Revolution’? I stubbornly refuse.” In 1888 she joined the Society of Christian Socialists, founded by fellow-Bostonian William Dwight Porter Bliss. In 1911 she joined the Socialist Party of America and actively supported strikers during the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912.

A teacher at Wellesley College for forty-one years, Scudder was central to the College Settlements Association, providing urban service similar to Jane Addams’s Hull House. Author of a score of books on socialism, literature, and religion, Vida Scudder was a founder in 1919 and prime mover of the Church League for Industrial Democracy (CLID). Following World War II, she feared that the middle class would support anti-Left repression. Consequently, she worked at bringing together in CLID a broad-based coalition of middle-class liberals and socialists who would work at civil liberties and industrial reform, under the slogan, “Industrial Democracy.” CLID fought the reality that the industrial system was “of, by, and for its owners” and worked toward a society that substituted “fraternal cooperation for mastery in industrial life.”

During the 1920s Scudder and William B. Spofford, Episcopal priest and editor of the Witness magazine, who became executive director of CLID, focused the league’s organizational efforts around three areas: civil liberties, church education about social justice in the workplace, and corporate responsibility. At the same time, CLID attempted to learn from and support secular movements. This thrust continued until the 1950s, when Spofford was summoned before the McCarthy Committee.

In her later years, Scudder believed that minority groups, driven by Christian impulse, would spark future social change. With this progression, CLID served as a bridge from the Social Gospel movement to the 1960s option of empowerment, which saw the direct participation in and funding of secular movements by church groups. Scudder’s autobiography, On Journey (1937), and her later book, My Quest for Reality, encapsulate her experiences. She has since been honored with a feast day on the Episcopalian liturgical calendar.

Donovan, Mary Sudman. A Different Call: Women’s Ministries in the Episcopal Church. Philadelphia: Morehouse, 1986.

Frederick, Peter J. Knights of the Golden Rule: The Intellectual as Christian Social Reformer in the 1890s. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976.

Greathouse, Gordon. “The Church League for Industrial Democracy.” In Which Side Are We On? Vol. 2, Christian Commitment for the ‘80s. Oakland: Interreligious Task Force for Social Analysis, 1980.

Hinson-Hasty, Elizabeth L. Beyond the Social Maze: Exploring Vida Dutton Scudder’s Theological Ethics. London: T&T Clark, 2006.

Works by or about Vida Dutton Scudder. Internet Archive.