Alison Palmer

Alison Palmer was born on November 22, 1931, in Medford, Massachusetts. She was the youngest of three children and, in her autobiography, recalled her childhood as being “idyllic.” She graduated high school near the top of her class (by choice) and entered Brown University in 1949 on a full scholarship. There she majored in English Literature with a minor in Latin and graduated in 1953.

Palmer originally intended to become a journalist; however, after her brother was drafted, she joined the Foreign Service, an agency in the United States Department of State, instead. She believed that she should “give two years of service to [her] country just as men were required to do.” During her decades as a Foreign Service Officer, she served in places such as the newly-independent Congo and Vietnam during the war.

Although the State Department recognized Palmer as an exceptional employee and even sent her to Boston University for graduate studies in African Political Development, she was thrice rejected for positions for which she was qualified for no reason other than her sex. This discriminatory action was one among many Palmer experienced or observed during her service. As she wrote later, “I had to decide whether to accept unjust actions by the ‘authorities’ based on their prejudice against women, or fight back and try to achieve justice.” In 1968, she filed the first sex discrimination complaint against the US Department of State. She would not only go on to win this lawsuit, but also expand her original efforts into a class-action lawsuit representing many women against whom the State Department had discriminated with an eye towards uprooting the entrenched systems of discrimination. This lawsuit would take thirty-four years to bring to completion (1976-2010).

Palmer joined The Episcopal Church as an adult; she was baptized in 1962 and confirmed in 1963. Five years later, in 1968, she volunteered to serve in Vietnam. It was during this service, and shortly after the death of her father, that she undertook an intensive study of the Bible and theological commentary. This study and her experiences among the Vietnamese people culminated in a call to become a priest.

In September 1971, Palmer became the first woman postulant in the Diocese of Washington. Working as a Foreign Service Officer during the day, Palmer took courses at Virginia Theological Seminary at night. She joined the Episcopal Women’s Caucus as founding member. Her two worlds merged when her colleagues at the State Department learned she was training for the priesthood and sought her out for pastoral counseling, a role she embraced, saying, “[her] purpose was to provide some kind of relief to people in the Foreign Service who were being crushed by the system.” She was ordained a deacon in 1974 and, in addition to continuing her support of colleagues in the Foreign Service, served at parishes in the Washington D.C. area. On September 7, 1975, she was ordained a priest alongside the other three women of the Washington Four.

After becoming a priest, Palmer continued her career with the State Department and saw herself as a “worker-priest” for her colleagues there. However, in 1977 she did publicly celebrate Holy Communion in England, the first woman priest to do so. As she wrote later, she believed that “to refuse to provide a Eucharist to someone who wanted it was to deny priesthood itself.” (Had the State Department objected, it was her view that interfering with her religious practice would have proven an “interesting” court case.) She retired from government service in 1981 and remains an active member of her local community.