Suzanne Hiatt

Suzanne Hiatt speaking at the National Consultation of Ordained Women in the United Methodist Church, in Nashville, Tennessee, 1975.

Suzanne Hiatt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on September 21, 1936. Although the Hiatt family was not initially a family of churchgoers, they began attending St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church after moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a teen, Hiatt attended the Northrop Collegiate School for girls, where she wrote a senior thesis critiquing American domestic life. She graduated from Radcliffe College with a Bachelor of Arts in American History in 1958, earned her Master of Divinity from Episcopal Theological School in 1964, and received her Master of Social Work from Boston University in 1965.

Hiatt began her work with the Presbyterian Church, but there she “began to think for the first time that [her] ministry might someday include insisting that The Episcopal Church face up to its discrimination against women instead of cheerfully sending its promising women on to other denominations.” In 1971, shortly after being ordained a deacon, she, along with Betty Powell and Nancy Witting, created The Episcopal Women’s Caucus to lobby the deputies to General Convention for women’s ordination. For her leadership, she was known to many of the women deacons as “the bishop to the women.” Although the women’s efforts were not initially successful, Hiatt was ordained a priest on July 29, 1974, alongside the other members of the “Philadelphia Eleven,” the first women to be ordained priests in The Episcopal Church.

After her ordination, Hiatt became a professor at Episcopal Divinity School. She taught there until her retirement in 1998. Suzanne Hiatt died on May30, 2002, at the age of 65.