Universalists choose all-women speaker panel
Following concerns that this year’s four speakers were all male, the 2025 Quaker Universalist Group conference will ‘have women speakers and topics relating to women’
Next year’s Quaker Universalist Group (QUG) conference will feature only women speakers, following concerns that this year’s four speakers were all male.
The news was announced in QUG’s newsletter, which said: ‘We will have women speakers and topics relating to women: there will be a wide range and we hope to include women in the Divine, women and Quakers, women talking about their own spirituality, how women think, women and art, and women’s activism and voices from different cultures.’
The QUG annual conference at High Leigh in Hertfordshire in April has booked five female speakers so far. These are: Rhiannon Grant, Woodbrooke’s deputy programme leader for research, and programme coordinator for Modern Quaker Thought; and Janet Monahan, a Quaker teacher currently writing her doctoral research ‘Spiritually Aware Practice (SAP) in Education’. At the conference she will be asking: ‘Do women and men think in the same way?’
The other three speakers are: Dora Bek, a solution-focused therapist and Reiki practitioner; Georgina Wright, a teacher, poet and novelist; and Frances Martin, a figurative artist and convenor of the ‘Norwich 20’ group of professional artists. In 2023 Frances contributed to a major exhibition in Norwich churches on the world of Julian, the mystic who wrote the first book in English 650 years ago.
The conference will be held from 25 to 27 April.
