They came from Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Texas and most of the "official" Southern states such as Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Florida and Virginia - Episcopal women curious about their foremothers. For four days in June at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina, they sat at the feet of their church's women leaders and ground breakers - Pamela Chinnis, the Very Rev. Martha Horne and the Rt. Rev. Mary Adelia McLeod. They heard stories about themselves they had never known and went away filled with new respect for the role of women in the Episcopal Church.

The conference, known as the Celebration of Southern Episcopal Church Women, presented an agenda rich in stories about women in the South's history, practical approaches to gathering such histories and some poignant and powerful stories about the struggle women have had and are still having to establish themselves in the church.

Mrs. Chinnis, third term presiding officer of the House of Deputies of General Convention, described her journey through the ranks as "painful. From my small town upbringing, I had been given a sense that it was arrogant for a woman to talk about herself," she said. "But a certain amount of pain makes the joy all the sweeter." Her life has taken her through discovery of self, to discovery of men and women in community and more recently she has gone beyond community to where "we are the body of Christ in the world."

She noted the lost generation of women born in the '20s and '30s, beset by the double standard, deprived of education and encouragement, who were forced to find their own way through kitchen captivity and marriage and family limitations. But many of those who did, have achieved leadership that is important to all women in the last years of the 20th century.

The Very Rev. Martha Horne, the first woman seminary dean (Virginia Seminary), told of her life on the borderline between academic and blue collar communities. She remembered her early Sunday school teachers as being "the checkout lady from the Red and White Grocery and the provost of Duke University."

Catherine Faver, professor in the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, focused on the ministries of Southern Episcopal lay women. Her examination of whom such women chose as role models revealed that while many pick famous women such as Mother Teresa and Joan of Arc, others select their mothers and grandmothers. Many describe their lay ministries as resulting from a "sense of call."

On the final day of the gathering, Bishop McLeod, the first woman diocesan bishop to be consecrated in the Episcopal Church, shared a year of her journal, a poignant expression of her doubts and misgivings, her journey from Sewanee to Vermont.