On this date in 1929, Margaret “Meg” Bowman was born in Rugby, North Dakota, to Hazel Whiting and Albert Gunnerud, “pillars” of the Methodist Church. She found one other avid reader in her small town who became her best friend and an atheist like her. After graduating from high school in Illinois, she moved to Arizona, where she married Richard Turner and raised three sons, two of whom preceded her in death.
Bowman became active with the Progressive Party in 1948, earned her B.A. from Colorado College in 1954, a master’s from Arizona State University in 1961 and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1985.
She organized the Fremont, Calif., Human Rights Commission in the 1960s and regularly participated in civil rights and peace marches. She has been active in the Fremont Unitarian Fellowship, the area chapter of National Organization for Women, the San Jose Unitarian Church, the Older Women’s League and at one time co-chaired the Feminist Caucus of the American Humanist Association.
Bowman took part in “burnt offerings” protests in the mid-’70s. A women’s group at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York City first came up with the idea. They rewrote the liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer, read sexist statements from the bible, brought them to the altar and set them on fire. In 1972 at the Democratic National Convention, women repeated the ritual on the streets of Miami Beach. “From Berkeley to Boston, Maine to Miami, we have burned,” Bowman wrote. “Omaha women drew the biggest audiences as they ignited the streets of Nebraska. And, yes, radical feminism has even ‘played in Peoria’ — pyromaniacally.”
Starting in 1986, Bowman helped sponsor impoverished young women through school in Kenya and Romania. She retired from the San Jose State University sociology department. She has written many books through Hot Flash Press, including Memorial Services for Women and Feminist Classics: Women’s Words that Changed the World. An intrepid world traveler, she has organized many international tours with a feminist and freethought slant. In 2010 she accepted the Humanist Heroine award from the American Humanist Association.
She died at age 91 in San Jose, Calif. (D. 2020)
