Isabel Carter Heyward (born 1945) is an American feminist theologian and priest in the Episcopal Church, the province of the worldwide

Anglican Communion The Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian communion after the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Founded in 1867 in London, the communion has more than 85 million members within the Church of England and oth ...

in the United States. In 1974, she was one of the

Philadelphia Eleven The Philadelphia Eleven are eleven women who were the first women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974, two years before General Convention affirmed and explicitly authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood. Ba ...

, eleven women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976.

Early life

Heyward was born on August 22, 1945, in

Charlotte Charlotte ( ) is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont (United States), Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Meckl ...

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia a ...

. She grew up in Hendersonville, North Carolina. She graduated from East Mecklenburg High School in 1963.The Archive of Women in Theological Scholarship
Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary (biographical details to 1998). For further details, se

Academic career

Heyward holds the degree of

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...

from Randolph-Macon Woman's College (now