The Rev. Eleanor McGee Street, a pioneer among women Episcopalian priests, dies at 78

The Rev. Eleanor Lee McGee Street, a Yale Divinity School graduate whose unauthorized ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church in the 1970s blazed a trail for female clergy within the denomination, died on Feb. 21 at her home in Hamden. She was 78.

Her son Kyle M. McGee II confirmed her death and said the cause was unknown. She had struggled with arthritis and other health issues in recent years.

McGee Street was part of a network within the Episcopal Church who agitated for the ordination of women priests. In 1975, two years after the church’s general convention reaffirmed the male-only standard for the priesthood, she joined three other women in a “bootleg ceremony.”

Even before the ceremony, the unauthorized move touched off a swift backlash: The bishop who defied church law to make McGee Street a priest was briefly suspended and the church received bomb threats, said Kyle McGee.

Tight security was put in place before to the ceremony at the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C. The women had an escape plan in case there was violence or the ceremony was interrupted, according to her obituary in the New Haven Register, but ultimately, the ordination occurred without incident before a crowd of more than 1,000 people.

Despite the intensity of the backlash, McGee Street never wavered, her son said.

“She was fierce and she would not back down from pressures from male-dominate spaces,” Kyle McGee said. “She always believed strongly that women’s voices were paramount to what the church’s mission was.” She later wrote a book about women’s voices in preaching titled “Wrestling with the Patriarchs.”

After the ordination, McGee Street received a letter barring her from functioning as a priest; she could not perform marriages or funerals or preside at holy communion services.

“It was a hard time,” she told The Courant in 1989. Being barred from the priesthood’s most sacred responsibilities created a “sense of marginality,” she said. “It’s as if the bishop has placed his hand between you and the people.”

In 1976, the Episcopal Church authorized the ordination of women and McGee Street was finally licensed as a priest. She served the church as a chaplain at Trinity College and as co-rector, along with her first husband, Kyle McGee, of St. Paul’s Church in New Haven, She was also a professor at Yale Divinity School, and a priest associate at Christ Church in New Haven.

McGee Street was born in Baltimore on Aug. 24, 1943. Her father worked for the Veterans Administration and her mother worked for a branch of the U.S. Air Force. She was a Roman Catholic but converted at the Yale Divinity School. She graduated with a master of arts in religion in 1969.

While at Yale, she married Kyle McGee, a Black fellow student from Dayton, Ohio. It was 1968, a year after the landmark Loving v. Virginia U.S. Supreme Court decision found that state laws banning interracial marriages violate the U.S. Constitution.

Kyle McGee became assistant priest at St. Stephen and the Incarnation, the city’s first racially integrated Episcopal church and a hotbed of social activism for civil rights, women’s equality and gay and lesbian civil liberties.

“It was a historic church and extremely progressive,” her son said.

McGee Street became the first female chaplain and assistant director of campus ministry at American University in Washington, according to her obituary.

The couple came to Connecticut in 1981 and shared the rectorship at St. Paul’s in New Haven. It was a lively church in a cosmopolitan neighborhood that included the city’s Little Italy. They divorced in 1993 and in 2000, she married C. Parke Street, who was also an Episcopal minister.

At 26, McGee Street was diagnosed with a rare, genetic eye disease that causes a slow loss of central vision in both eyes. Eventually she became legally blind, with only peripheral sight. She relied on a series of guide dogs to enhance her mobility; Max, her last dog died a week before her.

McGee Street served as a mentor and friend to several generations of younger women in the church, her son said.

In 1989, she was among the large crowd in the Hynes Auditorium in Boston to watch as Barbara Harris was consecrated as the Episcopal Church’s first woman bishop.

“When I heard she was elected, I was absolutely elated,” McGee Street told The Courant at the time. “I had great hope, but I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.” The church, she added, “continues to surprise me and it is one of the things that keeps me in the church.”

In addition to her son Kyle and his wife, Sophia Salguero McGee, she is survived by her son Matthew McGee and his wife Janet Mahon; two grandchildren; her brother, Joseph Hofmann, and his wife Mary; her nephew Chris Hofmann; and three stepchildren: Claude Parke Street 4th, Laura Street and Susannah Vitaglione.

Daniela Altimari can be reached at daltimari@courant.com