Olive Copp: A Woman Who Dared
What women who are called to ministry should or should not be doing is an ongoing debate. The "rules" are usually decided by men who, for whatever reasons, reinterpret Scripture and defy good sense. However, that discussion is not for this particular post—that comes later! History, (often as prejudiced as those who record it) still reminds us that women have often broken the barriers imposed on them to carry out the call of God, sometimes at great personal cost. Olive Copp was one of those. From the luxury of an estate called West Lawn in Hamilton to the rough and rude logging and mining camps of Northeastern Ontario and Northwestern Quebec during the 1920s, is quite the leap. For a single woman it would have been deemed by most to be, at the very least, imprudent, and at the worst, scandalous. Olive Copp was the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer who immigrated to Canada from England and established Empire Foundry in 1857. The family, of which Olive was the youngest, fre...