Margaret Brackenbury Crook

Margaret Brackenbury Crook (5 May 1886 – 24 May 1972) was a British Unitarian minister, a women's suffrage and peace activist, and a professor of religious studies in the United States.

[2] In America, Crook had difficulty finding a posting because the president of the American Unitarian Association, Samuel Atkins Eliot, actively excluded women ministers.

[2] Crook instead took the post of executive secretary of the American branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which was based in New York.

When the president of Smith College, William Allan Neilson, heard her speak, he offered her a position in the Department of Religion and Biblical Literature.

[3] Crook's last published book, Women and Religion (1964), offered an overtly feminist examination of the Bible and the ways in which it has been interpreted over the centuries.

[2] Crook acknowledged that Women and Religion was inspired in part by her reading of Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.

[2][4] In 1923–24, Crook went on a speaking tour throughout the eastern United States, lecturing on subjects such as women in the ministry, Christian fundamentalism, and the peace movement.

Despite the fact that she was never able to get the American Unitarian Association to recognize her as a minister, she wrote at one point: "I have always considered my life-work in religion a ministry".

She was a member of the St. Anne's Society, the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the National Association of Biblical Instructors, the American Association of University Professors, served as the Smith College representative on the Corporation of the American Schools of Oriental Research, was an honorary lecturer at the Jerusalem school of Oriental research during the summer of 1934, served as president and honorary secretary of the Alumni of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1943, 1942.