She Said God Blessed Us

When Gail Hovey was a teenager, her local Presbyterian church hired Georgia, a seminary-trained Christian education director. Brilliant and charismatic, Georgia used the language of faith to seduce several of her students, swearing each to secrecy. When she eventually abandoned the others and focused on Gail, Gail believed herself uniquely blessed and for the next 15 years modeled her life on Georgia's—the seminary degree, the minister husband. The relationship had a profound and lasting influence on the woman Gail became and left her a legacy of guilt and shame. Shedding light on the largely invisible issue of sexual abuse of girls by women, Hovey's brave memoir relates her decades-long journey—from East Harlem to South Africa to Brooklyn—to break free of an overwhelmingly powerful and deeply destructive first love.

Gail Hovey's brave and honest book shows us that clergy who abuse can also be women. This beautiful and yet haunting book is a must read for anyone concerned with stopping cycles of violence in our churches and institutions."—Serene Jones, President, Union Theological Seminary, New York City"Gail Hovey's memoir is an inspiring and transformative story, brilliantly told. She takes the reader along deeply personal churns and turns, to reach powerful insights into life marked by childhood events. Gail's imagery of the facets of violation, power, damage, as well as clarity, comfort and completion, echo familiar sentiments in the stories of military sexual trauma survivors I've heard, who seek a fit for events that don't, in their heroic lives."—Christine Burnett, Military Sexual Trauma Prevention and Response Program Manager, San Antonio, Texas"Gail Hovey's memoir is harrowing and haunting. Searingly honest, full of terrible truths, She Said God Blessed Us shows us, in agonizing truth, the effects of sexual abuse in her church. Hovey's story shines a light on a history some would prefer to remain untold--but in so doing, helps us all continue our search for justice, and for grace."—Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of Good Boy and She's Not There"In She Said God Blessed Us, Gail Hovey introduces us to a firebrand who confronts her world with a fierceness and determination to fight for change. As she participates in several of the pivotal social justice movements of our times, from the fight against American racism in the 1960s to the campaign to end South African apartheid in the decades that followed, Hovey grows to recognize how abuse of power also shaped her young life--abuse at the hands of her religious mentor. Wrenching and celebratory, Hovey's memoir depicts a long struggle to move through guilt and pain toward a peace she can claim as her own."—Elliot Long, Emmett Till Interpretive Center

Gail Hovey is an editor and writer. Her activism began with the civil rights movement and grew to include economic and social justice work with people's movements from southern Africa to Hawaii. She lives in New York's Lower Hudson Valley.