The following was recorded by the author from Varian’s telling of the story, at the Vails Gate Convent of the Order of St. Helena, Sept. 17 and 18, 2008.

Varian and David Cassat were Presbyterians, but probably not deeply theological Presbyterians. Sometime after their marriage, but before David’s graduation, he asked Varian if she believed in the after life, and with no ambivalence, she responded, “Absolutely not!”

He questioned her again.“Do you think the love we have between us will die when we die?” It forced her to think.

Life on campus was exciting in 1947. The War to End All Wars was over. There would be no more wars, no more loss of life, nothing so irrational ever again. The whole intellectual spirit was different. But Varian and David lived on a more practical plain. Their probing question was: How do we get rid of the cockroaches.

They lived near a river in Ohio, and everyone said they were “river bugs.” Varian’s father suggested they sprinkle equal parts of cocoa (to attract the bugs) and baking powder (to make them sick). They did, and it seemed to work.

One day at lunch at Carl’s Restaurant in Athens, Ohio, Varian commented to David with some excitement that the fatal recipe seemed to be working. A waiter overheard them and told them he was pleased to hear them admit they had roaches, since everyone else admitted only to “river bugs.” He then asked if he could come up to collect roaches for some experiments he was doing (which inadvertently killed the roaches). He showed up at 9 p.m. They doused the lights, then turned them on and nabbed roaches. When he had enough, they invited him — his name was David Von Craig Wilson — to have a cup of coffee with them. He declined because he would be going to 7 a.m. mass at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Shepherd. That started a conversation that lasted all night, and at 7 a.m., David and Varian Cassat went to mass with David Von Craig Wilson, and in fact, went back every Sunday thereafter. They loved everything they saw, especially the liturgy. They liked that Episcopalians worshipped with all their senses. Varian even enjoyed the smell of the incense. It was a totally new worship experience for them. They were hooked.

David eventually received a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia in 1949, while Varian worked as a staff writer for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, based at 281 Park Avenue South. Around that time, they were both confirmed at St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie Episcopal Church. Like all new converts, they eagerly looked forward to their first annual meeting. Only after they arrived did they discover that Varian could not vote because she was a woman. They left and in dead silence, they walked from the church at 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, home to 20th Street and 1st Avenue. When they got home, Varian took her Bible and threw it out their seventh story window (having first checked to make sure no one was walking below).

She later went downstairs to retrieve it, since her mother had given it to her, and on her way back up in the elevator, she vowed that she would never bake another cake or do a bit of “women’s work” in the church until women were ordained. She announced her determined plan to her colleagues at church center the next day and they predicted it would take 30 years. In fact, it took 27.

“I may have been in the right place at the right time,” Varian said. Years later, she would find like-minded friends when they moved to Katonah. Never shy to make her views known, she did get elected to the diocesan council and from there was elected the national chairman of the task force on women.

This was a group of representatives from all over the church who met regularly at 815 2nd Avenue. The 15 women had as allies that extremely subversive group known as the Episcopal Church Women. The members of the ECW instinctively knew that because they had no choice in the ministry they chose, that their ministry as lay women was denigrated. As more women came to realize this and accept it, there was a radical change in the Episcopal Church. Until that time, women simply believed that it was a man’s role to be ordained (or not). But no longer!

The 15 or so members of the task force pushed for women’s ordination. They went forth as speakers, they encouraged their various dioceses to keep the issue alive and through their leadership, the question of the ordination of women did not go away. They insisted that if women were called to the priesthood, their calls were valid. How could anyone tell another person they were not called? Women were responsible and intellectually equal to their male peers. They simply didn’t buy the old argument that because Jesus didn’t call any women, women weren’t meant to be called.

In 1974, 11 woman were ordained in Philadelphia by three retired bishops. Their ordinations were called “irregular” and the women were not welcome to minister within the church proper. The task force held a meeting in 1976 at the Cathedral Church in St. Louis, where the Very Rev. Michael Allen was the Dean. That meeting was a defining point at which all the women of the task force and the Episcopal Church Women united in their goal of getting women ordained. Within the next two years, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women.

When Carol Anderson was ordained deacon in the Diocese of New York, Varian loaded up her station wagon with home-baked goodies and drove down to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine to give her a proper celebration. It was the first time she had baked for the church since her Bible flew out the window 30 years earlier.

In 1974, the Rev. Lloyd Uyeki had appointed Varian to a committee to evaluate the restructuring of the Diocese of New York. The committee discovered that clergy wives were particularly disgruntled and perhaps because of her work on the task force, Varian was particularly attuned to their complaint. More than a few of them had themselves felt called to ordination, but they could only do the next-best thing: marry an ordained person.

Varian and David were at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Katonah when Dorothy Stackpole became the first women elected to the vestry. The rector, the Rev. A. Donald Wiesner, “complimented” her by saying, “Dorothy, you may be a woman, but you think like a man.”

Dorothy stood up, cigarette dangling from her mouth, and said, “I think!” and sat down.

Varian was later elected the first woman to serve as church warden at St. Luke’s.

In all this time, David, in addition to being Varian’s greatest support, was also the youngest man to serve as clerk of vestry at St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie in the Diocese of New York.