Helen Goodall's Pilgrimage Notes

Helen Goodall — the matriarch of the Oakland Bahá'í community, mother of Ella Cooper, hostess for many of the early Western travel-teachers passing through California — had made pilgrimage to 'Akká in the spring of 1908. The Master had then been free to receive Western pilgrims for only a few months, following the Young Turk revolution that ended His more than forty-year imprisonment. Goodall had taken full advantage of the opening: she had stayed, with her daughter Ella, for ten days in the household, taking notes carefully each evening on the talks of the day.

The notes, edited and arranged for publication, appeared in several issues of the early Star of the West in 1910. They gave the American friends a fuller picture of the Master's domestic life than any publication had yet provided. Goodall described the small dining room at the centre of the household; the table conversations among the family members and the visitors; the Master's habit of asking each guest about her own work and her own city; the steady presence of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Master's sister, at the Master's right hand; the running about of the grandchildren in the courtyards.

One conversation Goodall preserves at length. She had asked the Master what He thought of the agitation, then growing in both Iran and the United States, for the equal education of girls and women. He had answered, in His characteristic manner of bringing the principle down into the visible facts of the household:

In My household the daughters and the sons receive the same education.

He had pointed to His own granddaughters: Rúhá, Túbá, Munavvar, and the youngest, then a small child. He had named the subjects they were studying — the same subjects, He specified, that His grandsons were studying. He had said that it would be inconceivable, in the dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh, for a household to do otherwise. He had said this in a normal speaking voice, as a description of an already-existing fact in His own house, rather than as a piece of advocacy.

Goodall went home to Oakland. She built around herself one of the strongest Bahá'í communities of the early American Faith. She invited the travel-teachers to stay; she fed the visitors; she opened her parlour for the firesides. The notes on the equal education of the daughters and the sons in the Master's house went into her teaching from the first. The American friends, reading her notes in the Star of the West, heard the principle in the same plain voice in which the Master had spoken it.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 1, pilgrimage notes by Helen S. Goodall, 1910. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1910). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1