Flizita Kaiser

One of seven children born to parents of German heritage, Flizita Engle grew up on a farm in Kansas. She began school in a country schoolhouse and finished high school in the nearby small town of Grainfield. After graduation, she met her future husband Joe L. Kaiser. In 1936, in the depths of the Depression, they married and started buying their 320-acre farm, an action that required faith and hard work. The Kaisers thought of themselves as “dirt farmers” in what was referred to at the time as “the Dust Bowl days.” When drought and poverty forced many others off the land, they persevered. Without the benefits of electricity and indoor plumbing, amenities now taken for granted, the Kaisers raised two sons and a daughter. They believed strongly that education was the key to personal growth and so to help support the higher education of their children, the Kaisers managed a small motel in Grainfield in addition to their farming responsibilities.

The oldest son, Delmar, took over the family farm when his father became ill. After her husband died in 1961, Flizita Kaiser left to work as a priest’s housekeeper for three or four years, then spent a year as a frat housemother at Kansas State before becoming a dorm mother at Marymount College in Salina, Kansas where she became close to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia.

A teaching order, the sisters of St. Joseph, after the liberalizing of church practices following the Second Vatican Council, discerned in God’s calling authorization to use the Gospels as an instrument of social justice to serve the needs of the individual and human collective. Recognizing Flizita Kaiser’s intelligence and initiative, the Sisters encouraged her to go to college, which led to her graduating from Marymount at age fifty-eight with a major in social science. Her second son, Marvin, dean of the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State, credits the Sisters with providing the community of support and encouragement and his mother with the triumphant spirit that allowed her to break through the expected roles of wife and mother held for women of her class and generation.

With college degree in hand, Flizita found employment as a counselor for a non-profit agency in Kansas City that worked with court-ordered youth, a position that allowed her to combine her maternal instincts and experience with the passion for social justice that had been fostered by the Marymount nuns. After the center closed, she moved back to Salina, became even closer to the Sisters, and ended up working at their Retreat Center in Concordia as a woman-of-all-trades. There she became part of the broad national movement that sought to use religion and spirituality as tools for achieving a just society.

Rather than retiring to town and socializing with family and friends as farm widows of the era were more or less expected to do, Flizita deliberately involved herself in the larger world. Breaking the expected mold led to new people and ideas that inspired her remarkable revolution and evolution of thought. Changed by the change makers of the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements, Mrs. Kaiser became a spokesperson for her vision in the various circles she inhabited—from her family to her old neighbors to the various people she encountered out in the world. From her children’s perspective, this was made possible by the continuing confidence and support of the Marymount spiritual community where she lived and worked as a lay elder within the sisterhood that had first discerned in her and watere the seeds of intellectual curiosity, leadership, and commitment to peace and justice. 

Flizita’s three children have carried forward her legacy of stewardship of the land, service to humanity, and the arts of home and community. Her oldest son still works the family farm, lending continuity to a group of people whose fight for survival is as real today as it was seventy years ago. Marvin, her second son, has provided education and service through national and international programs, especially in the fields of community service and aging issues. Her daughter, Mattie, has used her educational degrees to support women and family issues.