Ruth Elizabeth (Liz) Workman (1928–2022)

Ruth Elizabeth Teague (Liz) Workman was a longtime activist who devoted years of service to social justice and human rights efforts, especially those of the United Methodist Church, where her father was a minister.

Elizabeth Teague was born on October 23, 1928, in Buckner (Lafayette County). She was the second child of Otto Warren Teague, who was a United Methodist minister, and Lydia Lois Young Teague.

Church and music were central parts of her youth. Workman once said that her earliest memory was of hearing a piano as she walked along a dirt road in rural Arkansas. By age twelve, she was playing at her father’s worship services, and she would ultimately become an accomplished piano player. She also served as a youth counselor, Sunday school teacher, and choir director at local churches.

After graduating from high school at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) in 1946, she enrolled at Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County), where she received her BA in 1950 and also met her future husband, John Workman. The couple married in 1949 and had four children. John Workman was a Methodist minister and journalist who served as the religion editor at the Arkansas Gazette from 1979 into the early 1990s.

While raising her four children, she was deeply involved in public education, working to enhance educational opportunities for underprivileged and neglected children. As her own children grew, she returned to school herself, earning an MA in special education from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway in 1970. She went on to teach in the Little Rock (Pulaski County) public schools for the next decade.

Workman’s extensive volunteer and civic efforts stemmed from her involvement with the United Methodist Women (now United Women in Faith), the only official organization for women in the United Methodist Church. She was a member of the advisory council for the Arkansas Conferences of Churches and Synagogues, and from 1986 to 1989, she served as the Arkansas president of Church Women United (CWU), an organization of women of diverse races, cultures, and religious traditions who worked for global peace and justice. Workman also served on CWU’s National Common Council in addition to the National Committee for Ecumenical Action. Workman was chosen state chairperson by the Arkansas CWU for their Jubilee Year Celebration, which marked the organization’s fifty-year anniversary. She helped reorganize the Conway CWU chapter while she was living in Little Rock, and when she later moved to Conway, she held a number of offices, including the presidency (2003–2004).

Workman also served as co-chair of the Conway League of Women Voters and was an active speaker for NOW (National Organization for Women) while also being an advocate for ending hunger in the state. Workman was a leader of ERArkansas, the organization founded in the mid-1970s that led the unsuccessful effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Workman was a close associate of former Arkansas first lady Betty Bumpers, and the women were early leaders of the Arkansas Peace Links initiative. With the organization focused on ending the nuclear arms race, Workman served on the Curriculum Committee for the Peace Education Project at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In addition, she served as the state coordinator for Peace Links’ Peace Ribbon Project in 1985, and in that role, she joined with Bumpers to represent the group at the Peace March in Washington DC. In addition, she served as a delegate for the organization’s 1987 mission to the Soviet Union.

In 1985, Hendrix College awarded Workman the Ethel K. Miller Award for Religious and Social Awareness, while the Arkansas Peace Center recognized her sustained commitment to contemporary issues of peace and justice in 1987. She was also the recipient in 2011 of the Human Rights Award from Church Women United, as well as the 2013 Humanitarian Award from Hendrix College.

Workman played tennis into her eighties. Her children commented that their mother’s celebrated efforts to promote peace did not extend to the tennis court.

Workman died on January 1, 2022. She is buried in the First United Methodist Church Columbarium in Conway.

For additional information:
Davis, Day. “Obituary—Ruth Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Workman.” United Methodists of Arkansas, January 13, 2022. https://arumc.org/2022/01/ruth-elizabeth-liz-workman/ (accessed June 26, 2024).

“Donor Spotlight: John and Liz Workman.” Children’s Sentinel: The News Magazine of the Methodist Family Health Foundation (Spring 2007). https://www.methodistfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Spring2007.pdf (accessed June 26, 2024).

William H. Pruden III
Ravenscroft School