Work in Collegeville, Minnesota After her marriage to Emerson Hynes, a professor at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, she worked in the College of St. Benedict library. She and her husband hosted guests that included monks and visitors from St. John's, and they also brought together groups of Catholic artists, writers, and thinkers who were part of what was called "The Movement," including
Dorothy Day, sculptor Don Humphrey, and
J. F. and Betty Powers. Powers called her husband Emerson "a fervent practitioner and leader in the Catholic rural- and family-life movements." Arleen Hynes was part of the Catholic Rural Life Movement, the
Liturgical Movement, and the
Christian Family Movement, and she served a term as National Family Life Chair for the Council of Catholic Women. As progressive Catholics they were both active in the
Catholic Worker movement, and the
Agrarian society.
Work with Senator Eugene McCarthy in Washington, DC In 1959, Democrat
Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with Republican
Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s anticommunist hearings) was elected a Senator from Minnesota. Hynes's husband Emerson had gone to college at St. John's with McCarthy, and been the best man in his wedding. Emerson Hynes left a 20-year academic career to move the family to Washington and become McCarthy's
legislative assistant. They lived in Arlington, Virginia, and she served on the
National Council on Aging, hosted a study group on
Vatican II, and was president of the Virginia chapter of the
American Association of University Women, producing an important study in 1962. McCarthy ran for president in 1968, and Arleen Hynes served as the head of Volunteers for McCarthy. Emerson Hynes suffered a small stroke and took disability leave from McCarthy's office. He retired in 1968 after McCarthy lost his bid to gain the US presidential nomination. The stress from the loss of their son, Michael, who drowned in the
Potomac river in 1970 at age 18, may have weakened his health. The failed campaign also took a toll, and the combination may have led to Emerson Hynes's second, more serious stroke. He died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1971, eleven months after Michael died, leaving Arleen widowed with 9 children, and the youngest three still living at home.
Developing bibliotherapy at St. Elizabeths Hospital In 1970, shortly before her husband's anticipated death and at his urging, Hynes found work as a patient's librarian at
St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast Washington, DC, the nation's only federal mental hospital. They assigned her a room for the library that had formerly been the morgue. Although the library had existed since 1903 and was one of the earliest patient libraries in the country, it had no windows, only one skylight, and 10,000 uncatalogued books, with many piled high on the floor. She expanded the library's services to more than 100 patients a week out of a population of 4,000, launched a lecture series and movie screenings, and allowed patients to read in the library and listen to music. She collected artwork that they could borrow to put in their rooms. She began a program reading to patients who she said "had never been read to before," and the groups included people who had experienced homelessness, battered women, former felons, alcoholics, and drug addicts. She described a favorite group: Early forerunners of the bibliotherapy she developed and taught were R. H. Schauffler's 1927 book
The Poetry Cure: The Medicine Chest of Verse, Music and Picture, psychiatrist Smiley Blanton's 1960
The Healing Power of Poetry, and Dr. Jack Leedy's 1969
Poetry Therapy: The Use of Poetry in the Treatment of Emotional Disorders, among others. Leedy's work inspired hers the most, and in the early 1970s, based on much of this work and more, she first founded the Bibliotherapy Roundtable, introducing the term widely and hosting lectures and readings. She embarked on a 1,000-hour program of work, analysis, and study to become a registered poetry therapist. After completing her own supervised training, she trained another bibliotherapist who became the first in the federal system, and she established the first such position as a government job. She was also a key figure in the founding of two other organizations that her daughter, Mary Hynes-Berry, considers as even more important for the recognition of this practice as a profession, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT), and the National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, which changed its name to the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy. She was engaged with patients' drug therapies, but asserted that a therapy based on books and reading could also be healing. As Patricia Lefevre wrote of an interview with Hynes, However, none of the aforementioned books functioned as a comprehensive text, so her 1986 book was needed. She based it on a training program she launched in 1984, and her need for a text. After the book's publication, she and Dr. Kenneth Gorelick, head of psychiatric training, established the first training course in bibliotherapy, along with a certification program. They worked closely with bibliotherapist Rosalie Brown, whom Hynes helped hire.
Entrance into religious life After leaving her job at St. Elizabeth's in 1981, she returned to Minnesota to enter the Sisters of St. Benedict in
St. Joseph, Minnesota, just a few miles from St. John's and Collegeville. She professed first vows on the Feast of St. Benedict, July 11, 1981, almost 10 years to the date since her husband's death, and perpetual vows on the same date in 1985. For two decades she was a staffer and occasional instructor in the monastery Spirituality Center. She worked with battered women at a shelter, and with seniors and jail inmates. She is buried at St. Benedict's Monastery in Minnesota. A short feature about the creation of this Wikipedia article via
Women in Red and about her life appeared in the Spring 2024 edition of Benedictine Sisters and Friends magazine. == Books ==