Queer Places:
1099 Pinnacle Rd, Henrietta, NY 14467
Oberlin College, 87 N Main St, Oberlin, OH 44074
Antoinette
Louisa Brown, later Antoinette Brown Blackwell (May 20, 1825 – November 5,
1921), was the first woman divinity student in the US and the first woman to be ordained as a mainstream Protestant minister
in the United States. She was a well-versed public speaker on the paramount
issues of her time, and distinguished herself from her contemporaries with her
use of religious faith in her efforts to expand women's rights. When
Antoinette Brown married Samuel Blackwell in 1856, her career as a lecturer
for suffrage came to a halt for eighteen years while she busied herself
bearing seven children and raising the five who survived infancy.
Susan B. Anthony foresaw such
dangers to the movement; in terms that were only nominally joking, she wrote
to Antoinette after the second pregnancy in 1858, "Not another baby, is my
peremptory command." But obviously Anthony had no control over what went on in
the Blackwells' bedroom.
Brown was born the youngest of seven in Henrietta, New York, to Joseph
Brown and Abby Morse. Brown was recognized as highly intelligent as early as
three years old. The preaching of evangelist Charles Grandison Finney from
nearby Rochester led Brown's family to join the Congregational Church.[1]
After daring to inject a prayer into her family's religious observance, Brown
was accepted into the church before the age of nine. Shortly after becoming a
member of the congregation, she began to preach during Sunday meetings. In
1841 at the age of 16, after completing her requisite early schooling at
Monroe County Academy, Brown taught school herself. She did not intend to
spend her life teaching and so she set her sights on a degree in theology from
Oberlin College and a career in the pulpit.
For four years, Antoinette taught school and saved enough money to cover
the cost of her tuition at
Oberlin College in Ohio. Supported by her parents, who believed not only
in equal education for men and women, but also for blacks, she enrolled at
Oberlin College in 1846. At the college, she completed the literary course and
received her literary degree in 1847,[1]
the prescribed course for women students. She spent her vacations in teaching
and in the study of
Hebrew and
Greek.[2]
In 1847, after graduating with her
bachelor’s degree, she
lobbied the college for admission to the college’s theological course with
its emphasis on Congregationalist ministry. The administration, opposed to the
idea of a woman engaging in any kind of formal theological learning and
training, eventually capitulated but with a specific set of pre-conditions:
Antoinette may enroll in the courses, but she was not to receive formal
recognition. Despite the stipulations made regarding her participation in the
theology course, Antoinette was a prolific writer and charismatic public
speaker. Her exegesis on the writings of the Apostle Paul was published in the
Oberlin Quarterly Review. It is there, from a brief excerpt, that her
understanding of what may now be popularly called feminist theology, takes
shape as she writes: “Paul meant only to warn against ‘excesses,
irregularities, and unwarrantable liberties’ in public worship.’”[3]
She insisted that the Bible and its various pronouncements about women were
for a specific span of time and certainly not applicable to the 19th century.
Even though women were not asked to do public speaking during this time
Antoinette was asked to speak in Ohio and New York to speak about anti-slavery
and on women's rights.[1]
In April 1860, Brown returned to Oberlin College to deliver a lecture entitled
"Men and Women." Testament to Brown's oratory skills appeared in a student
letter which noted, "it was an excellent lecture."[4]
Without a preaching license following graduation, Brown decided to pause
her ministerial ambitions to write for Frederick Douglass' abolitionist paper,
The North Star. She spoke in 1850 at the first
National Women's Rights Convention, giving a speech that was well received
and served as the beginning of a speaking tour in which she would address
issues such as abolition, temperance, and women's rights. Brown spoke at many
of the subsequent annual National Women's Rights Conventions.
Brown was eventually given a license to preach by the Congregational Church
in 1851 and then offered a position as Minister of a Congregationalist church
in South
Butler, New York in 1852. She temporarily suspended her vast speaking
engagements, writing to her friend (and later sister-in-law)
Lucy
Stone that she had lectured eighteen times in almost as many days, and was
ordained by a socially radical Methodist minister named Luther Lee, a
passionate and vocal advocate of women's right to theological education and
leadership. At her ordination, Lee delivered a sermon testifying to
Antoinette's suitability as a preacher and her calling from God: "If God and
mental and moral culture have not already qualified her," he said to the crowd
assembled for the occasion, "we cannot, by anything we may do by way of
ordaining or setting her apart ... All we are here to do ... is ... to
subscribe our testimony to the fact, that in our belief, our sister in Christ,
Antoinette L. Brown, is one of the ministers of the New Covenant, authorized,
qualified, and called by God to preach the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ."[5]
A month after her ordination Brown traveled as a delegate to the World's
Temperance Convention in New York City, where despite representing two
temperance organizations, she was denied a chance to speak by the organizers.
In the words of Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill, Brown again "faced the
difficulties of combining essentially conservative causes with women's right's
work" at the Temperance Conference
[6] This tension also manifested itself within her, and after a year
she decided to leave South Butler; and unfortunately, even Luther Lee's
unqualified support of Antoinette was not enough to provide her with a
sustainable lifestyle there. The Boston Investigator reported her departure
with the headline: "REV. ANTOINETTE BROWN, more recently Rev. Mrs. Blackwell,
seems to have made a failure in her first pastorate."[7]
It was not her personal failure as the papers were anxious to suggest, but rather a growing insecurity of belief in the
orthodoxy of the Congregational ministry, compounded with a lack of
sustainable resources for her work. In 1857, she returned to her work as an
orator and reformer with her new husband, Samuel C. Blackwell.
Following her separation from the ministry, she focused increasingly on
women's rights issues. While many women's rights activists opposed religion on
the basis that it served to oppress women, Blackwell was steadfast in her
belief that women's active participation in religion could serve to further
their status in society. Unlike many of her peers, she cared more about
improving women's status in society than for suffrage. She believed that the
inherent differences between men and women limited men's effectiveness in
representing women in politics; thus suffrage would have little positive
impact for women unless it was coupled with tangible leadership opportunities.
Brown also diverged in opinion from other reformers with her opposition to
divorce as a means of easing women's marital restrictions.
Antoinette left for
New York City to do charity work in the slums and to lecture and raise
money for the people who lived there. On her way to
New York City, she stopped in
Worcester, Massachusetts to attend the first National Woman's Rights
Convention. This convention influenced her so much that she decided to become
an independent speaker. She traveled throughout
New
England in places like
Pennsylvania and
Ohio to speak on Woman's Rights, Anti-Slavery and Temperance. She
sometimes even spoke in church sermons when she had the chance.[1]
With regard to her own prospect of marriage, Brown believed that it was
best to remain single because single women experienced greater levels of
independence than married women. Upon meeting
Samuel Blackwell, her opinions began to waver in favor of marriage. Samuel
Blackwell was the brother of
Elizabeth, Emily and
Anna Blackwell. The
two married on January 24, 1856,[8]
and they had seven children, two dying in infancy.
Blackwell continued her career until domestic responsibilities and her
disagreement with many aspects of the women's rights movement caused her to
discontinue lecturing. Writing became her new outlet for asserting social
change for women; in her works she encouraged women to seek out masculine
professions and men to share in household duties, yet she retained the belief
that women's primary role was care of the home and family. Inspired by yet
critical of the writings of
Charles Darwin and
Herbert Spencer, who she considered to be the most influential men of her
day,[9]
Blackwell published several works in the fields of theology, science and
philosophy. She believed both Darwin and Spencer employed a tainted version of
the scientific method, one that embraced a solely masculine vantage point.[10]
Blackwell instead asserted that in order to understand women in society, women
themselves ought to conduct the study of women, which Blackwell termed the
"science of Feminine Humanity."[11]
Perhaps her most notable work was published in 1875,
The Sexes Throughout Nature, in which she presented a quasi-scientific
theory arguing that the sexes are different but equal by way of natural
evolution.[12]
She knew she would be considered presumptuous for criticizing evolutionary
theory, but wrote that "However great the disadvantages under which we [women]
are placed, these will never be lessened by waiting."[13]
Darwin had written a letter to her in 1869, thanking her for a copy of her
book, Studies in General Science.[14]
She also wrote a novel, The Island Neighbors, in 1871, and a collection
of poetry, Sea Drift, in 1902.
In 1860, at the last National Woman’s Rights Convention held before the
outbreak of the Civil War, Antoinette engaged in the heated debate about
divorce with her colleagues and contemporaries, Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. She was opposed to an easy divorce arguing, “the married partner
can not annul his obligations to the other… All divorce is naturally and
morally impossible.” Antoinette, a staunch abolitionist and suffragette,
contrary to the hopes of her friends and fellow suffragettes, supported the
passage of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which did not include the right
of free women to vote. In 1869, during the controversy over the amendment, she
and Lucy
Stone separated from other preeminent women's rights activists to form the
American Woman Suffrage Association as a counterweight to Anthony’s
National Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1873, Blackwell founded the Association for the Advancement of Women in
an attempt to address women's issues that similar organizations ignored. She
was elected president of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association in 1891 and
helped found the American Purity Association. She also lectured on behalf of
the poor of New York City.
Oberlin College awarded Brown an honorary Master's and Doctoral degrees in
1878 and 1908, respectively.
In 1878, she returned to organized religion, becoming a Unitarian. She
applied to the
American Unitarian Association and was recognized as a minister. She spoke
in Unitarian churches and resumed her lecture touring.[15]
In 1893, Brown attended the
Parliament of Religions during the
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There, she said, "Women are needed in the
pulpit as imperatively and for the same reason that they are needed in the
world—because they are women. Women have become—or when the ingrained habit of
unconscious imitation has been superseded, they will become—indispensable to
the religious evolution of the human race."[15]
In 1903, she helped found the Unitarian Society of Elizabeth, New Jersey,
serving as its minister.[15]
In 1920, at age 95, she was the only surviving participant of the 1850
Women's Rights Convention that took place in Worcester, Massachusetts, to see
the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to
vote.[15]
She voted for
Warren G. Harding in the 1920 presidential election.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell died at the age of 96 in
Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Her
childhood home was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1989.[16]
In 1975, the
United Church of Christ at its 10th General Synod began awarding the
Antoinette Brown Awards to ordained UCC women who "exemplify the contributions
that women can make through ordained ministry, have provided outstanding
ministry in a parish or other church related institutions, including women in
specialized ministry, and have a sensitivity concerning the challenges and
possibilities of women in ministry and advocacy on behalf of all women in the
church."[17]
In 1993, Antoinette Brown Blackwell was inducted into the
National Women's Hall of Fame.[18]
My published books:
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