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Antoinette Brown Blackwell
“Why Should I Not Pray?”
Although the room was full to capacity, not a single whisper could be heard in the hush of quiet anticipation. The clacking of a woman’s shoes across the floor echoed through the large space as she walked to the lectern. Standing behind the podium, she paused a moment and then, looking directly into the audience, launched into her temperance speech, her voice ringing with authority. Seconds later, her words were lost in an uproar as the men in the room leapt to their feet, bellowing in protest, shouting, and pounding the floor with their canes. After the organizer of the convention brought the room to order, the delegates voted, passing a resolution that forbade women to speak on the issue. While women’s work behind the scenes on behalf of the temperance movement was appreciated, that afternoon the men in the room concluded “the public platform of discussion is not the appropriate sphere of women.”1
Undeterred, the following afternoon the same woman attempted to address the meeting a second time, and again she was barred from speaking. Yet as she left the room amid the hissing and shouts of the audience, she felt a surging confidence that would not be quelled: “There were angry men confronting me and I caught the flashing of defiant eyes, but above me and within me, there was a spirit stronger than them all.”2
Less than one week later, she stood before an audience once again, this time at the front of a small Congregational church in South Butler, New York. On that day, September 15, 1853, Antoinette Brown was ordained as the first woman minister in America.
Pushing Boundaries
Antoinette recalled an incident in which, as a very young girl, she felt compelled to pray aloud during a family prayer gathering. Later, when her brother William asked what had prompted her spontaneous prayer, she answered matter-of-factly, “Because I think I am a Christian, and why should I not pray?”3 Antoinette’s family accepted her answer and encouraged her to speak and pray whenever she was moved by the Spirit at family gatherings and informal prayer meetings at their local Congregational church. Not long after, just before she turned nine, Antoinette decided to answer an altar call. The minister, flustered by her youth, didn’t interrogate her as he usually did the adults, so Antoinette took the opportunity to make her own statement of her Christian faith. The church voted unanimously to receive her into membership.
Antoinette was a precocious child. Well-schooled in mathematics, composition, rhetoric, and French, she completed her secondary education by age fifteen. The following spring she was asked to teach the youngest children in a small district school a few towns over from her parents’ house. She was paid $1.50 a week plus board. She sent most of her earnings to her parents, with the exception of a few coins each week, which she saved to purchase writing paper for her personal compositions.
With precious few jobs available to women in the 1840s, Antoinette was well aware that teaching could become her lifelong occupation. But by the time she had reached her late teens, she had set her sights on another ambition altogether: she yearned to become a minister, despite the fact that at the time, women were never considered for ordination. Three years after she made this monumental decision, Antoinette had saved adequate funds from her teaching job to enroll in Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio, one of the few colleges that accepted both men and women.
Oberlin may have accepted female students, but the administration was otherwise quite traditional. Although the women shared classes with the men, they were “excused” from participation in debates or rhetorical exhibitions and were prohibited from speaking publicly in coed groups. The education of women was geared toward moral and religious self-improvement in order to contribute to their God-given roles as wives and mothers.
Despite the clear regulations, Antoinette and her fellow female students constantly pushed the boundaries. They blatantly disregarded the rules by speaking in public; they reactivated a dormant ladies’ association for the sole purpose of using the meetings to train themselves as public speakers; and they convinced their rhetoric professor to allow them to stage a debate in their coed class. By the time they graduated in 1847, Antoinette, her close friend Lucy Stone (who would later become Antoinette’s sister-in-law and a vocal women’s rights activist), and a handful of other women had acquired substantial public speaking experience.
Despite her enthusiasm, though, most of Antoinette’s friends and family members were staunchly opposed to her pursuit of ordination. In fact, Lucy claimed in a blunt letter that Antoinette would “never be allowed to stand in a pulpit, nor to preach in a church, and certainly . . . never be ordained.”4 Though her feelings were bruised by her friend’s lack of support, Antoinette was not swayed in her determination to study theology. While Lucy moved on to the women’s rights public speaking circuit, Antoinette decided that she was not finished at Oberlin.
The Oberlin administration, however, refused Antoinette’s admission into the graduate theology program. While the college allowed women a general education, it still had no intention of training women for professions other than teaching.
Finally, after much haggling, Antoinette and the administration settled on an uneasy compromise: she was welcome to sit in on theology classes, but she would not be supported in her ultimate goal of obtaining an advanced degree. Although Antoinette continued to appeal Oberlin’s position during the three years she was enrolled in graduate school, she was not successful. When she completed her coursework in 1850, her name was not included in the official listing of the theology graduates. It would not be added until 1908.
Breaking Barriers
Although Antoinette spoke frequently in favor of both women’s rights and the temperance movement, she considered herself first and foremost a Christian speaker, even at the risk of alienating her female companions. Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton eventually abandoned the church, concluding that religion was detrimental to the cause of women’s rights. Even Lucretia Mott, a Quaker whose views aligned with Antoinette’s, considered discussion of the Bible a waste of time. But for Antoinette, God and his Word were not simply a part of her public speaking platform; they were the whole focus. She viewed her faith as a fundamental part of her identity and a source of personal strength, which is why she did not abandon her goal of becoming an ordained minister in favor of becoming a women’s rights activist. Antoinette did not aspire simply to be a public speaker; she yearned to speak specifically about God and his Word.
As a result of these convictions, Antoinette turned her attention elsewhere when she failed to convince Oberlin’s administrators to ordain her. In 1853, after hearing her speak, a small Congregational church in South Butler, New York, invited Antoinette to become their pastor. On September 15, a huge crowd of friends and supporters gathered in the chapel to witness the historic occasion, the magnitude of which was not lost on Antoinette herself. “It seemed to me a very solemn thing when our three deacons and these clergymen all stood around me each placing a hand upon my head or shoulder and gravely admitting me into the ranks of ministry,” she said.5 For a salary of three hundred dollars a year, Antoinette was expected to preach two sermons every Sunday and minister to the sick and troubled members of the congregation.
News of the historic ordination spread like wildfire, and while some reactions were favorable, most were not. Few of Antoinette’s female contemporaries, including Susan B. Anthony, considered her ministerial role beneficial in furthering the women’s rights movement. They viewed her ambitions suspiciously, skeptical of her desire to expand women’s opportunities in what they considered the antifeminist hierarchy of the church. Other friends and family regarded her ministerial work as downright bizarre and wondered why she couldn’t have chosen a more acceptable profession like teaching.
One by one, even the male church leaders who had initially supported Antoinette in her quest for ordination began to recant. Two years after her ordination, when Antoinette requested a certificate of authentication from Luther Lee, the minister who had preached the sermon at her ordination, he refused, backpedaling on his original support. “I do not see my way clear to give you such a paper as you ought to have as I did not ordain you,” Lee told her. “All I did was to preach a sermon.”6 Until the late nineteenth century, some historians questioned whether Antoinette should actually be considered the first ordained female minister, although that distinction has come to be accepted by most history and religion scholars today.
“Was There Any God?”
Antoinette thrived during the early months of her ministerial work in South Butler, but the smooth sailing did not last long. Ostracized by most of her female and male peers, she struggled with feelings of abandonment and isolation. Worse, she also began to doubt both the orthodox Christian doctrine she was expected to preach and her personal faith. Early in her tenure at South Butler, Antoinette realized her liberal emphasis on divine mercy did not fit particularly well with the more traditional and conservative fire-and-brimstone style of preaching that was expected. At the same time, she began to question the authority of the Bible and her own understanding of God as love.
By the spring of her first year, Antoinette was frantic. “Suddenly I found that the whole groundwork of my faith had dropped away from me,” she said. “I found myself absolutely believing in nothing. . . . Was there any God?”7 Less than a year after she began her pastor duties, Antoinette left South Butler to return to her parents’ house to rest. She never returned to ministry in an official capacity.
She did, however, return to public speaking. Although she was terrified that her exit from the church would be seen as evidence that her ordination had been a hoax, Antoinette no longer felt comfortable preaching in a church. Instead, she planned to rent a hall in New York City every Sunday, where she would preach the gospel to the masses. She also spent a significant amount of time visiting women in prisons, tenements, and asylums, then wrote about her experiences in a series of articles for the New York Tribune.
Despite her emphatic declaration that marriage would not interfere with her public speaking and writing, her marriage to Samuel Blackwell in 1856 and the subsequent birth of her five daughters (she also lost two children in infancy) did, in fact, dramatically impact her public speaking career. She wrote to Susan B. Anthony about the clothes she needed to sew for her daughters, her husband’s garments that required mending, and her dirty house, in addition to “the whole winter store of coal and provisions to be taken in, a garden to be covered up from the frost, seeds to save, label and put up for spring, bulbs to store away, and shrubs to transplant. . . . This, Susan, is woman’s sphere!”8 Something had to give, and in the end it was Antoinette’s public speaking aspirations. Her dream to preach the gospel in New York City was never fully realized.
From the confines of her own home, however, Antoinette discovered an occupation that better coincided with her family duties: writing. Between 1869 and 1915, she wrote a number of theological, philosophical, and metaphysical articles and books. Her first project was a compilation of essays entitled Studies in General Science, in which she examined the dispute between the new science of Darwinism and traditional Christian doctrine. She also published several articles addressing the position of women in American society, particularly the issue of how women could balance intellectual work with household duties. She proposed a radical solution: that men and women share child-rearing and household responsibilities, and she admitted that she and her husband adhered to such an arrangement in their own household. “Mr. Blackwell, who was engaged in business and might have fewer hours to give to home occupations, declared himself more than willing to help me with home duties. This promise he generously more than redeemed for almost fifty years,” Antoinette wrote after her husband’s death.9 In 1875 she published The Sexes Throughout Nature, arguably her most important book, in which she wrestled with the theory of evolution and gender differences.
An Untrodden Path
As her daughters matured and her parenting responsibilities eased, Antoinette reentered the public speaking circuit, lecturing on women’s suffrage and advocating for equal pay for female factory workers. She also returned to organized religion after a more than twenty-five-year absence, and in 1878 she was recognized as a minister by the Committee on Fellowship of the American Unitarian Association. Although she preached regularly as an itinerant Unitarian minister, she never worked as a parish minister again.
Antoinette continued to write well into her later years and published her last book, The Social Side of Mind and Action, at age ninety, six years before her death in 1921. Her prolific writing served not only the public but also Antoinette herself, allowing her the space to wrestle with many of the spiritual questions that had erupted during her brief parish ministry and clarifying her thoughts on faith and theology.
Some might look at Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s life and conclude that she failed to realize many of her dreams. After all, she served as a parish minister for less than twelve months, suffered through a significant faith crisis, and ultimately was not able to launch the speaking platform in New York City she had envisioned. Yet her life as a whole points to incredible perseverance and an unwavering dedication to her calling. In the face of daunting obstacles, Antoinette pressed on, determined.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell may not have perfected the balance of work and home, but she was among the first to venture successfully into uncharted territory. She navigated a male-dominated culture with endurance and grace, redefined the role of women in religion and ministry, and advocated for a woman’s right for intellectual satisfaction, not at the expense of domestic responsibility, but in harmony with it.10