Olympia Brown

Suffragist

  • Born: January 5, 1835
  • Birthplace: Prairie Ronde, Kalamazoo County, Michigan Territory (now in Michigan)
  • Died: October 23, 1926
  • Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland

American Protestant cleric and social reformer

Among the first Americans to demand that higher education be opened to women, Brown managed to graduate from college and become one of the first women ordained a minister. She was also prominent in the woman suffrage movement.

Areas of achievement Religion and theology, women’s rights

Early Life

Olympia Brown was the first of four children born to Asa and Lephia Brown. Her parents were pioneers who made the eight-hundred-mile trip from their native Vermont to live on the frontier in Michigan Territory during the year before she was born. In contrast to many of their neighbors, the Brown family was one in which education played a vital role. When the children were young, they were taught by their mother, a woman passionate about education, who pasted together articles from newspapers and journals to make books for her children.

Lephia and Asa Brown were also strong in their religious faith, Universalism. They taught their children the main tenants of this religion—a detail that would greatly influence Olympia’s later life. In 1837, when Michigan attained statehood and began a state-wide public school system, the Browns built a one-room schoolhouse on their property and took the necessary steps to secure pupils and teachers. After attending Cedar Park Seminary in nearby Schoolcraft, Michigan, the fifteen-year-old Olympia taught at the family schoolhouse. At this time in her life, she experienced sexual discrimination for the first time: She wanted to continue her education, but few colleges admitted women.

After many debates with her father, Olympia and her younger sister left home in 1854 to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Although the courses she took deepened her hunger for learning, she left Mount Holyoke after only one year because of its rigid Calvinistic atmosphere and the sexual discrimination she perceived behind the facade of female education. Once again, she struggled to find an institution that would admit women, and she suffered many rejections. Finally, when she was twenty years old, she was accepted at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Antioch was an institution that imposed no religious conversion on its students.

Life’s Work

As had been the case in Brown’s education up to that moment, Antioch’s educational system was discriminatory, as male and female students were given different assignments. Brown’s religious background told her that all humans were created equal, so she refused to accept the system and became the only female student to complete the men’s assignments, orations on various topics, a discipline taboo at that time for American women. Brown also was responsible for bringing to the school other women speakers. It was, in fact, while listening to one of the few women ministers in America that Brown sensed her own destiny.

After graduating from Antioch in 1860, Brown struggled for entrance into a theological college. Once admitted, she again endured sexual harassment. She also struggled to perfect her speaking voice and had to fight for ordination. She finally was ordained at the Universalist Divinity School of St. Lawrence University in 1863. Within a year, she received the call to her first full-time parish in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. This assignment began a series of assignments to parishes struggling so hard that male ministers turned them down or gave up on them.

Although Brown’s first official work for the women’s movement began while she was attending Antioch College, it was not until her tenure at Weymouth Landing that she began winning national prominence for her role in the movement’s 1867 Kansas campaign, which sought to secure the vote for women in that newly settled territory. Although she had been given many promises concerning arrangements and accommodations that would be in place during the campaign, Brown faced disorganization, a collapsing support base in the Republican Party, and sweltering heat. She also worked almost entirely on her own, as the promised arrangements for a traveling companion also fell through. In Kansas, she was alone, an unmarried woman, hundreds of miles from home and within fifty miles of deadly wars between settlers and Native Americans. She was completely dependent on pioneer farmers for her conveyance, housing, support, and, at times, the means of escape in the face of sometimes hostile crowds. Although the Kansas campaign ultimately failed to achieve its objective, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was so impressed with the fear that the ninety-pound Olympia Brown aroused among opposition speakers that she began trying to persuade Brown to work full-time in the suffrage movement.

Brown chose to remain in her field for the time being, accepting her next religious call to the Universalist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1870. Three years later, she married John Henry Willis. Although those around her had feared that marriage would distract her from both the ministry and the women’s cause, Brown discovered in her husband one who supported her on every front. He changed his own job to meet the demands of hers and relocated when her work made it necessary. He also supported her then radical decision to keep her maiden name, Brown.

In 1874, Brown gave birth to her first child, John Parker Willis, and then discovered that while she had been on maternity leave some members of her congregation had begun lobbying for a male minister. Although the majority of the congregation supported Brown, she resigned. By 1876, Brown had given birth to a second child, Gwendolen Brown Willis. In 1878, she was appointed to a struggling church in Racine, Wisconsin. In her hands, the Racine parish not only survived, it flourished as an educational and cultural center. The Racine church would prove, however, to be Brown’s last full-time ministerial position.

Although Brown never completely quit the ministry, she dedicated her final decades to full-time work within the fight for women’s equality. She was active in many organizations, including the Wisconsin Suffrage Association, the Wisconsin Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Federal Suffrage Association, the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the Woman’s Party.

During the winter of 1917, when she was more than seventy years old, Brown participated in a march on Washington, D.C., in support of woman suffrage. She was among the people who witnessed several men attacking the marchers and then saw President Woodrow Wilson have the women arrested, instead of their attackers. The following year, she again marched in Washington, this time personally burning some of the president’s speeches before the crowds. Finally, in 1920, when she was eighty-five years old, she was able to vote in her first election. She then dedicated her remaining six years to worldwide equality by active participation in the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, the League of Nations, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Significance

Although Olympia Brown had relatives who ran an Underground Railroad station in their home, she herself never knew the plight of American slaves at first hand. She also had no firsthand knowledge of the abuses of factory workers or of the hardships of immigrants. Nevertheless, hers is an important story in American history. She lived on the American frontier; she shocked college administrators by wearing the costume named after Amelia Bloomer and refusing chaperones; she was ordained into the ministry at a time when the mere idea of such a thing was heresy to many; she knew and was respected by some of the most important leaders in the woman suffrage movement; and she was one of the few prominent figures of the movement still alive in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.

Olympia Brown experienced sexual discrimination both within the educational system and within churches. During her lifetime, she argued against prevailing notions of womanhood, accused novelists of portraying women as insipid, and railed against the notion that young girls should be taught to be “little ladies.” At a time in American history when women of her class were expected to be “quiet angels” in their homes, she was politically astute and vocal, taking on the weaknesses in the political positions of prominent figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, in their presence. Through it all, she refused to let go of her personal doctrine that all people are created equal and that women are people, too.

Bibliography

Baker, Jean H., ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002. A solidly researched work that places Brown in the national struggle for woman suffrage.

Brown, Olympia. Suffrage and Religious Principle: Speeches and Writings of Olympia Brown. Edited by Dana Greene. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983. Collection of some of Brown’s major writings and speeches.

Buhle, Mari Jo, and Paul Buhle, eds. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Gage, and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Like Baker’s book, this is an important work that helps place Brown in the larger picture of woman suffrage. Many readers should find this updated version more reader-friendly than the original source, which was published in 1868.

Coté, Charlotte. Olympia Brown: The Battle for Equality. Racine, Wis.: Mother Courage Press, 1988. A full-length biography, this book also includes two of Brown’s best-remembered addresses and lists the whereabouts of most of the other documents by and about Brown, most of which are located at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Emerson, Dorothy May, ed. Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776-1936. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2000. This work contains a biographical sketch of Brown and Brown’s own “The Higher Education of Women.” The book also confirms Brown’s status as the first woman ordained to the Universalist ministry.

May, 1869: Woman Suffrage Associations Begin Forming.