Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell

• Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell
• Born: May 20, 1825
• Died: November 5, 1921

The first ordained female minister in the United States, author, and suffragist, was born in Henrietta, New York, the fourth daughter and seventh of ten children of Joseph Brown, a prosperous farmer and justice of the peace, and Abby (Morse) Brown, a descendant of the Puritan Samuel Morse. Her father, originally from Connecticut, was a strong supporter of liberal causes, including abolition and moral reform. The area in which the family lived was deeply influenced by evangelical revivals, and her parents and older brothers and sisters were already members of the Congregational Church when Antoinette Brown made a public confession of faith at the age of nine and was accepted as a full church member.

Nettie, as she was known by her family, attended the district school from the age of three and then went on to Monroe County Academy, the first public high school in the state. After graduation she taught for several years in the surrounding community. In 1846, with the full support of her family, she entered Oberlin College, the first coeducational college in the country. There she became a close friend of her future sister-in-law, feminist Lucy Stone, and became a strong supporter of women’s rights. After graduating from the nondegree literary course in 1847, she decided to stay on at Oberlin for a degree in theology. Despite objections from her family and the college’s staff because of her sex, she completed the three-year theology course. She was refused a student’s license to preach, however, and was not allowed officially to graduate in 1850.

During her studies at Oberlin, Antoinette Brown had taught at Rochester Academy in Michigan and made lecture tours in Ohio and New York State. These experiences only strengthened her determination to become a minister. After leaving Oberlin, she lectured on the women’s rights movement, abolition, and temperance in New England and the Midwest. In 1853 she was a delegate to the World Temperance Convention in New York City but was not allowed to speak. On occasion she preached in certain progressive Unitarian churches, but in general most clergymen were hostile to her. Finally, however, on September 15, 1853, the First Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, ordained her, and she became the first female minister in a recognized denominational church.

She held that position for a year, resigning when she found that her religious views, especially on infant damnation and other Calvinisttenets, were far too liberal for the orthodox congregation Eventually she became a Unitarian. In 1855 she went to New York City and worked with the poor and underprivileged in tenements and prisons. She wrote of her experiences in articles that first appeared in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and were later collected in a book, Shadows of Our Social System (1856).

On January 24, 1856, Antoinette Brown married Samuel Charles Blackwell of Cincinnati, a businessman and brother of the pioneer physicians Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and of the suffragist editor Henry Browne Blackwell, the husband of Lucy Stone. Samuel Blackwell supported and encouraged his wife’s views on women’s rights and social reforms. They settled initially in New York City but moved to Newark, New Jersey, a year later and eventually established their home in Somerville, New Jersey. The Blackwells had seven children, and five daughters survived infancy.

Blackwell’s repeated pregnancies limited her outside activities to occasional public lectures, but she used the time to continue her intellectual and theological studies. She began to write and in 1869 published Studies in General Sciences; this was followed by The Sexes Throughout Nature (1875); The Physical Basis of Immortality (1876); The Philosophy of Individuality (1893); a novel, The Island Neighbors (1871); and a book of poems, Sea Drift; or, Tribute to the Ocean (1902). Her writings frequently expressed her moderate feminist opinions. In her view men and women were equal but not identical in feelings or attitudes. She wanted women to have equal opportunities for education in order to make their proper contribution to society and to have more jobs available to them. Every woman, She argued, should have an occupation. She urged equality in marriage but for religious reasons was strongly opposed to divorce. And, as a theologian, she believed that if the Bible were interpreted correctly, and not taken too literally, it would disprove the commonly held belief that women were inferior to men.

In 1878, when her husband was having financial problems, Blackwell returned to the lecture circuit, traveling extensively for the next two years. She also worked for the American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote for Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal, and was vice president of the Association for the Advancement of Women.

In 1896 the Blackwells moved back to New York City. Samuel Blackwell died in 1901, and after a series of moves, Antoinette Blackwell settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she helped to establish All Souls’ Unitarian Church, serving as its pastor from 1908 to 1915. The last years of her life, despite her failing health, were devoted to working for woman suffrage. She died at ninety-six, having lived long enough to exercise at last, in 1920, her right to vote. She was cremated and her ashes were buried in Elizabeth.

Blackwell’s papers are housed among the Blackwell Family Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; the Library of Congress; the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; and at Syracuse University. Her writings, in addition to those noted above, include The Making of the Universe (1914) and The Social Side of Mind and Action (1915). There are biographies by L. Kerr, The Lady in the Pulpit (1951), and E. Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1983). For additional information, see F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967); E. A. Dean, Great Women of the Christian Faith (1958); E. R. Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967); and B. G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (1978). For her suffrage activities see E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 1 and 2 (1881). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1929) and Notable American Women (1971). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, November 6, 1921.