Remembering Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

May 20, 1825 – November 5, 1921

She Stood Up in Church at Nine and Kept Speaking for a Lifetime

A CHILD OF THE REVIVALS

Antoinette Brown was born in a log cabin in Henrietta, New York, the seventh of ten children in a farming family swept into the revivals Charles Finney carried through the region. She preferred threshing to sewing and learned the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress at her grandmother's side. At nine years old she stood before the Congregational church, professed her faith in her own words, and was received by the elders as a full member. Soon she was speaking in the meetings.

A story handed down about her says that a year earlier she told her Sunday school teacher she meant to become a minister, that the teacher answered that the pulpit belonged to men, and that her mother pinned a small white ribbon inside her collar for her to hold on to. It comes to us through later retellings, and I share it as tradition. The record itself shows a girl who spoke up in church before she was ten.

OBERLIN AND THE OPEN BIBLE

In 1846 she enrolled at Oberlin College, finished the literary course the following year, and asked to enter the theology department. The faculty resisted, and for three years she needed special permission simply to speak in class while professors and classmates reminded her that Paul had told women to keep silent in church.

Her answer was to open the text. She wrote a careful exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12, arguing that Paul was correcting disorder in public worship, and the Oberlin Quarterly Review published it alongside a professor's rebuttal. Told that Scripture closed the door, she went to Scripture. She completed the theological course in 1850, and the college withheld both her degree and her license. Oberlin would honor her decades later with a master's degree in 1878 and a doctor of divinity in 1908.

EIGHTEEN TIMES IN NINETEEN DAYS

With the pulpit closed to her, she wrote for Frederick Douglass's North Star and spoke at the first National Woman's Rights Convention in Worcester in 1850. A license to preach finally came in 1851. She traveled constantly, and in one letter to her Oberlin friend Lucy Stone she reported speaking eighteen times in nineteen days across Wayne County, New York. On that same tour she missed a stagecoach, walked seven and a half miles through a snowstorm, and rose the next morning ready to go again.

Horace Greeley and Charles Dana offered her a substantial salary to hold Sunday services in a New York City hall. She chose a small Congregational church in rural South Butler.

SEPTEMBER 15, 1853

The Congregational clergy hesitated to ordain a woman, so the sermon fell to Luther Lee, a Wesleyan Methodist minister and a vocal advocate for women in theological education. He took Galatians 3:28 as his text and told the congregation that an ordinary sermon on such a day would be cowardly. Then he stated his proposition in one sentence: "Females have a God-given right to preach the Gospel." He added that ordination confers nothing God has withheld, and that the church had gathered simply to testify to what God had already done in her.

She was twenty-eight. Two months later she officiated at a wedding in Rochester, the first performed by an American woman minister. Writing about her new parish, she said the work suited her even better than she had expected and that her heart was full of hope.

Eight days before her ordination she had stood in Metropolitan Hall in New York City as a duly chosen delegate to the World's Temperance Convention. The chairman ruled that she had the same right to speak as any delegate, and a minority on the floor, many of them clergymen, drowned her out with hisses and shouting until the hall was cleared.

A LONELY PULPIT

The opposition she expected from men was joined by criticism from women in her own parish. Her closest friends in the women's movement, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, considered the church a poor use of her strength. Ten years would pass before another woman was ordained, and in the meantime she had no one to counsel her.

Then two infants died in her parish. The creed she had been handed required her to pronounce unbaptized children damned, and she could not bring herself to say it. After ten months she resigned, her health broken and her confidence in that creed shaken.

Her story carries a sober word for us, too. A calling needs a company. Antoinette had the call, the gift, and the courage. What she lacked in South Butler was an elder to sit beside her at two small graves and open the Scriptures with her. When God raises a pioneer, the rest of us are called to stand close.

THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED

Rest at the family farm in Henrietta restored her strength, and she returned to the lecture circuit. She spent a year serving in the slums and prisons of New York City and wrote about what she saw for the Tribune. On January 24, 1856, in the fieldstone house where she grew up, she married Samuel Blackwell. They had seven children, and five daughters grew to adulthood. Florence became a Methodist minister, and Edith and Ethel became physicians. During the years her children needed her most, Antoinette turned to writing, and in 1881 she was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the few women of her time to receive that recognition.

WHAT SHE LEFT IN OUR HANDS

She preached her last sermon at ninety. In 1920, at ninety-five, the last surviving delegate of the 1850 Worcester convention cast her first vote. She died in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on November 5, 1921.

Every woman who preaches, pastors, leads worship, or carries a prophetic word in an American church today walks through a door that opened in a village meetinghouse in Wayne County. The girl who stood up in church at nine heard God ask for her life, and she said yes before anyone told her she could. May we say ours as quickly, and may we surround the ones who say it with a family strong enough to keep them.