Hearing Women Speak: Antoinette Brown Blackwell and the Dilemma of Authority

Antoinette Brown Blackwell's work, especially her scientific writings, are prescient of contemporary, standpoint theory critiques of Enlightenment ways of knowing. Her ongoing struggle for an authority with which to speak led her to confront biblical teachings that forbade women's ministry and later led her to challenge the use of evolutionary theory to deny equality to women. In both cases, she attempted to meld the dominant discourse to her own uses, gaining the authority she needed to argue for women's equality. In her biblical arguments, she submitted Pauline texts to historical analysis by explicitly limiting their universal authority. Similarly, she critiqued the male bias evident in evolutionary science, undercutting its supposed objectivity. In so doing, though, Brown Blackwell undermined the universal basis of authority that she claimed for herself and encoded into her work conflicts about the basis of authority and women's equality.