"Dont DONT D-O-N-T" to "I Do": Antoinette Brown Blackwell's Relationship with Marriage

Like many female abolitionism and women's suffrage activists in the mid- nineteenth century, Antoinette Brown (1825–1921) feared marriage's potential limitations on her personal ambition. Many feminist activists of the nineteenth century campaigned primarily for women's legal rights. Brown believed in the holistic equality of women in marriage, motherhood, and career, with equal pay for equal work. She also advocated shared domestic responsibility, including housekeeping and childrearing.

Brown later married Samuel Blackwell, a fellow abolitionist and suffrage advocate, who affirmed her pursuit of holistic feminine equality (intellectual, spiritual, and legal) and domestic egalitarianism (marriage, motherhood, and career). Because Blackwell respected his wife's work, her career flourished throughout their marriage. They both remained at home with their children on several occasions, and he shared equally in domestic responsibilities. She often sent her children to stay with relatives, permitting freedom for career travel. Marriage did not impede Antoinette Brown Blackwell's career; rather, it offered additional support for her work.

Raised in the burned-over district of New York, Congregationalist Antoinette Brown received tremendous encouragement from her family to pursue education. Her parents enrolled her in a coeducational school as a teenager. She later saved her own money to attend Oberlin College, known prior to 1850 as Oberlin Collegiate Institute, one of the most progressive universities in the country because of its abolitionist views.

While Oberlin sanctioned equality for African Americans, its women's and men's programs existed separately, and Oberlin did not offer women access to the same education as men. The college claimed openness to coeducation, yet women's curriculum was limited to literature, art, and culture. Women were held to a higher standard of conduct than male students. In accordance with social propriety, women were not permitted to speak in mixed company.

Denied opportunity to speak even in class, Brown and schoolmate Lucy Stone (1818–1893), a Garrisonian abolitionist and progressive women's rights activist who would later become Brown's sister-in-law, established a literary and debate society where they "learned to stand and speak."¹ Eventually permitted to participate fully in classes by Charles Finney, the president of Oberlin College and a prominent Second Great Awakening revivalist who had evangelized Brown's father, Brown and Stone pursued public speaking opportunities: Brown a pulpit for preaching, and Stone a podium for advocating abolitionism and women's suffrage.

After completing her Ladies' Degree Program in 1847, Brown remained at Oberlin to attend theological classes, in spite of discouragement from family, colleagues, and even Stone. Oberlin awarded her neither credit for her coursework nor a diploma upon completion of the program in 1850. She was restricted from delivering a commencement speech, though elected by her classmates to deliver the graduation address. She was also not ordained upon completion of coursework, although male graduates were offered ordination.

Instead, Brown pursued preaching opportunities and ordination after coursework, facing ardent opposition to her right to speak publicly as a female. Perpetually denied a pulpit because of her gender, she advocated for women's rights as an avenue for opening the pulpit to women. She participated in women's rights conferences and speaking tours, during which she encountered many belligerent male clergy and insulting newspaper reporters.

These speaking tours led her to the Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, which took particular interest in her. The church had been without a pastor for some time and had even previously called a black pastor and a seminary student pastor, demonstrating their openness to nontraditional leadership, even if motivated by desperation. South Butler called her as their pastor in 1853, and she became America's first ordained female minister. She struggled to find a minister to perform her ordination; even former Oberlin professors refused to participate for fear of social stigma. Moreover, even friends of Brown's, like Stone, hesitated to attend the ordination for fear of negative association. In a ceremony officiated by Lee Luther, Brown was ordained in 1853. Those opposed to her ordination denied its legitimacy, though newspaper coverage often referred to her as...