Antoinette Brown's ordination by the Congregational Church broke a barrier that had kept women out of formal religious leadership for centuries in American Protestantism. A graduate of Oberlin College, where she had to fight to be allowed to study theology at all, Brown went on to a long career as minister, abolitionist, and suffragist, living to see women finally win the vote in 1920.
Antoinette Brown enrolled at Oberlin College in the 1840s determined to study theology, only to find that the school, though progressive enough to admit women, refused to let her complete the formal theological course or grant her a license to preach. She persisted anyway, attending lectures unofficially and preaching where she could find a pulpit willing to have her.
Her ordination as a Congregationalist minister in South Butler, New York, made her the first woman formally ordained by a mainstream Protestant denomination in the United States, a milestone that predated the broader women's rights movement's major legislative victories by decades. Brown went on to marry Samuel Blackwell, brother of pioneering physician Elizabeth Blackwell, and spent her long life entwined with reform movements: abolition, temperance, and suffrage. She lived to age 96, long enough to cast a vote in 1920 after the Nineteenth Amendment finally granted women suffrage, a right she had spent nearly seventy years fighting for.
Key people: Antoinette Brown Blackwell