This Day in Religious History (Brown Blackwell Ordained First Woman Minister in U.S.)

September 15, 1853—A decade of education, public speaking and social activism culminated in Antoinette Louisa Brown being ordained the first female minister of a recognized denomination in the United States.

Brown (better known to history now as Antoinette Brown Blackwell, following her marriage three years later to businessman Samuel Blackwell) had to fight long and hard just for a chance at her position—then, once she had it, it all ended quicker than it had to.

Less than a year after her groundbreaking appointment as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Butler and Savannah, N.Y. (in the state’s Wayne County), she left her post for a reason becoming increasingly common in 19th-century America: theological disagreements with her flock. (Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson had parted ways with his congregation 20 years before, resigning from his position in the Unitarian Church, with many attributing it to his disagreement with policy about communion.)

When I first heard how quickly Blackwell had lost her position, it reminded me a little of Bernice Gera. Remember her? After considerable litigation, she finally had a chance to fulfill a dream—umpiring a baseball game—only to give it up, after a single professional game, when the other umps wouldn’t cooperate with her.

Women backing down in the face of rambunctious male opposition—not the first time that’s happened. But I know one part of humanity about which this is not true. One phrase, faithful reader. Think: Irish nun. Just let someone like, say, Earl Weaver—a manager of the old school, complete with clouds of dust kicked up, tobacco juice spit in every direction, expletives drawn from every written and unwritten dictionary on the planet—tangle with one of them. You’d see him walking back to the dugout, head down, hat not turned completely around like a crazy man but held meekly in his hands…

Well, the more I read about Blackwell, it didn’t turn out to be so simple. She had as much backbone as the Irish nuns of my youth. You had to, given everything she had taken. The same year she became a pastor, she was shouted down by a hostile audience when she attempted to speak at the Women’s Temperance Union Convention in New York City. (Women’s right to speak constituted a constant bone of contention in the abolitionist and temperance movements in those years.)

Blackwell formed part of an illustrious circle in the early women’s movement. Her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first female graduate of a medical school in the U.S. A brother-in-law married Lucy Stone, her close friend at Oberlin and the first woman in the U.S. to keep her name after marriage.

Yet another friend in the women’s movement was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at whose funeral Blackwell delivered the eulogy. (One of the few points on which the two friends disagreed was on liberalizing divorce. Stanton took the affirmative; Blackwell, the negative. Reading about their own marriages, you can’t help but think that their personal situations affected their views on this. Samuel Blackwell was consistently supportive of his wife’s activism and achievements; Henry Brewster Stanton was not.)

After she left her pastorate, Blackwell converted to Unitarianism. As the years went on, she published a steady stream of books related to science, philosophy, as well as a novel and poetry. It’s impossible not to respect her wide-ranging intellect.