[Vision2020] An Even Earlier Ordained Woman ?

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

Someone from Pocatello sent me the following information about a woman ordained 10 years earlier. I stand corrected, although this Brown appears to be ordained by a single church rather than a denomination.

Antoinette Louisa Brown, later Antoinette Brown Blackwell (May 20, 1825 – November 5, 1921), was the first woman to be ordained as a minister in the United States.

She was a well-versed public speaker on the paramount issues of her time, and distinguished herself from her contemporaries with her use of religious faith in her efforts to expand women's rights.

Brown was born in Henrietta, New York, the daughter of Joseph Brown and Abby Morse. After daring to inject a prayer into her family's religious observance, she was accepted into her family's branch of the Congregational Church at age nine. She spoke in church in her youth. She studied at the Monroe County Academy and taught for a few years, but soon decided that God meant for her to become a minister.

Brown attended Oberlin College, which was a Christian school and the first coeducational college in the country. As a woman she was not permitted to learn public speaking or rhetoric, nor was she allowed to speak publicly in her coeducational courses. She graduated from Oberlin in 1847 and studied at the Oberlin Seminary until 1850, when she was refused a degree and ordination due to her gender.

Without a preaching license following graduation, Brown decided to pause her ministerial ambitions to write for Frederick Douglass' abolitionist paper, The North Star. She soon spoke at a women's rights convention, giving a speech that was well-received and served as the beginning of a speaking tour in which she would address issues such as abolition, temperance, and women's rights.

The Congregational Church of South Butler, New York inducted Brown as minister on September 15, 1853, making her the first woman ordained minister to a regular Protestant denomination in the United States. Not long after, she also became the first woman to officiate a message. She later left the Church due to illness coupled with discontent with some Congregational ideologies.