Brown, Olympia (1835–1926)

First woman ordained by a denominational authority (Universalist) in America, whose dual career set a precedent for women in ordained ministry and for obtaining enfranchisement. Name variations: Olympia Brown Willis. Born Olympia Brown on January 5, 1835, in Prairie Ronde, near Schoolcraft, Michigan; died on October 23, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland; daughter of Asa (a farmer) and Lephia (Brown) Brown (a housewife); attended Mt. Holyoke Seminary (1854–55); graduated from Antioch College, 1860, and St. Lawrence Theological School, 1863; married John Henry Willis, April 1873; children: Henry Parker Willis (b. 1874); Gwendolen Brown Willis (b. 1876).

Graduated from St. Lawrence Theological School, one of the first women to obtain a theology degree, and ordained by Universalist Association (1863); was a founding member of American Equal Rights Association (1866); helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association (1868); helped found the Federal Suffrage Association (1892); assisted in the final editing of The Woman's Bible (1898); reorganized the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association and served as president for 28 years; was a member and activist for the Congressional Union (1913), which became the Woman's Party (1916); served as publisher of Racine Times-Call (1893–1900); helped found and wrote regularly for the suffrage newspaper The Wisconsin Citizen.

Selected publications: authored the history of Kansas women's suffrage campaign of 1867 for History of Woman Suffrage (Vol. II, 1881, 1882), "Democratic Ideals—A Sketch of Clara Bewick Colby" (1917), Acquaintances, Old and New, Among Reformers (1911), and an unpublished autobiography.

Growing up on the Michigan frontier during the middle of the 19th century, Olympia Brown had the support of a mother who believed in equality for women and a family who valued education. In 1849, at age 14, she discovered an outlet for her early ambitions when she founded a newspaper, along with her sisters and brother and two cousins, named The Family Museum. Brown discovered quickly that she liked to express her views, and her forthright editorials show a candor and conviction that foreshadowed the uncompromising principles she later maintained for herself and others. The habits of free activity, inquiry, and expression developed in the environment of her home; they were the source of both courage and conflict as she grew into the roles she pursued throughout her life: as a renowned religious lecturer and staunch worker for women's suffrage.

One early conflict for Olympia was the belief of her father Asa that an elementary education was enough for Olympia. Asa and Lephia Brown had left the Green Mountains of Vermont for the open farmland to the west soon after their marriage in 1834, and Olympia was their first child, born in 1835, followed by two more daughters and a son. Olympia was still small when Asa took her with him on rides to other farms, as he gathered support to erect a building and hire a teacher for the community. But in 1849 her father had reservations about sending Olympia and her sister Oella into town for further schooling, until his older daughter persuaded him that the education would allow them to be self-supporting rather than dependent on him if they did not marry. Thus, in the fall of 1849, Olympia and Oella became students at Cedar Park Seminary in nearby Schoolcraft, commuting in good weather and staying with relatives in town during the week in winter.

In Schoolcraft, Olympia's appetite for speaking her mind soon provoked a controversy. Despite women like Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Lucy Stone , who were then successes on the lecture circuit, public speaking was generally considered improper behavior for females; while boys at Olympia's new school were required to give speeches and debates, girls were only allowed to read prepared texts. When Brown persuaded a male cousin to present a resolution that girls be allowed to debate, members of the teaching staff were so appalled they threatened to quit, and Olympia declined to push the point.

In 1850, at age 15, Brown taught for one term, then returned to classes in Schoolcraft, knowing she wanted to do something different with her life. Once again she convinced her father to allow continued studies, and she searched for a university or college that accepted female students. Lephia discovered Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and, in the fall of 1854, Olympia and Oella set out for the school in Massachusetts, headed for what would soon prove one of the most unpleasant years of their young lives.

Mt. Holyoke had been established in 1837 by Mary Lyon , at a time when public sentiment was so antagonistic to higher education for females that the founder had felt it necessary to monitor virtually every activity. In 1854, the school's regulations still included many petty and rigid prohibitions against lingering in doorways and windows, speaking above a whisper in the halls, leaving one's room during study hours, sitting on one's bed. An atmosphere of mistrust was created by the encouragement of students and staff members to report any observed infractions.

The Brown sisters, despite extra studying done at home, found they would not be allowed to sit for examinations to pass their first year's coursework. But they joined a group of young women who were forming a literary society and invited their teachers to attend a meeting. After Olympia and Oella had presented a debate at one of the meetings, they were called in and told that the society must be disbanded or they would have to leave the school. A debate was considered inappropriate behavior because it encouraged opposite viewpoints, and the society risked making the women too independent.

Mt. Holyoke had also retained the evangelical intensity of its founder, which Olympia Brown found confusing. Encouraged by her mother's Universalist teaching of God as full of love and compassion rather than vengeance and punishment, she was so disturbed by visiting preachers speaking of hellfire and brimstone that she wrote for guidance to the Universalist Association in Boston. A letter from her mother gave her the strength to maintain her sense of open-mindedness. Concerned that her daughter would "become the dupe of superstitious bigotry," Lephia wrote, "I suspect the reason why they have you go so slow in your studies is that the mind unoccupied may more easily become their prey." She also suggested a visit to relatives in Vermont, which helped Olympia to relax, but after that year she could not face a return to Mt. Holyoke.

Her father agreed to send her elsewhere, and Olympia chose Antioch College in Ohio, which had a liberal outlook, emphasized character development as well as education, and required no religious instruction. Entering in the fall of 1855, she found the students compatible and professors who encouraged reason and tolerance. The school drew renowned lecturers on controversial topics of the day, including the abolition of slavery and advocacy of women's rights. Brown was instrumental in bringing to campus the Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell , no relation to Olympia but an important role model for her later work in both ordained ministry and women's rights.

After graduating from Antioch in 1860, Brown spent the summer and fall writing essays on religion and women's rights while searching for a theological school to attend. Her applications brought letter after letter of rejection and ridicule. At Christmas, while on a holiday visit with friends in Cleveland, Brown was recruited to help with a petition drive in support of women's property rights that was to be presented to the Ohio state legislature. She surprised organizers with her success at gaining the support of entrepreneurs, was invited to Columbus to assist the state leaders, and then given the honor of carrying the petition into the legislative chamber when it was presented.

In 1861, Brown was admitted to the Universalists' St. Lawrence Theological Seminary. There she proved to have a gift for oratory. Though at first her soft, high-pitched voice was a target for taunts, she silenced her classmates with her sharp wit and accurate critiques. At Christmas, when an area church was in need of a preacher, Brown was hired. Resolutely preparing her services, she soon overcame the initial resistance of members who had not wanted to welcome a "woman preacher."

In spring 1863, Brown requested ordination from the Universalist denomination; the glowing endorsement of one regional board member who had heard her preach overcame all opposition. On June 25, 1863, she became the first woman ordained by any denominational authority in the United States. (Ten years earlier, Antoinette Brown Blackwell had been ordained by the authority of an individual Congregational parish.) Olympia Brown's first ministry was to a small congregation in Marchfield, Vermont, near her beloved Green Mountains, another small church in East Montpelier was soon added.

That fall, she resigned to help nurse her brother in Michigan. After his recovery, she returned east, to Boston, where she had heard of a man who could help correct her speaking deficiencies with vocal and physical exercises. To fund her studies, she sought another church. The head of the Universalist Association, despite his personal opposition, told her of a congregation in need, and Brown was invited to preach. Approved on the first congregational vote, she was formally installed as minister for the Universalist Church in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts, on July 8, 1864, and served there the next five years. While there was some initial opposition to her ministry, it soon ended. Her sermons and her interest in the congregation and community caused the church to grow, and she instituted lecture programs that made it a meeting place for speakers from Boston and elsewhere. She also grew increasingly involved in the women's rights movement.

Susan B. Anthony had read some of Olympia Brown's essays, and in 1866 Brown was invited to a convention in New York City, where she gave her first speech on women's rights and helped to organize the American Equal Rights Association. After hearing Anthony, she also taught herself to speak extemporaneously, and that summer she met Lucy Stone in Albany, New York, where their discussion about Stone's refusal to take her husband's name would affect the decision Brown was to later make at the time of her own marriage.

By 1867, a major campaign for women's suffrage was underway in Kansas. When Anthony asked Brown to canvass the state, Brown was given leave by the Weymouth Landing church and crossed the frontier from town to farmstead, not always in the most comfortable or sanitary conditions, gaining recognition as a speaker. Debating publicly with men on the issue of women's right to vote, she converted many to the cause, and although some newspapers took her words out of context and degraded her position, she gained the backing of others.

The Civil War was not long over, and the debate in Kansas centered on whether to approve universal suffrage including women, or only the addition of African-American males to the voting rolls. Brown was accused of championing the rights of women over those of black men. The Republican Party, which had championed the anti-slavery cause and also raised the hopes of many people for women's suffrage, now supported those who were appealing for the black male vote over any vote for women, and Brown saw this as a betrayal, which was to prejudice her view of both Republicans and many working for the suffrage of African-American men for years to come.

Women's suffrage was defeated in Kansas, and Brown returned to her church in Weymouth Landing, where she soon found that parish work no longer brought her satisfaction. When Anthony offered her a salary of $1,000 a year to "take the World for your Pastoral Charge" by speaking full time for women's rights, Brown agonized over her decision. She admired Anthony and her co-worker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton , but she believed that three such strong-willed women with such distinct views about women's rights were likely to find themselves constantly at odds, and she finally reached the conclusion that her true calling was the ministry. For the next 20 years, her work for women's rights was to remain on the fringes of the movement.

Regarding the conflict over universal suffrage, major differences between Anthony and Brown had in fact already arisen. Anthony had advised Brown against championing women over African-American men, although she and others were sometimes to use arguments later that were similar to Brown's. After a meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, where Brown found herself in a public disagreement with Frederick Douglass, she decided the debate was futile and became involved in helping organize the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA). At its first convention, she cautioned: "This is a woman suffrage convention, and as such, members will work toward the ballot for women to the exclusion of all other issues. Only those willing to work for that cause are invited to join." Her sentiment was not universal among NEWSA members, however, and eventually the movement splintered into the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. Brown, fearing each would be run by "a small clique of people with selfish purposes," refused to join either organization, saying that she would work for the cause on her "own hook," as opportunities arose.

While Brown refused to compromise her principles, her confidence in her own position was generally balanced by a fairness that was a hallmark of both her ministry and her suffrage work. She recognized that her inflexibility and aggressiveness were often offensive to others, and through the years she won and lost many colleagues and friends because of outspoken and sometimes unpopular stands. But she also believed firmly in the necessity for many views and voices to be heard in the course of any movement for change.

By 1869, Brown felt her work in Weymouth Landing was done. Despite the vocal opposition of a small group, she was accepted to a new position at Bridgeport, Connecticut, at a salary of $1,500 per year, but she soon noted that the people of the new parish were "apathetic and narrow-minded." Four years later, resistance to her persisted, and the unity of the congregation was threatened. She only decided to stay another year because she was about to marry John Henry Willis.

Willis had met Brown at Weymouth Landing and followed her to Bridgeport, but her family had opposed the union. Lephia worried that marriage would have an adverse effect on the position her daughter had worked so hard to achieve, while workers in women's rights feared the effect on her suffrage work. Once Brown made up her mind, it was unlikely to be changed, however, and Willis proved to be fully supportive of his wife, financially and domestically.

A son and a daughter were born to the couple while they were still in Bridgeport. But as opposition to Brown's ministry became more open, dissenters put restrictions on the church budget that led the trustees to release her. Brown continued to write essays on religion and equal rights, and occasionally spoke on behalf of women's suffrage from 1876 to 1878, until a visit to the Universalist Church of the Good Shepherd in Racine, Wisconsin, brought about an important change.

Impressed by the city, the people, the business climate, and the view of Lake Michigan, Brown decided to move west, where she remained pastor of the church until 1887, maintaining a favorite lakeview residence until her death. Willis invested in a publishing company, whose publications included The Racine Times-Call newspaper, and Lephia Brown, now separated from her husband, joined their family. Her presence in the home enabled her daughter to travel as a preacher and to continue the suffrage campaign. Brown became active in regional Universalist meetings, wrote articles that increased her reputation, and built the Racine church into an educational and social center. In 1880, approached by Anthony, Brown wrote the history of the 1867 Kansas campaign for the second volume of History of Woman Suffrage.

In 1883, Brown joined the faltering Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association. The following year, she was elected its president, a position she held for the next 28 years. In the 1885–86 legislative session, after a limited women's suffrage bill was passed and ratified by voters, it remained unclear whether women were eligible to vote in all elections or only school elections, and Brown approached Anthony for help in getting out the vote in Wisconsin in 1887. When Anthony advised Brown to lead the effort, Brown was faced once again with the choice she had confronted 20 years before, of whether to devote herself to women's suffrage or the ministry. This time she decided, at age 52, to give her time to the enfranchisement for women, and she resigned her Racine pastorate.

In the 1887 general election, Brown was joined by a few women in testing the legal limits of the law. They were refused twice by the inspector at the polls, because separate ballots had not been provided for the women. Despite an internal debate about the effects of a loss, the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association filed suit to challenge the action; they won in the initial hearing but lost in the state supreme court, and another 15 years would pass before Wisconsin met its obligation to provide separate ballots for women.

With the support of her husband and mother, Brown now traveled extensively and wrote for The Wisconsin Citizen, a suffrage newspaper she had helped to establish. Some of her letters addressed the social restrictions she still found within the suffrage movement, while demonstrating her wry and forthright humor. Addressing rumors about her own behavior, she wrote: "I have never struggled to force my ballot into the box…. The women at the Circuit Court in Racine behaved with the utmost dignity and propriety. They kicked up no dust (as reported by the Herald), they did nothing but listen in silence." Later, she fended off concerns about her family while she campaigned: "I would like everyone to know that my children are fine. They are being carefully watched over by their father and grandmother and a private tutor is training them in Greek and Latin."

In the mid-1880s, Brown was drawn into another controversy. Proponents of women's suffrage became divided over how to meet the challenge of cultural differences resulting from the influx of immigrants who were becoming naturalized citizens. Many immigrants had customs and beliefs that kept women subservient. In condemning the rights of the new citizens to vote as long as they opposed women's suffrage, Brown alienated many colleagues.

In 1889, when the National and the American Woman's Suffrage Associations voted to merge, Brown saw the prospect of more organizational power struggles at the expense of suffrage and felt further estranged from the mainstream. She refused a request from Anthony for support, and she sent remarks at the time of Anthony's 70th birthday celebration that reflected her lingering resentment. Later, however, when Anthony asked her to join a campaign trip, she willingly agreed.

From 1887 to 1893, Brown's suffrage work continued. Reporters who had once made her a subject of ridicule now wrote that she "warms and mellows and ripens with the years" and "makes more and more eloquent speeches and is more and more lovable in character." In 1893, after Lephia suffered a nervous breakdown, Brown remained at home. Shortly afterward, Willis died of a stroke, and for the next several years, Olympia ran the publishing business, nursed her mother, took on a small pastorate, spoke in other churches, and also assisted in the final editing of The Woman's Bible, produced by Stanton.

After her mother's death in 1900, Brown spent winters with her son or her daughter in the East, and summers in Racine. As her own family dwindled with the deaths of two siblings, and her generation of the women's movement numbered fewer and fewer, she fought off loneliness by writing and lecturing, encouraging young college women to become involved in suffrage work. She published two books and a history of women's suffrage in Wisconsin. Encouraged by friends and family, she began an autobiography but had so little interest in the past that she left it for her daughter to complete. She preferred spending her time on gardening and cooking.

Ever controversial, Brown was in her 80s when she marched with Alice Paul in the Woman's Party protests, which were scorned as unladylike by many suffrage workers. When the women's suffrage amendment was finally passed and ratified by Congress, in August 1920, Brown noted that the ballot did not create equal rights, it only gave women voting rights, and urged women to work for an equal rights amendment. In the presidential election on November 2, 1920, among the millions of women casting their national ballots for the first time, Olympia Brown and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were the only survivors of the first generation of suffragists.

A few weeks earlier, on September 12, Brown had preached her last sermon at the Racine church. Entitled "The Opening Doors," it pointed out reforms that had happened in the 40 years since she moved there. In 1926, at 91, she took a trip to Europe with her daughter, Gwendolen. Perhaps feeling free to break from the somber appearance of a pastor, she bought a hat of dark purple silk, fringed with pansies, and a shawl of black Chantilly lace. After a brief illness, Olympia died that fall and was buried in Racine. Tributes came from across the country and newspapers marked the event with moving editorials, recalling the barriers she had broken as a minister, public speaker and suffrage worker.

In her later life, Brown wondered if she had made the right decision by staying in the ministry rather than devoting her time to the suffrage movement, but she had never really neglected either. Throughout her life, the two vocations had been woven together; in her personal ministry, improving the status of women meant improving the world. As one eulogist remarked at her funeral, perhaps the tribute that would please Olympia Brown most would be for every woman to vote in the next election.

sources:

Coté, Charlotte. Olympia Brown: The Battle for Equality. Racine, WI: Mother Courage Press, 1988.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. II. NY: Fowler and Wells, Publishers, 1881, 1882.

suggested reading:

The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir. Edited and with an introduction by Alice S. Rossi. NY: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. Vols. I & II. NY: Fowler and Wells, Publishers, 1881, 1882; Vols. III & IV. Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1886, 1902; Vols. V & VI. NY: National American Woman's Suffrage Association, 1922.

collections:

Correspondence and papers collected at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; additional information available from Racine County (Wisconsin) Historical Society and Museum, and from the Unitarian Universalist Association, Boston, Massachusetts.

Margaret L. Meggs , Assistant to the Director, Women's Studies Program, Vanderbilt University, and lecturer in Women's Studies, Middle Tennessee State University