Who is olympia brown

Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other leading figures of the suffrage movement, and traveled to Hartford and Washington to testify before various legislative committees. She actively spread the suffrage word in Bridgeport through petition drives and other efforts. In , they expanded their efforts beyond the First Universalist congregation with meetings around Bridgeport. They also called on local ministers to speak out against women ministers generally and Brown in particular.

Though still a small minority, James and his group successfully lobbied to get an injunction placed on the church. The success of the opposition group was as big a blow as Brown had yet endured, but she moved on without missing a beat.

She remained active in organizations such as the National Woman Suffrage Association and continued traveling, lecturing, and testifying on behalf of the cause she held so dear. Brown gave birth to a daughter in and remained in Bridgeport with her husband and children for nearly three years after leaving the Universalist Church. She finally accepted a ministry position in Wisconsin at the end of Brown was still participating in suffrage activities in when legislators ratified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

Olympia Brown died six years later, on October 23, , in Baltimore, at the age of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio caught her interest. Antioch was the first co-educational college in the United States to offer the same curriculum to both men and women. Antioch was the first college to appoint a woman to its faculty, and it was among the first to offer an equal education to African Americans. At that time, Antioch College was run by Horace Mann, a strong advocate for education reform.

While an undergraduate at Antioch, Olympia Brown helped arrange for Antoinette Brown Blackwell to speak to the students. Blackwell had graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, but was refused a license to preach because of her gender.

Career in Religion After graduating from Antioch in , Olympia Brown decided her calling was to become a minister. Several schools rejected her application, until the Theological School of St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York agreed to admit her as a student. However, Dr. Ebenezer Fisher, dean of the Theological School, tried to discourage her from enrolling. While he believed that the ministry was not a proper place for women, Dr.

Brown also faced opposition from fellow students and wives of the faculty. The men in her class worried that admitting women to the ministry would diminish their roles. Brown took it all as a challenge. People do not become pioneers by giving up easily. While a student, she preached in nearby Ogdensburg whenever she had a break from school.

A church in Heuvelton offered her a job as pastor, but she wanted to be ordained by a full denominational authority. While the Northern Association of Universalists were in session in Malone, New York, she presented her case for ordination. On June 25, , the Universalist Church of America, a Christian Universalist religious denomination, ordained Brown the first fully ordained woman minister. Ebenezer Fisher, who had opposed her at St. Lawrence, participated in the ceremony.

Mount Holyoke and a college education were what Olympia had hoped for. Her excitement was tempered by the restrictions placed on women at Mount Holyoke. These restrictions included a list of forty rules, the abolition of a literacy society founded by the Browns, and religious restrictions. Once Olympia began her education at Antioch, she realized she had to catch up to higher standards. Olympia also learned that despite the progressive nature at Antioch, there were still forms of discrimination.

In a defiant act, Olympia delivered her speeches from memory, just as the men had. Once Olympia Brown finished her schooling at Antioch, she decided her calling was to be a minister. Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals, which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful.

Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves. Those who may read this will think it strange that I could only find a field in run-down or comatose churches, but they must remember that the pulpits of all the prosperous churches were already occupied by men, and were looked forward to as the goal of all the young men coming into the ministry with whom I, at first the only woman preacher in the denomination, had to compete.

All I could do was to take some place that had been abandoned by others and make something of it, and this I was only too glad to do. Olympia Brown. Part of What We Choose.

She spoke the familiar words we find in Singing the Living Tradition , Reading Stand by this faith.