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BROWN, OLYMPIA 1835-1926

UNIVERSALIST MINISTER, SUFFRAGIST

The Final Push

On 2 November 1920 Olympia Brown, at the age of eighty-five, cast a ballot for the first time in her long, distinguished life when she voted in a presidential election. That simple act was the culmination of a life-time of fighting for women's rights as well as achieving personal goals against much resistance. The 1910s had seen the suffrage movement reenergized, and Brown, although she was seventy-five when the decade began and had faced numerous disappointments in her career as an activist, again became focused on the goal, knowing that the time was ripe and the era would provide a final chance for women to achieve the vote in her lifetime.

Youth

Brown's beliefs and her strong personality came from her mother, Lephia Brown. Olympia was born in a log cabin near Schoolcraft, Michigan, in 1835 in what was then still frontier country. Lephia Brown believed in equality and education, teaching her children herself until her husband, Asa, built a school-house on his farm and arranged to have a teacher brought there. Brown's aunt and uncle, Thomas and Pamela Nathan, were ardent abolitionists, and their home nearby served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, which helped runaway slaves escape to Canada. Brown was raised in an atmosphere of equality, with her mother stressing the need for education. In 1854, unable to attend college in Michigan, Olympia and her sister Oella traveled to South Hadley, Massachusetts, to attend Mount Holyoke College, founded eighteen years earlier as a women's college. Brown found the school suffocating and restrictive. One year later she entered Horace Mann's Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where her education blossomed. She graduated in 1860 and began applying to theological schools. Only one would consider a woman. Brown went there.

Pastor Brown

Brown entered the Universalist St. Lawrence Theological School in Canton, New York, in the fall of 1861. She found much resistance from the other students—all men—and several faculty wives. The resistance that she would face from other women frustrated her throughout her career. Despite the opposition, Brown excelled at St. Lawrence. In summer 1862 she worked as a pastor in Vermont, where much of her family lived. On 25 June 1863 she became the first woman to be ordained in the United States and was graduated from St. Lawrence weeks later. She found a church in Marshfield, Vermont, and became its pastor after a trial visit. She began to attract the attention of women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony, who wrote to her to inquire if she would be interested in helping the cause. Brown, intent on succeeding as a pastor, declined the offer, even though she had shown a talent for such work in 1860-1861 in Cleveland getting signatures for a women's property bill. But Brown felt the need to further her career in the ministry. In 1864, after taking voice improvement lessons in Boston, Brown became the pastor of a Universalist church in Weymouth Landing. Massachusetts newspapers carried the story. She was the only woman minister in the United States. She stayed at Wey-mouth Landing for five years while also launching her second career, that of a suffragist.

Activist

In 1866 Brown attended a women's rights convention in New York City. There she met Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as Henry Ward Beecher and Frederick Douglass. The group organized the American Equal Rights Association, which was to work for the rights of black men as well as all women. Later that year Brown spent six weeks on the campaign trail with Anthony, Lucy Stone, and others. She developed a schism with many of the male activists who supported the vote for black men (the Fifteenth Amendment) but did not believe that women should vote. This equality-for-some attitude frustrated her throughout her career, causing her to debate vehemently with the likes of Frederick Douglass in person as well as President Woodrow Wilson from afar. Brown's fervent work on behalf of women's equality had gained her national attention, and she was offered a full-time position by Anthony. She rejected it, however, in order to return to Weymouth Landing and continue with her now-flourishing church. In late 1867 she participated in the ordination of Phoebe Hanaford in Hingham, Massachusetts. She had broken the barrier alone and was now helping others to do so. She helped to found the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and in 1868 helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association. She was succeeding in both careers, becoming known not only as a hardworking organizer but also as a fine orator.

Principles

In 1869 Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association and asked Brown to work for her. She again said no. She became increasingly concerned about factionalism within the women's movement, and when Lucy Stone formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, Brown wrote to Stone in November 1869 that "For my own part I wish to work for principles, not individuals or cliques." Instead, she took a pastorate in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1873, at the age of thirty-eight, she married John Henry Willis and within three years had given birth to a son and a daughter. Her pastorate, meanwhile, was foundering, because of resistance to her based on her sex. She began to devote more time to suffrage work. In January 1876 she delivered a strong speech before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C. "Women from the rank and file, lawabiding women, desire the ballot," she told them. "Not only that they desire it, but they mean to have it." Congress remained unmoved. She would have to wait another forty-four years.

Wisconsin

In 1878 Brown reenergized her career as a pastor when she took a position in Racine, Wisconsin. It was her final congregation. Her family followed her west, and her husband founded a newspaper, The Racine Times-Call. Brown became instantly active in Wisconsin suffrage work as well as making her church an educational and social center. She founded a Sunday school, a women's club, and youth groups and brought speakers in to discuss issues, especially women's issues. She organized and raised funds for major building repairs to her church while becoming president of the then-slumping Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association. In 1885 Wisconsin passed a vague and limited woman suffrage bill. Brown decided to test it and in 1887 resigned her pastorate in order to work full-time as a suffragist. She tried to vote, was refused, and filed a lawsuit against ballot inspectors who would not permit women to vote. Ironically, some inspectors had allowed it and many women across the state had their votes counted. A circuit court judge ruled in favor of the suffrage group, but the state Supreme Court struck down the ruling. Brown again faced defeat, and though she would continue her work and, after the death of her husband, take to editing his newspaper, the women's movement settled into a valley. Anthony and most of the others of her generation would not live to cast the ballot themselves. Only Brown and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, an early inspiration to Brown, would survive long enough to cast a vote.

Victory

The year 1912 had seen a woman suffrage bill passed by the legislature of Wisconsin, where Brown resided, though in a popular referendum the bill failed. At the same time, Kansas voted to give women the vote, forty-five years after Brown had canvased the state alone supporting such a bill. In 1913 Brown joined the Congressional Union, a new party dedicated to getting the Susan B. Anthony amendment through Congress. The Congressional Union, inspired by English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her more militant approach, began picketing the White House. Brown had already testified before Congress and had seen one vote defeated. Women took to the street before the White House and campaigned vehemently against President Woodrow Wilson, who, while speaking frequently about justice and human rights, was staunchly opposed to women voting. Protesters spent months through the winter of 1917 marching in the streets, the eighty-two-year-old Brown among them. Women of the Congressional Union, now known as the Woman's Party, were arrested and thrown in jail. Even other suffragists, such as Anna Howard Shaw, disliked their tactics, criticizing them as unladylike and even unpatriotic for pushing the issue during the war years. But Brown had seen how "ladylike" activism had failed, that demanding rights instead of reasoning for them was what was needed. In December 1918, with President Wilson at the peace talks in France, Brown participated in a protest in Washington at which a pile of Wilson's books and speeches were burned. Six months later the Anthony bill passed through Congress. Within twenty months the amendment had been ratified by the states. Brown, as well as all American women, had the right to vote. Brown survived to cast another vote in the 1924 election. She had had a remarkable career and life—active, stubborn, cantankerous, and indomitable, in conflict with a male world throughout and even the younger generation of suffragists during the 1910s. When she died in 1926, tributes poured in from across the nation.