"Pioneer Olympia Brown"
Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, February 23, 2003
For the past two years I have made it a practice to do a sermon on a significant figure in Unitarian Universalist history. First was "William Ellery Channing — Father of American Unitarianism," followed by "John Murray - Father of American Universalism” last year. This morning I want to examine an important, but sometimes unappreciated, stream of UU history; the contributions of women to Unitarian Universalism. In that vein, I will be presenting to you the life and work of Rev. Olympia Brown (1835-1926) who was a Universalist minister shortly after the Civil War.
It is important to remember the contributions of Unitarian Universalist women of the past, in no small part because of their influence in Unitarian Universalism today. In 1998 the UUA became the first denomination in history to have over fifty percent female ministers. As a male UU minister, I am officially a minority! Shortly after I graduated from Meadville Lombard, where I went to seminary, I met a friend at General Assembly who had graduated the year before. We were catching up, and I told her about passing the Fellowship Committee, an act that officially made me a Unitarian Universalist minister. She commented on this in a facetious tone, “We are still letting straight white men into the ministry?! I am shocked!” But in her joke is a grain of truth. By the time I became a Unitarian Universalist ten years ago, I never met anyone who ever batted an eyelash at women being in the ministry. Two of my predecessors as minister of this Church were women, Rev. Betty Pingle and Rev. Jane Mauldin. One of my good friends from Meadville, Rev. Rebecca Cohen followed her mother Rev. Helen Cohen into the ministry. While there have been many male ministers who have followed their father’s footsteps into the ranks of the clergy, this was one of the rare cases of a mother and daughter both being ministers. It was remarkable enough to warrant a rather lengthy article in the New York Times a few years back.
Most mainline Protestant denominations began ordaining women some time in the 1960s. Unitarian and Universalist began ordaining women in the 1860s, a full century earlier! Olympia Brown has the historical distinction of being the first woman in America to be ordained and fully recognized as a minister by her denomination in June of 1863 by the St. Lawrence Association of Universalists. One other woman, Antoinette Brown Blackwell was ordained as a Congregationalist minister ten years earlier, but the Congregationalists did not recognize her ordination. She was one of Olympia Brown’s inspirations and later became a Universalist herself. The Universalists were sort of cutting edge when it came to including women in their denomination. Judith Sergeant Murray, John’s second wife, wrote as early as the 1790s that women were emotionally and mentally equal to men. Maria Cook was the first woman to ever preach in a Universalist Church in 1811. Lydia Jenkins received fellowship to do supply preaching in and among some of the Universalist Churches in New York. She was a very powerful preacher who convinced a number of people that women had the capability to preach effectively. However there was still quite a bit of resistance even among the Universalists to ordain a woman and have her be the sole steward of a congregation.
From our current vantage point of history, where more women are ministers than men, it is sometimes hard to grasp the roadblocks that were in place for women wishing to enter the ministry. Many people were wary of allowing women into professions such as the ministry or medicine or law. This was considered a terrible thing because there would be no one left to take care of the home. As 1950s as this sounds to our ears, it was a very pervasive attitude, and it was very hard to get people to break out of that perception.
Religion in particular can be a very conservative force in a culture. Religion often sees itself as the last line of defense against the cultural values of the past. (A precedent that may go back to the Church preserving the culture of the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages.) Religions, particular western religions, are the stewards of their tradition, and this can create some excess baggage that gets in the way of progress and adaptation to the times. As I said, it took most Protestant denominations until the liberal 1960s to ordain women. Only Catholics and some very conservative fundamentalist Protestant Churches still refuse to allow women to speak in Church. The Bible says this on the subject:
“I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument; also that the women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. Let a woman lean in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty”
I Timothy 2: 8-15
This paragraph from Paul’s first letter to Timothy has been the primary source of opposition to the feminist movement in Christianity. It is an albatross around the neck of Jesus’ gospel of love and equality. And while we Unitarian Universalists nowadays can dismiss such a view as from another time and place, our Universalist ancestors were not able to do so as easily. Ironically the very next paragraph in I Timothy proclaims that Bishops should be married only once, and have full authority over their children. Odd that one paragraph about women remaining silent in Church is taken so literally while the verses immediately after this, describing the family life of Bishops, are almost completely ignored. Thomas Whittemore, one of the denomination’s leaders in the mid-nineteenth century, after hearing Lydia Jenkins preach commented, “The question whether a woman ought to preach is not yet fully settled in all minds, but there is no longer any doubt that a woman can preach…. A woman can speak, can preach, can pray, in the pulpit, without throwing off her womanly dignity and modesty.” You can see that Whittemore, and presumably others, were very aware of Paul’s prohibition against woman praying and teaching in Church. I can almost hear his mind creaking open to the possibility that women can actually do it.
The Universalists, with their belief that God saves all people without exception, should have had more faith in this central principle of their theology. Tufts, a Universalist university, debated fiercely whether or not it should admit women. Other universities were just beginning to do so, including their own Lombard College. One physician at the time, Edward H. Clarke, supposedly did studies that demonstrated that women were not suited for coeducational universities because it was physically, emotionally, and mentally, detrimental to them. This did not endure Dr. Clarke to many of the women in his Church! One of the examples people used to counter Clarke’s argument was Rev. Olympia Brown.
Olympia Brown was born in Prairie Ronde Michigan near Kalamazoo. There are actually a number of early Unitarian and Universalist women ministers who came from Michigan. She grew up on the frontier in a log cabin, not unlike Laura Ingalls Wilder. She went to college at Antioch College. She applied to Meadville Theological School, a Unitarian seminary and my alma mater, but was turned down. She was accepted to Canton Theological School that was a part of St. Lawrence University. The Dean of St. Lawrence, Dr. Ebenezer Fischer, allowed her to become a student there in order to prove to Olympia that is would be too hard for her to handle. He did not expect her to make it through the program, and figured she would not be able to find a Church even if she did. Olympia did complete theological school and was ordained. Ironically, Dr. Fischer changed his mind and participated in her ordination ceremony. Dr. Fischer’s wife on the other hand, was very antagonistic towards Brown and commented to one of her classmates that, “You will see now the consequence of this. Next year there will be fifteen women in the class, and then women will flock to the ministry.” An accurate, albeit premature, prophecy.
Olympia Brown was therefore, a Jackie Robinson of sorts for Unitarian Universalism. Not only did she speak out for women’s rights, but her very existence help to bring those rights into a reality. Olympia Brown served Unitarian Churches in New England. First was the Church in Weymouth Massachusetts in 1864. It was a Church that had not had a minister or a Sunday School for two years and was deeply in debt. Can you imagine what the ministerial search packet for such a place would have looked like?! She might not have even gotten that if a friend and colleague had not tipped her off to its availability. Despite this though, Olympia wrote in her autobiography that her time in Weymouth was the happiest of her ministerial career.
Now I should not over state the Universalist opposition to having female ministers. Yes the powers that be had some deep reservations, but the people in the pews were very impressed with her preaching and her ministry. Olympia was apparently a powerful speaker, despite her petite size. There is even a report that she went to the Dio Lewis School in Boston where she worked on developing her chest and shoulder muscles and strengthening the carrying power of her voice. Many of the early women preachers packed in the pews, in part because of the novelty of hearing a woman preach, but also because many of them were very good. According to some of my colleagues who have been in the ministry for a few decades or more, they recall the days when it was not particularly common to have a woman minister. Women have transformed the Unitarian Universalist ministry. According to these accounts, which were before my time so I have no reference for comparison, women made us sing more, and better. UUs began to share themselves in worship. This is also about the time that Joys and Concerns made its debut in Unitarian Universalist liturgy. Sermons became more personal and more human. Family and relationship issues have come to the foreground. There is less separation between RE and Adult Worship. There are clauses in ministerial letters of agreement about maternity and paternity leave. Minister meetings at the district and continental level are punctuated with the sharing of pictures of children and grandchildren. Crocheting needles are a common sight and sound during the ministry days at General Assembly. These are all changes for the better. Thanks to Olympia Brown, we have a hundred year head start on everybody else. No wonder the majority of our ministers are women, and that the last two bids for UUA president have included women candidates.
In 1870 Olympia Brown began her ministry at the Universalist Church in Bridgeport Connecticut. It was here that she met Mary Livermore, Susan B. Anthony, and Isabella Beecher, sister of Henry Ward Beecher, and became heavily involved in the burgeoning woman’s suffrage movement. She was asked to travel around Kansas in support of the Suffrage Amendment that was being considered there. While the amendment failed, Brown gained experience in the movement. It was at this time that she became a player on the national scene for cause of a woman’s right to vote. In 1892 she and many others began focusing on creating a federal constitutional amendment to allow women the vote. Eventually this became the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Olympia Brown was in her late eighties at the time, but she was the only well-known suffragist who lived long enough to actually cast a vote.
In 1878 Brown took her final ministerial post in Racine Wisconsin. It was to be her longest, nine years. She did some pulpit supply after her retirement, but focused primarily upon the suffragist movement after leaving the ministry. In a real sense she did not leave the ministry, she just changed her focus. She was focused on social justice now, and the whole nation became her congregation. After her husband John Henry Willis died in 1893, Olympia took over his business affairs, which included newspaper publishing. She herself died in her daughter’s home in Baltimore Maryland in 1926. She was 91 years old.
There are many lessons that Olympia Brown’s life has for Unitarian Universalists today: how to hold up under adversity, to show courage as the victim of oppression and discrimination, and in her work for a woman’s right to vote, that we must give ourselves to a cause that is worth fighting for whether we live to see the fruit of our labors or not. The now Unitarian Universalist Church in Racine Wisconsin is named after Olympia Brown. Laurel Clarke, one of the astronauts aboard Columbia who died two weeks ago, grew up and was married in the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church. If you caught the right news programs you might have seen the memorial service filmed there, and interviews with some of the members. One of whom was Charlotte Cote, Olympia Brown’s most recent biographer. Laurel Clarke was a doctor and researcher who had an incredible passion for science and learning. She well embodied the courage and the risk that her Universalist ancestor also embodied. Olympia Brown’s spirit has not faded in the mist of history and myth. It is a powerful example of how to face life. Laurel Clarke will no doubt have a similar legacy, committed to the lessons of science and the achievement of the human mind. There is no greater testimony to the lives of these two great Unitarian Universalist women than the courage to live fearlessly.
May they be our example as well. May we heed well the life and lessons of those who have walked these spiritual paths before us. May we too seek courage and love and respect for all people. Amen, Blessed Be.
Recommended Books:
Cote, Charlotte. Olympia Brown
Emerson, Dorothy May. Standing Before Us; Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform 1776-1936
Hitchings, Catherine. Universalist and Unitarian Women Ministers. Second Edition
Miller, Russell. The Larger Hope. Volume One.Recommended Site:
www.laurelclark.org