American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

BLACKWELL, ANTOINETTE LOUISA BROWN

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(20 May 1825, Henrietta, NY -5 November 1921, Elizabeth, NJ). Education: Graduated from Oberlin College, 1847; studied religion at Oberlin, but denied an advanced degree because of her sex-belatedly awarded honorary M.A., 1878, and honorary D.O., 1908. Career: Guest preacher in many pulpits and lecturer on women's rights, antislavery movement, and temperance, 1850-53; minister, First Congregational Church, Butler and Savannah, Wayne County, NY, 1853-54; housewife and mother; lecturer, author, and social activist; founder and pastor emeritus, All Souls Unitarian Church, Elizabeth, NJ, 1908-21. 

Antoinette Blackwell was the first American woman to serve as minister in a major denomination. Raised in the "Burnt-Over District" of upstate New York, the home of many religious innovations, she made a public confession of faith at age nine and became a full member of the Congregational Church. She attended a local academy, taking substantially the same courses as the boys. With parental support she attended Oberlin, the first American college to admit women. 
Blackwell ran into resistance from her formerly supportive parents, however, when she decided to study for an advanced degree at Oberlin and become a minister. Even Oberlin balked at the idea of a young woman aiming so high. "Masculine headship everywhere was held to be indispensable to morality," 

Blackwell later remarked. Oberlin finally agreed to admit her, but although she completed the same course as the men, they denied her the license to preach and the divinity degree her male colleagues received. None the less, Blackwell was invited to preach and became minister over a Congregational church in Wayne County, New York. 

One wonders how she would have fared as a minister, had she remained in the pulpit for the next half century of her active life. But she withdrew from the ministry the next year, having persuaded herself that the Unitarian faith was more compatible with her own beliefs. She sought a clerical position among the Unitarians, but was never called to the ministry. As a writer, lecturer, and social reformer, however, she was active for many decades, and at the age of ninety-five in 1920 she voted in the first American presidential election after the passage of the Woman Suffrage Amendment. 

Blackwell's short career as a Congregationalist minister indicates the flexibility available in a church in which an individual congregation is given considerable latitude in choosing a pastor. Her decision to become a Unitarian suggests how porous the denominational boundaries were a few decades after the most "liberal" Congregationalists decided to create the Unitarian church. And her inability to secure a second pulpit indicates that women were generally denied the opportunity to the ministry until well into the twentieth century. 

Bibliography 
A: The Sexes Throughout Nature (New York, 1875); The Physical Basis of Immortality (New York, 1876); The Social Side of Mind and Action (New York, 1915); Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill, eds., Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93 (Champaign-Urbana, IL, 1987). 
B: DAB 2, 319-20; NAW 1, 158-61; NCAB 29, 129; Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (New York, 1967); Laura Kerr, Lady in the Pulpit (New York, 1951); Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (Old Westbury, NY, 1983).