Antoinette Brown

Brown joined the Congregational Church when she was nine and often preached in the church in her youth. Starting at the age of sixteen she taught school in order to earn her tuition t0 the relatively new Oberlin College* in Ohio where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in 1847. She then approached the school with a request to join its theological course with the goal of becoming a minister. The administration, which was initially opposed to any woman receiving any kind of formal education in theology, finally agreed to allow her to enroll, with one stipulation: she would never receive any formal recognition of her ministry.

Without a preacher’s license she was forced to employ public speaking and writing as ways to spread her views on the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, temperance and women’s suffrage. She spoke in 1850 at the first National Women’s Rights Convention, as well as at many of the annual Conventions thereafter. She wrote for Frederick Douglass‘ The North Star (an abolitionist newspaper) and exhibited the beginnings of a feminist theology in her essay on St. Paul which was published in the Oberlin Quarterly Review.

She was finally given a license to preach by the Congregationalist Church in 1851 and a position as a church rector the following year. In 1856, despite her original conviction that it would be better to stay single, she married Samuel C. Blackwell (whose brother, Henry, married Lucy Stone, another women’s rights activist and friend of Brown’s). In 1857, she left the ministry to resume her career as an orator and reformer.

While many women’s rights activists opposed religion on the basis that it oppressed women, Brown believed that women’s active participation in religion could serve to further their status in society.  While she believed that the inherent differences between men and women limited men’s effectiveness in representing women in politics she also felt that suffrage would have little positive impact for women unless it was coupled with tangible leadership opportunities. Brown also split from other reformers with her opposition to divorce. [Wikipedia]

Eventually her domestic responsibilities caused her to curtail her speaking engagements and she began to concentrate on her writing. Despite having seven children (two of whom died in infancy), she wrote extensively on theology, science and philosophy.  She dared to criticize the theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer even though she considered them to be the most influential men of her day. One of her books,  The Sexes Throughout Nature was based on her argument that evolution resulted in two sexes that were different but equal.

In 1869, Brown and Stone separated from other preeminent women’s rights activists to form the American Woman Suffrage Association over their support of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. (The mainstream position was to oppose it because it gave black men but not women–of any race–the right to vote.)  In 1873, she founded the Association for the Advancement of Women in an attempt to address women’s issues that similar organizations ignored.

In 1878 she joined the Unitarian church and applied to the American Unitarian Association to be a minister.  That same year Oberlin College awarded her an honorary Master’s Degree. (Thirty years later the college also awarded her an honorary Doctoral degree.) By this time she had resumed her career giving public lectures.

In her later years

Brown lived long enough to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, the only participant of the 1850 Women’s Rights Convention to do so. She died the following year at the age of 96.

Her books include:

• Studies in General Science. New York: G.P. Putnam and Son, 1869.
• The Sexes Throughout Nature. New York: G.P. Putnam and Son, 1875.
• The Physical Basis of Immortality. New York: G.P. Putnam and Son, 1876.
• The Philosophy of Individuality. New York: G.P. Putnam and Son.
• The Making of the Universe. Boston, Massachusetts: The Gorham press, 1914.
• The Social Side of Mind and Action. New York: The Neale Publishing COmpany, 1915.
• The Island Neighbors. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1871. (Novel)
• Sea Drift. New York: J.T. White & Co., 1902. (Poetry)

Further Reading:

• Cazden, Elizabeth. Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1983.
• Lasser, Carol; Merrill, Marlene Deahl, editors. Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
• Lindley, Susan Hill. You Have Stept Out of Your Place. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.

*Established in 1833, Oberlin was the first college in the United States to regularly admit African-American students (1835) and is the oldest continuously operating coeducational institution, having first admitted women in 1837.

WWII Women Aviators Receive Congressional Medals

(Adapted from Feminist Majority Foundation’s Feminist News)

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly from Britain to Australia (1930)

The women who flew US military aircraft during World War II were awarded with Congressional Gold Medals on March 10, 2010.  The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest honor Congress can give civilians, according to the Associated Press.

The Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, was formed in 1942 despite the initial hesitation of Army Air Corps Chief Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold to let women fly, according to the Air Force Times. There were a total of 1,102 women aviators during WWII, and 38 of them lost their lives during the war. About 130 of the 300 women WASPs alive today will attend the medal ceremony.

WASP pilots were given permission to fly domestic aircraft in order to free male aviators to fly overseas. These women test-flew every aircraft of the time, reported the Air Force Times, including the B-26 bomber, nicknamed the “Widowmaker.”

Despite their efforts, WWII women aviators did not receive any military benefits or honors. The WASP was disbanded in December 1944 and the records were kept classified. However, with the help of former Lieutenant General Arnold’s son, Colonel Bruce Arnold, and former Senator Barry Goldwater (AZ-D), Congress eventually recognized WASP pilots as veterans in the 1970s. According to the Air Force Times, Deanie Bishop Parrish, one of the original women aviators, and her daughter Nancy, interviewed 110 former WASP pilots during the 1990s, resulting in “Fly Girls of World War II,” an exhibit currently on display at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Media Resources: Air Force Times 2/23/10; Associated Press 3/10/10

Also read “The Women Who Dared the Skies” about women aviators before WWII. (See picture of one of them at right.)

For Women’s History Month I’m going to include some brief histories of famous women you may not have heard of.  The first of these is Christine de Pizan.

Christine de Pizan lecturing to a group of men.

Christine de Pizan has been called Europe’s first professional woman writer. Born in 1365, married at 15 and widowed at 24, she turned to writing to support her mother, niece and three young children. Uncommonly well-educated for a woman of her day, she wrote extensively about love and chivalry, mythology and legends, peace, history and the misogyny of male authors who she felt denigrated women in their writings.

She began her writing career composing love ballads for wealthy patrons in the court of Charles V of France, writing over 300 in a span of 20 years. She also wrote and became well-known for her poetry. But she gained prominence at the turn of the century when she dared to criticize the author of the thirteenth-century poem, “The Romance of the Rose,” Jean de Meun, for what she considered to be the slander of women. She specifically objected to his depiction of women as nothing more than seductresses.

From there she moved on to her most successful literary works, The Book of the City of Ladies and The Book of the Three Virtues (or The Treasure of the City of Ladies). In them she attempted to show the importance of women’s past contributions to society and to teach women how to develop qualities that could help to counteract the problem of misogyny. Her final work, Tale of Joan of Arc, is valued by historians because it is the only record of Joan of Arc besides the documents of her trial.

Further reading:

• The standard biography about Christine de Pizan is Charity Cannon Willard’s Christine de Pisan: Her Life and Works (1984).
• Quilligan, Maureen, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Cité des Dames”. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991.
• Green, Karen, and Mews, Constant, eds, Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005.
• In the Sisterhood’s excellent blog post, which introduced me to Christine de Pizan in the first place!

Source: Wikipedia

At the end of my March 1st post, “Why Do We Need a Women’s History Month?“, I wrote:

“Keep your eyes and your ears open during March and you just might learn something you didn’t even know you didn’t know about the most influential group of people on earth.”

What did I mean by that? I meant that most people think they know all there is to know about women’s history and so they tend to ignore anyone who tries to teach them anything new about it. But there is always something new to learn about what women have done in the world.  So why isn’t more attention paid to it?

There are two schools of thought which lead to the ignoring of women’s history:

1) People don’t believe that women are capable of great things, or at least of great things in the outside world (which is also considered to be the man’s world); and

2) People (especially men) feel threatened by accomplished women and so seek to downplay their contributions.

The first school is the more laughable, but it’s a mistake to not take it seriously. There really are people out there who don’t think women have what it takes to be a doctor, president, CEO, engineer, etc. They believe that their minds are too illogical, their emotions too unstable and their priorities skewed toward inconsequential things (children, marriage, the home). And, sadly, it is not only men who think this way. Plenty of women limit their choices in life because they, too, believe that they don’t have what it takes to compete in a “man’s” world.

This kind of self-sabotage can be subtle. A woman may go after a career, but only one she feels is appropriate for a woman (nurse instead of doctor, flight attendant instead of pilot, secretary instead of salesperson, and so on). But what is even worse, and not that uncommon, is when a girl grows up thinking that she can’t have a career at all. When she sees her options as limited to the home merely because she is female.

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Here is a Spanish short film by Xavi Sala about  the discrimination young Muslim women face in a so-called “free” Europe where everything but religion is tolerated in the name of freedom.