Olympia
Brown was
born in Prarie Ronde, Michigan on 5th January, 1835. One of four children
she was educated locally and became a schoolteacher when she was 15
years old.
After being refused entry to the University of Michigan because she
was a woman, Brown was accepted by Antioch College. While studying
at Antioch she heard a speech made by the anti-slavery
campaigner, Francis Gage. Afterwards she reported that: "It was
the first time I had heard a woman preach and the sense of victory
lifted me up."
Brown graduated from Antioch in 1860 and after much resistance, managed
to enter St. Lawrence Seminary. In June 1863, she became the first
woman to be ordained as a minister of the church. Over the next few
years Brown worked as a pastor in Marshfield, Weymouth, and Bridgeport.
A founder member of the New England Woman's
Suffrage Association in 1867 she joined Susan
B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Lucretia Mott and Lucy
Stone in Kansas where Negro suffrage and woman suffrage were to
be decided by popular vote. However, both ideas were rejected at the
polls.
In 1878, Brown, now president of National Woman
Suffrage Association in Wisconsin, became the pastor at the Church
of the Good Shepherd in Racine. Over the next few years she invited
leading campaigners for women's suffrage,
such as Julia Ward Howe, Susan
B. Anthony and Mary Livermore
to speak from the pulpit.
During the First World War Brown joined Alice
Paul and Lucy Burns to form the Congressional
Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS) and attempted to introduce the
militant methods used by the Women's Social and
Political Union in Britain. This included organizing huge demonstrations
and the daily picketing of the White House. Over the next couple of
years the police arrested nearly 500 women for loitering and 168 were
jailed for "obstructing traffic".
In June, 1920, Brown, now aged eighty-five, was one of the women who
took part in the march on the Republican
Convention in Chicago. This was the last of the great suffrage demonstrations
as the Nineteenth Amendment was passed two months later. Of the original
campaigners, Brown was the only one who lived long enough to witness
women being granted the vote. Olympia Brown died in Baltimore on 23rd
October, 1926.
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