[Rarebooks] FS: 1911 Memoir by the First Female Minister in a Mainstream Congregation and a Prominent Suffragist

[Charles Agvent]

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BROWN, Olympia. ACQUAINTANCES, OLD AND NEW, AMONG REFORMERS. 
[Milwaukee]: [S. E. Tate Printing Company], 1911. First Edition. 
Duodecimo (5-1/4" x 7-3/4") bound in bright blue publisher's cloth with 
gilt lettering on the front cover; 115 pages. Illustrated with a 
frontispiece portrait and several plates. Brown describes meeting 
Frederick Douglass and touring with Susan B. Anthony as well as her 
experiences as a minister. Bookplate of Brown's daughter; Gwendolen 
Brown Willis, on the front free endpaper. A spectacular, as new copy of 
a very scarce book.

Olympia Brown (1835-1926) was refused admission to the University of 
Michigan because of her gender and instead attended Mount Holyoke 
College and Antioch University. She decided to become a preacher because 
she wanted to counter the prevalent and, she believed, erroneous 
"doctrine of endless punishment" offered by traditional 
hellfire-and-brimstone ministers. She had to argue to gain admittance to 
the Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University where she 
became the first female graduate of a mainstream theological school. In 
1863, when she was posted as minister to a congregation in Weymouth 
Landing, Massachusetts, she was the only female granted full clergy 
status in any mainstream Christian denomination. Almost as soon as she 
arrived in Massachusetts, she became active in the women's suffrage 
movement.

She was later posted at a church in Bridgeport, Connecticut--where 
circus master P. T. Barnum was in her congregation--but received little 
support from her congregation, where a traditionalist faction sought to 
have her removed from the pulpit during her first pregnancy.

She was unemployed for two years, before accepting a post at the 
struggling Church of the Good Shepherd in Racine, Wisconsin, which had 
been without a regular minister for several years. At Racine, she 
granted female church members equal voting rights on church matters and 
brought in such guest speakers as Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe, 
Mary Livermore, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1887, just after her 
father's death, she switched her life's priorities, becoming a part-time 
minister and a full-time activist for women's rights.

She served as Vice President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, 
founded the Federal Suffrage Association in 1892 (which became the 
Federal Equality Association), and became one of the first members of 
the more radical and confrontational Woman's Party when it was formed by 
Alice Paul in 1913. She was one of the last of the "old time 
suffragettes" who lived to see women granted voting rights in 1919. 
After casting her first ballot in 1920 at the age of 85, she became 
active in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Her 
church in Racine has since been renamed Olympia Brown Unitarian 
Universalist Church. (#016966)        $750.00

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