Become part of an organization that recognizes the accomplishments of women who live in and contribute to Henrietta, and help support Rush-Henrietta students as they continue their education.  Your dues not only go toward funding our programs, they help promote a little-known Henrietta resident who breached “the great wall of custom” and realized her dreams.  A prominent women’s rights activist, she was every bit as active as her friend and contemporary, Susan B. Anthony.

YOUR MEMBERSHIP:

• Helps make our Scholarship and Woman of the Year Programs possible
• Includes you in invitations to Society events, including our annual celebration of Antoinette’s birthday and Women’s Week in May
• Entitles you to participate and vote in the Society’s annual meeting
• Helps promote and carry on the legacy of Antoinette Brown Blackwell

 

ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL: FEMINIST, LEADER, SOCIAL REFORMER

COMMUNITY –  While she was at Oberlin, Brown became increasingly involved in the women’s rights, temperance and anti-slavery movements. Despite widespread opposition to public speaking by women, in 1847 she delivered several speeches on temperance in Ohio, and lectured about women’s rights in the nearby Baptist church. Beginning in 1855, Miss Brown spent a year doing volunteer work with Abigail Hopper Gibbons in the slums and prisons of New York City, studying the causes of mental and social disorders, and how these affected the lives of women in poverty.

LEADERSHIP – Antoinette Brown Blackwell believed that suffrage would have little positive impact on women’s lives unless it was coupled with leadership opportunities. Always ahead of her time, she wrote prolifically on religion and science, constructing a theoretical foundation for sexual equality.  In 1873, Blackwell founded the Association for the Advancement of Women in an attempt to address women’s issues that similar organizations ignored. She was elected president of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association in 1891, and helped found the American Purity Association.

DETERMINATION – In four years of teaching, between the ages of 16 and 20, Antoinette saved enough money to cover the cost of her tuition at Oberlin College.  Through sheer determination and perseverance, she became the first female ordained minister in the United States.  After her husband’s business failed in 1870, she returned to the lecture circuit, promoting gender equality, abolition, and women’s rights.

Brown recounted “speaking 18 times in 19 days, in Wayne County [New York].” During that lecture tour she missed a stagecoach, walked 7 1/2 miles in a snow storm, “took a cold water wash when I got home, and the next morning got up as well as ever without even a stiff joint.”