Blackwell, Antoinette Louisa Brown (20 May 1825-5 Nov. 1921), minister, reformer, and author, was born in Henrietta, New York, the daughter of Joseph Brown, a farmer and justice of the peace, and Abigail Morse. Antoinette proved a precocious child, following her older siblings to school at the age of three. The preaching of evangelist Charles Grandison Finney in nearby Rochester during the Second Great Awakening deeply affected the family, and before she reached her ninth birthday, Antoinette Brown joined the Congregational church. The associated reform movements of the era--antislavery, temperance, and moral reform--also drew support from the Browns, who upheld the educational aspirations of both their sons and daughters. Antoinette attended local schools and the Monroe Academy before becoming a teacher in 1841.

In 1846 the family acceded to Antoinette's persistent desire to attend Oberlin College, known for its evangelical theology and its principled commitment to the equal education of women and African Americans. There Brown began a lifelong friendship with Lucy Stone, who encouraged Brown's interest in woman's rights, but, as a radical abolitionist, did not approve of her commitments to orthodox religion and political abolition of slavery.

After receiving her literary degree in 1847, Brown remained at Oberlin for three more years, classified as a "resident graduate" because the faculty refused to allow her regular enrollment in the theology department while she trained for the ministry. Despite widespread opposition to public speaking by women, Brown accepted invitations in Ohio and New York to lecture against slavery and on woman's rights. To answer opponents who wished to exclude women from the pulpit, she completed an exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and 2 Timothy 11-12, published in the Oberlin Quarterly Review in July 1849. At commencement in 1850, the faculty refused to recognize Brown's studies and withheld the degree in theology; fearing further controversy, she chose not to seek ordination at that time, determining instead to wait to be ordained in a church for which she held pastoral responsibility.

Brown left Ohio for New York City, where she had been invited to undertake charitable work in the slums and to lecture to raise funds for this cause. But first she traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, to attend the first National Woman's Rights Convention. Alarmed that their efforts might become associated with Brown's work for the equality of women, the New York supervisors cooled to the proposed arrangement, and Brown decided instead to take up a career as an independent lecturer. She spoke in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New England on woman's rights, antislavery, and temperance, preaching church sermons on Sundays when invited.

In the fall of 1852 Brown received an invitation from the Congregational church in rural South Butler, New York, to take up its ministry. She accepted this call, turning down an offer from Horace Greeley and Charles H. Dana to support her preaching in New York City. Brown was ordained as minister of the Congregational Church of South Butler on 15 September 1853; on this ceremony rested her claim to be the first woman ordained in a regular Protestant denomination in the United States.

While attending to her pastorate, Brown continued her reform activities, becoming the center of a controversy at the 1853 World's Temperance Convention, where fellow delegates received her credentials but shouted her off the platform, refusing to permit a woman to speak. Growing religious doubts about the basis for her orthodox faith increasingly troubled her, and she resigned her pastorate in July 1854. After some months of rest she returned to New York City, working with Abby Hopper Gibbons for women criminals and prisoners and writing for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. During this time she was courted by fellow reformer Samuel Charles Blackwell. Brown and Blackwell married in 1856.

The year of her marriage, Antoinette Brown Blackwell moved with the extended Blackwell family--many of whom were active in reform movements--from Cincinnati to New York and northern New Jersey. Between 1856 and 1869 she bore seven children; five daughters survived to adulthood. Except for brief periods of lecturing and travel and an interlude in New York City between 1896 and 1901, she resided in various communities in northern New Jersey for the rest of her life.

In 1860 Blackwell became embroiled in the controversy about divorce that engulfed the last national woman's rights convention held before the Civil War. Unlike her colleagues Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who agitated for easing the grounds on which women might seek divorce, Blackwell argued "that the married partner can not annul his obligations towards the other, while both live. . . . All divorce is naturally and morally impossible, even though we should succeed in annulling all legalities" (Stanton et al., vol. 1, p. 723). She reunited with Anthony and Stanton during the Civil War to found the Women's National Loyal League in support of African-American emancipation and enfranchisement. They argued again, however, in 1869 on the question of support for passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted suffrage to all men irrespective of color but lacked similar guarantees for women. Blackwell joined Lucy Stone to found the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported the amendment, while Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association opposed its ratification. Despite these political differences, Blackwell generally succeeded in maintaining cordial relationships with Stanton and Anthony for the rest of their lives.

In 1869 Blackwell published her first book, Studies in General Science. In it she set forth the outlines of the philosophical projects she pursued in her subsequent work: the reconciliation of natural and revealed religion, the relationship of mind and matter, and the unity of the physical and mental universe joined in an inexorable movement toward harmony. Much influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, she drew on explorations in science to argue for the continued growth of "a perfected system of coöperations in which all sentient and unsentient forces mutually co-work in securing the highest ultimate good . . . by which successive generations . . . of being are mutually aiding each other into higher stages of existence" (p. 252). The Sexes throughout Nature (1875) proposed that equality of the sexes was an evolutionary necessity. In The Physical Basis of Immortality (1876) she further elaborated on what she viewed as scientific evidence of the "indivisible 'mind-body' " (p. 17), claiming on this basis the unalterable and timeless existence of souls. Her final works, The Philosophy of Individuality (1893), The Making of the Universe (1914), and The Social Side of Mind and Action (1915), further developed these themes, underscoring the unity of nature accomplished through individual "correlated" actions. She also published a novel, The Island Neighbors (1871), and a book of poems, Sea Drift (1902).

Blackwell presented her philosophy regularly to a variety of organizations in which she was active. She helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873 to promote the general betterment of women, and she participated in meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She spoke regularly at suffrage meetings at the state and national levels and was elected president of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association in 1891. She was also active in the founding of the American Purity Association, which supported efforts to prevent state regulation of prostitution and to reform the social relations of the sexes.

In 1878 Blackwell requested and received recognition from the American Unitarian Association as a minister, and for a short time she actively sought a pulpit. The same year Oberlin belatedly recognized her theological studies by granting her an honorary A.M.; in 1908 it presented her with an honorary D.D. After she resettled in New Jersey, she worked with Unitarians in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and made a grant of land for a house of worship. In 1908 the Elizabeth Society recognized her as minister emeritus of All Souls Church.

Blackwell outlived her fellow suffrage pioneers; of all who attended the 1850 Woman's Rights Convention in Worcester, she alone survived to become enfranchised with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She cast her vote in 1920 for Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding. She died in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Blackwell was in the vanguard of antebellum reform, braving opposition to her ministerial career and her antislavery principles and persisting to build on the successes of her causes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Synthesizing the evangelical orthodoxies of her childhood, the transcendental and romantic concern for nature, and the evolutionary science popularized by Darwin and Spencer, she built philosophical foundations on which she argued for the equality of the sexes.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell's life is documented in the Blackwell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, as well as in two collections of Blackwell Family Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The Schlesinger collections include a partial typescript of Blackwell's memoirs, assembled and edited by Sarah Gilson. Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (1983), is a more complete biography than two popular accounts, Laura Kerr, Lady in the Pulpit (1951), which concentrates on her early years, and Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967), which places her in the context of her family. Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill, eds., Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93 (1987), includes the lifetime correspondence of the two reformers. Also useful are accounts in Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., 1881-1922). Additional, if unreliable, accounts underscoring the significance of Blackwell to her contemporaries appear in James Parton et al., Eminent Women of the Age (1868), and Frances Willard and Mary Livermore, American Women (1897).