Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

The Story of Olympia Brown

Reverend Darcey Laine
February 19, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

At the time when Olympia Brown was a little girl, there was no such thing as a woman minister. In the mid 19th century, everyone knew that ministers were men. But Olympia grew up in a family so committed to education, that her father built a schoolhouse on their pioneer farm in Michigan so that Olympia and her 3 younger sisters could have a place to learn. At a time when few women attended college, Olympia Brown convinced her parents to let her attend Antioch college. The family was so pleased with her education, they moved the whole family there so all 4 daughters could attend.

While she was at Antioch, she invited Antoinette Brown (no relation) to lecture and preach. “It was the first time I had heard a woman preach,” she remembered, “and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.”

Still Olympia dreamed of being a minister. But, as her biographer tells us:

The Unitarian School of Meadville, Pennsylvania, replied to her request for admission saying that “the trustees thought it would be too great an experiment” to admit a woman. Oberlin replied that she could be admitted but could not participate in public exercises. Finally, Mr. Ebenezer Fisher, President of the Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University, offered her admission but added that he “did not think women were called to the ministry. But I leave that between you and the Great Head of the Church.” “This,” Olympia thought, “was exactly where it should be left. But when I arrived, I was told I had not been expected and that Mr. Fisher had said I would not come as he had written so discouragingly to me. I had supposed his discouragement was my encouragement.”¹

They say many of the men at this seminary were uncomfortable having a female classmate. Like so many pioneers, Olympia worked diligently to prove that she was just as smart and able to excel in her field of study. After 2 years, she graduated at the top of her class, making her the first woman to receive a theological degree from an established program. but getting a theological degree and being ordained are different processes with different people in charge. Nevertheless during her second year of seminary she went before the Ordaining council of the Northern Universalist Association and was able to change the minds of men who had preciously been set against her ordination. In 1863 she was finally ordained, and became the first woman to be ordained a Universalist minister, and was the first woman to be recognized as a minister by an organized denomination in the United States. In her autobiography she writes that “Afterward Mr. Fisher, who had been especially opposed to me, had said gloomily to one of my classmates ‘You will see now the consequence of this. Next year there will be fifteen women in the class, and then women will flock to the ministry.’”² It seems Mr. Fisher was right. Just a few years ago the UUA announced that just over half of all UU ministers are women.

In 1964 Brown was called to full-time parish ministry in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. She loved this little church and they loved her. By this time Olympia was active in the women’s suffrage movement. When Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony asked her to ride the circuit in Kansas, her church gave her 4 months leave to do the hard work of changing people’s hearts and minds. She rode the circuit speaking in small towns throughout Kansas and what was then the far west. This was before shock absorbers, remember, and before asphalt. Imagine her fortitude and determination to ride on a hard wooden seat over a rocky road through the plains, not knowing whether this next town would be open to her message or would be outraged and call her names. It must have been hard and lonely, but she accepted it as a challenge. She spoke over 300 times in those 4 months. Though in the end only 1/3 of the male electorate in Kansas voted for women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony considered this a wonderful triumph.

Brown eventually married, and had children of her own. It was through the support of her husband, who moved his business to Racine, Wisconsin, to support her ministry, and of her mother who shared their home, that she was able to serve as a full-time parish minister and an activist. Eventually she retired from the full-time ministry to devote more of her energies to promoting the rights of women, especially the right to education and the right to vote. Imagine the sense of joy and fulfillment she must have experienced when the US constitution was finally changed to give women the right to vote. Imagine standing for the first time at the ballot box. Brown was one of the few early suffragists who lived to see their dream fulfilled.

She continued preaching and organizing into her eighties, and in her obituary The Baltimore Sun noted that "Perhaps no phase of her life better exemplified her vitality and intellectual independence than the mental discomfort she succeeded in arousing, between her eightieth and ninetieth birthdays, among the conservatively minded Baltimoreans." That’s a pretty amazing story — a life any of us would be proud to have. This is one of the stories we tell our children in this church; I told Olympia’s story in Family Chapel earlier this month, and Amy will talk about her again today as a way of thinking about what it means to be first at something. It follows a kind of formula for the UU hero story:

• The hero is a person of principle.
• She takes her faith in a radical new direction based on those principles.
• She meets resistance even within her own faith.
• She perseveres through tough times, and eventually the radical ideas become accepted by the larger community, and become part of our identity as a people.

Think about the stories of Michael Servetus, Theodore Parker, or John Murray. It’s fun to hear stories about the principled hero who meets resistance, but eventually changes minds and hearts and transforms the thinking of our culture. But it’s not so fun to live those stories. It’s no fun when you speak the truth that reason and experience has revealed to you and everyone looks at you like you have lobsters crawling out of your ears. How does one summon the courage to bring the message of women’s suffrage to a roomful of angry men in Kansas as Olympia Brown did?

Put yourself in the shoes of John Murray, the father of American Universalism standing in the pulpit as a rock comes flying through your church. It’s amazing, and possibly apocryphal that he responded “This argument is solid and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.” … “Not all the stones in Boston except they stop my breath, shall shut my mouth.” How did it feel to be a member of John Murray’s congregation? Would you be frightened to go to church on Sunday? Would you hesitate to tell your friends where you went to church? There MUST HAVE been some debate at the annual meeting about the “broken window” line item.

Think how uncomfortable it actually is to have your heart turned by a powerful new idea. Even John Murray himself was disturbed when he first was exposed to Universalism in England. It turned his whole world view on its head. His whole life changed as he began to assimilate the Universalist idea that a loving God wouldn’t predestine most of humanity to an eternity of fire and brimstone.

We happen to know that all these stories end happily. Women can vote. WE don’t feel we have to choose between scientific truth and religious truth. WE are free from the idea that only an elect few are saved and the rest of us will burn in eternal hellfire. The road was long and hard, but the ideas and principles our heros stood for endure. Even the story of Servetus which ends tragically when he is burned at the stake by Calvin for his Unitarian ideas offers a seed of hope and triumph in the retelling because his ideas live on in us.

But try to imagine what it was like to live out these stories. All those suffragists who gave their lives to the idea that women had a right to vote- to have a voice in our political process- most of them did not live to see the constitution changed. They must have known dark moments of despair. How would it feel to die without seeing any fruit from your life’s work? They could only dream of a time like the one I was born into; where a woman’s vote is not any more radical than a man’s vote.

In fact, we do know all these experiences in our own stories, the stories we live out day to day…

• We know what it’s like to stand up for a principle.
• We know what it’s like to have our ideas challenged.
• We know what it’s like to work hard for something without any assurance that we will live to see progress.

That’s why we tell one another the story of Olympia Brown: We want our little girls and little boys to know this story so that when they run into gender barriers in their own lives, they know that they are not the first to encounter such barriers. We want them to have that inner knowing that sometimes it’s important to stand firm for what you believe.

Throughout our lives these stories provide support and encouragement when we realize the ideas we know in our guts to be true are unpopular, or go against conventional wisdom. These stories are a challenge to us in the moments of choice in our day to day lives: that sudden flip flop in the stomach, the surge of energy when I realize I have an opportunity to speak my truth, and that the heroes of my faith spoke their truth even when that might mean a loss of status, loss of a job, or the crash of a rock through a window.

These stories give hope when our own struggle is long and hard, and we see no signs of progress. We remember that some kinds of change take more than 1 generation. The fruit we harvest today gives us hope for the seeds we plant for future harvest.

Stories provide us with a kind of ethical model. In a moment of decision it is sometimes easier to ask “What would Olympia Brown do” than work with more abstract principles. The memory of a good story jerks something in us awake.

Stories also inform our identity. I know that as a UU I stand in a lineage of people who use reason and science like Theodore Parker, a lineage of people who speak the truth like Michael Servetus, a lineage of people who work for social change like Olympia Brown, a lineage of people who care for others like Clara Barton. Of all the stories we hear over a lifetime, certain narratives really resonate with us. This is because we recognize them, either as something like what we have experienced, or as something like what we aspire to be. What stories have inspired and challenged and stuck with you over your lifetime?

Today I challenge you to honor those stories that you have gathered to yourself. Honor the part of yourself that recognizes you in those stories. Believe that you can be as brave and determined as Olympia Brown. Remember that you will have your own moment to speak your truth. Know that will have opportunities to stand up to oppressive forces. The stories that inspire you. The stories that stir your hearts. Let us tell those stories in the very living of our lives.

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