A benevolence of Blackwells
Reading
books on-line is uncongenial to me, but it becomes necessary if the book is not
readily available in a nearby library.
And if you happen to be living in the middle of a medical crisis that
has closed or severely limited access to academic libraries, that means
virtually any book that is not already in your personal library. So this past week when it seemed imperative
to me to consult for a little light reading something entitled The Making of the Universe (Boston,
1914), I had to turn to the Internet.
There I found—from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe--a digitized copy of the book originally presented by its author to an old
friend, bearing the following inscription: “Rev. Olympia Brown with best
Christmas wishes from her longtime friend Antoinette Brown Blackwell. Dec. 1914.
Elizabeth N.J.” They were indeed
old friends at that time. Antoinette was 89, Olympia 79.
I’ll tell
you about how the Universe was made another time. Today I want to move to this week’s centenary
commemoration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. To get there one might begin in 1848, a
revolutionary year in Europe and the United States, although many historians
have paid too little attention to the American side. That is a pity, because whereas the European
revolutions, which took part in many places on the Continent, all failed pretty
ignominiously, that in America succeeded.
Admittedly, it took its own sweet time to do so. On the nineteenth and twentieth of July,
1848, a small convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, with the aim of airing national
women’s issues, including suffrage.
August 19, 1920 saw the final stage of the ratification of the
constitutional amendment extending the franchise: seventy-two years later! The date of August 19th has other
distinctions. Happy Birthday, Joan.
The “Seneca
Falls Convention,” though not the first public discussion of its themes, claims
its fame for its early date and the literary celebrity or future prominence of
several of its attendees. The more
substantial political work really got moving at the first of the annual
“Women’s Rights Conventions” (1850-1869).
The first meeting drew something like truly national representation,
including such activist superstars as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. But the only attendee of the initial meeting
in 1850 still alive at the time of the 1920 election was Antoinette Brown Blackwell. As an idealistic young woman she had once
believed that women’s suffrage was so just, reasonable, and necessary that it
would take no more than a year or two to achieve when raised in rational
political discussion. One recalls the
line in John Brown’s final communication concerning his one-time belief that
slavery could be abolished fairly easily.
“I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much
bloodshed it might be done.”
So far as I
know there was no familial kinship between Antoinette Brown and Olympia Brown,
or of either with a third Brown revolutionary just mentioned, John Brown of
Osawatomi, who does not feature as a principal in this essay but who is hardly
an insignificant figure. What united the
female Browns was an unflinching Christian vocation to religious ministry and
to cardinal aims of political and social justice, meaning the fair and equable
treatment of all: the abolition of slavery, the achievement of female
enfranchisement, the ordination of women in the Protestant churches, and the
amelioration of a huge national problem of alcohol abuse that left in its wake
poverty, misery, and violence against women and children. Every one of these causes ran headlong into
the opposition of powerful and mainly male groups, and every one was
principally animated by Christian religious conviction. All of these causes save the last have been
successfully “achieved” on paper; yet all remain works in progress. It is apparently impossible to legislate
intoxication away. Prohibition was, to use
a mild adjective, unsuccessful. It still
is. Though alcohol abuse remains a major
national problem, today’s prisons are filled not with the dealers and users of
booze, but with those of narcotic intoxicants.
Antoinette Brown
Blackwell (1825-1921) and Olympia Brown (1835-1926) both have claims to be the
first American women to have been ordained to religious ministry in a mainline
Protestant church. The former was
ordained in 1853 under the sponsorship of her local church, the latter in 1863 with
the blessing of the constituted authorities of her whole denomination. As is suggested by Blackwell’s dedication of
her gift book, there was a warm relationship between the two, the older woman
being a mentor and inspiration for the latter.
Though until recently unknown to me, Antoinette is very well known among
scholars of American social history. The
Blackwell family into which she married was for more than a century a virtual
training college for activists in virtuous social causes, especially though not
limited to causes expanding the opportunities for women in American
professional life, and particularly medicine.
It is virtually impossible to look into nineteenth-century social movements
without encountering the Blackwells and their close associates such as Olympia
Brown. (Olympia, married to a man named
Willis, continued to use her maiden name.)
I knew
practically nothing of this when I whimsically set off to check out some lady’s
ideas about the formation of the Universe.
And when the topic mutated opportunistically to the history of women’s
suffrage I did not sufficiently anticipate that everybody and her sister would
of course be writing about this topic this week. The Times
had a very informative magazine supplement about it, but (in my opinion) a
much more brittle and doctrinaire editorial (roughly “# Suffrage History So
White”). Most of us are convinced, I
suppose, that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody in it
were exactly like ourselves in their unspotted political orthodoxy; but several
of the Times’s regular editorial
writers have made an art form of conveying such belief. My own half century of historical study has
convinced me that such study invites less the imposition of conformity than the
appreciation of diversity—a word frequently trivialized in today’s campus
discourse.
In one of
her books available on-line (The Sexes
Throughout Nature, 1875) Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a serious student of
science and especially of evolutionary biology, tries to link men and women
both in their commonalities and in their differences, and to draw a bright line
between nature and nurture. This
necessarily involved her in a trenchant though modest and respectful engagement
with two intellectual giants of her day, Charles Darwin and Herbert
Spencer. Though I lack the competence to
judge, I know that few if any of the classics of nineteenth-century science
have not undergone serious emendation, and that undoubtedly holds true both for
Blackwell’s ideas and those of her sources.
But some spurious theory of innate male intellectual superiority (as
opposed to diversity of evolutionary function and social conditioning) was
always implicit if not overtly explicit in defense of the exclusively male
electoral privilege and numerous other social arrangements. Blackwell addresses both the nurture and the
nature parts with elegance. “[A]s highly
complex beings women must be taught to exercise all their functions, that they
may develop and strengthen all their faculties healthily and
symmetrically. A regimen of sofas must be as utterly demoralizing as would be a
regiment of soft bread and milk, appropriate enough to the yearling baby…If
anybody’s brain requires to be
sacrificed to those two Molochs, sewing-machine and cooking-stove, it is not
hers!” Concerning the Nature part, she
is pithy. “Is it true that average women
to-day are less versed than average men in abstract thinking, feeling, or
acting? Not in New England!”
