As graduating classes go, consider
1860 one of Antioch's finest. That year, out of a class of 28, Antioch produced
among others four ministers, four teachers, four business owners, three lawyers, two
college professors, two physicians, a banker, a newspaper editor, and a railroad
official. By far its most interesting member was Olympia Brown, a Universalist
preacher and a key figure in the women's suffrage movement. Olympia Brown was born in Michigan in 1835. Her parents took an active interest in her education, and she had a powerful example in her mother, Lephia Brown, a highly independent woman with a strong belief in the equality of the sexes. At fifteen Olympia began teaching school in her hometown of Prairie Ronde. She wished to attend the University of Michigan, but that institution did not yet admit women. She then enrolled at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, but found its strict orthodoxy in conflict with her already progressive ideas. She subsequently came to Antioch in 1855 and her family moved to Yellow Springs with her.
Olympia was a good, if somewhat difficult student with a great enthusiasm for learning. She was, after all, her mother's daughter, and she brought Lephia's independent spirit with her to school. In first year English, the instructor assigned in-class orations and readings, stating "all of the young men will be required to give speeches before the class. The young women must bring manuscripts to class and read from them." Many believed women inferior public speakers to men, and unable to recite from memory. Really. Olympia did not argue, but when her turn came the next day, she delivered a rousing oration with her manuscript rolled up in her hand. The confused faculty did not know what to do, and could not prevent her from memorizing her papers, which she never read while a student.
Olympia stuck adamantly to her beliefs, and as a result she and other like-minded women turned the Antioch of Horace Mann on its ear. In the mid 1850s the Amelia Bloomer dress came into fashion, a sort of pants-skirt combination that was (of all things) comfortable and practical. It was also scandalous, for the skirt only reached halfway down the shin, and the freedom of movement it afforded allowed women to engage in such male pursuits as running and easily traversing stairs. Olympia always wore her Bloomer dresses as a student, and ignored the ridicule she received from the many outraged Yellow Springs men.
Physical education was not available for Antioch women in Olympia's day, and she and her friends took long walks for exercise. When Horace Mann found out that young Antioch women were seen in nearby towns laughing, running, and talking noisily, he sent to Boston for a professional chaperone. Olympia noticed no such person had been hired to watch the men, so she and her friends expressed their displeasure by teasing the woman relentlessly in German. The chaperone lasted a week, and Mann sent for no others.
Olympia marveled at the distinguished speakers Mann attracted to the college, including Horace Greeley and Edward Everett Hale. Despite its coeducational philosophy, Antioch never invited female lecturers in the early years, believing no women at all comparable to the men invited. Students customarily arranged these visiting lectures, so Olympia organized other women students, raised a lecturer's fee, and brought Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a lay minister and reformer, to preach at the village Christian Church. This was the essence of Olympia Brown - where she saw wrongs she simply righted them.
Olympia developed strong moral, religious, and political beliefs at Antioch. She became an ardent abolitionist, took in the anti-slavery atmosphere prevalent on the campus, and coupled it to her familiarity with the Underground Railroad station her aunt operated in Michigan. Her experience at Antioch tempered an earlier evangelistic fervor she had felt at Mt. Holyoke, and influenced her to become a minister. She came to not believe in the doctrines of endless punishment and predestination that she felt kept so many congregations in thrall. She chose instead to lift up the spirits of Christians by rejoicing in their God.
After graduation she spent three years searching for a seminary that ordained women. Many rejection letters later, she entered the Theological School of St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. In 1863 she received her ordination at a meeting of the Northern Universalist Association in Malone, New York. At twenty-eight she became the Reverend Olympia Brown, the first woman in America to be ordained by a regularly constituted ecclesiastical body. While spreading the Gospel, she worked to advance the causes of equality and suffrage with such luminaries as Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Though she admired and respected these women, Olympia had many differences of opinion with them, and the ministry was still her first calling. She did her best to balance both careers at once, but when offered a post with Anthony's new suffrage newspaper The Revolution, she turned it down to remain pastor of the Universalist Church in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
There she met the church secretary, John Henry Willis, whom she married in 1873. She kept her maiden name for professional reasons, which she learned from Lucy Stone, with the enlightened John Henry's full approval. They had two children, and in 1878 the family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, when Olympia was named pastor of its Universalist congregation, the Church of the Good Shepherd. In 1882 the Wisconsin Women's Suffrage Association elected her its president, a post she held for thirty years. Five years later she resigned her pastorate to devote all her time to marching, lecturing, preaching and traveling ceaselessly for the cause of suffrage.
In 1885 Wisconsin passed a half-hearted suffrage law that provided in part that every woman over twenty-one had the right to vote in any election pertaining to school matters. Olympia reasoned that in a sense all elections pertain to school matters and this interpretation thrust her into the national spotlight in one of Wisconsin's most celebrated court cases. In a spring 1887 election she and about twenty other women showed up at the polls intending to vote for officers in no way connected with educational matters. Their votes refused, Olympia and the WWSA filed suit against the election inspectors, and won. This landmark decision essentially enfranchised Wisconsin women, but the State Supreme Court overturned the ruling just two months later. Olympia refused to share her colleagues' bitterness about the defeat, turning her energies to a monthly suffragist paper she started, The Wisconsin Citizen.
J. H. Willis died in 1893, and by that time owned part of the Times Publishing Company in Racine. Olympia bought his partners out, and for the next seven years managed the Racine Times-Call. In 1914 she moved to Baltimore to live with her daughter Gwendolyn Willis, a teacher at Bryn Mawr preparatory school. Six years later the Nineteenth Amendment finally passed, and Olympia Brown, at 85 one of the last survivors of the suffragist leadership, cast her first vote. Now that's some victory for humanity.