Nevertheless, She Persisted!

By Bonnie Withers

If you are looking for a UU woman for a role model, you need look no further than Olympia Brown. But beware! This feisty little woman will ask much of you. Olympia was born in a Universalist household on January 5, 1835. Her upbringing lead her to pursue education beyond high school.  It was then that she became fully aware of the barriers women faced in American society. Olympia was faced with rejection at every turn—no to theological seminary, no to ordination, no to being installed in a church. Each rejection was overcome by her persistence and skill. 

Olympia Brown became the first woman to be fully ordained by denominational authority in the U.S. She served Universalist churches in five states, including Racine, Wisconsin. The Racine church, not unlike others which called her, was in a sorry state.  She wryly noted that the more stable churches were all in the hands of men; she got the difficult ones.  When she left the Racine Universalist Church, it was thriving and a beacon of social justice in the community, and remains so to this day, where it proudly bears her name. 

Throughout and beyond her ministerial career, Olympia was deeply involved in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.  After working with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she was disappointed in the second generation of leadership and joined forces with the more militant National Woman’s Party. During a cold, snowy, demonstration at the White House in 1917, with Woodrow Wilson off to France, tiny, 83-year-old Olympia Brown, burned a copy of his speech in front of a cheering crowd. 

Olympia was the one of a small handful of original suffragists who lived long enough to vote in 1920, the year in which she gave her last sermon in Racine where she said, 

“Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which placed before you the loftiest ideals, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty and made the world beautiful for you.”

Olympia Brown died in 1926 at age 91.

To read more, I recommend uudb.org/brown-olympia/