The Rev. Olympia Brown (1835-1926) was the first ordained female minister in the United States. She served as pastor of the Good Shepard Universalist Church in Racine from February 1, 1878, until February 1, 1887. "I feel," said Brown, "that no other profession is so well-suited to women in their various relations of wife, mother, or housewife as the ministry." Her struggle for a college degree and ordination was groundbreaking. She attended Antioch College in Ohio, at a time when only three schools were participating in "the experiment of co-education." After graduation she took up the cause of woman suffrage, helping to win property rights for women in Ohio. In the fall of 1861 she entered St. Lawrence Theological School in Canton, New York. Along with Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, Brown devoted her adult life and energies to equality for blacks and females. Both as a minister and as a private citizen, she carried the message of suffrage to Kansas and much of the rest of the Midwest, as well as to Boston, New York, and Washington.

When she married John Willis in 1873, Brown kept her own name. Willis, a publisher and printed, supported and encouraged his wife’s causes. The couple lived at 941 Lake Avenue. They had a son, Henry Parker, and a daughter, Gwendolyn. It was at Gwendolyn’s house in Baltimore that Brown died in 1926. She was 91 years old.

One of Racine’s schools bears her name and so does the church of which she was pastor. A bronze tablet in Atwood Hall in New York, where she attended seminary, calls her a "pioneer and champion of women’s citizenship rights, forerunner of the new era," and concludes: "The flame of her spirit still burns today."

Submitted by Deborah Crowell