Waiting A Lifetime - Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell

1825–1921

Antoinette Blackwell lived to do something that many of her contemporaries did not. She voted in a presidential election. On November 2, 1920, at the age of ninety-five, she was among the first women to vote for a US president.

The women’s suffrage movement can be traced to the late 1700s, but the organized effort began in the mid-1800s. Yet it wasn’t until 1920 that women were given the right to vote on a national level.

Many of the pioneers of the women’s suffrage movement didn’t live long enough to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution. They never had the opportunity to cast the votes they worked tirelessly to secure for all women in the United States. But Antoinette did.

It seems she was fighting for women’s rights all her life. Graduating from Oberlin College, she wanted to continue at the school and earn a theological degree. Oberlin did not want to admit a woman to the program, but Antoinette fought, and eventually the school compromised. She could take the classes, but with no official credit. (Many years later, the college did grant her honorary Master of Arts and Doctor of Divinity degrees.) Significantly, while there, Antoinette published in an Oberlin journal her analysis of the apostle Paul’s writings on women, suggesting that his restrictions on female leadership were merely warnings against “excesses, irregularities, and unwarrantable liberties” in the church’s worship services.

She pastored a Congregationalist church in New York State for a time, and she was much in demand as a speaker on women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Antoinette took a break from public life to get married and rear her seven children, but once they were grown, she went back to preaching and fighting for women’s suffrage. It took almost her whole life to see the outcome of her fight, but it happened.

When you’re fighting for something you know is right, don’t give up. Frustrations may arise, people may try to stand in your way, but even if you never see the results in your lifetime, you’ll know you were true to what you knew was right.

Let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.

Galatians 6:9