Sexes Throughout Nature, The.
Blackwell, Antoinette Brown. The Sexes Throughout Nature. New York: Putnam’s, 1875.
8vo.; brown uncoated endpapers; green cloth, stamped in gilt; tips bumped, light wear to spine; a nice copy. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of the second book by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, pioneer women’s rights reformer, theologian, and social scientist. In this uncommon collection of essays, Blackwell bravely attempts to establish a scientific theory of women’s equality:
It is the central theory of the present volume that the sexes in each species of beings compared upon the same plane, from the lowest to the highest, are always true equivalents—equals but not identicals in development and in relative amounts of all normal force. This is an hypothesis which must be decided upon the simple basis of fact (p. 11).
The book consists of five chapters—“Sex and Evolution,” “The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction,” “Sex and Work,” “The Building of a Brain,” and “The Trial by Science”—in which Blackwell responds to the theories of contemporary scientists—particularly Darwin—to advance her radical argument.
Blackwell, the first ordained female minister in the U.S., was born in Henrietta, New York in 1825. Her family was a strong supporter of liberal causes, including abolitionism and moral reform. Blackwell’s brothers and sisters were already members of the Congregational Church when, at age nine, she made a public confession of faith and was accepted as a full church member. Antoinette attended school from age three on; in 1846, with the full support of her family, she entered Oberlin College, the nation’s first coeducational college. At Oberlin, Blackwell became a close friend of classmate Lucy Stone (her future sister-in-law) and she became, like Stone, a strong supporter of women’s rights. After graduating from a non-degree literary course in 1847, Blackwell decided to pursue a degree in theology; three years later, after many objections from faculty members on account of her gender, she graduated with a theology degree. She went on to face years of struggles for the right to preach and be recognized as a theologian by her peers.
After leaving Oberlin, Blackwell lectured in support of the women’s rights movement. She was ordained as a minister in 1853 by the First Congregational Church in South Butler, New York; eventually she became a Unitarian, and in 1855 traveled to New York City, where she worked with the poor in tenements and prisons. On January 24, 1856, she married Samuel Charles Blackwell, the brother of Lucy Stone’s husband, Henry Browne Blackwell. Samuel Blackwell was, like his brother, supportive of feminist causes, and he helped to raise the couple’s five children.
In 1878, when her husband suffered financial problems, Blackwell returned to the lecture circuit. She traveled extensively for the next two years; somehow she also found time to work for the American Woman Suffrage Association, to write for Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal, and to serve as Vice President of the Association for the Advancement of Women. Blackwell spent the last years of her life, despite failing health, working full-time for woman’s suffrage. “She alone of the pioneer woman suffragists lived to see the long-awaited suffrage legislation passed. On November 2, 1920, accompanied by her daughter, Blackwell rode to the local schoolhouse near Elizabeth, New Jersey, and cast her ballot” (HWH, p. 78). Blackwell died the following year.
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