ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL
The first woman ordained a mainstream Protestant minister in the United States, who answered Darwin four years after The Descent of Man and showed that his conclusion about women was in place before his evidence. Darwin had written to her once, and addressed her as a man. Nothing in his correspondence answers the book.
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Antoinette Brown was born in Henrietta, New York, in 1825. At Oberlin she finished the literary course in 1847 and then asked to study theology. The college let her take the course and withheld the recognition: she completed the work and was given no degree. In 1853 she was ordained to the pulpit of the Congregational church at South Butler, New York, with Luther Lee preaching the sermon, the first woman ordained a minister of a mainstream Protestant church in the United States. She married Samuel Blackwell, raised children, wrote philosophy and science, voted in 1920 at ninety-five, and died in 1921.
She was admitted to the course and refused the credential for it, which is the shape of every admission this Codex reads.
[See EZER KENEGDO · THE MARKED/UNMARKED STRUCTURE]
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DARWIN WROTE TO HER ONCE
In 1869 she published Studies in General Science and sent Darwin a copy. He answered on 8 November, from Down, thanking the author for the book and noting that it quoted work of his that was little known. His inscribed copy is still in his library. The letter, Darwin Correspondence Project DCP-LETT-6976, opens Dear Sir and closes Dear Sir, Yours faithfully.
Two years later he published The Descent of Man, with its sentence that man attains a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman. The one letter he wrote her was addressed to a man, because a book of general science by a woman was not among the things he expected to receive.
[See DARWIN · PRESUMED INCOMPETENT]
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THE ANSWER, 1875
The Sexes Throughout Nature was published in New York by Putnam in 1875. Its opening states the thesis as a claim to be tested: that the sexes in each species, compared on the same plane, are always true equivalents — equals but not identicals in development and in relative amounts of all normal force. And it says where the question stands: It is decided on both sides by inferences drawn from yet untested data.
She did not dispute Darwin's observations. She disputed how the conclusion had been reached. Of Darwin and Spencer she wrote that neither had given the question the attention he gave his own work: They accept the theory as a foregone conclusion, pushing forward a few stones as underpinning without being welded together by the cement of long and intent thinking.
Her finding was that the conclusion came first and the evidence was placed under it afterwards, which is the backdate stated in the vocabulary of 1875.
[See BACKDATING · NOW IT'S JUST YOUR NATURE]
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NO REPLY
The Darwin Correspondence Project records one letter between them, the one of 1869. Nothing in it, or after it, answers The Sexes Throughout Nature. The book had argued that his conclusion was a premise, and the premise went on being cited as a conclusion.
That is not a failure of her argument. It was sound, and it was in print, and it was addressed to the right man by name. It changed nothing, because the nature it refuted was never held up by argument. It is held up by upkeep, and upkeep does not need to read the reply.
[See THE HANDOVER · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
Her theory of equivalence kept the sexes different in kind and equal in sum, and later readers have heard in it the old doctrine of complementary spheres dressed as science. A reading that holds her up against Darwin adopts a second theory of woman's nature in place of the first.
The entry does not adopt her theory. It records what she did with it. She stated it as a hypothesis, which must be decided upon the simple basis of fact, and demanded the same test of the claim she opposed. What she refused was not Darwin's conclusion but its exemption from the test, and that refusal stands whatever the test would have found.
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She was admitted to study theology and refused the degree, ordained a minister when no mainstream Protestant church had ordained a woman, and addressed as Sir by the man whose book she would answer.
She asked for the test. The answer she got was the silence of a conclusion that had never needed one.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
