Abstract
Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: “young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway”; “young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls”; and “we never examine young ladies in Algebra.” Reared in Michigan under the influence of a mother determined to see her daughters fully educated, Brown was attracted to Antioch “by evidence of a broader spirit.” She graduated four years later and went on to become the country's first ordained female Universalist minister, a women's rights activist, and a vice president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. In the 1850s, however, she was particularly interested in what Antioch's first president, Horace Mann, described as its “Great Experiment”: coeducation.
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