Antoinette Brown (American National Biography)

Blackwell was in the vanguard of antebellum reform, braving opposition to her ministerial career and her antislavery principles and persisting to build on the successes of her causes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Synthesizing the evangelical orthodoxies of her childhood, the transcendental and romantic concern for nature, and the evolutionary science popularized by Darwin and Spencer, she built philosophical foundations on which she argued for the equality of the sexes.