Marcus Lafayette Gordon was born in Gwinette County, Georgia on June 16, 1837. He was raised and educated in that county and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1858. While at Dickinson, Gordon was elected to the Belles Lettres Society. He graduated with his class and, after legal studies, was admitted to the bar in Lawrenceville, Georgia in his home county. Shortly after this, Gordon moved west to Waco, Texas, where he opened a law office.

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.