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HEARING WOMEN SPEAK: Antoinette Brown Blackwell and the Dilemma of Authority
Antoinette Brown Blackwell's work, especially her scientific writings, are prescient of contemporary, standpoint theory critiques of Enlightenment ways of knowing. Her ongoing struggle for an authority with which to speak led her to confront biblical teachings that forbade women's ministry and later led her to challenge the use of evolutionary theory to deny equality to women. In both cases, she attempted to meld the dominant discourse to her own uses, gaining the authority she needed to argue for women's equality. In her biblical arguments, she submitted Pauline texts to historical analysis by explicitly limiting their universal authority. Similarly, she critiqued the male bias evident in evolutionary science, undercutting its supposed objectivity. In so doing, though, Brown Blackwell undermined the universal basis of authority that she claimed for herself and encoded into her work conflicts about the basis of authority and women's equality.
Whether as lecturer, abolitionist, advocate of women's rights, ordained minister, or participant in scientific associations, Antoinette Blackwell embraced public life.(2) Nonetheless, as a woman, she constantly ran up against the need to establish her authority. Frequently, she complained about the subtle exclusionary practices of both religious and scientific associations. While the Association for the Advancement of Science allowed Brown Blackwell to read papers at the Association's meetings, she noted that the professionals at these meetings required a "mark" of approval from a man before accepting her ideas.(3) Participation in religious associations led her to the similar conclusion that "no one has yet found herself helped in the direction of publicity by the occupants of other pulpits."(4) Even when audiences tolerated a woman's public, physical presence, few listened to her words.(5)
The thread uniting Brown Blackwell's writing was her ongoing concern with establishing authority for herself and for other women. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, an historian of nineteenth-century women's rhetoric, argues, women rhetoricians of the nineteenth century faced a double task -- to present and argue their grievances and, more fundamentally, to gain the authority that would make those arguments persuasive.(6) This struggle proceeded at great cost to women like Brown Blackwell who spent inordinate amounts of time and energy justifying and apologizing for their desire to be taken as intelligent individuals. Indeed,...