Hello again... my friend.
Last time we stood in a doorway at White Earth with Enmegahbowh, watching a man hold two worlds together without letting either one disappear. Tonight I want to walk you into a very different doorway---into a crowded church in upstate New York---where a young woman named Antoinette Brown Blackwell dares to step into a pulpit that was never built with her in mind.
Come with me while we take a peak into that church.
The church is not large, and that makes it worse.
If this were a grand cathedral, some of the tension would vanish into the rafters. But here, in South Butler, the ceiling is low, the lamps are close, and the people are close to one another. I can feel the mixture of smells: lamp oil, damp wool, starch, a hint of nervous sweat. Outside, the fields are quiet. Inside, the air is crowded with opinions.
The men in the front pews are trying very hard to look calm. A few stare straight ahead with the fixed expression of people who have decided not to be amused. Others keep glancing sideways, measuring their neighbors' reactions, as if disapproval will be safer if it is shared. Behind them, women in dark dresses lean forward, eyes bright---not just curious, but hungry. They have been listening to sermons their whole lives. Tonight, one of their own is stepping over a line that has always held firm.
At the front of the church, the pulpit rises like a little ship's bow above the sea of heads. That is where the trouble is.
Antoinette stands just below it at first, in a plain black dress, dark hair pulled back, hands steady on the rail. She is not imposing. She is not trying to be. There is no theatrical flourish in her posture, no hint that she enjoys scandal. What I see in her face is a kind of concentrated calm, the calm of someone who has argued this moment through with herself a thousand times and has finally stopped arguing.
Around her, other ministers move through the familiar motions of ordination: prayers spoken, scripture read, questions asked and answered. Their voices carry the weight of habit. And yet everyone knows this is not habit. When they ask if she will preach the gospel faithfully, if she will care for this flock, if she will live a life worthy of the calling, the words sound slightly different wrapped around a woman's name.
When the time comes for the laying on of hands, she kneels.
Hands rest on her dark hair---hands that have blessed only men until now. I watch the faces of the congregation as much as hers. Some soften. Some harden. Some look away, as if this is a moment they are not sure they should see.
It is, in the scale of empire, a small scene in a small room. No government will fall tonight. No law will be overturned. But I can feel, in the quiet held breath of this congregation, something subtle and irreversible happening: the pulpit, that symbolic place where the Word is interpreted for the people, is widening by exactly the width of one woman.
Later, the record-keepers will be very proud of a phrase. They will call her "the first woman ordained to Christian ministry in America," as if the story began in this room. You and I, of course, have already met Jarena Lee---the fierce African Methodist woman who was preaching her heart out a generation earlier without anyone bothering to give her the official word ordained. So let us be precise: in the ledgers of a mainstream white denomination, Antoinette is the first woman they were willing to write down. Jarena was already there, uncounted but unforgettable.
The words she chooses will make more sense if we go back with her, to the girl who learned to love both scripture and argument long before anyone imagined her standing here.
For now, I simply want you to see Antoinette rise from her knees, step up into that narrow wooden pulpit, and open her mouth to speak.
The words she chooses will make more sense if we go back with her, to the girl who learned to love both scripture and argument long before anyone imagined her standing here.
She began, as so many reformers do, in a place that didn't look remarkable at all.
Henrietta, New York: farm country, long winters, a Congregational church that took its theology seriously and its habits even more seriously. Antoinette was one of many children in a family that loved scripture and argument in roughly equal measure. She read early. She listened harder. By the time other girls were worrying mainly about chores and courtship, she was worrying about predestination and justice.
I like to think of her as a girl sitting at the edge of the family table, listening to the men talk doctrine after Sunday dinner---about sin, about grace, about who was "called" to preach and who was not. When the conversation paused, she would slip in a question that didn't quite fit the frame: If God is love, why would he create souls only to damn them? If God is just, why are women always on the listening end of sermons, never on the speaking end?
The answers she received were learned, but they did not satisfy her. Her hunger was not for novelty; it was for coherence. She wanted a God whose character matched the deepest sense of right and wrong in her own conscience.
Oberlin College was, for a while, the great hope.
It was one of the few places in America that would even consider educating women alongside men, and it carried a reputation for piety and reform. Antoinette arrived with the same fierce seriousness she would later bring into the pulpit. She studied the "Ladies' Course," which was supposed to be enough: literature, "moral philosophy," a gentle dusting of theology. It was not enough.
She looked across the hall at the men bent over Greek verbs and thick volumes of systematic theology and thought---not for the last time---Why should the mysteries of God be locked in their heads and not mine?
So she did something simple and subversive: she showed up.
She asked to sit in the all-male theology classes. The faculty, to their credit and their limits, allowed it---sort of. She could attend the lectures; she could do the work; she could think at the same level as any minister-in-training. But when it came time to grant formal recognition---degrees, licenses, the paper proof that she belonged in a pulpit---the door stayed half-shut. She was there, but not officially. Present, but not counted. You can hear Jarena Lee coughing politely in the background of that arrangement.
For a while, she tried to live with the contradiction. She finished her studies, she prayed, she waited to see if some path would open that did not require a collision with the expectations of her time.
It did not.
So she did another simple, subversive thing: she started preaching anyway.
Not by storming a pulpit, but by accepting invitations to speak in places where the official rules were a little less rigid---reform meetings, abolition gatherings, women's rights conventions. She spoke about slavery as a sin that stained the entire nation. She spoke about temperance, about the misery pressed into families by liquor. She spoke about the right of women to think, to vote, to shape the world they lived in.
At first, her speaking license from Oberlin was carefully worded, as if the college itself was nervous. She could "exhort," she could give religious addresses---but the word "preach" hovered over the page like a forbidden spell. In practice, the distinction meant little. When she stood up before a crowd with a Bible and a text, when she opened a passage and applied it to the conscience of the listeners, she was doing the thing that pulpits exist to do.
That is how the people of South Butler first came to know her.
Some of them heard her at a temperance rally. Others at a revival meeting. They noticed that she did not use her gender as an apology or as a weapon. She spoke plainly, with a logic that did not need shouting. She named sin where she saw it, including in the economic and social structures that kept women and Black people in their "places." She sounded, in other words, like a pastor.
So when their little church needed one, a faction of the congregation wrote to her with what must have felt, in that world, like a wild idea: Come be our minister.
You can imagine the arguments that followed.
Some of the men in the wider association shook their heads violently. A woman as pastor? Impossible. Unbiblical. Dangerous to the natural order. Others, less certain, wrapped their discomfort in procedural concerns: There is no precedent. The rules are unclear. Perhaps another man would be safer. The members of South Butler who had already sat under her preaching were not persuaded. They had heard the word through her. They trusted what they had experienced more than abstract fears.
Antoinette hesitated, but not for long. The call tugged at the same place inside her that had been restless since childhood. She had not pushed into theology classes simply to decorate her mind. She believed she was called to preach.
And so we return to that low-ceilinged church, to the ordination we have just watched.
Behind the moment---a few hands, a few prayers---is a long line of invisible wrestling: with scripture, with tradition, with her own reluctance to be the center of controversy. There is also the half-remembered presence of other women whose gifts had been tolerated in back rooms and galleries but never recognized with formal words: "Reverend. Pastor. Minister."
When she steps into the pulpit that first Sunday as the duly ordained pastor of South Butler Congregational Church, she carries all of that with her. She also carries a quieter burden: the knowledge that she is being watched not only as herself, but as a test case. Any mistake she makes will not be filed under "Antoinette's misjudgment," but under "Women in general."
It is an impossible standard, which is to say, a thoroughly familiar one.
Her ministry there, as you know, will not last long. The pressures are too many; the expectations too tangled. Some parishioners want a tamer, more "feminine" spirituality. Some of her fellow reformers think she has given too much of herself to a conservative structure. The strain between her conscience and the limits of that small church will, in time, pull her away from the pastorate.
But before we follow her out of South Butler and into the long arc of her writing and later life, I want to linger with the spiritual question that lay under her first steps: What does it mean, in a culture built on male authority, for a woman's mind and voice to be treated as fully capable of speaking for God?
That question, more than the date on any certificate, is the real heart of her story.
There are many ways to answer that question.
You can answer it with a Bible verse, of course. Antoinette knew all the arguments---both the ones used against her and the ones she used in reply. You can answer it with church history, with appeals to early Christian communities where women hosted gatherings and taught new believers. You can answer it with stories of call and resistance, like Jarena Lee's, where the fire to speak burns hotter than the rules that forbid it.
Antoinette's answer was simpler and, in its way, more radical: If women are fully human, then everything that belongs to human beings belongs to them as well.
Not "special privileges." Not "feminine intuition" as a decorative accent on male authority. Just full access to the same tools: conscience, reason, scripture, science, public voice. The pulpit was not, for her, a magical piece of furniture. It was a symbol of something more basic---the belief that there is nothing about male bodies that makes God's words fit them better.
From that conviction, a great many things follow.
It means that when she stands up to preach, she is not asking for a favor. She is exercising a right rooted in reality itself. It means that the doubts and misgivings of the men around her, however sincere, do not outweigh the combination of call and competence she knows in her bones. It means that when she looks out over the congregation, she does not see "flock" and "shepherds," or "men who think" and "women who feel," but souls on the same footing, facing the same God.
This is why the little church in South Butler is spiritually important even though it is historically fragile. The church will not keep her. The structures cannot yet hold the weight of what she represents. But in that brief season, an experiment is made visible: What if we treated women's spiritual authority not as a borrowed cloak, but as something woven into their being?
The experiment does not fail because she is inadequate. It falters because the environment around her is not ready to receive what she embodies.
Some parishioners want "a lady pastor" in a very narrow sense: someone gentle, soothing, focused on private piety and personal kindness. They are less comfortable when she carries the same prophetic edge into the pulpit that they admire in male reformers---when she denounces slavery, or questions economic practices, or suggests that the gospel might have something to say about how men treat their wives. Others, outside the congregation, decide that the whole adventure is scandalous on its face, regardless of what she actually says.
Antoinette tries, for a while, to navigate these currents. She moderates some tones, chooses her battles, listens for the Spirit in the complaints as well as in the encouragements. But there is only so much you can do when the very fact of your presence is the problem.
After less than a year, she resigns.
If we stopped her story there, it would be easy to read it as proof that the experiment was premature, that women in the pulpit were a charming but unrealistic notion. Many did read it that way. Antoinette did not.
Stepping away from that pastorate does not mean stepping away from her calling. It means changing its shape.
She returns to the lecture circuit, to the rough-and-tumble world of reform meetings and public debates. She writes. She marries a man, Samuel Blackwell, who believes in her mind and her work, and together they weave family life and activism in ways that are messy, imperfect, and very modern.
More importantly for our purposes, she extends her question into new territory.
If women are fully human, then it is not only churches that must change. Science must, too.
By the time she is writing The Sexes Throughout Nature, the word "evolution" has begun to rearrange how people think about themselves. Some use it as an excuse to throw away the idea of God entirely. Others use it more selectively: they keep their belief in providence but happily take on the new language of "higher" and "lower" types, applying it to races, classes, and sexes with a confidence that curdles into cruelty.
Antoinette sees this happening. She reads not only Darwin but his interpreters, the men who insist that the development of the human species proves that women are naturally passive, dependent, mentally narrower, designed to support male genius rather than to possess it.
If she were a different kind of believer, she might choose to reject the whole scientific enterprise, to retreat into a defensive piety that insists the Bible is enough and biology is a dangerous temptation. If she were a different kind of rationalist, she might conclude that the new science has trumped her old faith and that "nature" has rendered equality impossible.
She does neither.
Instead, she tries something that, in her time, is startling: she reads nature with the same trust in coherence she brings to scripture. If both are telling the truth about the same reality, they must, at a deep level, agree. If they appear not to, then we have misunderstood one or the other---or both.
So she writes a book arguing, in essence, that if you look closely at the natural world, you will find cooperation, complementarity, mutual development between the sexes---not a simple hierarchy where one is always the actor and the other always the acted upon. She challenges the way male scientists interpret their own data. She insists that any picture of evolution that makes half the species a permanent assistant is not good science, whatever the credentials on the cover.
This is not a side project. It is an extension of the same spiritual conviction that drove her into the pulpit.
Equal souls, equal minds.
You can hear the echo of Sor Juana in her work---the insistence that a woman's intellectual life is not an ornament but an offering. You can hear an anticipatory resonance with the future, where other women will argue that their presence in laboratories, operating rooms, and courts is not a concession but a correction.
Antoinette's faith also changes over time. The God of her childhood, wrapped tightly in doctrinal definitions, becomes harder to hold onto as she watches how churches behave around slavery, war, and women's rights. At one point she confesses, with painful honesty, that "the whole groundwork of my faith has dropped away from me." And yet she does not settle into cynicism. She rebuilds her vision of the divine around the same core principle: a moral order woven into the universe, one that demands equality and integrity even when institutions lag behind.
If you want a single image for her contribution to the golden thread, it is this: a woman standing at the meeting point of church and science, refusing to let either be used as a weapon against women's full humanity.
Why should that matter now, when women stand in many pulpits and hold many degrees?
Because history moves, but it does not move evenly.
In some places, Antoinette's questions seem quaint. Of course women can preach, teach, practice medicine, lead laboratories, argue cases in court. Who would doubt it? In other places---sometimes just a few streets away---the old assumptions are very much alive. A woman speaks in a meeting and is ignored until a man repeats her point. A girl is taught that her highest calling is to support the ministry of men, never to imagine herself in that role. A woman in a scientific field learns to expect that her competence will be doubted until it is proven three times over.
Even where laws have changed, habits of mind persist. The pulpit has many forms now: the lectern, the podium, the conference table, the operating room, the commentator's desk. In each of those spaces, there are still moments when a woman feels the weight Antoinette felt---the knowledge that she is being watched not only as herself, but as a test of what women can or cannot do.
That is one reason her story remains sharp.
Another is this: we are still tempted to treat faith and science as enemies, and still tempted to weaponize both in the service of our preferred hierarchies.
Some would like to use religious texts to keep women in subordinate roles, as if the divine image were distributed in layers, thicker in men than in women. Others would like to use selective readings of biology to argue that "nature" assigns leadership to one sex and nurture to the other, and that anything else is rebellion against our design.
Antoinette stands at the intersection of those temptations and says, gently but firmly, No.
No, because any God worthy of worship cannot contradict the deepest truth about justice etched into the human conscience. No, because any honest science must change its models when the data do not match its prejudices. No, because women's actual lives---their resilience, their creativity, their courage---refuse to fit into the cramped roles prepared for them.
She does not offer an easy, triumphalist story. Her own path is full of disappointment and unfinished work. She does, however, offer a way of thinking that our age desperately needs: a refusal to let any authority---religious or scientific---off the hook when it justifies inequality.
I do not know what your relationship is to these questions.
Perhaps you are a woman who has grown tired of being the exception. You have been told for years that you are "not like other women," as if competence were a rare and startling quirk, not a shared possibility. You have walked into rooms and felt, as Antoinette once did, that every misstep will be used as ammunition against your entire sex. You have heard your calling---whether to ministry, to research, to leadership---as something that must constantly be defended rather than simply lived.
If that is you, I hope you hear in Antoinette's life not only the strain but the legitimacy of your desire. You are not asking for too much when you ask to be treated as fully human in every arena. You are asking for exactly what reality itself is structured to give.
Perhaps you are a man who has been handed, without your consent, the role of default authority. You are expected to lead, to decide, to speak first. You may have absorbed, without ever quite agreeing, the idea that your voice carries a natural weight that others' voices lack. You may feel, when equality is discussed, a quiet, unspoken fear: that your place will be taken, that you will be left without a role or a dignity of your own.
If that is you, I invite you to see Antoinette's story as an opening, not a threat. When women step into pulpits and laboratories and boardrooms, they are not taking something that properly belongs to you. They are relieving you of a burden you were never meant to carry alone. The world is not poorer when more minds are allowed to work at full strength. It is safer.
And perhaps you are someone who has watched faith and science used as clubs, and have grown wary of both. You have seen religious language deployed to keep people small. You have seen "scientific" claims smuggled into conversations to shut down questions about justice. You are not sure where, if anywhere, the golden thread of meaning and morality might still be found.
If that is you, Antoinette offers a quiet reassurance: the deeper truth is not aligned with your oppressors. When faith and science are used to belittle or exclude, it is the misuse of those tools, not the underlying reality, that is at fault. You are allowed to ask more of both.
By now, you may have noticed a pattern running through the lives we have been visiting.
Jarena Lee preaching without permission. Sor Juana writing theology and poetry from a cloistered cell. Enmegahbowh standing between peoples. Antoinette climbing the steps of a pulpit that the rulebooks said was not hers.
Each of them, in their own way, refused to let the official story dictate the limits of their soul.
The golden thread does not ask you to pretend that gender, race, culture, and history do not matter. It asks you to see that beneath all of those, there is a shared ground---a dignity that is older than any law and stronger than any prejudice. When that dignity is recognized, structures change. When it is denied, structures crack, whether or not they know it yet.
You do not have to be famous to live into that truth. You do not have to write books or give speeches or cross oceans. You do, however, have to be willing to let your conscience and your intellect work together, rather than turning one against the other.
You are allowed to ask, in every setting you enter: If this space truly recognized the full humanity of everyone in it, what would be different? You are allowed to listen seriously to whatever answers come. And you are allowed to act on them, in whatever sphere of influence you have.
If someone tells you that your mind is a threat to your faith---or that your faith is an embarrassment to your mind---you can remember Antoinette, who refused to choose between them. She did not always achieve a perfect harmony. None of us do. But she trusted that a universe made by a just and loving source would not ultimately pit truth against truth.
You are free to trust that as well.
We have been spending time in churches lately: with Jarena in the galleries of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Enmegahbowh in a small wooden mission on Native land, and now with Antoinette in a low-ceilinged Congregational meeting house. All of these spaces are shaped by human hands and human limits. None of them can contain the whole of the sacred.
For our next visit, I want to take you somewhere very different.
Not into a pulpit, but into a palace.
Imagine a stone fortress in sixteenth-century India, its walls high and guarded, its courtyards full of gossip and expectation. Inside, a young Rajput princess is expected to play her part: a dutiful wife in a royal household, a jewel in someone else's crown. Instead, she keeps slipping away to a small temple in the dark, where a statue of Krishna waits behind flickering lamps.
There, in that quiet, she sings.
She sings to him not as an idea or an obligation, but as her true beloved. The songs she pours out are so full of intimacy that they scandalize the court. A married woman daring to call a god her husband? A princess ignoring the rules of caste and decorum to dance in the streets with wandering devotees? The whispers grow. The pressure mounts. The threats sharpen.
And one night, she walks out of the palace for love.
Her name is Mirabai. She will not write theological treatises. She will not argue with scientists. Her protest is stranger and more dangerous: she simply lives as if her first loyalty were to the One she loves, and refuses to pretend otherwise, no matter who is offended.
Next time, I want to remember her with you---not because we are all meant to abandon our homes, but because there are moments when the demand to be respectable must give way to the demand to be true.
Until then, may you have the courage of Antoinette's mind and the steadiness of her conscience. May you trust that your questions are not enemies of faith, but possible paths into a clearer light.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.