About This Exhibit

Celebrating 50 Years of Antoinette Brown Lectures

In the early 1970s, theological education saw an influx of women students, and Vanderbilt Divinity School was no exception. The Divinity School established a Women’s Task Force, which sponsored the first Antoinette Brown Lecture in 1974 and created the Office of Women’s Concerns. Named for Antoinette Brown, the first woman ordained to the ministry in the US, the Lectures were funded originally by benefactor Sylvia Sanders Kelley of Atlanta, GA, who received her BA from Vanderbilt in 1954. Over the past 50 years, the Office of Women’s Concerns, and later the Dean of the Divinity School, brought to campus theologians, Biblical scholars, church historians, ethicists, church leaders, and civil rights champions to speak on some aspect of religion as it relates to women. Join us for a tour of the lectures, both written and oral, and experience the passion and creativity of the lecturers.

“Women are needed in the pulpit as imperatively and for the same reason they are needed in the world-because they are women. Women have become-or when the ingrained habit of unconscious imitation has been superseded, they will become-indispensable to the religious evolution of the human race.”

“Woman and the Pulpit”
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
The Worlds Parliament of Religions, p. 1150.
Parliamentary Publishing Company, 1893