1835-1926
Universalist Minister, Suffragist

The Final Push.

On 2 November 1920 Olympia Brown, at the age of eighty-five, cast a ballot for the first time in her long, distinguished life when she voted in a presidential election. That simple act was the culmination of a lifetime of fighting for women's rights as well as achieving personal goals against much resistance. The 1910s had seen the suffrage movement reenergized, and Brown, although she was seventy-five when the decade began and had faced numerous disappointments in her career as an activist, again became focused on the goal, knowing that the time was ripe and the era would provide a final chance for women to achieve the vote in her lifetime.

Youth.

Brown's beliefs and her strong personality came from her mother, Lephia Brown. Olympia was born in a log cabin near Schoolcraft, Michigan, in 1835 in what was then still frontier...