“There were angry men confronting me and I caught the flashing of defiant eyes, but above me and within me, there was a spirit stronger than them all.” She had said.
Undeterred, she spoke before an audience again less than a week later, this time before a small congregational church in South Butler, New York. There, Antoinette Brown was ordained as the first woman minister in America. This was on September the 15th, 1853.
November 15, 1853, Brown presided at the marriage of a daughter of Rhoda DeGarmo, an early women’s rights activist from Rochester. She also signed “The Just and Equal Rights of Women,” a summons to the Woman’s Rights State Convention, which took place in Rochester on November 30 and December 1, 1853.
Brown prospered in the early months of her ministerial work in South Butler, but the good times were short-lived. She battled with feelings of rejection and solitude because she was ostracized by the majority of her female and male peers.

Worse, she began to have doubts about both the true Christian theology and her convictions. During her first year at South Butler, Antoinette discovered that her liberal emphasis on God’s mercy didn’t seem to align with the more conservative and classic style of preaching that she was expected to follow.   She began to question her personal understanding of God as love, as well as the Bible’s authority.
Brown was distraught a few months down. “Suddenly I found that the whole groundwork of my faith had dropped away from me,” she said. “I found myself absolutely believing in nothing. . . Was there any God?” It wasn’t up to a year after she began pastoring before Antoinette left South Butler to return to her parents’ house to rest.
She would later return to ministering but not in an official capacity. She spent a significant amount of time visiting women in prisons, tenements, and asylums. She published journals of her experiences in a series of articles in the New York Tribune.