Great American Events/Universalists

Augusta Jane Chapin

Augusta Jane Chapin was the second woman ordained a Universalist minister (after Olympia Brown) and the first women in America to receive an honorary doctorate of divinity degree awarded by Lombard College in 1893 at the World’s Fair in Chicago. She was a director and organizer of the World Parliament of Religions and chairwoman of the Women’s Committee during the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. She addressed both the opening and closing sessions of the World’s Fair and was the only woman to preside over a session of the Parliament. In her welcoming address to the opening session she reflected, “My memory runs easily back to the time when, in all the modern world, there was not one well equipped college or university open to women students, and when, in all the modern world, on woman had been ordained, or even acknowledged, as a preacher outside the denomination of Friends.” Chapin was a minister, teacher, writer, lecture, suffragist, and champion of women’s rights, forging the way for future generations of women in the United States to seek higher education and advanced degrees.

Chapin was born in Lakeville, New York on July 16, 1836. She was the oldest of eleven children. At the age of six, her family moved to Vevey, Michigan. At fourteen, she became a schoolteacher and began teaching in Lyons and Lansing, Michigan. At sixteen, she entered Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, after being denied admission at the University of Michigan because she was a woman. She would go on later in life to earn a master’s degree in rhetoric and contemporary languages from Michigan. As a student at Olivet College, Augusta Chapin converted to Universalism and decided to become a minister. Chapin knew she was destined to be a minister. She said: “I have no recollection of ever considering the question of whether I would preach or not. . . From the moment I believed in Universalism it was a matter of course that I was to preach it.” While preparing for the ministry, Chapin taught Latin, French, German, mathematics, and drawing. Chapin preached her first sermon in 1859 in Portland, Michigan, and was ordained in Lansing, Michigan, on December 3, 1863. She served as minister in various towns and cities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, California, Nebraska, Massachusetts, and New York.

In 1870, Chapin was the first woman to serve on the Council of the Universalist General Convention, as a delegate from Iowa to the 1870 Universalist Centennial held in Gloucester, Mass.

Augusta Chapin was active in both the women’s suffrage and temperance movements. She was a executive committee member of the American Woman Suffrage Associate and a member of the famed Sorosis Society. She attended several national woman’s suffrage meetings including the first Women’s Congress held in New York City in 1873 and she was a member of the revising committee of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s bold feminist Woman’s Bible in 1885. Along with Olympia Brown and Phebe Hanaford, Augusta Chapin helped open the Universalist ministry to women.

Chapin taught at Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois as a non-resident lecturer in English literature and art from 1885 to 1897. She was also an extension lecturer in English literature at the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1897. In her later years, she lead tours of Europe for twelve summers.

Although Chapin never married, family ties nonetheless kept her connected to her Michigan home where she had grown up. She died in New York City in 1905. The Universalist Leader noted her passing with high praise: “Thus passes one of the earliest and most conspicuous of our women preachers; one who by her ability and consecration and her broad-minded sympathies with every good cause, commanded universal respect and won enduring friendships.”

NEXT -->

Harvard Square Library 2011