be popularly called feminist theology, takes shape as she writes: "Paul meant only to warn against 'excesses, irregularities, and unwarrantable liberties' in public worship.'" She insisted that the Bible and its various pronouncements about women were for a specific span of time and certainly not applicable to the 19th century. Even though women were not asked to do public speaking during this time Antoinette was asked to speak in Ohio and New York to speak about anti-slavery and on women's rights. In April 1860, Brown returned to Oberlin College to deliver a lecture entitled "Men and Women." Testament to Brown's oratory skills appeared in a student letter which noted, "it was an excellent lecture." Career Abolition and Ordination Without a preaching license following graduation, Brown decided to pause her ministerial ambitions to write for Frederick Douglass' abolitionist paper, The North Star. She spoke in 1850 at the first National Women's Rights Convention, giving a speech that was well received and served as the beginning of a speaking tour in which she would address issues such as abolition, temperance, and women's rights. Brown spoke at many of the subsequent annual National Women's Rights Conventions. Brown was eventually given a license to preach by the Congregational Church in 1851 and then offered a position as Minister of a Congregationalist church in South Butler, New York in 1852. She temporarily suspended her vast speaking engagements, writing to her friend (and later sister-in-law) Lucy Stone that she had lectured eighteen times in almost as many days, and was ordained by a socially radical Methodist minister named Luther Lee, a passionate and vocal advocate of women's right to theological education and leadership. At her ordination, Lee delivered a sermon testifying to Antoinette's suitability as a preacher and her calling from God: "If God and mental and moral culture have not already qualified her," he said to the crowd assembled for the occasion, "we cannot, by anything we may do by way of ordaining or setting her apart ... All we are here to do ... is ... to subscribe our testimony to the fact, that in our belief, our sister in Christ, Antoinette L. Brown, is one of the ministers of the New Covenant, authorized, qualified, and called by God to preach the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ." A month after her ordination Brown traveled as a delegate to the World's Temperance Convention in