Pittsburgh Female College, and in 1862, was graduated at the head of her class. Career At the age of 20, Martha made the acquaintance of Reverend W. Kennedy Brown, of the Pittsburgh Methodist Episcopal Conference, and on November 15, 1858, they were married. The young people were imbued with a strong purpose of educating and projecting woman personally along religious lines. 1860s In 1864, Brown appeared in a public lecture in support of the American Civil War in the courthouse hall of the strong Democratic county of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, where her husband was pastor. That movement was followed by public lectures in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and many smaller places. In 1866, Brown, owing to the unexpected death of the principal of the public schools in the county-seat of Columbiana County, Ohio, where her husband had been appointed pastor, was engaged as associate principal with her husband. She was elected superintendent of the Sunday school, although the Methodist Church had not at that time arranged its law to admit women to such responsibility. She delivered temperance and literary lectures. In 1867, she was elected to a place in the executive committee of Ohio Good Templary, and immediately founded the temperance lecture system. That position she held from 1867, through the organization of the Prohibition party in 1869, the Ohio Woman's Crusade in 1873, and the founding of the National WCTU in 1874, in each of which movements she was a leader. In 1868, she took editorial charge of the Republican newspaper of Alliance, Ohio. At that time, the Republican party was known to weaken before the demands of the German Brewers' Beer Congress, and Brown openly denounced the demands of the brewers as "un-American." She also sharply criticised the efforts of what she recognized as the rum oligarchy at political domination, and she reprimanded the truculent spirit and conduct of many politicians. Julius A. Spencer, of Cleveland, secretary of Ohio Good Templary in 1868, proposed to Brown the formation of an independent political party, and she extended her hand to assist him. The question being further discussed, Brown's husband required that, before his wife should unite in the movement for a new party, there must be an agreement to place woman on an equal status with man. Spencer finally agreed that woman should have equal status in the new party, and that a plank asserting this fact should be inserted in