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Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 19, 1893) was a prominent American suffragist. She was the wife of abolitionist Henry Brown Blackwell (the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell) and the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell, another prominent suffragette, journalist and human rights defender. Stone was best known for being the first recorded American woman to keep her own last name upon marriage and being the first woman in Massachusetts to receive a college degree.
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Early life and influences
Lucy Stone was born on August 13, 1818 on her family's farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. She was the eighth of nine children, and as she grew up, she watched her father rule the household and his wife by "divine right". Disturbed when her mother had to beg her father for money, she was also unhappy with the lack of support in her family for her education. She was faster at learning than her brother—but he was to be educated, she was not.
She was inspired in her reading by the Grimké sisters, abolitionists but also proponents of women's rights. When the Bible was quoted to her, defending the positions of men and women, she declared that when she grew up, she'd learn Greek and Hebrew so she could correct the mistranslation that she was confident lay behind such verses. Growing up Stone attended a Congregationalist church, but because of a disagreement with members of the congregation, she joined a Unitarian Universalist church in her twenties.1
Secondary education
Her father would not support her education, and so she alternated her own education with teaching, to earn enough to continue. She attended several institutions, including Mount Holyoke College (then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in 1839. By age 25 (1843), she had saved enough to fund her first year at Oberlin College in Ohio, the country's first college to admit both women and African-Americans.
After four years of study at Oberlin College, all the while teaching and doing housework to pay for the costs, Lucy Stone graduated in 1847. She was asked to write a commencement speech for her class but refused because someone else would have had to read her speech as women were not allowed, even at Oberlin, to give a public address.
Abolitionist and suffragist
Shortly after Stone returned to Massachusetts, the first woman in that state to receive a college degree, she gave her first public speech: on women's rights. She delivered the speech from the pulpit of her brother's Congregational Church in Gardner, Massachusetts. Stone became a leader of the women's suffrage movement, lecturing extensively on both suffrage and abolition. Stone was hired by the Garrisonian Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society as a lecturer and organizer. William Lloyd Garrison and the society were not fond of her mixing women’s rights with abolitionism in her speeches, so she agreed to speak of abolition on the weekends and women’s rights during the week.
During the war, Stone along with other abolitionist-women’s rights supporters formed the Womans' National Loyal League which fought for full emancipation and enfranchisement of African Americans. Once Reconstruction began, she helped form the American Equal Rights Association. The AERA's main goal was to achieve equal voting rights for both genders and all races.
During the May 1869 AERA conference, a division arose between those participants who wanted to voice support for the fifteenth amendment which granted suffrage to African American men, and those who wanted an amendment which would provide universal suffrage. The conflict led to the adoption of a muted resolution in favor of the fifteenth amendment - while acknowledging disappointment that Congress had not offered the same privilege to women. The AERA imploded from the strife between these two positions. A few days later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to focus on women gaining voting rights at the same time as African-American men. In November of that year, Stone, along with her husband and Julia Ward Howe, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. By 1890, the two groups resolved their differences and merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1870 she founded, in Boston, the Woman's Journal, the publication of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and she continued to edit it for the rest of her life, assisted by her husband and their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. Alice wrote her mother's biography, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights, which was published in 1930; its second printing was published in 1971.
"I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex." (1847)
Later life
Lucy Stone and her husband moved to Pope's Hill in Dorchester, MA around 1870, relocating from New Jersey due to their work in organizing the New England Woman Suffrage Association. In several ways, Dorchester was a fitting site for Stone's crusade, as many of the town's women had been active in the Dorchester Female Anti-Slavery Society and as, by 1870, a number of local women were bona fide suffragettes. There she spent the last 23 years of her life. Stone was diagnosed as suffering from a stomach tumor. Having "prepared for death with serenity and an unwavering concern for the women's cause," Lucy Stone passed away on October 18, 1893, at the age of 75.
Legacy
Lucy Stone's refusal to take husband's name, as an assertion of her own rights, was controversial then and is what she is remembered for today. Women who continue to use their birth names after marriage are still occasionally known as "Lucy Stoners" in the U.S. In 1921, the Lucy Stone League was founded in New York City. It was reborn in 1997.
On her passing in 1893, Lucy Stone was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
In 1968, the U.S. Postal Service honored Lucy Stone with a 50 cent postage stamp.
In 2000, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls included a song entitled "LucyStoners" on her first solo recording, Stag.
An administration and classroom building on Livingston Campus at Rutgers University in New Jersey is named for Lucy Stone.
The birthplace of Lucy Stone can be seen on the top of Coy Hill in West Brookfield, Massachusetts.
Lucy Stone Park is located in Warren, Massachusetts, along the Quaboag River.
"In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer." (1855)
See also
Notes
References
- Blackwell, Alice Stone. Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights. With an Introduction by Randolph Hollingsworth. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. ISBN 0-8139-1990-8
- Kerr, Andrea Moore. Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8135-1860-1
- Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. Hill and Wang, New York, 2005. ISBN 0-8090-9528-9.
- Wheeler, Leslie. Lucy Stone: Radical beginnings (1818-1893) in Spender, Dale (ed.) Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers, Pantheon 1983, pp. 124-136 ISBN 0-394-53438-7
- Stevens, Peter F. (May 26, 2005). "A Voice From On High". Dorchester Reporter. <http://www.dotnews.com/lucystone.html>.
- Hinks, Peter P, John R. McKivigan, and R. Owen Williams. Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition: Greenwood Milestones in African American History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007.
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