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Lucy Stone
1818-1893

Lucy Stone: in her lifetime, she achieved a number of important "firsts" for which we can remember her. She was the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She even achieved a "first" at death, by being the first person in New England to be cremated. She's remembered most for one first: being the first woman in the United States to keep her own name after marriage. 
Considered on the radical edge of women's rights at the beginning of her speaking and writing career, she's usually considered a leader of the conservative wing of the suffrage movement in her later years. The woman whose speech in 1850 converted Susan B. Anthony to the suffrage cause, later split with Anthony over strategy and tactics, splitting the suffrage movement into two major branches after the Civil War. 
Lucy Stone was born on the 13th of August, 1818, on her family's Massachusetts farm. She was the eighth of nine children, and as she grew up, she watched as her father ruled 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 Grimke 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 sure was behind such verses! 
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 Female Seminary </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.mtholyoke.edu/cic/about/history.shtml> in 1839. By age 25 (1843), she had saved enough to fund her first year at Oberlin College </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.oberlin.edu/%7EEOG/> in Ohio, the country's first college to admit both women and blacks. 
After four years of study at Oberlin College, all the while teaching and doing housework to pay for the costs, Lucy Stone graduated (1847). She was asked to write a commencement speech for her class. But she refused, because someone else would have had to read her speech: women were not allowed, even at Oberlin, to give a public address. 
And so, 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. 
(Thirty six years after she graduated from Oberlin, she was an honored speaker at Oberlin's fiftieth anniversary </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.oberlin.edu/%7EEOG/Booklets/Jubilee%2520Notes%2520folder/JubileeNotes.htm> celebration.)
A year later, she was hired as an agent -- an organizer -- of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In this paid position, she traveled giving speeches on abolition. She included speeches, as well, on women's rights. 
William Lloyd Garrison, whose ideas were dominant in the Anti-Slavery Society, said of her, the year she began working with them: "She is a very superior young woman, and has a soul as free as the air, and is preparing to go forth as a lecturer, particularly in vindication of the rights of women. Her course here has been very firm and independent, and she has caused no small uneasiness in the spirit of sectarianism in the institution." 
When her women's rights speeches created too much controversy within the Anti-Slavery Society -- was she diminishing her efforts on behalf of the abolition cause? -- she arranged to separate the two ventures, speaking on weekends on abolition and weekdays on women's rights, and charging admission for the speeches on women's rights. In three years, she earned $7,000 with her women's rights talks. 
Her radicalism on both subjects brought large crowds; the talks also drew hostility: "people tore down the posters advertising her talks, burned pepper in the auditoriums whee she spoke, and pelted her with prayer books and other missiles." (1) 
Having been convinced by using her Greek and Hebrew learned at Oberlin that indeed the Biblical proscriptions on women were badly translated, she challenged those rules in churches which she found to be unfair to women. Raised in the Congregational Church, she was unhappy with their refusal to recognize women as voting members of congregations as well as their condemnation of the Grimke sisters for their public speaking. Finally expelled by the Congregationalists for her views and for her own public speaking, she joined with the Unitarians. 
In 1850, Stone was a leader in organizing the first national woman's rights convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts. The 1848 convention in Seneca Falls <http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_seneca_falls_declaration.htm> had been an important and radical step, but the attendees were mostly from the local area. This was a next step. 
At the 1850 convention, Lucy Stone's speech is credited with converting Susan B. Anthony <http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blanthony.htm> to the cause of woman suffrage. A copy of the speech, sent to England, inspired John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor to publish "The Enfranchisement of Women </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.pinn.net/%7Esunshine/whm2003/ht%5Fmill4.html>." Some years later, she also convinced Julia Ward Howe <../bio/blbio_howe_julia_ward.htm> to adopt women's rights as a cause along with abolition. Frances Willard <http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_townsend_willard.htm> credited Stone's work with her joining the suffrage cause. 
This "free soul" who had decided that she would remain free, in 1853 met Cincinnati businessman Henry Blackwell, on one of her speaking tours. Henry, seven years younger than Lucy, courted her for two years. Lucy was especially impressed when he rescued a fugitive slave from its owners. 
(This was the time of the Fugitive Slave Law, which required residents of non-slave-holding states to return escaped slaves to their owners -- and which brought many anti-slavery citizens to break the law as often as they could. This same law helped inspire Thoreau </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html>'s famous essay, Civil Disobedience.) 
Henry was anti-slavery and pro-women's rights. His sister, Elizabeth </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi%2Dbin/query/r%3Fammem/mcc:%40field%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28mcc/065%29%29> (1821-1910), became the first woman physician in the United States, and another sister, Emily </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/black%2Dem.html> (1826-1910), became a physician also. Their brother, Samuel, later married Antoinette Brown (1825-1921) </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.cc.oberlin.edu/%7EEOG/OYTT%2Dimages/NettyBlackwell.html>, a friend of Lucy Stone at Oberlin and the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States. 
Two years of courtship and friendship convinced Lucy to accept Henry's offer of marriage. She wrote to him, "A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should her's. My name is my identity and must not be lost." 
Henry agreed with her. "I wish, as a husband, to renounce all the privileges which the law confers upon me, which are not strictly mutual. Surely such a marriage will not degrade you, dearest." 
And so, in 1855 <../cal/bl0501.htm>, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell married. At the ceremony, the minister, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, read a statement by the bride and groom <../etext/bl_marriage_stone_blackwell.htm>, renouncing and protesting the marriage laws of the time, and announcing that she would keep her name. Higginson published the ceremony widely, with their permission. (Yes, this is the same Higginson known for his connection to Emily Dickinson <aa041299.htm>.) 
Their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, was born in 1857 </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://inform.umd.edu/Pictures/WomensStudies/PictureGallery/stone.html>. (A son died at birth; Lucy and Henry had no other children.) Lucy "retired" from active touring and public speaking, and devoted herself to raising her daughter. The family moved from Cincinnati to New Jersey. 
The next year, Stone refused to pay property taxes on her home. (She and Henry carefully kept her property in her name, giving her independent income during their marriage.) In her statement to the authorities, she protested the "taxation without representation" that women still endured, since women had no vote. The authorities seized some furniture to pay the debt, but the gesture was widely publicized as a symbolic gesture on behalf of women's rights. 
Inactive in the suffrage movement during the Civil War, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell became active again when the war ended and the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed, giving the vote to black men. For the first time, the Constitution would, with this Amendment, mention "male citizens" explicitly. Most woman suffrage activists were outraged. Many saw the possible passage of this Amendment as setting the cause of woman suffrage back. 
In 1867, Stone again went on a full lecture tour to Kansas and New York, working for woman suffrage state amendments, trying to work for both black and woman suffrage. 
The woman suffrage movement split, on this and other strategic grounds. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony <http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blanthony.htm> and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, decided to oppose the Fourteenth Amendment, because of the language "male citizen." Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe <../bio/blbio_howe_julia_ward.htm> and Henry Blackwell led those who sought to keep the causes of black and woman suffrage together, and in 1869 they and others founded the American Woman Suffrage Association </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/rbnawsahtml/nawsa.html>. 
The next year, Lucy raised enough funds to start a suffrage weekly newspaper, The Woman's Journal </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://search.eb.com/women/articles/Woman>. For the first two years, it was edited by Mary Livermore, and then Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell became the editors. Lucy Stone found working on a newspaper far more compatible with family life, compared with taking to the lecture circuit.
Their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, attended Boston University, where she was one of two women in a class with 26 men. Later, she also became involved in The Woman's Journal which survived until 1917, the later years under Alice's sole editorship. 
Her radical move to keep her own name continued to inspire and enrage. In 1879, Massachusetts gave women a limited right to vote: for the school commmittee. But in Boston, the registrars refused to let Lucy Stone vote unless she used her husband's name. She continued to find that on legal documents and when registering with her husband at hotels, she had to sign as "Lucy Stone, married to Henry Blackwell," for her signature to be accepted as valid. 
But for all her radical reputation, she was identified in this later period with the conservative wing of the woman suffrage movement. The Woman's Journal under Stone and Blackwell maintained a Republican Party line, opposing, for instance, labor movement organizing and strikes and Victoria Woodhull's radicalism, in contrast to the Anthony-Stanton NWSA. 
(Other differences in strategy between the two wings included the AWSA's following a strategy of state-by-state suffrage amendments, and the NWSA's support of a national constitutional amendment. The AWSA remained largely middle class, while the AWSA embraced working class issues and members.) 
Lucy did, in the 1880s, welcome Edward Bellamy's American version of Utopian socialism, as did many other woman suffrage activists. Bellamy's vision in Looking Backward drew a vivid picture of a society with economic and social equality for women. 
In 1890, Alice Stone Blackwell, now a leader in the woman suffrage movement in her own right, engineered a re-unification of the two competing suffrage organizations. The National Woman Suffrage Association </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://search.eb.com/women/articles/National%5FWoman%5FSuffrage%5FAssociation.html> and the American Woman Suffrage Association </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://search.eb.com/women/articles/American%5FWoman%5FSuffrage%5FAssociation.html> united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, </gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://search.eb.com/women/articles/National%5FAmerican%5FWoman%5FSuffrage%5FAssociation.html> with Elizabeth Cady Stanton <../bio/blstanton.htm> as President, Susan B. Anthony <../bio/blanthony.htm> as Vice President, and Lucy Stone chairman of the executive committee.
Stone's voice had already faded, and she rarely spoke to large groups, but in 1893, she gave lectures at the World's Columbian Exposition <../etext/bl_1893_lucy_stone.htm>. A few months later, she died in Boston of cancer and was cremated. Her last words to her daughter were "Make the world better." 
Far less known today than Elizabeth Cady Stanton <../bio/blstanton.htm> or Susan B. Anthony <../bio/blanthony.htm> -- or even, perhaps, Julia Ward Howe <../bio/blbio_howe_julia_ward.htm>, whose "Battle Hymn of the Republic" helped immortalize her name. Lucy Stone's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, published her mother's biography Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Woman's Rights in 1930, helping to keep her name and contributions known. But Lucy Stone is still remembered, today, primarily as the first woman to keep her own name after marriage, and women who follow that custom are sometimes called "Lucy Stoners." 
More About Lucy Stone <../bio/blbio_stone_lucy.htm> 
Notes: 
(1) Wheeler, Leslie. "Lucy Stone: Radical Beginnings" in Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers. Dale Spender, editor. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.