Lucy Stone

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Lucy Stone. Daguerreotype photograph ca. 1840-1860

Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893, died at age 75) was a prominent American suffragist, the wife of abolitionist Henry Brown Blackwell (1825-1909) (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.

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 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 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 refused because someone else would have had to read her speech as 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. Stone became a leader of the women's suffrage movement, lecturing extensively on both suffrage and abolition. 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. That daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), wrote her biography, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights (ISBN 0-8139-1990-8), which was published in 1930 and again in 1971 (2nd edition).

Contents 1 Legacy 2 See also 3 External links 4 Reference

[edit] 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 2000, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls included a song entitled "LucyStoners" on her first solo recording, Stag.

An administration building in Livingston College at Rutgers University in New Jersey is named for Lucy Stone.

[edit] See also

• First-wave
• History of feminism

[edit] External links

• Brief biography at Oberlin College
• Brief biography at Spartacus schoolnet
• A profile of Lucy Stone
• "My Hero" project
• Lucy Stone League
• First Wave Feminists
• Lucy Stone with Alice Stone Blackwell
• "Meet Lucy Stone"' (Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities)
• National Women's Hall of Fame
• Lucy Stone Home Site
• Petition to the New Jersey Legislature (1868)

[edit] Reference

• 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