Lucy Stone

American social reformer

• Born: August 13, 1818
• Birthplace: Coy's Hill, near West Brookfield, Massachusetts
• Died: October 18, 1893
• Place of death: Dorchester, near Boston, Massachusetts

A gifted orator and activist for the abolitionist movement, Stone was the first woman to speak out full time for women’s rights, and she devoted her life to the struggle for woman suffrage and equal rights.

Early Life

Lucy Stone was born into a family whose ancestors were among New England’s first European settlers. Her father, Francis Stone, tanned hides and served as the community’s teacher until her birth, at which time he settled into farming. At home he commanded absolute authority, and discipline was swift, marked with severe whippings and humiliation. Lucy’s mother, Hannah Matthews Stone, was an obedient, hardworking housewife. Despite this outward docility, Lucy saw in her mother a quiet anger and resentment against male domination as prescribed by fundamental Christian ideology. Her father’s control and her mother’s grudging submission were such powerful influences that as a child Lucy swore never to marry or accept such a contemptible station in life.

Stone’s developing objection to the status of women compelled her to pursue a solid education and, in the process, to learn Greek so that she could verify the accuracy of biblical translations regarding a woman’s position in society. At the age of sixteen, she was hired to teach at a local school with a salary of four dollars per month. The salary itself enraged Stone because male teachers with the same credentials earned four times the money.

When not teaching, Stone continued her studies at the local seminary for girls until 1843, when, at the age of twenty-five, she entered Oberlin College in Ohio, the only college that admitted female students and one that also supported the emancipation of slaves. Abolitionism was not new to Stone. She had avidly read William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator since it began publication, and she considered herself a “Garrisonian”—supporting a more radical antislavery stance than Oberlin College itself.

While a student at Oberlin, Stone taught former slaves, worked in the school cafeteria, learned Greek, founded the college’s first women’s debating society, and delivered her first public speech on women’s rights and slave emancipation. Considered too radical by her peers and a potential troublemaker by the college, she nevertheless earned respect for her determination, intelligence, and ability to argue an issue soundly and convincingly. Following her graduation in 1847, she was hired by the Massachusetts Anti-Slave Society as a public speaker—a position considered socially improper for a woman.

Life’s Work

Against her parents’ wishes, Lucy Stone delivered her first public address on slave emancipation and women’s rights in the summer of 1847. Stone possessed strong conviction, sound logic, and an eloquence in oratory that compelled even the most ardent opponent of women’s rights to listen respectfully. Stone made frequent public lectures during that year, and most of these speeches concentrated on issues of women’s rights.

By the end of the decade, New England had become the center of a growing social reform movement in the nation, and Stone was quickly emerging as one of the movement’s most competent and committed proponents. She advocated the strict control of alcoholic beverages, arguing that liquor destroyed the fabric of the home and emboldened men to abuse their wives. She criticized Christianity for relegating women to a position of social inferiority and for not taking a stronger antislave position. She championed a woman’s right to own property, to receive an advanced education, and to be granted equal status before the law. Without doubt, her arguments were sharply criticized by the male-dominated social order of the era, but the women who filled her lecture halls and whispered encouragement strengthened Stone’s resolve to continue speaking for equality. She made women’s rights her principal topic and was noted as the first woman speaker to do so. For her near solitary public position, she became known as the “morning star” of the women’s rights movement.

Lucy Stone was the primary organizer of the First National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts, on October 23, 1850. More than one thousand participants listened to speakers such as Sojourner Truth, Sarah Tyndall, Frederick Douglass, and Stone present their calls for equality for women. Although the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was the first such gathering, it had drawn a limited local audience of reformers. The 1850 convention, however, placed the issue of women’s rights before a national audience and set into motion an annual conference largely directed by Stone, who, at her own expense, published a report of the conference proceedings.

Stone’s hectic lecture schedule took her across much of the nation pressing state assemblies for equal rights for women. In 1853, she endorsed a woman suffrage petition presented to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in Boston. From there, she spoke in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Louisville, and several other cities. Her presentations included specific points regarding women’s equality in marriage—perhaps because of her developing relationship with Henry Blackwell, to whom she was married in May, 1855.

The Civil War interrupted Stone’s public lecturing. Also, the birth of her daughter refocused Stone’s attention to child rearing and would have taken her from the lecture circuit even if the war had not erupted. Moreover, she started having severe headaches that occasionally confined her to bed for days.

Despite these interruptions, Stone resumed her active public life following the war. Increasingly, she emphasized woman suffrage in her speeches—a right she believed was central to women’s equality. She argued for suffrage in a series of lectures throughout New England and New York, coauthored a petition for Congress to consider women’s right to vote, and helped organize a convention that led to the founding of the American Equal Rights Association.

In March, 1867, Stone argued for black and woman suffrage before the New Jersey legislature, stating that every person capable of rational choice was entitled to the right to vote. Democracy required equal suffrage. When a woman is denied the vote, she added, the very principle of democracy itself is violated. If women were indeed the natural possessors of morality, she concluded, then extension of the franchise would automatically bring a humane attitude to legislation. She spread her views throughout the North and again lobbied Congress, was instrumental in the formation of the New England Suffrage Association, and helped organize the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association.

The fact that women were not included in the Fifteenth Amendment only intensified Stone’s battle for equal rights. Throughout 1869, she labored to publish Woman’s Journal , with seven thousand copies of the first edition sold in early January, 1870. Voting rights was the primary focus of each edition, and this first issue highlighted Wyoming’s new woman suffrage law. The Journal also addressed a variety of women’s issues and concerns such as education, health, marriage, work, and the rearing of children.

Stone took residence on the floor above the Journal’s office and from there worked to gain advertisers, subscribers, and news stories. She spent hours managing the office, handling financial matters, and arranging for printing and distribution. Despite the hectic and consuming work, she maintained a lecture schedule that took her into Pennsylvania, Vermont, New York, and throughout Massachusetts. At the same time, she continued her active involvement in the American Equal Rights Association and in the creation of an amendment to grant woman suffrage nationally.

The 1870’s were no less busy for Stone. Persons who could not vote, she consistently argued, were defenseless in society. Power rested in the ballot box, and once women received the franchise the ills of society would be remedied. To bring added pressure on state legislatures, Stone looked for untapped sources of support. The suffrage movement had relied upon a minority of women—those who were well educated, skilled at public speaking and organization, and not intimidated by the male population or by accepted norms for proper female behavior.

During the late 1870’s, Stone sought to include middle-class women by making the push for suffrage a socially acceptable position among women themselves. The formation of women’s clubs in communities across the nation would afford women the opportunity to discuss the issue of suffrage and to chart a course of action locally to advance the cause. With clubs becoming fashionable outlets for middle-class women, Stone believed suffrage specifically, and the demand for equal rights in general, could be pressed forcefully by a new body of supporters. She imagined the widespread effect of such political action in every town and anticipated the strength such clubs could use in lobbying state legislatures. In one month she recruited almost eleven hundred women into local clubs.

At the same time, Stone criticized government efforts to provide protective legislation for women in the workplace, arguing that gender-based laws guaranteed unequal treatment for women, even if the intention of the legislation was positive. In addition, through the Woman’s Journal, she championed better working conditions for all individuals, an end to inhumane conditions in reform schools, and the elimination of government and business corruption, and she protested vigorously existing federal policy regarding American Indians. Before the decade ended, Woman’s Journal was distributed in every state and in thirty-nine foreign countries.

Despite declining health throughout the 1880’s, Stone remained as active as possible. In May, 1893, she attended the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. More than 150,000 people from twenty-seven nations assembled for a week-long convention. Among the slated speakers was Lucy Stone. Weak and frail, she took the podium and delivered her address entitled “The Progress of Fifty Years.” She traced the course of the women’s rights movement over five decades, praised the women who had unselfishly devoted themselves to the struggle, and clearly detailed the much improved status of women in contemporary America. She ended the speech with a reminder—much more work was needed, and the movement must continue until full equality was achieved.

Stone’s speech in Chicago was her last. Five months later, on October 18, she died with her daughter Alice at her side.

Significance

Symbolic of her expectations and demands for equality in marriage, Stone retained her maiden name and never did she refer to herself as Mrs. Blackwell, preferring instead Lucy Stone, wife of Henry Blackwell. Taking the husband’s name amounted to the loss of a woman’s identity, she argued. She further insisted that once married, a woman’s property should remain hers, and the same should be true for the product of her labor and the guardianship of the children. According to Stone, a husband’s control over a wife’s property amounted to nothing short of legal theft. Moreover, nonconsensual sex was the equivalent of marital rape, she stated. She further demanded the abolition of the entire system of legal codes and customs that placed women under the care, protection, and exclusive control of their husbands. Personal independence and equal human rights, she maintained, could never be relinquished by a woman because of marriage, and the law should recognize the institution as an equal partnership.

Stone’s arguments were certainly advanced for the era in which she lived. More often than not she was considered too extreme in her views. Typically, male listeners were outraged by Stone’s speeches, and women found her ideas correct but impossible to attain. Despite the cool, and sometimes even hostile, response given her by the general public, Stone persisted in demanding equal rights in marriage.

In commemoration of Lucy Stone’s life’s work, university dormitories, city parks, and public schools were named in her honor. The suffrage movement persisted until passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1919 that granted woman suffrage. The Woman’s Journal continued publication until 1931 and, with each issue, echoed Stone’s demand for gender equality.

Bibliography

Blackwell, Alice Stone. Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights. 2d ed. Norwood, Mass.: Alice Stone Blackwell Committee, 1930. Reprint. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone’s daughter, presents an insightful and personal view of her mother’s personal and public life.

Hays, Elinor Rice. Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818-1893. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Hays portrays Stone as a solid, committed champion of women’s rights and the emancipation of slaves—a model for contemporary feminists and reformers.

Kerr, Andrea Moore. Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Kerr presents a thorough and well-researched biography of Lucy Stone, and she ranks Stone as one of the most powerful women reformers of the nineteenth century.

Lasser, Carol, and Marlene Merrill, eds. Friends and Sisters: Letters Between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Lucy Stone’s personal thoughts, views on women’s rights, and half-century friendship with Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman ordained into the Protestant ministry, are revealed through their private letters to each other.

Million, Joelle. Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Million recounts the events of Stone’s personal life and her significant role in the antebellum women’s rights movement.

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. This publication surveys the history of women in America from the early seventeenth century through the late 1970’s and places Lucy Stone in the broader context of the suffrage movement.