103 Facts About Lucy Stone

Lucy Stone was an American orator, abolitionist and suffragist who was a vocal advocate for and organizer promoting rights for women.

In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree.

Lucy Stone spoke out for women's rights and against slavery.

Lucy Stone was known for using her birth name after marriage, contrary to the custom of women taking their husband's surname.

Lucy Stone helped initiate the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts and she supported and sustained it annually, along with a number of other local, state and regional activist conventions.

Lucy Stone spoke in front of a number of legislative bodies to promote laws giving more rights to women.

Lucy Stone assisted in establishing the Woman's National Loyal League to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment and thereby abolish slavery, after which she helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association, which built support for a woman suffrage Constitutional amendment by winning woman suffrage at the state and local levels.

Lucy Stone wrote extensively about a wide range of women's rights, publishing and distributing speeches by herself and others, and convention proceedings.

Lucy Stone was born on August 13,1818, on her family's farm at Coy's Hill in West Brookfield, Massachusetts.

Lucy Stone was the eighth of nine children born to Hannah Matthews and Francis Stone; she grew up with three brothers and three sisters, two siblings having died before her own birth.

When Lucy Stone recalled that "There was only one will in our family, and that was my father's", she described the family government characteristic of her day.

Hannah Lucy Stone earned a modest income through selling eggs and cheese but was denied any control over that money, sometimes denied money to purchase things Francis considered trivial.

At age 16, Lucy Stone began teaching in district schools, as her brothers and sister, Rhoda, did.

Lucy Stone's beginning pay of $1.00 a day was much lower than that of male teachers, and when she substituted for her brother, Bowman, one winter, she received less pay than he received.

Lucy Stone entered the college believing that women should vote and assume political office, that women should study the classic professions, and that women should be able to speak their minds in a public forum.

Lucy Stone hoped to earn most of her college expenses through teaching in one of the institute's lower departments.

Oberlin's compensation policies required Lucy Stone to do twice the labor a male student had to do to pay the same costs.

Lucy Stone frequently rose at two o'clock to fit in work and study, and she found her health declining.

Lucy Stone had planned to borrow money from her father when funds ran out, but Francis Lucy Stone, moved by his daughter's description of her struggles, promised to provide money when needed.

In February 1846, Lucy Stone intimated to Abby Kelley Foster that she was thinking of becoming a public speaker, but not until the following summer did a storm of controversy over Foster's speaking at Oberlin decide the matter for her.

Faculty opposition to Foster ignited impassioned discussion of women's rights among the students, especially of a woman's right to speak in public, which Lucy Stone vigorously defended in a joint meeting of the men's and women's literary societies.

Lucy Stone's brothers were at once supportive, her father encouraged her to do what she considered her duty, but her mother and only remaining sister begged her to reconsider.

Shortly thereafter, Lucy Stone accepted a challenge from a former editor of a county newspaper to a public debate on women's rights, and she soundly defeated him.

Lucy Stone then submitted a petition to the Faculty Board, signed by most members of her graduating class, asking that women chosen to write graduation essays be permitted to read them themselves, as men so honored did, instead of having them read by faculty members.

Lucy Stone received her baccalaureate degree from Oberlin College on August 25,1847, becoming the first female college graduate from Massachusetts.

Lucy Stone gave her first public speeches on women's rights in the fall of 1847, first at her brother Bowman's church in Gardner, Massachusetts, and a little later in Warren.

Lucy Stone became a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in June 1848, persuaded by Abby Kelley Foster that the experience would give her the speaking practice she still felt she needed before beginning her women's rights campaign.

Lucy Stone immediately proved to be an effective speaker, reported to wield extraordinary persuasive power over her audiences.

The best-known of them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony, and Lucy Stone, met, and worked together harmoniously as they wrote, discussed, and circulated petitions for the woman's rights movement.

When Lucy Stone sent petitions to the legislature in February 1850, over half were from towns where she had lectured.

Davis presided while Lucy Stone presented the proposal to the large and responsive audience and served as secretary.

Seven women were appointed to organize the convention, with Davis and Lucy Stone assigned to conduct the correspondence needed to solicit signatures to the call and recruit speakers and attendance.

Lucy Stone was able to attend the Worcester convention, but frail health limited her participation, and she made no formal address until the closing session.

Lucy Stone was appointed to the Central Committee of nine women and nine men.

In May 1851, while in Boston attending the New England Anti-Slavery Society's annual meeting, Lucy Stone went to the exhibit of Hiram Powers's statue The Greek Slave.

Lucy Stone was so moved by the sculpture that when she addressed the meeting that evening, she poured out her heart about the statue being emblematic of all enchained womanhood.

Lucy Stone launched her career as an independent women's rights lecturer on October 1,1851.

When Lucy Stone resumed lecturing in the fall of 1851, she wore a new style of dress that she had adopted during her winter convalescence, consisting of a loose, short jacket and a pair of baggy trousers under a skirt that fell a few inches below the knees.

When Lucy Stone lectured in the dress in the fall of 1851, hers was the first Bloomer most of her audiences had ever seen.

Many women retreated in the face of criticism, but Lucy Stone continued to wear the short dress exclusively for the next three years.

Lucy Stone wore her hair short, cut just below her jaw line.

Lucy Stone found the short skirt convenient during her travels and defended it against those who said it was a distraction that hurt the women's rights cause.

Lucy Stone had already moved significantly away from that church's Trinitarian doctrines.

Intrigued, Lucy Stone began to engage in classroom discussions about the Trinitarian-Unitarian controversy and ultimately decided that she was a Unitarian.

Lucy Stone wished to keep the subject separate, to prevent the appearance of moral laxity.

In 1853, Lucy Stone drew large audiences with a lecture tour through several southern states.

When Lucy Stone headed home in January 1854, she left behind incalculable influence.

From 1854 through 1858, Lucy Stone lectured on women's rights in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Washington, DC, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario.

Lucy Stone initiated petition efforts in New England and several other states and assisted the petitioning efforts of state and local organizations in New York, Ohio, and Indiana.

Lucy Stone called a New England Woman's Rights Convention in Boston on June 2,1854, to expand her petitioning efforts.

Lucy Stone took charge of the work in Ohio, her new home state, drafting its petition, placing it in Ohio newspapers and circulating it during lectures across southern Ohio while her recruit worked in the northern part of the state.

Lucy Stone lectured in Illinois and Indiana in support of the petition drives there and personally introduced the work in Wisconsin, where she found volunteers to circulate the petition and legislators to introduce them in both houses of the legislature.

At the national convention of 1856, Lucy Stone presented a new strategy suggested by Antoinette Brown Blackwell to send a memorial to the various state legislatures signed by the officers of the National Woman's Rights Convention.

Lucy Stone drafted and printed the appeal, and Brown Blackwell mailed it to twenty-five state legislatures.

On July 4,1856, in Viroqua, Wisconsin, Lucy Stone gave the first women's rights and anti-slavery speech delivered by a woman in the area.

In January 1858, Lucy Stone staged a highly publicized protest that took the issue of taxation without representation across the nation.

The previous summer she and Blackwell had purchased a house in Orange, New Jersey, and when the first tax bill came, Lucy Stone returned it unpaid with the explanation that taxing women while denying them the right to vote was a violation of America's founding principles.

Lucy Stone's protest inspired other tax-paying women to action: some followed her example and refused to pay taxes, with one case reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1863, while others went to the polls to demand their right as taxpayers to vote.

Lucy Stone told him she did not wish to marry because she did not want to surrender control over her life and would not assume the legal position occupied by a married woman.

Lucy Stone believed that marriage would allow each partner to accomplish more than he or she could alone, and to show how he could help advance Stone's work, he arranged her highly successful western lecturing tour of 1853.

Lucy Stone gradually fell in love and in November 1854 agreed to marry Blackwell.

Over Blackwell's objections, Lucy Stone refused to be supported and insisted on paying half of their mutual expenses.

Lucy Stone viewed the tradition of wives abandoning their own surname to assume that of their husbands as a manifestation of the legal annihilation of a married woman's identity.

In 1879, when Boston women were granted the franchise in school elections, Lucy Stone registered to vote.

In 1859, while the family was living temporarily in Chicago, Lucy Stone miscarried and lost a baby boy.

Lucy Stone was said to have slipped the prisoner the knife so that Garner could kill herself if she was forced to return to slavery.

Anthony helped Lucy Stone arrange the 1858 convention and then took sole responsibility for the 1859 meeting.

Lucy Stone hired a nursemaid to help care for her daughter, who was in poor health for several years, but she didn't trust her ability to provide proper care when Lucy Stone was absent.

Lucy Stone eventually withdrew from most public work to stay at home with her child.

Lucy Stone resigned from the Central Committee, which organized the annual women's rights conventions.

Lucy Stone made only two public appearances during the Civil War : to attend the founding convention of the Women's Loyal National League and the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, both in 1863.

Lucy Stone began to increase her reform activities back to a normal level after the Civil War had ended.

Lucy Stone declined to go on lecture tours for the League.

Lucy Stone was enormously relieved to have the family freed from the debts that had been contracted to buy investment property.

Lucy Stone was still experiencing periods of self-doubt a year later, but, with Blackwell's encouragement, she traveled with him on a joint lecture tour in 1866.

Lucy Stone did not attend the AERA's founding convention, most likely for fear of the recent cholera outbreak in New York City, the meeting's location.

Lucy Stone was nevertheless elected to the new organization's executive committee.

Lucy Stone had expected that progressive forces would push for the enfranchisement of African Americans and women at the same time and was distressed when they did not.

In 1870, Lucy Stone and Blackwell moved from New Jersey to Dorchester, Massachusetts, which today is a neighborhood of Boston just south of downtown.

At her new home, Lucy Stone worked closely with the New England Woman Suffrage Association, the first major political organization in the US with women's suffrage as its goal.

Lucy Stone edited the journal for the rest of her life, assisted by her husband and their daughter Alice Lucy Stone Blackwell.

Lucy Stone did not collect a salary for her work on the paper, which required continual financial support.

In 1877, Lucy Stone was asked by Rachel Foster Avery to come assist Colorado activists in the organization of a popular referendum campaign with the aim of gaining suffrage for Coloradan women.

In 1879, after Lucy Stone organized a petition by suffragists across the state, Massachusetts women were given strictly delimited voting rights: a woman who could prove the same qualifications as a male voter was allowed to cast her vote for members of the school board.

Lucy Stone applied to the voting board in Boston but was required to sign her husband's surname as her own.

In 1887, eighteen years after the rift formed in the American women's rights movement, Lucy Stone proposed a merger of the two groups.

Lucy Stone was too weak with heart problems and respiratory illness to attend its first convention but was elected chair of the executive committee.

Lucy Stone demanded an eradication of coverture, the folding of a wife's property into that of her husband.

Lucy Stone later published Stanton's speech in its entirety in the Woman's Journal as "Solitude of Self".

Back at the NAWSA convention, Anthony was elected president, with Stanton and Lucy Stone becoming honorary presidents.

In 1892, Lucy Stone was convinced to sit for a portrait in sculpture, rendered by Anne Whitney, sculptor and poet.

Lucy Stone had previously protested the proposed portrait for more than a year, saying that the funds to engage an artist would be better spent on suffrage work.

Lucy Stone finally yielded to pressure from Frances Willard, the New England Women's Club and some of her friends and neighbors in the Boston area, and sat while Whitney produced a bust.

In February 1893, Lucy Stone invited her brother Frank and his wife Sarah to come see the bust, before it was shipped to Chicago for display at the upcoming World's Columbian Exposition.

Lucy Stone went with her daughter to Chicago in May 1893 and gave her last public speeches at the World's Congress of Representative Women where she saw a strong international involvement in women's congresses, with almost 500 women from 27 countries speaking at 81 meetings, and attendance topping 150,000 at the week-long event.

Lucy Stone's immediate focus was on state referendums under consideration in New York and Nebraska.

Those who knew Lucy Stone well thought her voice was lacking strength.

Lucy Stone's death was the most widely reported of any American woman's up to that time.

Lucy Stone's remains are interred at Forest Hills; a chapel there is named after her.

In 1921, the Lucy Stone League was founded in New York City by Ruth Hale, described in 1924 by Time as the "'Lucy Stone'-spouse" of Heywood Broun.

In 1986, Lucy Stone was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Anne Whitney's 1893 bust of Lucy Stone is on display in Boston's Faneuil Hall building.

Lucy Stone is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.