Known For: American abolitionist and women’s rights activist
Dates: A.H.: 1233 - 1310
C.E.: 1818 - 1893

Faith: Christianity
Country: United States

About

One of nine children born to farming family in 1818 in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, Lucy Stone’s hard-working parents passed on their abolitionist values and Congretationalist faith to their daughter. As a young woman Lucy kept the antislavery position, but became disillusioned with the Congregationalist church when its leaders disapproved of the unfeminine behavior of abolitionist sisters Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké in speaking to mixed audiences in churches on their 1837 tour of Massachusetts (and later found the Unitarian church). She also differed from her parents in pursuing higher education, by teaching and saving money for college after completing local public school at age sixteen. Attending Mount Holyoke Seminary for one term in 1839, she left to care for her ill sister and waited a few years before attending Oberlin Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1847 as the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a bachelor’s degree.

At Oberlin Stone developed her abolitionist and feminist values, and first spoke publicly on women’s rights in 1847 from her brother’s pulpit in Gardner, Massachusetts. The next year she was hired as an agent for the Garrisonian Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. When reproved by the Society for blending the two controversial topics in lectures, Stone responded: “I was a woman before I was an abolitionist” (Woman’s Journal, 15 Apr. 1893). She then relegated her weekends to speaking for the society to open her weekdays for women’s rights lectures, becoming popular orator. A leader in the growing women’s rights movement, she also served as an organizer for its first national convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850.

For the next five years Stone lectured across the country for feminist, abolitionist, and related reforms such as temperance. In 1855 she married fellow abolitionist and women’s rights supporter Henry B. Blackwell, brother of pioneer women doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, and they had a daughter in 1857. Henry joined her in protesting the legal inequalities of husband and wife and supported her when she reclaimed her birth name in legal signature, while she helped him establish his publishing career. In 1858 she protested women’s legal disfranchisement by allowing the confiscation of her household possessions rather than pay taxes to a government in which she was not allowed to participate.

During the Civil War, Stone co-founded the Woman’s National Loyal League, for African Americans’ full freedom and civil rights, with other feminist-abolitionists. Later she also co-founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), to work for voting rights to be given to all citizens, regardless of both race and sex. For the AERA cause, she campaigned extensively in Kansas 1878. The subsequent actions on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the constitution benefited only African American men, which angered many women’s rights supporters, but Stone eventually resigned herself to working for African American men’s voting rights without equal enfranchisement of white or black women.  Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton disagreed, and left the AERA to form the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) in May 1869, that refused to support constitutional changes that did not enfranchise women.

The same year Stone, her husband, Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and others founded the rival American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which was committed to achieving women’s suffrage, while not diminishing the civil rights of African-Americans. Out of the AWSA came the Woman’s Journal, and Stone and her family later had prime responsibility for its publication, the writing of which covered an immense range of events, history, and personalities.

Though at odds with Stanton, Anthony, and the NWSA for many years, Stone saw the unification of the suffrage movement as the best course of action. The NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890 and she became chair of the executive committee. In failing health, she last appeared at the Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in May 1893 and died shortly afterward at age 75.