Stone, Lucy

Stone, Lucy (1818–1893), early women's rights advocate.Born in Brookfield, Massachusetts, Lucy Stone gave her first women's rights lecture in 1847 following her graduation from Oberlin College. Prior to the Civil War, she divided her lecture time between women's rights and antislavery. She organized the first National Woman's Rights Convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. A skilled lobbyist and political organizer, Stone addressed legislatures throughout the United States and Canada on behalf of women's legal and political rights. Beginning in the 1840s she set up education committees in cities, towns, and villages, using her lecture fees to print and distribute women's rights propaganda. At her marriage to Henry Blackwell in 1855 she and her husband issued a public protest against women's legal disabilities in marriage; thereafter she retained her birth name, a bold and unusual gesture at the time.

After the Civil War, women's exclusion from the Fifteenth Amendment caused suffrage advocates Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to campaign against its ratification. Stone led the majority of suffragists in resisting these racially divisive tactics. When a schism in the movement developed in 1869, Stone founded the Boston‐based American Woman Suffrage Association, the larger and more politically oriented organization to emerge from the break. The Stanton‐Anthony wing would write the History of Woman Suffrage, however, which marginalized Stone's contribution. In 1870 Stone launched The Woman's Journal; for the next sixty years it chronicled women's progress. Reconciliation of the divided movement came in 1890 with the merger of the two rival groups to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Stone continued to lobby, petition, and lecture for woman suffrage until her death.
See also Feminism; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Right Movements.

Bibliography

Andrea Moore Kerr , Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality, 1992.
Andrea Moore Kerr , White Women's Rights, Black Men's Wrongs, in One Woman, One Vote, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, 1995, pp. 61–79.

Andrea Moore Kerr