Lucy Stone

Lucy Stone: The Woman Who Kept Her Name

On 22 January 1858, the town of Orange, New Jersey, auctioned off Lucy Stone's household goods. She had refused to pay property taxes on the grounds that she was not permitted to vote, and she had made sure everyone knew why. Women across the country began doing the same. It was a characteristic Stone manoeuvre: small, legal, unanswerable, and impossible to ignore.

Coy's Hill

She was born on 13 August 1818 at Coy's Hill, the family farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, the eighth of nine children of Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews. What she took from that farm was not nostalgia but evidence. She watched her mother work and hand over every cent she earned, dependent entirely on her husband's goodwill, and concluded early that she would "call no man my master." The plan for escaping that condition was education and self-employment, and she pursued both with a single-mindedness that lasted seventy-five years.

At sixteen she began teaching in district schools at a dollar a day, substantially less than male teachers were paid for the same work. In 1839 she enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and left after a single term, disgusted by the institution's intolerance of antislavery and women's rights opinion. She attended Wesleyan Academy from 1839 to 1841, then spent two years at Quaboag Seminary grinding through Latin and Greek to qualify for college. From 1843 to 1847 she attended Oberlin, the only college in the country admitting both women and African Americans, and on 25 August 1847 became the first woman from Massachusetts to hold a baccalaureate degree.

The Voice

In the autumn of 1847 she gave her first public speeches on women's rights, at her brother's church in Gardner and at Warren. In June 1848 she became a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and on 1 October 1851 launched herself as an independent women's rights lecturer — self-employed, as promised.

Her employers were not always comfortable with the division of her attention, and her answer to them became the movement's shorthand: "I was a woman, before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for women." Between the autumn of 1853 and January 1854 Henry Blackwell arranged a western tour on which she delivered more than forty lectures in thirteen cities, stirring interest in women's rights on a scale nobody had previously reached. From 1851 to 1854 she wore the Bloomer dress — short skirt over trousers — as one of the first prominent women to adopt reform clothing in public, abandoning it in 1855.

The Machinery

Stone's less visible achievement was infrastructure. In 1850 she helped launch the first National Women's Rights Convention at Worcester, drawing roughly a thousand people over 23 and 24 October, and was appointed to its Central Committee; by the spring of 1851 she was its secretary, organising the national conventions and setting their agendas for the rest of the decade. From 1849 to 1852 she ran petition campaigns in Massachusetts for women's voting rights and eligibility for public office, and on 27 May 1853 she appeared with the lawyer Wendell Phillips before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention's Committee on Qualifications of Voters carrying more than 5,000 signatures asking that the word "male" be struck from the state constitution.

At the 1855 national convention in Cincinnati a heckler dismissed the movement as a pack of disappointed women. Stone took the insult and turned it inside out: "In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman."

The Marriage Contract

On 1 May 1855 she married Henry Browne Blackwell at West Brookfield, with Thomas Wentworth Higginson officiating and a protest read aloud in which Blackwell renounced the legal rights husbands then held over wives. Their agreement made them joint proprietors of everything except the fruits of earlier labour; neither would attempt to control the other's residence, employment or habits; and Stone retained the choice of when, where and how often she would bear children.

She also kept her name, regarding the assumption of a husband's surname as "a manifestation of the legal annihilation of a married woman's identity." After a property registration snarl she obtained confirmation from the future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase that no law required the change, and announced publicly at the American Anti-Slavery Society convention on 7 May 1856 that she remained Lucy Stone. In 1879, when Boston women won limited school-election votes, officials demanded she sign as Blackwell. She refused and was turned away from the polls.

Her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell was born on 14 September 1857; a son was lost to miscarriage in 1859. Activism nearly stopped for eight years afterwards, as she struggled with self-doubt, lost drive and chronic headaches, making only two public appearances during the Civil War.

Split and Reunion

The Fifteenth Amendment broke the movement. Stone supported it, believing Black male enfranchisement should proceed even if women's did not — "But I thank God for that XV. Amendment, and I hope that it will be adopted in every State" — while Stanton and Anthony demanded both at once. In 1869 she co-founded the American Woman Suffrage Association with Julia Ward Howe against their National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1870 she and Blackwell founded the Woman's Journal, an eight-page weekly she edited without salary for the rest of her life. Carrie Chapman Catt later judged that "the suffrage success of today is not conceivable, without the Woman's Journal's part in it." Stone became president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1877, and in 1890 proposed the merger that produced the National American Woman Suffrage Association, chairing its executive committee.

Why Lucy Is Called a Genius

Her distinctive faculty was strategic — an ability to convert a principle into an instrument that could not be argued with. The tax protest of 1858 made disenfranchisement a matter of confiscated furniture rather than abstraction. The 1855 marriage contract turned a private ceremony into a public legal document. Keeping her name was not sentiment; she took it to Salmon P. Chase and established that no statute required otherwise, then announced it from a convention platform. She built the conventions, the petition machinery, the committees and finally the newspaper that carried the movement for two decades, and she trained her successor: in 1891 she taught Carrie Chapman Catt the lobbying and fundraising methods that won the 1920 campaign.

Against this, Stone was not an original thinker. She produced no theory of sex equality; her power was oratorical and organisational, and the ideas she carried were largely the movement's common property. Her judgement failed in places — the split of 1869 wasted years, and her husband's 1867 appeal to southern legislators, promising that enfranchising Black people and women would preserve "the political supremacy of your white race," is a stain on her circle to which the record preserves no response from her. If genius is originality, the word does not fit. If it describes an unusual talent for making an argument physically undeniable, it fits her exactly.

Legacy

She gave her final speeches in May 1893 at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago, telling the young: "I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned." She died of stomach cancer on 18 October 1893, aged seventy-five. Eleven hundred people packed her funeral, and she became the first person cremated in Massachusetts. In 1921 Ruth Hale founded the Lucy Stone League in New York to defend women's naming rights; American women who keep their own names are still occasionally called Lucy Stoners.