Early Life – include where she was born, about her parents, what views she adopted, how she began teaching at the age of 16, her fight for equal pay, and what caused her to take up a stand for women’s rights; lead into the first steps taken to fight against slavery and for increasing women’s rights.
First steps towards creating awareness about more women’s rights by organizing and participating in several woman’s rights conventions during the 1950s.
1848: Lucy Stone became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, through which she came to be known as an effective speaker. During her lectures, she spoke up against slavery and for women, and although she gained many supporters, she was also ex-communicated from her childhood church. This caused her to be even more outspoken about the necessity to abolish slavery, and soon started travelling to different states to give her speeches on anti slavery and women’s rights.
1850: Lucy Stone organized the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts.
1852: Stone participated in the National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York; the speech she gave at this convention is what convinced Susan B Anthony to join the cause for increasing women’s rights.
1850s – Stone continued to participate and give speeches in numerous Woman’s Rights Conventions, and in 1856 was the President of the convention held in New York.
Marriage with Henry Blackwell:
Keeping her last name: What Lucy Stone is most well known for is the fact that she was the first woman who chose to keep her own last name and not take her husband. She preferred to be addressed as Lucy Stone instead of Lucy Blackwell or Lucy Stone Blackwell. Despite signing documents as Lucy Stone in private, she was forced to sign them with her husband’s last name in public until her lawyer ensured her that no law stated she must keep her husband’s name. Following this, she started signing all documents without Blackwell, and became the first woman in American History to do so, inspiring a change in numerous women during and after her time period.
After her marriage: Stone and Blackwell has a daughter named Alice Stone Blackwell, who took after her mother and in her later years, also spoke up against slavery and for the women’s rights movement.
Further Activism in the 1860s:
1865-66: In 1865, she toured New York and New England, where she gave lectures on women’s rights, and in 1866, along with her husband, she and Blackwell travelled on a joint-lecture tour in different states.
Difference within women’s movement and AWSA: In 1869, Stone broke away from Susan B Anthony over disagreements on the 15th Amendment, which allowed black people to vote – something Anthony heavily disagreed with as she believed women’s right to vote should have come first. After splitting up, Stone and her allies formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The AWSA worked for women’s suffrage, and was headed by both male and female leaders – this association created a respectable image for itself.
1870s: Stone and Blackwell moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, where most of the local women were advocates for the suffrage movement, and had also been a part of the Female Anti-Slavery Society. In Dorchester, Stone worked closely with the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA), which was the first major political organization in the US for the suffrage movement. In 1877, she became the President of the Association.
Woman’s Journal: She founded a weekly newspaper in Boston along with her husband in 1870. It was an eight-page newspaper which was originally founded to promote the ideas of the AWSA and NEWSA, and by the 1880s, it had become the “unofficial” voice of the women’s rights movement. When the AWSA and the National Women’s Suffrage Movement joined to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Woman’s Journal became the official voice of the movement. By the late 1870s, Stone’s daughter Alice Blackwell had taken over as the editor for the newspaper. This newspaper published numerous speeches, essays and debates Stone and her allies had given to increase awareness on women’s suffrage.
Final Years:
1893: Stone, along with her daughter Alice, gave her final public speech in 1893 at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, where nearly 150,000 women attended from 27 different countries. On October 18, 1893, Stone died at the age of 75. At her funeral, over 1000 people were present, and her death was the most widely reported of any American woman’s at the time.
Legacy: Being the first woman who refused to take her husband’s last name, other women who followed in her footsteps came to be known as the “Lucy Stoners”. Her daughter, Alice Blackwell, took over the Women’s Journal, and continued to give numerous lectures and speeches just as her mom did. In 1921, the Lucy Stone League was founded by Ruth Hale, and it was the first group that fought for women to keep their maiden name and use it legally, and this group gained a lot of attention.