Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818. She was one of Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews’s 9 children, and like her parents, became a committed abolitionist. In 1847, Stone graduated with honors from Oberlin College at Ohio, becoming the first woman from Massachusetts to do so, inspiring numerous other women in her state to do so as well. The following year, under the mentorship of William Lloyd Garrison (whom she met at Oberlin College), 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 gained many supporters. She was ex-communicated from her childhood church for her belief that slavery should be ended. 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.
In 1850, Lucy Stone organized the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. This event was the first major significant event for the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, and helped define Stone as an important leader of the movement. Two years later, 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. Over the next few years, Stone continued to give speeches in conventions held in different states, and in 1856, she was named the President of the National Convention at New York.
In 1854, Lucy Stone married Henry Blackwell, but did not take his surname, an act that was unprecedented in the history of American marriage. She said, “A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost.”. 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. After he did so, she started signing all documents without “Blackwell”, becoming the first woman in American history to do so, and inspiring a change in numerous women during and after her time period. Stone and Blackwell had 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.
In 1863, Stone assisted Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B Anthony in running the Women’s National Loyal League, which was created to campaign for the abolishment of slavery. The league collected about 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery, and succeeded in getting the Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, thus ending slavery. In 1865, Stone toured New York and New England, where she gave lectures on women’s rights, and in 1866, along with her husband, she travelled on a joint-lecture tour in different states. Throughout these tours, she aimed to gather more support for the women’s suffrage movement.
In 1869, Stone broke away from 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 in the years that followed, and garnered a large following amongst both women and men.
During the following years, 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.
Stone 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 merged to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Woman’s Journal became the official voice of the movement. This newspaper published numerous speeches, essays and debates Stone and her allies had given to increase awareness on women’s suffrage. It had around 20,000 copies in circulation, and it played a central role in allowing various suffrage leaders to speak up about the topic, thus helping the movement gather a widespread following in the different states.
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.
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. Lucy Stone was a central figure in the women’s suffrage movement and abolitionist movement for over half a century, bringing them to full organizational autonomy. She worked meticulously as an orator, publisher and organizer in pursuit of full legal equality, especially in the enfranchisement of women.