Lucy Stone was an American suffragist, the wife of abolitionist
Henry Brown Blackwell (1825-1909) (the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell)
and the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell, another prominent suffragette,
journalist and human rights defender.
Born
in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, Stone first attended Mount
Holyoke College (then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in 1839.
She left Mount Holyoke and later joined Oberlin College, from
which she graduated in 1847. Her graduation from Oberlin made
her the first woman of Massachusetts to earn a B.A.
Stone
became a leader of the women's suffrage movement, lecturing extensively
on both suffrage and abolition. In 1870 she founded, in Boston,
the Woman's Journal, the publication of the American Woman Suffrage
Association, and she continued to edit it for the rest of her
life, assisted by her husband and their daughter. That daughter,
Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), wrote her biography, Lucy Stone:
Pioneer of Woman's Rights (ISBN 0813919908), which was published
in 1930 and again in 1971 (2nd edition).
Lucy
Stone's refusal to be known by her husband's name, as an assertion
of her own rights, was controversial then and is what she is remembered
for today. Women who continue to use their birth names after marriage
are still occasionally known as "Lucy Stoners" in the
U.S. In 1921, the Lucy Stone League was founded in New York City.
It was reborn in 1997.
On
her passing in 1893, Lucy stone was interred in the Forest Hills
Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
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