August 13, 1818 – Birth of Women’s Rights Activist Lucy Stone

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony often worked together, along with a third feminist less well known, Lucy Stone.

Lucy Stone, born on this day in history, August 13, 1818, was also a prominent suffragist and abolitionist. In 1847 she became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree, as she did in 1847 at age 29 from Oberlin College in Ohio.

In October of 1850, Stone organized the first national women’s rights convention, in Worcester, Mass., attracting a broad cross-section of attendees. (Per Time Magazine, while the more famous Seneca Falls Convention had been held two years earlier, it is considered to have been more regional.) Susan B. Anthony later credited a newspaper article about the meeting that Susan B. Anthony with inspiring her to join the women’s rights movement.

Daguerreotype of Lucy Stone, circa 1840–1860

Most notably, when Stone married Henry Blackwell (the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the nation to graduate from medical school), she kept her maiden name, an unheard of practice at the time. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, she was “the first woman in the nation to protest against the marriage laws at the altar, and to manifest sufficient self respect to keep her own name, to represent her individual existence through life.” Women who kept their names came to be called “Maiden Namers” and “Lucy Stoners.”

Stone also drew national attention for dressing in baggy trousers under a skirt that became known as “Bloomers” after Amelia Bloomer copied the idea from Stone and wrote about it in the temperance newspaper The Lily.

Stone travelled throughout the country lecturing on abolition and women’s rights. From 1854 through 1858, Stone lectured on women’s rights in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later write that “Lucy Stone was the first speaker who really stirred the nation’s heart on the subject of woman’s wrongs.” As a history of Lucy Stone in Time Magazine reports:

Her speeches drew crowds of hundreds, but they were not always civil; she got used to men hurling books, rotten vegetables and cold water at her.”

The birth of her daughter in September 1857, however, led her to reduce the level of her activism. Stone hired a nursemaid to help care for her daughter, who was in poor health for several years, but she didn’t trust the nurse’s ability to provide proper care when Stone was absent. Stone eventually withdrew from most public work to stay at home with her child. She made only two public appearances during the Civil War (1861—1865): to attend the founding convention of the Women’s Loyal National League and the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, both in 1863. Stone began to increase her reform activities back to a normal level after the Civil War ended.

Stone eventually broke with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony over the matter of abolition. The latter two rejected the idea of giving black men citizenship and the right to vote, arguing that would give the “lower stratas of manhood” the vote over white women.

In fact, many in the women’s suffrage movement shared racist attitudes or at the very least, did not want to risk winning support for their movement by aligning with those seeking rights for blacks. On one occasion Anthony even asked Douglass not to attend a gathering in Atlanta, Georgia because, as she later recalled: “I did not want anything to get in the way of bringing the Southern white women into our suffrage association.”

Stanton and Stone also disagreed on the matter of divorce. Stanton was a fierce advocate of a woman’s right to divorce, while Stone believed in “marriage for life.”

Lucy Stone in old age

Thus, when Stanton and Anthony wrote the series History of Woman Suffrage, (online here) Stone refused to cooperate with them. As a result, she is hardly mentioned in the six volumes long considered a definitive account of the 19th century women’s rights movement. The text was used as the standard scholarly resource on 19th-century U.S. feminism for much of the 20th century, causing Stone’s extensive contribution to be overlooked in many histories of women’s causes.

Lucy Stone died on October 18, 1893 at the age of 75. At her funeral three days later, 1,100 people crowded the church, and hundreds more stood silently outside. Mourners lined the streets for a sight of the funeral procession, and front-page banner headlines ran in news accounts. Stone’s death was the most widely reported of any American woman’s up to that time.

According to her wishes, her body was cremated, making her the first person cremated in Massachusetts. Even in death, she was defying norms and setting new precedents.