Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights

by Alice Stone Blackwell, Randolph Hollinghurst (Introduction)

Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Woman's Journal, published this biography of her mother, Lucy Stone, in 1930, a decade after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Reprinted now for the first time, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights is a fascinating, plainspoken document of an important era in women's history.



Lucy Stone's biography is all the more impressive because she has been largely left out of the history of women's suffrage. Her leadership came in a form that was not grandstanding or shocking but personal and mentoring. Her daughter's book provides a vivid, unsentimental portrait of growing up female in rural Massachusetts in the nineteenth century, of earning a college degree, and of beginning a lifelong advocacy for basic civil rights for all Americans.

Often facing hostile audiences, Stone lectured all over the country, and she led the call for the first national woman's rights convention, which took place in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. She brought other leaders&emdash; for example, Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe--to the cause, and she attended antislavery conferences with Frederick Douglass. The reissue of her biography can kindle a vital discussion of how Stone's activism influenced abolitionist and feminist reform ideology. Her story should be especially remarkable to students, who may find her struggles with keeping her own name after marriage hard to imagine, but her successes as a female public figure and political speaker worth emulating.

Genres: Biography, Feminism, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

From Wikipedia: "Alice Stone Blackwell (September 14, 1857 – March 15, 1950) was an American feminist, journalist and human rights advocate. The daughter of Henry Brown Blackwell and Lucy Stone, she was born in East Orange, New Jersey."

Detailed biography available at http://armenianhouse.org/blackwell/bi...

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up for research, and ended up enjoying it too! Stone is mostly remembered for not taking her husband's name. But she was a leader in the early women's rights movement, an abolitionist and suffragist, and brilliant charismatic orator. According to this, she split with Anthony and Stanton over the 15th amendment and their collaboration with racists and with a group that promoted total sexual freedom and non-monogamy -- a split in the movement that her daughter later would help mend.

She also wore the Bloomer reform dress for a few years, and a letter from her to Anthony is quoted in this book, scoffing at the idea that the main problem with it was that it detracted from their credibility.  "No, no, Susan, it is all a pretense that the cause will suffer. I wish that the dress gave me no other troubles; but I am annoyed to death by people who recognize me by my clothes, and when I get a seat in the cars, they will get a seat by me and bore me for a whole day with the stupidest stuff in the world. Much of that I should escape if I dressed like others."

I also loved the story in this of the first, illicit, women's debate society at Oberlin. Stone saved up her income from teaching for nine years in order to go to college there (women were first admitted in 1837). They met in secret, out in the woods, with "posted sentinels" at first, and an older Black friend let them use her parlor in the winter so long as it was women only--the white ladies of the town were opposed to women speaking in public.

Blackwell adored both her parents and carried on their activism, and she seamlessly combines family memories, letters and documents, and interviews. Of course it's hard to know how much could be corroborated by other sources, but she is a lively and clear writer, is not flowery, and does not romanticize.