Lucy Stone

Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893) was an American orator, abolitionist and suffragist who was a vocal advocate for and organizer of promoting rights for women. In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and campaigned against slavery. Stone was known for using her birth name, after marriage, contrary to the custom of women taking their husband's surname.

Stone's organizational activities for the cause of women's rights yielded tangible gains in the difficult political environment of the 19th century. Stone helped initiate the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she supported and sustained it, annually, along with a number of other local, regional, and state activist conventions. Stone spoke in front of a number of legislative bodies, to promote laws giving more rights to women. She assisted in establishing the Woman's National Loyal League to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment and thereby abolish slavery, after which she helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which built support for a woman suffrage Constitutional amendment by winning woman suffrage at the local and state levels.

Stone wrote, extensively, about a wide range of women's rights, publishing and distributing speeches by herself and others, and convention proceedings. In the long-running and influential Woman's Journal, a weekly periodical that she founded and promoted, Stone aired both her own and differing views about women's rights. Called "the orator", the "morning star," and the "heart and soul" of the women's rights movement, Stone influenced Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that "Lucy Stone was the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question." Together, Anthony, Stanton, and Stone have been called the 19th-century "triumvirate" of women's suffrage and feminism.

Early life and influences

Lucy Stone was born on August 13, 1818, on her family's farm at Coy's Hill in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. She was the eighth of nine children born to Hannah Matthews and Francis Stone. She grew up with three brothers and three sisters, two siblings having died before her own birth. Another member of the Stone household was Sarah Barr, known as "Aunt Sally" to the children, who was a sister of Francis Stone who had been abandoned by her husband and left dependent on her brother. Although farm life was hard work for all and Francis Stone tightly managed the family resources, Lucy remembered her childhood as one of "opulence,” the farm producing all the food the family wanted and enough extra to trade for the few store-bought goods they needed.

When Stone recalled that "There was only one will in our family, and that was my father's", she described the family government characteristic of her day. Hannah Stone earned a modest income through selling eggs and cheese but was denied any control over that money, sometimes denied money to purchase things Francis considered trivial. Believing she had a right to her own earnings, Hannah sometimes stole coins from his purse or secretly sold a cheese. As a child, Lucy resented instances of what she saw as her father's unfair management of the family's money. But she later came to realize that custom was to blame, and the injustice only demonstrated "the necessity of making custom right, if it must rule."

From the examples of her mother, Aunt Sally, and a neighbor neglected by her husband and left destitute, Stone early learned that women were at the mercy of their husbands' good will. When she came across the biblical passage "and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,” she was distraught over what appeared to be divine sanction of women's subjugation, but then, she reasoned that the injunction applied only to wives. Resolving to "call no man my master,” she determined to keep control over her own life by never marrying, obtaining the highest education she could, and earning her own livelihood.

One of her biographers, Andrea Moore Kerr, writes, "Stone's personality was striking: her unquestioning willingness to take responsibility for other people's actions; her 'workaholic' habits; her self doubt; her desire for control."

Teaching at "a woman's pay"

At age 16, Stone began teaching in district schools, as her brothers and her sister, Rhoda, also did. Her beginning pay of $1.00 a day was much lower than that of male teachers, and when she substituted for her brother, Bowman, one winter, she received less pay than he received. When she protested to the school committee that she had taught all the subjects Bowman had, it replied that they could give her "only a woman's pay." Lower pay for women was one of the arguments cited by those promoting the hiring of women as teachers: "To make education universal, it must be at moderate expense, and women can afford to teach for one-half, or even less, the salary which men would ask." Although Stone's salary increased along with the size of her schools, until she finally received $16 a month, it was always lower than the male rate.

The "woman question"

In 1836, Stone began reading newspaper reports of a controversy raging throughout Massachusetts that some referred to as the "woman question" – what was woman's proper role in society; should she assume an active and public role in the reform movements of the day? Developments within that controversy, over the next several years, shaped her evolving philosophy on women's rights.

A debate over whether women were entitled to a political voice had begun, when many women responded to William Lloyd Garrison's appeal to circulate antislavery petitions and sent thousands of signatures to Congress, only to have them rejected, in part, because women had sent them. Women abolitionists responded by holding a convention in New York City to expand their petitioning efforts and declaring that "as certain rights and duties are common to all moral beings,” they would no longer remain within limits prescribed by "corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture." After sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké began speaking to audiences of men and women, instead of women-only groups as was acceptable at the time, a state convention of Congregational ministers issued a pastoral letter condemning women's assumption of "the place of man as a public reformer" and "itinerat[ing] in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Stone attended the convention as a spectator and was so angered by the letter that she determined, "if ever [I] had anything to say in public, [I] would say it, and all the more, because of that pastoral letter."

Stone read Sarah Grimké's "Letters on the Province of Woman" (later republished as "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes"), and told a brother they only reinforced her resolve "to call no man master." She drew from these "Letters," when writing college essays and later, her women's rights lectures.

Having determined to obtain the highest education she could, Stone enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1839, at the age of 21. But she was so disappointed in Mary Lyon's intolerance of antislavery and women's rights that she withdrew after only one term. The very next month, she enrolled at Wesleyan Academy (later Wilbraham & Monson Academy), which she found more to her liking: "It was decided by a large majority in our literary society the other day," she reported to a brother "that ladies ought to mingle in politics, go to Congress, etc. etc." Stone read a newspaper account of how a Connecticut antislavery meeting had denied the right to speak or vote to Abby Kelley, recently hired as an antislavery agent to work in that state. Refusing to relinquish her right, Kelley had defiantly raised her hand every time a vote was taken. "I admire the calm and noble bearing of Abby K," Stone wrote to a brother, "and cannot but wish there were more kindred spirits."

Three years later, Stone followed Kelley's example. In 1843, a deacon was expelled from Stone's church for his antislavery activities, which included supporting Kelley by hosting her at his home and driving her to lectures that she gave in the vicinity. When the first vote for expulsion was taken, Stone raised her hand in his defense. The minister discounted her vote, saying that, though she was a member of the church, she was not a voting member. Like Kelley, she stubbornly raised her hand for each of the remaining five votes.

After completing a year at coeducational Monson Academy in the summer of 1841, Stone learned that Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio had become the first college in the nation to admit women and had bestowed college degrees on three women. Stone enrolled at Quaboag Seminary in neighboring Warren, where she read Virgil and Sophocles and studied Latin and Greek grammar, in preparation for Oberlin's entrance examinations.