Lucy Stone
As a young girl, she noticed that her mother was totally dependent on her father, even having to beg him for spending money. That must have made an indelible impression on her. Her father paid tuition for her brother to receive an education, but would not do the same for Lucy. The attitude at that time was that an education would be wasted on a girl. They would only marry and have children.
So Lucy taught school to pay her own tuition. At the age of 25, she had finally earned enough to pay for one year at Oberlin College, the first school in the country to admit women and blacks. She continued to teach and keep house to pay her way, and graduated at the age of 29.
She was asked to write a commencement speech for her class, but she refused. Someone else would have had to deliver the speech, because women were not allowed to speak in public.
What craziness is that? How nineteenth-century men must have feared her that they would stand on a woman’s neck until she gained the strength to pry it off!
Lucy returned to Massachusetts and made a career of speaking and writing in support of women’s rights. A year later, the American Anti-Slavery Society hired her as an organizer. In that position, she traveled the country giving speeches on abolition and, whenever possible, the rights of women. Trying to do both caused problems, so she began to speak for women’s rights only on weekends, earning $7000 in 3 years, a tidy sum for the times. Her controversial views drew huge crowds, but some jeered and threw things at her.
Lucy had sworn not to marry, but at the age of 35, she met a Cincinnati businessman, Henry Blackwell, and everything changed. How lucky she was to find such a husband! (Henry was the brother of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, whom I wrote about in an earlier post.) He vehemently opposed slavery and supported women’s rights. She married Henry at the age of 37 and gave birth to a daughter at the age of 39.
Lucy and Henry kept her property in her name, and she refused to pay property taxes on her home, considering it taxation without representation because women were not allowed to vote.
All activities for the rights of women ceased while the Civil War raged on for 4 years, but in 1867, at the age of 49, she again undertook a lecture tour, campaigning for the right of women and blacks to vote. She and Henry began to publish a weekly suffrage newspaper, “The Woman’s Journal.”
She continued working as her health allowed. In 1893, at the age of 75, she gave lectures at the World's Fair in Chicago. A few months later, she died of cancer and was cremated, the first person in New England to be cremated. It is said that her last words to her daughter were, “Make the world better.” A true pioneer until the end.
Copyright © 2006 Maggie MacLean
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