Lucy Stone

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Image:Sm lucy stone 3d02055r.jpg

Lucy Stone. photo ca. 1840 - 1860

Lucy Stone (August_13, 1818 – October_18, 1893) 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 [1]. 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.

In 2000, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls included a song entitled "LucyStoners" on her first solo recording, Stag.

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