Lucy Stone: Champion of Abolition and Suffrage

 Lucy Stone

Champion of Abolition and Suffrage

    Lucy Stone was born on the 13th of August in 1818 in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. Her father, Francis Stone, engaged in a fervent abolitionist lifestyle and engaged Lucy in these beliefs as well. Where Lucy and her father differed, however, was in their stance on the role of women in society. Francis Stone believed that men should take a dominant role over women, which Lucy found to be unacceptable. She was frustrated with the notion that, despite being much smarter than her three brothers, she was not given a single opportunity to attend college. Lucy manifested this frustration, and set off to Oberlin University in Ohio - the only college in America that offered nonexclusive tuition to women and African Americans.

    One would not use the word "rare" to describe a woman from Massachusetts graduating college in the mid-1800's. A more apt word would be "unprecedented", considering she was the very first Massachusetts-born woman to obtain a college degree. This was no mean feat, either. Lucy Stone had finally saved enough money to enter the women's college of Mount Holyoke in 1839 after working as a schoolteacher from the age of sixteen. She had only finished one semester at Mount Holyoke before she had to return home to care for her sickly sister, and wouldn't return to academia until 1943 when she enrolled at Oberlin.

    Oberlin's reputation as the only university in the country that integrated women and African Americans was what drew Lucy in, but she would soon find out how deep inequality ran within this institution. Lucy was not only a staunch believer in the rights of African Americans, but also for the rights of women to vote and assume public office. She had gone all the way to Ohio from Massachusetts for school only to face the reality that Oberlin would not support her passionate stance on suffrage. Debra Michals noted in a 2017 article for the National Women's History Museum that, "When [Lucy Stone] graduated in 1847, she declined the “honor” of writing a commencement speech that would be read by a man."

    After graduating in 1847, Lucy Stone's career as an activist took off. She was able to nurture her gift for public speaking in both abolitionist foundations and women's rights foundations, which culminated in her selection by famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Her husband, fellow suffragist and abolitionist Henry Blackwell, encouraged her decision to keep her birth surname when they became married in 1855. Her active focus remained in abolition and women's suffrage throughout her life, but her ardent focus on suffrage culminated in the organization of the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

    Lucy Stone befriended activists in both the abolition and suffrage camps throughout her life, including but not limited to Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When the fourteenth an fifteenth amendments were passed, however, Lucy Stone stood with her abolitionist comrades in regaling in it's significance. Suffragists were upset with these amendments not because of the rights it granted African Americans, but because it did not grant those rights to women. Lucy Stone saw these amendments not as a misstep on behalf of progress, but as the first step to an ever-trying battle that wouldn't resolve until a few decades after her death.

The following video is a reading of an excerpt from "101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History" by Michele Bollinger and Dao X. Tran regarding Lucy Stone:

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Bibliography:

Benstead, A. (2020, December 20). Lucy Stone (U.S. National PARK SERVICE). Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://www.nps.gov/people/lucy-stone.htm

Editors of The Encyclopedia Britannica. Lucy Stone. Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lucy-Stone

Lucy stone (1818-1893). (n.d.). Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://www2.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/OYTT-images/LucyStone.html

Lucy Stone. (2020, December 27). Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Stone

Michals, E. (2017). Lucy Stone. Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lucy-stone

Million, J. (2003). Woman's voice, woman's place: Lucy Stone and the birth of the woman's rights movement. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Stone, Lucy. (n.d.). Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/lucy-stone/#:~:text=When%20she%20graduated%20from%20Oberlin,the%20American%20Anti%2DSlavery%20Society.