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Lucy Stone

Born: 13-Aug-1818
Birthplace: West Brookfield, MA
Died: 18-Oct-1893
Location of death: Boston, MA
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Cremated, Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston, MA

Gender: Female
Religion: Unitarian
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Activist

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: American Women's Suffrage Association

Lucy Stone dedicated her life to writing, working, and rabble-rousing for the rights of women. Her father paid his sons' college tuition, but refused to pay his daughter's. Stone worked for nine years as a domestic laborer and teacher to earn her college tuition, and attended Oberlin -- one of very few colleges in America that admitted women at the time. After two years at Oberlin, her father, impressed by her dedication, began paying her tuition.

With Lucretia Mott, she organized the first National Women's Rights Convention, held in October 1850 in Worcester, MA. A speech delivered by Stone at the convention inspired Susan B. Anthony's decision to dedicate herself to women's rights. Attended by more than a thousand women, it led to annual women's rights conventions and helped spark the suffragette movement.

Her husband, Henry Brown Blackwell, was a well-known activist against slavery, and both Stone and Blackwell were actively involved with the American Anti-Slavery Society. Despite their marriage, Stone retained her maiden name, and is believed to be the first American woman to do so. Stone and Blackwell founded and edited Woman's Journal, a weekly newsmagazine for the women's rights movement, published by the American Women's Suffrage Association, which Stone co-founded with Julia Ward Howe and others in 1869. She died in 1893, twenty-six years before women were granted the legal right to vote in America.

Stone's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Blackwell, was also an active suffragette, and the first female physician in the United States. Another sister-in-law, Emily Blackwell, also became a physician, and a third sister-in-law, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, became the first female ordained minister in a mainstream Christian denomination. Stone's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, took over as editor of Woman's Journal in 1909, and became a prominent feminist in her own right. Stone is the namesake of the Lucy Stone League, a group founded decades after her death, dedicated to letting people choose their own names at marriage.

Father: Francis Stone (farmer, b. 1779, d. 1864)
Mother: Hannah Matthews (b. 1779, d. 1860)
Husband: Henry Brown Blackwell (activist, m. 1855, d. 1909)
Daughter: Alice Stone Blackwell (activist, b. 14-Sep-1857, d. 15-Mar-1950)
Son: (stillborn)

    University: Oberlin College (1847)

    National Women's Hall of Fame 1986 (posthumous)



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