Lucy Stone
American abolitionist and suffragist
1818 CE to 1893 CE
Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 19, 1893) is a prominent American abolitionist and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women.
In 1847, Stone is the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree.
She speaks out for women's rights and against slavery at a time when women are discouraged and prevented from public speaking.
Stone is the first recorded American woman to retain her own last name after marriage.
Stone's organizational activities for the cause of women's rights yields tangible gains in the difficult political environment of the 19th century.
Stone helps initiate the first National Women's Rights Convention and she supports and sustains it annually along with a number of other local, state and regional activist conventions.
Stone speaks in front of a number of legislative bodies to promote laws giving more rights to women.
She assists in establishing the Woman's National Loyal League to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment and thereby abolish slavery, after which she helps form the largest group of like-minded women's rights reformers, the politically moderate American Woman Suffrage Association, which works for decades at the state level in favor of women's right to vote.
Stone writes 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 establishes and promotes, Stone airs both her own and differing views about women's rights.
Called "the orator" and "the morning star of the woman's rights movement", Stone delivers a speech that sparks Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's suffrage.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes that "Lucy Stone was the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question."
(Blackwell, Alice Stone.
Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights.
Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001, p.
94.)
Together, Anthony, Stanton, and Stone have been called the 19th century "triumvirate" of women's suffrage and feminism.
(Library of Congress.
American Memory.
American Women, Manuscript Division.
Women's Suffrage: The Early Leaders.
Retrieved on November 26, 2012.)
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Stanton's position has led to a major schism in the women's rights movement itself by the time the Fifteenth Amendment is making its way through Congress.
Many leaders in the women's rights movement, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, strongly argue against Stanton's "all or nothing" position.
By 1869, disagreement over ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment has given birth to two separate women's suffrage organizations.
The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) had been founded in May 1869 by Anthony and Stanton, who will serve as its president for twenty-one years.
The NWSA opposes passage of the Fifteenth Amendment without changes to include female suffrage and, under Stanton's influence in particular, champions a number of women's issues that are deemed too radical by more conservative members of the suffrage movement.
The better-funded, larger, and more representative woman suffragist vehicle American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded the following November and led by Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, supports the Fifteenth Amendment as written.
Following passage of that Amendment, the AWSA prefers to focus only on female suffrage rather than advocate for the broader women's rights espoused by Stanton: gender-neutral divorce laws, a woman's right to refuse her husband sexually, increased economic opportunities for women, and the right of women to serve on juries.