LUCY STONE Essay, Research Paper

Lucy Stone (1818 ? 1893) By: Meghan Monokian

Well I, Lucy Stone am mostly known for being one of the most famous leaders for women’s rights in the United States. I came to be known as one of the most outspoken women of my time. I had firm beliefs against slavery and rejected the Biblical stand that men should rule over women. I was determined to make the world a better place for women.

I was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818. While still a young girl, I began to notice the restrictions placed on the female gender. I took on various home chores in order to help my mother. At sixteen I began teaching for low pay, which once again was an irritation. I worked and saved for nine years to get enough money to attend college. I would study at 2:00 in the morning before going to work to earn and save enough money for college. In order to help myself out, I attended Quaboag Seminary in Warren, Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, a Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley. I learned Hebrew and Greek in order to determine if the passages in the Bible that seemed to give man a higher order in life than women were properly translated. I graduated from Oberlin College in 1847 becoming the first women to earn a college degree. I was asked to write an essay to read at the graduation. The college was not going to allow me to read her own essay because she was a woman. She refused to write the essay because she was insulted. For a while the college was thinking about taking away her degree because of not writing the essay but they did not.

After college I became a lecturer for William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-slavery Society. I firmly believed in the evils of slavery and discrimination against women. In 1850, I led a call for a national convention on women’s rights. I continued on lecture tours for several years. In 1855, I married an abolitionist who worked at stopping slavery named Henry Blackwell. I insisted on keeping my maiden name and I wrote out one of the first “marriage contracts” leaving out the word “obey”. I had one daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. In 1866 I helped found the American Equal Rights Association. In 1867 I was elected president of the New Jersey Woman suffrage Association. After organizing the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. I moved from Orange, New Jersey, to Boston.

In 1869 there was a major division in the women who were working for female’s rights. Other conservative reformers and I formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. While serving on that association’s executive board, I raised money to start the Woman’s Journal in 1870. In 1872, my husband and I became the editors. The journal became famous over the years as the journalistic voice of the suffrage movement.

I was one of the first women to speak out against women not having the right to vote in the United States. I never knew that women won the right to vote. I died in 1893 in Massachusetts after what I considered was a successful life speaking out for women’s rights. I set goals and I tried and did accomplish most of my goals/dreams!