ection>Alice Stone Blackwell
The Life of Lucy Stone
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2018 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-4282-5
Table of Contents
Preface
Lucy Stone was noteworthy for many things. She was the first Massachusetts woman to take a college degree. She was "the morning star of the woman's rights movement", lecturing for it, in the ten years from 1847 to 1857, to immense audiences all up and down the country. She headed the call for the First National Woman's Rights Convention. She converted Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe. She was the first married woman to keep her own name. She organized a nation-wide association in which those suffragists could work who did not wish to have equal suffrage mixed up with free love and other extraneous questions. She founded and edited the Woman's Journal of Boston, which was the principal woman suffrage newspaper of the United States for almost half a century. She was a striking example of single-hearted and lifelong devotion to a great idea.
Her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, had great ability, and was the one man in America who devoted his life to securing equal rights for women.
One of her sisters-in-law, Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first woman in modern times to take a medical degree. Another, the Reverend Doctor Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman in the world to be ordained as a minister. Lucy Stone was thus in close touch with the movement to open the learned professions to women. Her letters give a graphic picture of early American life, as different from the life of to-day as that of some remote foreign country.
Great obligations are due to a large number of friends who subscribed a sum of money to provide me with help while writing this biography. This enabled me to have the assistance of Mrs. Ida Porter-Boyer, who has given invaluable aid in collecting and arranging the material.
Alice Stone Blackwell
Boston, Massachusetts
Chapter I
Lucy Stone was born on August 13, 1818. She was the eighth of nine children. Her mother, a farmer's wife, had milked eight cows the night before Lucy was born, a sudden shower having called all the men of the family into the hayfield to save the hay. When told of the sex of the new baby, she said sadly, "Oh, dear! I am sorry it is a girl. A woman's life is so hard!" No one then could foresee that the little girl just born was destined to make life less hard for all the generations of little girls that were to follow.
The world upon which little Lucy first opened her bright eyes was very different from that which greets the young women of to-day. No college or university admitted women. There was not a single free public high school for girls. It was the general belief that all the education a woman needed was enough to enable her to read her Bible and keep her household accounts, and that any attempt to give her more would spoil her for a wife and mother.
In most States of the Union — all those where the law was founded upon the common law of England — a husband had the legal right to beat his wife, "with a reasonable instrument." There is a story that Judge Buller, when charging the jury in a case of wife-beating, said, "Without undertaking to define exactly what a reasonable instrument is, I hold, gentlemen of the jury, that a stick no thicker than my thumb comes clearly within that description." A committee of women waited upon him the next day to learn the exact size of the judge's thumb.
Wife-beating, unless done with uncommon brutality, was sanctioned not only by law but by public opinion. Mrs. Emily P. Collins (who organized at South Bristol, New York, in 1848, the first local woman's rights society in the world) says in her reminiscences:
"In
