Lucy Stone

At age 16, Stone began teaching in district schools, as her brothers and sister, Rhoda, also did. Her beginning pay of $1.00 a day was much lower than that of male teachers, and when she substituted for her brother, Bowman, one winter, she received less pay than he received. When she protested to the school committee that she had taught all the subjects Bowman had, it replied that they could give her "only a woman's pay." Lower pay for women was one of the arguments cited by those promoting the hiring of women as teachers: "To make education universal, it must be at moderate expense, and women can afford to teach for one-half, or even less, the salary which men would ask."[15] Although Stone's salary increased along with the size of her schools, until she finally received $16 a month, it was always lower than the male rate.[16]

In 1836, Stone began reading newspaper reports of a controversy raging throughout Massachusetts that some referred to as the "woman question" – what was woman's proper role in society; should she assume an active and public role in the reform movements of the day? Developments within that controversy over the next several years shaped her evolving philosophy on women's rights.[17]

A debate over whether women were entitled to a political voice had begun when many women responded to William Lloyd Garrison's appeal to circulate antislavery petitions and sent thousands of signatures to Congress only to have them rejected, in part because women had sent them. Women abolitionists responded by holding a convention in New York City to expand their petitioning efforts, and declaring that "as certain rights and duties are common to all moral beings", they would no longer remain within limits prescribed by "corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture." After sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké began speaking to audiences of men and women, instead of women-only groups, as was acceptable, a state convention of Congregational ministers issued a pastoral letter condemning women's assuming "the place of man as a public reformer" and "itinerat[ing] in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Stone attended the convention as a spectator, and was so angered by the letter that she determined "if ever [I] had anything to say in public, [I] would say it, and all the more because of that pastoral letter."[18]

Stone read Sarah Grimké's "Letters on the Province of Woman" (later republished as "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes"), and told a brother they only reinforced her resolve "to call no man master." She drew from these "Letters" when writing college essays and her later women's rights lectures.[19]

Having determined to obtain the highest education she could, Stone enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1839, at the age of 21. But she was so disappointed in Mary Lyons' intolerance of antislavery and women's rights that she withdrew after only one term. The very next month she enrolled at Wesleyan Academy (later Wilbraham & Monson Academy),[20] which she found more to her liking: "It was decided by a large majority in our literary society the other day," she reported to a brother "that ladies ought to mingle in politics, go to Congress, etc. etc." Stone read a newspaper account of how a Connecticut antislavery meeting had denied the right to speak or vote to Abby Kelley, recently hired as an antislavery agent to work in that state. Refusing to relinquish her right, Kelley had defiantly raised her hand every time a vote was taken. "I admire the calm and noble bearing of Abby K," Stone wrote to a brother, "and cannot but wish there were more kindred spirits."[21]

Three years later, Stone followed Kelley's example. In 1843, a deacon was expelled from Stone's church for his antislavery activities, which included supporting Kelley by hosting her at his home and driving her to lectures that she gave in the vicinity. When the first vote for expulsion was taken, Stone raised her hand in his defense. The minister discounted her vote, saying that, though she was a member of the church, she was not a voting member. Like Kelley, she stubbornly raised her hand for each of the remaining five votes.[22]

After completing a year at coeducational Monson Academy in the summer of 1841, Stone learned that Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio had become the first college in the nation to admit women and had bestowed college degrees on three women. Stone enrolled at Quaboag Seminary in neighboring Warren, where she read Virgil and Sophocles and studied Latin and Greek grammar in preparation for Oberlin's entrance examinations.[23]

Stone hoped to earn most of her college expenses through teaching in one of the institute's lower departments. But because of its policy against employing first-year students as teachers, the only work Stone could get other than teaching at district schools during the winter break was housekeeping chores through the school's manual labor program. For this, she was paid three cents an hour—less than half what male students received for their work in the program. Among measures taken to reduce her expenses, Stone prepared her own meals in her dormitory room. In 1844 Stone was given a position teaching arithmetic in the Ladies Department, but again received reduced pay because of her sex.

Oberlin's compensation policies required Stone to do twice the labor a male student had to do to pay the same costs. Stone frequently rose at two o'clock to fit in work and study, and she found her health declining. In February 1845, having decided to submit to the injustice no longer, she asked the Faculty Board for the same pay given two lesser-experienced male colleagues. When her request was denied, she resigned her position. Pleading with the faculty to restore Stone, her former students said they would pay Stone "what was right" if the college would not. Stone had planned to borrow money from her father when funds ran out, but Francis Stone, moved by his daughter's description of her struggles, promised to provide money when needed. Help from home was not needed, however, because after three months of pressure, the faculty yielded and hired Stone back, paying both her and other women student teachers at the same rate paid male student teachers.[26]

1881 portrait of Lucy Stone

In February 1846, Stone intimated to Abby Kelley Foster that she was thinking of becoming a public speaker,[27] but not until the following summer did a storm of controversy over Foster's speaking at Oberlin decide the matter for her. Faculty opposition to Foster ignited impassioned discussion of women's rights among the students, especially of a woman's right to speak in public, which Stone vigorously defended in a joint meeting of the men's and women's literary societies. She followed that campus demonstration by making her first public speech at Oberlin's August 1 commemoration of Emancipation in the West Indies.[28]

In the fall of 1846, Stone informed her family of her intention to become a women's rights lecturer. Her brothers were at once supportive, her father encouraged her to do what she considered her duty, but her mother and only remaining sister begged her to reconsider. To her mother's fears that she would be reviled, Stone said she knew she would be disesteemed and even hated, but she must "pursue that course of conduct which, to me, appears best calculated to promote the highest good of the world."[29]

Stone then tried to gain practical speaking experience. Although women students could debate each other in their literary society, it was considered inappropriate for them to participate in oral exercises with men; women members of the collegiate rhetoric class were expected to learn by observing their male classmates. So Stone and first-year student Antoinette Brown, who also wanted to develop skill in public speaking, organized an off-campus women's debating club. After gaining a measure of competence, they sought and received permission to debate each other before Stone's rhetoric class. The debate attracted a large student audience as well as attention from the Faculty Board, which thereupon formally banned women's oral exercises in coeducational classes.[30] Shortly thereafter, Stone accepted a challenge from a former editor of a county newspaper to a public debate on women's rights, and she soundly defeated him.[31] She then submitted a petition to the Faculty Board, signed by most members of her graduating class, asking that women chosen to write graduation essays be permitted to read them themselves, as men so honored did, instead of having them read by faculty members. When the Faculty Board refused and Stone was elected to write an essay, she declined, saying she could not support a principle that denied women "the privilege of being co-laborers with men in any sphere to which their ability makes them adequate."[32]

Stone received her baccalaureate degree from Oberlin College on August 25, 1847, becoming the first female college graduate from Massachusetts.

An engraving of Lucy Stone wearing bloomers was published in 1853.

When Stone resumed lecturing in the fall of 1851, she wore a new style of dress that she had adopted during her winter convalescence, consisting of a loose, short jacket and a pair of baggy trousers under a skirt that fell a few inches below the knees.[52] The dress was a product of the health-reform movement and intended to replace the fashionable French dress of a tight bodice over a whalebone-fitted corset, and a skirt that dragged several inches on the floor, worn over several layers of starched petticoats with straw or horsehair sewn into the hems. Ever since the fall of 1849, when the Water-Cure Journal urged women to invent a style of dress that would allow them to use their legs freely, women across the country had been wearing some form of pants and short skirt, generally called the "Turkish costume" or the "American dress."[53] Most wore it as a walking or gardening dress, but a letter writer to the National Woman's Rights Convention urged women to adopt it as common attire.[54]

By the spring of 1851, women in several states were wearing the dress in public.[55] In March, Amelia Bloomer, editor of the temperance newspaper The Lily, announced that she was wearing it and printed a description of her dress along with instructions on how to make it. Soon, newspapers had dubbed it the "Bloomer dress", and the name stuck.[56]

The Bloomer became a fashion fad during the following months, as women from Toledo to New York City and Lowell, Massachusetts, held reform-dress social events and festivals. Supporters gathered signatures to a "Declaration of Independence from the Despotism of Parisian Fashion" and organized dress-reform societies. A few Garrisonian supporters of women's rights took prominent part in these activities, and one offered silk to any of his friends who would make it into a short skirt and trousers for a public dress. Stone accepted the offer.[57]

When Stone lectured in the dress in the fall of 1851, hers was the first Bloomer most of her audiences had ever seen. But by then, the dress had become controversial. Although newspapers had initially praised the practicality of the new style, they soon turned to ridicule and condemnation, now viewing the trousers as a usurpation of the symbol of male authority.[57] Many women retreated in the face of criticism, but Stone continued to wear the short dress exclusively for the next three years. She also wore her hair short, cut just below her jaw line. After Stone lectured in New York City in April 1853, the report of her speeches in the Illustrated News was accompanied by this engraving of Stone in the Bloomer dress.[58]

Stone found the short skirt convenient during her travels and defended it against those who said it was a distraction that hurt the women's rights cause. Nevertheless, she disliked the instant attention it drew whenever she arrived in a new place. In the fall of 1854, she added a dress a few inches longer, for occasional use.[59] In 1855, she abandoned the dress altogether and was not involved in the formation of a National Dress Reform Association in February 1856. Her resumption of long skirts drew the condemnation of such dress-reform leaders as Gerrit Smith and Lydia Sayer Hasbrouk, who accused her of sacrificing principle for the sake of pleasing a husband.[60]

Stone's anti-slavery work included harsh criticism of churches that refused to condemn slavery. Her own church in West Brookfield, the First Congregational Church of West Brookfield, was one of those, having expelled a deacon for anti-slavery activities. In 1851, the church expelled Stone herself.[50] Stone had already moved significantly away from that church's Trinitarian doctrines. While at Oberlin, Stone had arranged for her friend Abby Kelley Foster and her new husband, Stephen Symonds Foster, to speak there on the abolition of slavery. Afterwards, Charles Finney, a prominent professor of theology at Oberlin, denounced the Fosters for their Unitarian beliefs. Intrigued, Stone began to engage in classroom discussions about the Trinitarian-Unitarian controversy[61] and ultimately decided that she was a Unitarian.[62] Expelled from her childhood church, she affiliated with the Unitarian church.[63]

Before her own marriage, Stone felt that women should be allowed to divorce drunken husbands, to formally end a "loveless marriage" so that "a true love may grow up in the soul of the injured one from the full enjoyment of which no legal bond had a right to keep her[64] ...Whatever is pure and holy, not only has a right to be, but it has a right also to be recognized, and further, I think it has no right not to be recognized."[65] Stone's friends often felt differently about the issue; "Nettee" Brown wrote to Stone in 1853 that she was not ready to accept the idea, even if both parties wanted divorce.[65] Stanton was less inclined to clerical orthodoxy; she was very much in favor of giving women the right to divorce,[66] eventually coming to the view that the reform of marriage laws was more important than women's voting rights.[64]

In the process of planning for women's rights conventions, Stone worked against Stanton to remove from any proposed platform the formal advocacy of divorce. Stone wished to keep the subject separate, to prevent the appearance of moral laxity.[67] She pushed "for the right of woman to the control of her own person as a moral, intelligent, accountable being."[67] Other rights were certain to fall into place after women were given control of their own bodies. Years later, Stone's position on divorce would change.

In 1853, Stone drew large audiences with a lecture tour through several southern states. Former slave Frederick Douglass rebuked her in his abolitionist newspaper, accusing her of achieving success by putting her anti-slavery principles aside and speaking only of women's rights.[68] Douglass later found Stone at fault for speaking at a whites-only Philadelphia lecture hall, but Stone insisted that she had replaced her planned speech that day with an appeal to the audience to boycott the facility. It took years before the two were reconciled.[69]

On October 14, 1853, following the National Woman's Rights Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Stone and Lucretia Mott addressed Cincinnati's first women's rights meeting, arranged by Henry Blackwell, a local businessman from a family of capable women, who had taken an interest in Stone. After that successful meeting, Stone accepted Blackwell's offer to arrange a lecture tour for her in the western states – considered then to be those west of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Over the following thirteen weeks, Stone gave over forty lectures in thirteen cities, during which a report to the New York Tribune said she was stirring the West on women's rights "as it is seldom stirred on any subject whatsoever." After four lectures in Louisville, Stone was begged to repeat the entire course and told she was having more effect there than she could have anywhere else. An Indianapolis newspaper reported that Stone "set about two-thirds of the women in the town crazy after women's rights and placed half the men in a similar predicament." St. Louis papers said her lectures attracted the largest crowds ever assembled there, filling the city's largest auditorium beyond its capacity of two thousand. Chicago papers praised her lectures as the best of the season, and said they were inspiring discussion and debate in the city's homes and meeting places. When Stone headed home in January, 1854, she left behind incalculable influence.[70]

From 1854 through 1858, Stone lectured on women's rights in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario.[71] Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later write that "Lucy Stone was the first speaker who really stirred the nation's heart on the subject of woman's wrongs."[72]

After petitioning the Massachusetts legislature from 1849 through 1852 for the right of women to vote and serve in public office,[73] Stone aimed her 1853 petitions at the convention that would meet on May 4, 1853, to revise the state constitution. Wendell Phillips drafted both the petition asking that the word "male" be stricken wherever it appeared in the constitution, and an appeal urging Massachusetts citizens to sign it. After canvassing the state for nine months, Stone sent the convention petitions bearing over five thousand signatures. On May 27, 1853, Stone and Phillips addressed the convention's Committee on Qualifications of Voters. In reporting Stone's hearing, the Liberator noted: "Never before, since the world was made, in any country, has woman publicly made her demand in the hall of legislation to be represented in her own person, and to have an equal part in framing the laws and determining the action of government."[74]

Stone called a New England Woman's Rights Convention in Boston on June 2, 1854, to expand her petitioning efforts. The convention adopted her resolution for petitioning all six New England legislatures, as well as her proposed form of petition, and it appointed a committee in each state to organize the work.[75] In a speech before the second New England Woman's Rights Convention, held in June 1855, Stone urged that one reason women needed suffrage was to protect any gains achieved, reminding them that "the next Legislature may undo all that the last have done for women." The convention adopted a resolution calling the ballot "woman's sword and shield; the means of achieving and protecting all other civil rights" and another urging the national convention to make suffrage petitioning its priority.[76]

The next National Woman's Rights Convention met in Cincinnati on October 17 and 18, 1855. It was here that Stone delivered impromptu remarks that became famous as her "disappointment" speech. When a heckler interrupted the proceedings, calling female speakers "a few disappointed women", Stone retorted that yes, she was indeed a "disappointed woman." "In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer."[77] The convention adopted Stone's resolution calling for the circulation of petitions and saying it was "the duty of women in their respective States to ask the legislators for the elective franchise."[78] Following the convention, suffrage petitioning took place in the New England states, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska, with resultant legislative hearings or action in Nebraska and Wisconsin. Amelia Bloomer, recently moved to Iowa near the Nebraska border, took up the work in that area,[79] while the Indiana Woman's Rights Society, at least one of whose officers was at the Cincinnati convention, directed the work in Indiana. Stone had helped launch the New York campaign at a state woman's rights convention in Saratoga Springs in August,[80] and at the Cleveland convention recruited workers for it, as well as for the work in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio.[81] Stone took charge of the work in Ohio, her new home state, drafting its petition, placing it in Ohio newspapers and circulating it during lectures across southern Ohio while her recruit worked in the northern part of the state. Stone also lectured in Illinois and Indiana in support of the petition drives there and personally introduced the work in Wisconsin, where she found volunteers to circulate the petition and legislators to introduce them in both houses of the legislature.[82]

At the national convention of 1856, Stone presented a new strategy suggested by Antoinette Brown Blackwell to send a memorial to the various state legislatures signed by the officers of the National Woman's Rights Convention. Antoinette Brown had married Samuel Charles Blackwell on January 24, 1856, becoming Stone's sister-in-law in the process.[83] Stone, Brown Blackwell, and Ernestine Rose were appointed a committee to carry out the plan. Stone drafted and printed the appeal, and Brown Blackwell mailed it to twenty-five state legislatures. Indiana and Pennsylvania referred the memorial to select committees, while both Massachusetts and Maine granted hearings. On March 6, 1857, Stone, Wendell Phillips and James Freeman Clarke addressed the Judiciary Committee of the Massachusetts senate, and on March 10, Stone and Phillips addressed a select committee of the Maine legislature.[84]

On July 4, 1856, in Viroqua, Wisconsin, Stone gave the first women's rights and anti-slavery speech delivered by a woman in the area.[85]

In January 1858, Stone staged a highly publicized protest that took the issue of taxation without representation across the nation. The previous summer she and Blackwell had purchased a house in Orange, New Jersey, and when the first tax bill came, Stone returned it unpaid with the explanation that taxing women while denying them the right to vote was a violation of America's founding principles. On January 22, 1858, the city auctioned some of her household goods to pay the tax and attendant court costs.[86] The following month, Stone and Blackwell spoke on taxation without representation before two large meetings in Orange, and circulated petitions asking the New Jersey legislature for woman's suffrage.[87] Stone's protest inspired other tax-paying women to action: some followed her example and refused to pay taxes, with one case reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1863, while others went to the polls to demand their right as taxpayers to vote.[88]

Stone viewed the tradition of wives abandoning their own surname to assume that of their husbands as a manifestation of the legal annihilation of a married woman's identity. Immediately after her marriage, with the agreement of her husband, she continued to sign correspondence as "Lucy Stone" or "Lucy Stone – only."[98] But during the summer, Blackwell tried to register the deed for property Stone purchased in Wisconsin, and the registrar insisted she sign it as "Lucy Stone Blackwell." The couple consulted Blackwell's friend, Salmon P. Chase, a Cincinnati lawyer and future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was not immediately able to answer their question about the legality of her name. So while continuing to sign her name as Lucy Stone in private correspondence, for eight months she signed her name as Lucy Stone Blackwell on public documents and allowed herself to be so identified in convention proceedings and newspaper reports. But upon receiving assurance from Chase that no law required a married woman to change her name, Stone made a public announcement at the May 7, 1856, convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Boston that her name remained Lucy Stone.[99] In 1879, when Boston women were granted the franchise in school elections, Stone registered to vote. But officials notified her that she would not be allowed to vote unless she added "Blackwell" to her signature. This she refused to do, and so she was not able to vote. Because her time and energy were consumed with suffrage work, she did not challenge the action in a court of law.[100]

Stone and Blackwell had one daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, born September 14, 1857, who became a leader of the suffrage movement and wrote the first biography of her mother, Lucy Stone: Pioneer Woman Suffragist.[101] In 1859, while the family was living temporarily in Chicago, Stone miscarried and lost a baby boy.[102]

Slavery was abolished in December 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which raised questions about the future role of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). In January 1866, Stone and Anthony traveled to an AASS meeting in Boston to propose a merger of the anti-slavery and women's movements into one that would campaign for equal rights for all citizens. The AASS, preferring to focus on the rights of African Americans, especially the newly freed slaves, rejected their proposal.[114]

In May 1866, Anthony and Stanton organized the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since before the Civil War began.[115] In a move similar to the proposal that had been made earlier to anti-slavery forces, the convention voted to transform itself into a new organization called the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights for all, especially the right of suffrage.[116] Stone did not attend the AERA's founding convention, most likely for fear of the recent cholera outbreak in New York City, the meeting's location. She was nevertheless elected to the new organization's executive committee. Blackwell was elected as the AERA's recording secretary.[117]

In 1867, Stone and Blackwell opened the AERA's difficult campaign in Kansas in support of referenda in that state that would enfranchise both African Americans and women. They led the effort for three months before turning the work over to others and returning home. Neither of the Kansas referenda was approved by the voters. Disagreements over tactics used during the Kansas campaign contributed to a growing split in the women's movement, which was formalized after the AERA convention in 1869.[118]

The immediate cause of the split was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. In one of their most controversial moves, Anthony and Stanton campaigned against the amendment, insisting that women and African Americans should be enfranchised at the same time. They said that by effectively enfranchising all men while excluding all women, the amendment would create an "aristocracy of sex" by giving constitutional authority to the idea that men were superior to women.[119]

Stone supported the amendment. She had expected, however, that progressive forces would push for the enfranchisement of African Americans and women at the same time and was distressed when they did not. In 1867, she wrote to Abby Kelley Foster, an abolitionist, to protest the plan to enfranchise black men first. "O Abby", she wrote, "it is a terrible mistake you are all making... There is no other name given by which this country can be saved, but that of woman."[120] In a dramatic debate with Frederick Douglass at the AERA convention in 1869, Stone argued that suffrage for women was more important than suffrage for African Americans. She nevertheless supported the amendment, saying, "But I thank God for that XV. Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every State. I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit. But I believe that the safety of the government would be more promoted by the admission of woman as an element of restoration and harmony than the negro."[121] Stone and her allies expected that their active support for the amendment to enfranchise black men would lead their abolitionist friends in Congress to push for an amendment to enfranchise women as the next step, but that did not happen.[122]

Henry Blackwell, Stone's husband and an important figure in the suffrage movement in the coming years, also supported the amendment. His special interest, however, which he pursued for decades, was in convincing southern politicians that the enfranchisement of women would help to ensure white supremacy in their region.[123] In 1867, he published an open letter to southern legislatures, assuring them that if both blacks and women were enfranchised, "the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged" and "the black race would gravitate by the law of nature toward the tropics."[124] Stone's reaction to this idea is unknown.[125]

The AERA essentially collapsed after its acrimonious convention in May 1869, and two competing woman suffrage organizations were created in its aftermath. Two days after the convention, Anthony, Stanton and their allies formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and their allies formed the competing American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).[126] The AWSA initially was the larger of the two organizations,[127] but it declined in strength during the 1880s.[128]

Even after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, differences between the two organizations remained. The AWSA worked almost exclusively for women's suffrage while the NWSA initially worked on a wide range of issues, including divorce reform and equal pay for women. The AWSA included both men and women among its leadership while the NWSA was led by women.[129] The AWSA worked for suffrage mostly at the state level while the NWSA worked more at the national level. The AWSA cultivated an image of respectability while the NWSA sometimes used confrontational tactics.[130]

In 1870, at the twentieth anniversary celebration of the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Stanton spoke for three hours rallying the crowd for women's right to divorce. By then, Stone's position on the matter had shifted significantly. Personal differences between Stone and Stanton came to the fore on the issue, with Stone writing "We believe in marriage for life, and deprecate all this loose, pestiferous talk in favor of easy divorce."[64] Stone made it clear that those wishing for "free divorce" were not associated with Stone's organization AWSA, headed at that time by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.[64] Stone wrote against 'free love:' "Be not deceived—free love means free lust."[64]

This editorial position would come back to haunt Stone. Also in 1870, Elizabeth Roberts Tilton told her husband Theodore Tilton that she had been carrying on an adulterous relation with his good friend Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore Tilton published an editorial saying that Beecher "has at a most unseemly time of life been detected in improper intimacies with certain ladies of his congregation."[131] Tilton also informed Stanton about the alleged affair, and Stanton passed the information to Victoria Woodhull. Woodhull, a free love advocate, printed innuendo about Beecher, and began to woo Tilton, convincing him to write a book of her life story from imaginative material that she supplied.[132] In 1871, Stone wrote to a friend "my one wish in regard to Mrs. Woodhull is, that [neither] she nor her ideas, may be so much as heard of at our meeting."[133] Woodhull's self-serving activities were attracting disapproval from both centrist AWSA and radical NWSA. To divert criticism from herself, Woodhull published a denunciation of Beecher in 1872 saying that he practiced free love in private while speaking out against it from the pulpit. This caused a sensation in the press, and resulted in an inconclusive legal suit and a subsequent formal inquiry lasting well into 1875. The furor over adultery and the friction between various camps of women's rights activists took focus away from legitimate political aims. Harry Blackwell wrote to Stone from Michigan where he was working toward putting woman suffrage into the state constitution, saying "This Beecher-Tilton affair is playing the deuce with [woman suffrage] in Michigan. No chance of success this year I fancy."[134]

At her new home, Stone worked closely with the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA), the first major political organization in the U.S. with women's suffrage as its goal. Two years earlier she had traveled to Boston to participate in its founding convention and had been elected to its executive committee.[136] In 1877, she became its president and served in that position until her death in 1893.[137]

In 1870, Stone and Blackwell founded the Woman's Journal, an eight-page weekly newspaper based in Boston. Originally intended primarily to voice the concerns of the NEWSA and the AWSA, by the 1880s it had become an unofficial voice of the suffrage movement as a whole.[138] Stone edited the journal for the rest of her life, assisted by her husband and their daughter Alice Stone Blackwell. Stone did not collect a salary for her work on the paper, which required continual financial support. One of her greatest challenges was raising money to keep it going. Its circulation reached a peak of 6,000, although in 1878 it was 2,000 less than it had been two years earlier.[139]

After the AWSA and NWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, the Woman's Journal became its official voice and eventually the basis for a newspaper with a much wider circulation.[140] In 1917, at a time when victory for women's suffrage was coming closer, Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the NAWSA, said, "There can be no overestimating the value to the suffrage cause of the Woman's Journal... The suffrage success of to-day is not conceivable without the Woman's Journal's part in it.[141]

Lucy Stone's portrait as it appeared in History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II, in 1881

In 1877, Stone was asked by Rachel Foster Avery to come assist Colorado activists in the organization of a popular referendum campaign with the aim of gaining suffrage for Coloradan women. Together, Stone and Blackwell worked the northern half of the state in late summer, while Susan Anthony traveled the less-promising rough-and-tumble southern half. Patchwork and scattered support was reported by activists, with some areas more receptive. Latino voters proved largely uninterested in voting reform; some of that resistance was blamed on the extreme opposition to the measure voiced by the Roman Catholic bishop of Colorado. All but a handful of politicians in Colorado ignored the measure, or actively fought it. Stone concentrated on convincing Denver voters during the October ballot, but the measure lost heavily, with 68% voting against it. Married working men showed the greatest support, and young single men the least. Blackwell called it "The Colorado Lesson", writing that "Woman suffrage can never be carried by a popular vote, without a political party behind it."[142]

In 1879, after Stone organized a petition by suffragists across the state, Massachusetts women were given strictly delimited voting rights: a woman who could prove the same qualifications as a male voter was allowed to cast her vote for members of the school board. Stone applied to the voting board in Boston but was required to sign her husband's surname as her own. She refused, and never participated in that vote.[143]

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