June 5, 2023 • 35 mins
Lucy Stone is sometimes written about as the person who should be mentioned alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. She lived an incredibly unique life for a woman of her time and station.
Research:
- Michals, Debra “Lucy Stone.” National Women’s History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lucy-stone
- Million, Joelle. “Woman’s Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement.” Praeger. 2003.
- Kerr, Andrea Moore. “Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality.” Rutgers University Press. 1992. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780813518602/page/n323/mode/2up
- Blackwell, Henry B. “What the South can do. How the Southern states can make themselves masters of the situation. To the legislatures of the Southern states.” New York. Robert J. Johnston, printer. January 15, 1867. Library of Congress: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbpe/rbpe12/rbpe127/12701100/12701100.pdf
- Tucker, Neely. “Stone/Blackwell Marriage: To Love And Honor, But Not ‘Obey.’” Library of Congress Blog. May 5, 2020. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/05/stone-blackwell-marriage-to-love-and-honor-but-not-obey/
- com Editors. “Lucy Stone.” Biography. Com. Nov. 23, 2021. https://www.biography.com/activists/lucy-stone
- Smith, Bonnie Hurd. “Lucy Stone.” Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. https://bwht.org/lucy-stone/
- “Lucy Stone.” National Women’s Hall of Fame. https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/lucy-stone/
- “Garrisonians.” Vermont Christian Messenger. Jan. 30, 1850. https://www.newspapers.com/image/490750662/?terms=%22Lucy%20Stone%22&match=1
- Hays, Elinor. “Morning Star.” New York. Harcourt, Brace & World. 1961. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/morningstar00hays/page/n7/mode/2up
- Lang, Allison. “The 14th and 15th Amendments.” National Women’s History Museum. Fall 2015. https://www.crusadeforthevote.org/14-15-amendments/
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Lucy Stone". Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Oct. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lucy-Stone
- Wheeler, Marjoeiw Spruill. “New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States.” Oxford University Press. 1993.
- McMillen, Sally Gregory. “Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life.” Oxford University Press. 2015.
- “Love and Protest in a Marriage.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/seneca-falls-and-building-a-movement-1776-1890/family-friends-and-the-personal-side-of-the-movement/love-and-protest-in-a-suffrage-marriage/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy he Wilson. And this episode is
inspired by me being a ding dong. So I was
(00:22):
talking with a person that I am close to recently
and I had a need to know her last name,
and I wasn't sure what it was. I know, this
sounds like I'm a horrible person, but hear me out.
She's been married twice once away's back when it was
pretty standard that most folks would take their husband's name.
(00:43):
Her second marriage was later enough that not everybody would
have done that. At that point, a couple of decades
had gone by, and I honestly could not remember if
she had chosen to change her name again or not.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I want to say, you're not the only person this is,
you know, well, like if you.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Have friends, like unless you really need their name for
like a legal reason or to fill out a form, yeah,
it's not always going to come up unless they actually say, hey,
my name is now right snakity doo, you'd be like, oh,
that's so and so. So. That put me, though, in
the mind of just thinking about the practice of marriage
(01:20):
related name changes and how much it has changed in
our lifetime in terms of like being pretty normal for
people to not do it. But that made me think
of Lucy Stone, who did it when it was not
normal at all to keep your original name.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
And Lucy Stone is sometimes written about as like that
person that should be mentioned right alongside Lucretia Mott and
Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but she often isn't.
That's a pretty valid point. She really was kind of
in right in the mix with all of them. She
did live an incredibly unique life for a woman of
her time and her station. She had a lot of gumption,
(01:58):
and she's one of those figures who is pretty central
to a lot of important US history moments. So now
we're going to give her her day. So.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Lucy Stone was born on August thirteenth, eighteen eighteen. Her parents,
Francis and Hannah matthew Stone, were farmers. They were members
of the Congregational Church and lived on four hundred acres
on Coy's Hill and west Brookfield, Massachusetts. Lucy was one
of their seven children, and according to the lore, when
(02:27):
Lucy was born her mother, Hannah said, Oh, dear, I'm
so sorry.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's a girl.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
A woman's lot is so hard.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
As a child, Lucy was often frustrated because she knew
that she was smarter than a lot of boys, including
her brothers, and while they were offered some educational opportunities
beyond like the basics, she and other girls and young
women just were not. At this point, Massachusetts offered primary
education to girls, which she got, but the idea of
(02:56):
higher learning for women not really a thing, and certainly
not in most farming communities. But this desire to get
more education for her was driven also just because she
wanted to learn Hebrew and Greek, and she wanted to
learn those languages because she wanted to read untranslated versions
of the Bible because she was real curious if the
(03:20):
original versions of it did indeed have that language that
gave men power over women, or if that was something
that got added in translation. And one of the drivers
of her interest in exploring that inequality of women and
the challenges they faced was because she watched her mother
work very very hard with very little help. She certainly
(03:43):
didn't get much credit and she didn't get much rest.
And she also saw this common occurrence happening in their community,
where a lot of women were being mistreated by their husbands,
and that was just kind of accepted as normal, and
she did not like it. And her father, even though
he was very pro abolition and very anti slavery, did
not feel any kind of good way about women being equal.
(04:07):
She later wrote of him, quote, there was only one
will in our home, and that was my father's.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
In addition to being smart, Lucy was also a self starter.
She took a teaching job at the age of sixteen
so she could save up money for college. It took
five years for her to save enough because she was
not paid very much at all, but finally, at the
age of twenty one, she was able to enroll at
Mount Holyoaks Seminary for Women. Leading up to her entrance,
(04:35):
she got one of her brother's friends to tutor her
in math, Latin, and grammar, because she thought that her
exposure to and mastery of those subjects was really not
served well by her early schooling. Mount Holyoak it turned
out was not the best fit for Lucy. She had
expected it to be a lot more progressive regarding women's
(04:55):
equality than it was, and Lucy's abolitionist activism was not
especially welcome. For example, she got in trouble because she
had her brother send her copies of William lud Garrison's
The Liberator and then left them spread around the reading
room in the hopes that other students would read them.
But aside from her issues with authority there, unfortunately, there
(05:16):
was another obstacle that sidelined her education, and that was
that her sister, Rhoda, who had been ill for quite
some time, died in July of eighteen thirty nine, and
Roda was an adult at this point. She had children
of her own when she died, and Lucy went home
to help with Rhoda's children and also to comfort their
grieving mother, and she also went back to teaching. For
(05:37):
several years, she'd teach, save up all of her money,
and then spend a semester here and there at a
private school, first Wesleyan, then Monson Academy, and then finally
kvog Seminary. Four years after her time at Mount Holyoke,
Lucy once again enrolled in college, this time at Oberlin College.
That's the first co educational school in the US, the
(05:58):
only one at the time, having opened just ten years earlier,
in eighteen thirty three.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Even Oberlin was not the realization of Stone's hopes, though
she had worked so hard to get there, and it
was the first time that she had lived away from home.
She had left with ninety dollars in cash in her
pocket to start this new phase of her life, and
she was one of seven women that were enrolled in
that first year. In her first year, we should say,
(06:25):
it was at the schools, and there were thirty four
male students. And Lucy was really really fretful about her
finances because her father had paid for her brother's tuitions
for college, but he did not do the same for Lucy.
So she was really really diligent in seeking out additional
income to make sure she could stay in school this time,
(06:45):
including arranging to teach at Oberlin's preparatory school and at
the Liberty School, which was a town school for black students.
She also taught at the town's common schools when Oberlin
was on winter break. If this sounds like a lot
to have three jobs while you're going to school, it
was so much so that Lucy was often foregoing sleep
to keep up on her study. She wrote about sometimes
(07:07):
only like sleeping two hours a night, and when her
father found all of this out, he actually wrote her
a very out of character letter in which he told
her that he did not want any of his children
to have to work the way he had when he
was young, and that he would help her with school
expenses through a loan. Lucy, though, preferred instead to lean
(07:27):
on her older siblings for financial help. She didn't accept
any help from her father until her senior year at Oberlin.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Lucy did very well academically, but she found some disappointment
in a couple of important areas. For one, though the
school admitted women and black students, it was less progressive
than what she wanted. Even most of the professed abolitionists
there among both the students and the staff, thought Garrison's
idea of abruptly ending slavery was too extreme. They were
(07:58):
not in favor of true equality for women either. She
described herself as quote at swords points with them, and
one Oberlin trustee described Lucy as having quote wild and
radical ideas. She had to appear before the Ladies Board
to defend her behavior regularly, whether it was taking off
her bonnet in church because she had a migraine or
(08:21):
the time, she told some of her fellow students that
people should not have children they couldn't afford. She also
advocated for male and female students who were working as
teachers in the college's preparatory school should be paid the
same wages. She was so aggressive in that pursuit that,
in an outcome that made her a legend at the school,
four years the faculty board instituted equal pay for teachers. Yeah,
(08:47):
in reading some accounts of that, it sort of sounds
like the faculty board was just like whatever it takes
to shut Lucy Stone up at this point, like they
really gave it because she was so determined about it
and what she really wanted to pursue at college with
studies in public speaking. She wanted to follow in the
footsteps of other abolitionists like Abby Kelly and the Grimkey sisters.
(09:10):
But those kinds of lessons in public speaking were not
offered to women. They could enroll in rhetoric classes, but
they were only allowed to observe the male students. Lucy
was not allowed to debate in class, and she was
not allowed to join the Debate Society while the school
was co ed. That group that was for male students only,
(09:31):
so Lucy and one of her close friends started a
secret women's debate society at the school. She is recorded
as having stated at the group's first meeting, quote, we
shall leave this college with the reputation of a thorough
collegiate course. Yet not one of us has received any
rhetorical or elocutionary training. Not one of us could state
(09:52):
a question or argue it in a successful debate. For
this reason, I have proposed the formation of this association.
In eighteen forty six, she made her first public speech
at a West Indian Independence Day celebration, where she addressed
the black community of Oberlin in a speech she titled
why do we Rejoice Today? She was given a talking
(10:15):
to by the Lady's Board for her brazenness, but her
brilliance was recognized to some degree. In eighteen forty seven,
the school asked her to write a speech for her graduation,
but she was not the one who would give that
speech that would be a male graduate, so she flatly
turned that down. But she did graduate at the ceremony
(10:35):
at the age of twenty nine. Though it might have
seemed that Lucy was at this point very well educated,
for no real opportunities before her, she did find a
place in her chosen career.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Of public speaker. She was hired in eighteen forty eight
as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society, and
she was paid six dollars a week. She traveled constantly,
which was absolutely grueling, but she was very successful because
she was really great at connecting with audiences. Her anti
slavery upbringing, and her skills in oration and writing were
(11:10):
all of use. The society was also open to letting
her use some of her time not just for abolition
and anti slavery rhetoric, but also to advocate for women's rights.
But in order to make that deal, she had to
take a reduced rate of four dollars a week because
those speeches were taking away time from her abolition speeches.
(11:31):
This meant that she was making at that point a
pretty meager income, and at the urging of many other
lecturers and speakers, she finally started charging a small fee
or passing a collection hat at her lectures.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Even with more money coming in, this was not an
easy job. Lucy became a public figure and a movement
that had a lot of hostile detractors. She had books
and eggs thrown at her, had ice cold water turned
on her, had to run from the occasional angry mob.
She adopted the practice of wearing bloomers like a lot
of other women's rights activists did, and she was jeered
(12:05):
for doing so. There were plenty of people who were
not in favor of abolition and certainly did not want
to hear that message from a woman. Newspaper writeups would
describe her as ugly or manish, and she was accused
of having abandoned her womanly purpose. But she was also
praised by people like Frederick Douglas, who said she was
(12:25):
one of the most effective advocates for the cause. Over time,
Lucy was getting so many invitations to lecture that she
left the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society job and was working
essentially as an independent orator. Coming up, we're going to
talk more about Stone's work on the Woman's Rights Convention,
and we'll get into that after we have a sponsor break.
(12:51):
Lucy was one of the organizers of the first National
Women's Rights Convention in Worcestern, Massachusetts, in eighteen fifty. This
was two years after the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention,
which we've talked about on the show before, and which
Lucy did not attend. That superlative first of the eighteen
fifty convention is based on it being considered a national convention,
(13:13):
whereas Seneca Falls was considered a local effort. Starting with
no money to host this national event, Lucy and her
fellow organizers advertised their need for donations, and contributions were
soon coming in. Everyone involved used their entire network of
connections both to get those donations and to invite attendees.
(13:35):
The lead up to the convention was difficult for Stone.
She wasn't able to be as active in the effort
as she had initially planned. Her brother Luther, who lived
in Illinois, died that summer of cholera, and his wife, Phoebe,
was pregnant. Lucy had been the only nurse maid at
his deathbed for that reason. After he died, Lucy packed
(13:56):
Phoebe up to move her to Massachusetts, but just three
days into the journey, on August twenty third, Phoebe gave birth.
Because baby was sadly stillborn, and Lucy and Phoebe stayed
in a hotel so Phoebe could regain some of her strength.
Then Lucy contracted typhoid while they were there. She did
make it to Wooster on October twenty fourth for the
(14:17):
start of the convention, though, and that convention was well attended.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
The eighteen fifty Convention is really a key moment in
the movement for women's rights, and the introduction of the
idea that everything about the way the US operated needed
to be reorganized if it was going to be made equitable.
It called for in its resolutions quote equality before the law,
without distinction of sex or color. That meant that black
(14:42):
women should be included in the efforts of the movement. Now, obviously,
in eighteen fifty this was not supported by everyone, and
it would become an issue of heated contention several years
down the road. Even in the immediate wake of the convention,
reviews were mixed. There were plenty of newspaper accounts that
spoke derisively about the attendees and called the entire event trash.
(15:06):
But even within the women's rights movement, there were concerns
even outside those disagreements involving racial equality. Prior podcast subject
Elizabeth Blackwell, for example, found the message of the entire
convention to be two quote anti Mam.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Among the attendees who signed the convention's resolution document were
many names you'll probably recognize, including some we've covered on
the show. This is not an exhaustive list, but they
included Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Earl,
Charles K. Whipple, and M. C. Goodwin. The next October
(15:43):
eighteen fifty one, there was another National Convention in Worcester.
In eighteen fifty two, it moved to Syracuse, and then
in eighteen fifty three to Cleveland. In eighteen fifty four
it was in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
The year after the first convention, Lucy was given an
audience at the Massachusetts State House, speaking before legislators and
imploring them to write full civil rights for women into
the state constitution. That same year, Lucy met Henry Brown Blackwell.
He was the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell, and he was
(16:14):
very taken with Lucy. She was at this point quite famous,
and he may have been drawn to that, but he
was also completely entranced by her quote beauty, charm, and eloquence.
As he wrote to a friend after seeing her speak,
he asked people that they had in common about her,
and while they told him she was not romantically linked
to anyone. They also told him that she was not
(16:36):
interested in becoming anyone's wife. He still pursued her, though
initially through letters, and after a month of writing back
and forth, he started hinting that she really should get
married to someone someday.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Lucy Stone's feelings on marriage were still pretty negative. In
one of her letters to Henry, she wrote, quote, I
have been all my life alone. I have planned and
executed without counsel and without control, and have shared thought
and feeling in life with myself alone. I have made
a path for my feet which I know is useful.
It brings me a more intense and abundant happiness by
(17:13):
far than comes to the life of the majority of men.
And it seems to me I cannot risk it by
any change. And then I ask, can I dare change it?
Rings an everlasting no. Henry persisted, and Lucy did soften
to him, and as the two kind of slowly fell
in love, Henry offered Lucy an uncommon kind of marriage
(17:35):
for the time. He told her he wanted one of
true equals. He wrote to her, quote equality with me
is a passion. Henry uh is often described as kind
of a romantic one. Biographer described him as falling in
and out of love with a lot of young women.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Prior to meeting Lucy, and in Lucy's case, her odd life,
famous but also a lonely outsider really fascinated him, and
although she initially told him she wanted only friendship, he
did things like go to her lectures. He actually helped
organize one of her tours, and then he invited her
to spend time in the Blackwell family home, and she
(18:12):
really loved the family, and eventually she did agree on
a marriage of equals.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Lucy remained Lucy Stone after the wedding, keeping her own
name instead of taking her husband's.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
This was not.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Initially the route she took, though She went by Blackwell
for a little while, but decided to stick with Stone
after about a year of trying out the new name
and carefully investigating the law to make sure there wasn't
a legal requirement for a wife to take her husband's name.
She asked people to address her not as missus Blackwell,
but as missus Stone. In situations where it seemed like
(18:48):
there might be a legal need to recognize the union,
she'd write her name as Lucy Stone, wife of Henry Blackwell.
Lucy and Henry carefully crafted their vows with the intent
that they would be published as an example of equal union.
There was no mention of obeyance. Elizabeth Katie Stanton wrote
to Stone after the wedding quote, nothing has been done,
(19:10):
and the women's rights movement for some time that so
rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a
woman's right to her name. Missus Stone and mister Blackwell
did jointly publish a pamphlet regarding the inequity of marriage laws,
titled protest, and it read, in part quote, while acknowledging
our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband
(19:33):
and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle,
we deem it our duty to declare that this act
on our part, implies no sanction of, nor promise of
voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage,
as refused to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being,
while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority,
(19:56):
investing him with legal powers which no honorable man one
would exercise, and which no man should possess. We protest,
especially against the laws which give the husband one the
custody of the wife's person, two the exclusive control and
guardianship of their children, three, the sole ownership of her
personal and use of her real estate, unless previously settled
(20:20):
upon her or placed in the hands of trustees. Four
the absolute right to the product of her industry.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Five. Also against the laws which give the widower so
much larger and more permanent an interest in the property
of his deceased wife than they give to the widow
in that of the deceased husband. Six. Finally, against the
whole system by which the legal existence of the wife
is suspended during marriage, so that in most states she
(20:48):
neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence,
nor could she make a will, nor sue or be
sued in her own name, nor inherit property. So, just
as a spoiler alert, this all sounds really idyllic. It
may have been for a time, but this marriage did
have its problems, and we're going to talk about some
of those in just a bit.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
In the press, the wedding and the decision to keep
Stone as her last name both got a lot of attention,
and a lot of that attention was negative, like why
would anyone want to marry Lucy Stone? She was seven
years older than Henry, and journalists wrote about her like
she was ancient. According to them, she clearly hated marriage
(21:29):
and men, so why did she even bother? And they wondered,
especially if she didn't want to take his name. Lucy
continued her lecture career and they used the Blackwell home
as their home base because they traveled so much they
didn't really have time to settle anywhere else. Lucy's letters
to friends and family show her very happy to have
someone to share her life with. Lucy also wanted a
(21:52):
family very much. She had this vision of having four children,
and she and Henry had a daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell,
on September fourteenth of eighteen fifty seven. They later expected
a second child, but Lucy miscarried and they did not
have any other children after that. When Alice was still
tiny and Lucy was stuck at home caring for an infant,
(22:13):
she decided to protest taxation by not paying property taxes.
Because as a woman, she was not represented in government,
so this isn't a case where she just didn't pay
her taxes, which is sometimes how this is written. About
This was a thought out civil disobedience effort, and she
actually wrote the tax collector in Orange, New Jersey, where
they were living at the time, and explained this she
(22:35):
would not be paying taxes because they were unjust to
half the population. As a consequence of this, the Stone
Blackwell home was rated. Many of their possessions were seized,
and then when the furniture that had been taken was
sold at auction, one of their neighbors bought it all
and returned it to them. The marriage definitely experienced some strain.
(22:56):
Henry had made some investments that didn't really pay off.
He had also gone to Chicago to work for a
friend for five months when Alice was still a baby,
and he and Lucy missed each other terribly. He had
to dip into Lucy's savings at times, and they downgraded
their home to a smaller farmhouse to try to save money. Yeah,
he wasn't like taking that money from Lucy just of
(23:18):
his own volition. They discussed it and she was like,
of course, you should take from some of the money
that I have saved up. But it still was like
a thing of you know, not quite what they had
planned financially, having a child had also slowed Stone's activism considerably.
She really did not trust anyone else to care for Alice,
so it wasn't like she could call someone to come
(23:39):
and watch the baby while she went and did work things. Then,
during the US Civil War, Lucy felt morally compelled to
say nothing on the part of the war effort, even
in support of the Union, because she was a pacifist
and thought all of it was wrong. She still supported
anti slavery efforts in other ways, including drumming up signatay
(24:00):
for abolitionist petitions. In the later years of the war,
some of Henry's investment properties had finally started to pay off.
He had purchased quite a few investment properties over the years,
and he sold them at high profits during the war,
and that gave the Stone Blackwell family a little bit
of financial security for the first time since the couple
(24:20):
had wed.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Though their finances were finally in order, though Lucy had
other challenges during this time. In eighteen sixty four, her
father died. She was often in poor health that entire year.
She worried, of course, about the future of the country,
and it also seems like she was really grappling with
her identity when she was suddenly not doing the work
(24:44):
that she had been so driven to do for so
many years.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
We're going to pause here for a moment and here
from some of the sponsors that keep the show going,
and when we come back, we will talk about Stone's
place in the rift in the women's rights movement in
the US.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
We have talked on the show before about the fissure
in the women's suffrage movement over the right to vote
being granted to black men before white women. Lucy was
mostly and will describe this more carefully in a moment
on the side of the conflict within the group that
thought it was okay for black men to gain more
rights through the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments. So, for the
(25:31):
very quickest recap, the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution,
passed by the Senate on June eighth, eighteen sixty six,
stated that everyone born in the US, including formerly enslaved people,
was a US citizen. And then the fifteenth Amendment, which
passed several years later on February twenty sixth, eighteen sixty nine,
stated that all male citizens over the age of twenty
(25:53):
one should be able to vote. This was the first
introduction of language about sex or gender into a constantitutional amendment,
and for many in the women's rights movement, they felt
that allowing this wording in the interest of conferring black
men rights would ultimately hurt the cause of women, and
specifically white women. Elizabeth Katie Stanton is often quoted for
(26:16):
her written commentary on the matter, quote if that word
mayle be inserted, it will take us a century at
least to get it out.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
But Lucy Stone saw the suffrage movement as one whole,
at least sort of, with any victory being part of
forward progress, and as a lifelong abolitionist, she was also
supportive of black men's rights and of their gaining forward
progressive ground. To be clear, though Stone had absolutely not
(26:45):
wanted abolitionists to favor the voting rights of black men
at the expense of women's suffrage, she was chagrined at
how that played out, but she did support the fifteenth
Amendment ultimately.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
As all of this was going on, there was a
very odd and unsettling move on the part of her husband,
Henry Blackwell. On January fifteenth, eighteen sixty seven, he wrote
an open letter titled quote, what the South can do,
how the Southern States can make themselves masters of the
situation to the legislatures of the Southern States, and in
(27:18):
it he makes a case that's really hard to square
with the abolitionist in women's rights values that he had
been speaking about publicly his entire life. He wrote, quote,
the population of the late Slave States is about twelve million,
eight million white, four million black. The radicals demand suffrage
for the black men on the ground named above. Very good.
(27:41):
Say to them, as mister Cowan said to the advocates
of Negro male suffrage in the district, apply your principle,
give suffrage to all men and women of mature age
and sound mind, and we will accept it as the
basis of state and national reconstruction. Consider the result from
the Southern standpoint. Your four millions of Southern white women
(28:03):
will counterbalance your four millions of Negro men and women,
and thus the political supremacy of your white race will
remain unchanged. He also made the case that black people
would eventually just leave because they would get sick of
all of this.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
It's not clear to me from this writing whether he's
sort of trying to appeal to what he thinks will
sway racists or if these are his opinions. Either way,
it's gross though.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, even if he thinks he's like playing eight level
chess and that he's ahead of them and using their
own ideas against them, putting it in writing just creates
a big problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So this is obviously a strange outlier in Blackwell's work
and makes it appear that while he may have supported
the anti slavery effort, that he also saw the black
population as inferior. Really no documentation about how Lucy felt about.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
This, No, that's like one of the great mysteries. In
eighteen sixty nine, the division in the women's movement led
to a formal split. Stone and Julia Ward Howe formed
the American Women's Suffrage Association, while Elizabeth Katie Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony launched the National Women's Suffrage Association. Both
(29:21):
of these organizations waxed and waned in their numbers over
the years, and they sort of carved out turf in
terms of who was going to advocate for what. The
AWSA focused, for example, on getting suffrage passed at the
state level, working with advocates in each state, while the
NWSAY set its sites on national suffrage rights. In eighteen seventy,
(29:42):
Lucy and Henry moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, and started working
closely with the New England Woman's Suffrage Association. The couple
also started publishing Woman's Journal, which was the American Women's
Suffrage Association periodical. When Massachusetts offered women p many strictly
regulated voting rights in eighteen seventy nine, Lucy's intent was
(30:05):
that she would register, but she would be struck from
the voter roles because she had not changed her name
to Henry's. She was told she was going to have
to sign the voting roles as Blackwell, which she refused
to do, so she did not get to vote.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
In eighteen eighty three, an echo of Lucy's past emerged
when she was asked by Oberlin College to compose a
commencement speech, just as she had when she was graduating.
This time, though she was invited to also give this speech.
She accepted the invitation and was part of the school's
fiftieth anniversary celebration. In eighteen ninety, the rift between the
(30:43):
women that had founded the American Woman's Suffrage Association and
the National woman Suffrage Association was healed in large part
by the daughters of the original founders of those organizations.
Lucy's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell and Elizabeth Gaty Stanton's daughter,
Harriet Stanton black bat worked to reunite the two groups
under the umbrella of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
(31:07):
Elizabeth Katie Stanton was its president and Susan B. Anthony
was vice president. It is pretty widely accepted that Anthony
was the actual leader of the group. In practice, Lucy
Stone was not active in the group though, because her
health had really started to decline. This story will once
again intersect with another topic that came up recently in
(31:29):
our episode on architect Louis Sullivan. That was the eighteen
ninety three Columbia Exposition. That event was the stage of
Lucy Stone's last public speech in May of eighteen ninety three.
Lucy had wanted to make additional speeches there later in
the summer, but her health just did not allow for it.
In the autumn of that year, in September eighteen ninety three,
(31:49):
Lucy was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Ever pragmatic, she very
carefully got all her affairs in order. Some of this
meant that She was admonishing Henry not to stop looking
after his own health because their daughter, Alice, who had
become an important collaborator in their work, was going to
need him. And there were well wishes that poured in
from all around the world, and Lucy assured her friends
(32:11):
that she was not afraid of dying, and that even
in the next world, she would know when women got
the right to vote. When one of her doctors told
her with certainty that she was going to die soon
and that he hoped she would approach the end with serenity,
she told him there is nothing to be unserene about.
On October eighteenth, eighteen ninety three, Lucy Stone died. Her
(32:33):
last words spoken to her daughter Alice, were make the
world better. She was cremated and her ashes were interred
at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Lucy I like her heaps, and I have many thoughts
to share on Friday about marriage and Lucy's life and
Lucy's husband. In the meantime, I have fun email fun
email from our listener James, who writes Dear Holly and
Tracy and Team. I have been a listener to your
(33:09):
podcast for the last few years and did, in fact
catch the Levi Strauss episode when it originally aired, and
I was very happy to have it as a classic
episode this weekend. I live in Butenheim, the birthplace of
Loeb Strauss. When I moved here, my American family my
dad was US American, had no end of fun at
the fact that I was going to be a Buttenheimer,
(33:31):
but they were also duly impressed by the fact that
Levi Strauss was born here. As you can see from
the pictures attached, we're celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the five oh one gene with a street
party in front of the Levi Strauss Museum. I have
also attached a picture of the birthplace, which is part
of said museum, complete with the statue they put up
a few years ago. In fact, my husband and I
(33:52):
got married in that museum. It belongs to the local
council and the rooms in the town hall are really small.
Almost exactly four years ago. Okay, that's like the coolest
place to get married and also happy anniversary. So if
any listeners are true fans, they should come and visit
the museum. Franconia is one of the most beautiful parts
of Germany and well worth a visit. Best regards and
thanks for the podcast. I am putting that on my
(34:14):
list of places that I want to go now because
it does look amazing. I want to go to the
Levistras Museum real bad. He would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or cool museums
or places we should visit. My list can get longer,
that's fine. You can do that at History podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on the
(34:36):
internet social media's as Missed in History pretty much everywhere,
and if you haven't subscribed yet, you can subscribe anywhere
you listen to your favorite podcasts, or the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy he Wilson. And this episode is
inspired by me being a ding dong. So I was
(00:22):
talking with a person that I am close to recently
and I had a need to know her last name,
and I wasn't sure what it was. I know, this
sounds like I'm a horrible person, but hear me out.
She's been married twice once away's back when it was
pretty standard that most folks would take their husband's name.
(00:43):
Her second marriage was later enough that not everybody would
have done that. At that point, a couple of decades
had gone by, and I honestly could not remember if
she had chosen to change her name again or not.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I want to say, you're not the only person this is,
you know, well, like if you.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Have friends, like unless you really need their name for
like a legal reason or to fill out a form, yeah,
it's not always going to come up unless they actually say, hey,
my name is now right snakity doo, you'd be like, oh,
that's so and so. So. That put me, though, in
the mind of just thinking about the practice of marriage
(01:20):
related name changes and how much it has changed in
our lifetime in terms of like being pretty normal for
people to not do it. But that made me think
of Lucy Stone, who did it when it was not
normal at all to keep your original name.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
And Lucy Stone is sometimes written about as like that
person that should be mentioned right alongside Lucretia Mott and
Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but she often isn't.
That's a pretty valid point. She really was kind of
in right in the mix with all of them. She
did live an incredibly unique life for a woman of
her time and her station. She had a lot of gumption,
(01:58):
and she's one of those figures who is pretty central
to a lot of important US history moments. So now
we're going to give her her day. So.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Lucy Stone was born on August thirteenth, eighteen eighteen. Her parents,
Francis and Hannah matthew Stone, were farmers. They were members
of the Congregational Church and lived on four hundred acres
on Coy's Hill and west Brookfield, Massachusetts. Lucy was one
of their seven children, and according to the lore, when
(02:27):
Lucy was born her mother, Hannah said, Oh, dear, I'm
so sorry.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's a girl.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
A woman's lot is so hard.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
As a child, Lucy was often frustrated because she knew
that she was smarter than a lot of boys, including
her brothers, and while they were offered some educational opportunities
beyond like the basics, she and other girls and young
women just were not. At this point, Massachusetts offered primary
education to girls, which she got, but the idea of
(02:56):
higher learning for women not really a thing, and certainly
not in most farming communities. But this desire to get
more education for her was driven also just because she
wanted to learn Hebrew and Greek, and she wanted to
learn those languages because she wanted to read untranslated versions
of the Bible because she was real curious if the
(03:20):
original versions of it did indeed have that language that
gave men power over women, or if that was something
that got added in translation. And one of the drivers
of her interest in exploring that inequality of women and
the challenges they faced was because she watched her mother
work very very hard with very little help. She certainly
(03:43):
didn't get much credit and she didn't get much rest.
And she also saw this common occurrence happening in their community,
where a lot of women were being mistreated by their husbands,
and that was just kind of accepted as normal, and
she did not like it. And her father, even though
he was very pro abolition and very anti slavery, did
not feel any kind of good way about women being equal.
(04:07):
She later wrote of him, quote, there was only one
will in our home, and that was my father's.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
In addition to being smart, Lucy was also a self starter.
She took a teaching job at the age of sixteen
so she could save up money for college. It took
five years for her to save enough because she was
not paid very much at all, but finally, at the
age of twenty one, she was able to enroll at
Mount Holyoaks Seminary for Women. Leading up to her entrance,
(04:35):
she got one of her brother's friends to tutor her
in math, Latin, and grammar, because she thought that her
exposure to and mastery of those subjects was really not
served well by her early schooling. Mount Holyoak it turned
out was not the best fit for Lucy. She had
expected it to be a lot more progressive regarding women's
(04:55):
equality than it was, and Lucy's abolitionist activism was not
especially welcome. For example, she got in trouble because she
had her brother send her copies of William lud Garrison's
The Liberator and then left them spread around the reading
room in the hopes that other students would read them.
But aside from her issues with authority there, unfortunately, there
(05:16):
was another obstacle that sidelined her education, and that was
that her sister, Rhoda, who had been ill for quite
some time, died in July of eighteen thirty nine, and
Roda was an adult at this point. She had children
of her own when she died, and Lucy went home
to help with Rhoda's children and also to comfort their
grieving mother, and she also went back to teaching. For
(05:37):
several years, she'd teach, save up all of her money,
and then spend a semester here and there at a
private school, first Wesleyan, then Monson Academy, and then finally
kvog Seminary. Four years after her time at Mount Holyoke,
Lucy once again enrolled in college, this time at Oberlin College.
That's the first co educational school in the US, the
(05:58):
only one at the time, having opened just ten years earlier,
in eighteen thirty three.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Even Oberlin was not the realization of Stone's hopes, though
she had worked so hard to get there, and it
was the first time that she had lived away from home.
She had left with ninety dollars in cash in her
pocket to start this new phase of her life, and
she was one of seven women that were enrolled in
that first year. In her first year, we should say,
(06:25):
it was at the schools, and there were thirty four
male students. And Lucy was really really fretful about her
finances because her father had paid for her brother's tuitions
for college, but he did not do the same for Lucy.
So she was really really diligent in seeking out additional
income to make sure she could stay in school this time,
(06:45):
including arranging to teach at Oberlin's preparatory school and at
the Liberty School, which was a town school for black students.
She also taught at the town's common schools when Oberlin
was on winter break. If this sounds like a lot
to have three jobs while you're going to school, it
was so much so that Lucy was often foregoing sleep
to keep up on her study. She wrote about sometimes
(07:07):
only like sleeping two hours a night, and when her
father found all of this out, he actually wrote her
a very out of character letter in which he told
her that he did not want any of his children
to have to work the way he had when he
was young, and that he would help her with school
expenses through a loan. Lucy, though, preferred instead to lean
(07:27):
on her older siblings for financial help. She didn't accept
any help from her father until her senior year at Oberlin.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Lucy did very well academically, but she found some disappointment
in a couple of important areas. For one, though the
school admitted women and black students, it was less progressive
than what she wanted. Even most of the professed abolitionists
there among both the students and the staff, thought Garrison's
idea of abruptly ending slavery was too extreme. They were
(07:58):
not in favor of true equality for women either. She
described herself as quote at swords points with them, and
one Oberlin trustee described Lucy as having quote wild and
radical ideas. She had to appear before the Ladies Board
to defend her behavior regularly, whether it was taking off
her bonnet in church because she had a migraine or
(08:21):
the time, she told some of her fellow students that
people should not have children they couldn't afford. She also
advocated for male and female students who were working as
teachers in the college's preparatory school should be paid the
same wages. She was so aggressive in that pursuit that,
in an outcome that made her a legend at the school,
four years the faculty board instituted equal pay for teachers. Yeah,
(08:47):
in reading some accounts of that, it sort of sounds
like the faculty board was just like whatever it takes
to shut Lucy Stone up at this point, like they
really gave it because she was so determined about it
and what she really wanted to pursue at college with
studies in public speaking. She wanted to follow in the
footsteps of other abolitionists like Abby Kelly and the Grimkey sisters.
(09:10):
But those kinds of lessons in public speaking were not
offered to women. They could enroll in rhetoric classes, but
they were only allowed to observe the male students. Lucy
was not allowed to debate in class, and she was
not allowed to join the Debate Society while the school
was co ed. That group that was for male students only,
(09:31):
so Lucy and one of her close friends started a
secret women's debate society at the school. She is recorded
as having stated at the group's first meeting, quote, we
shall leave this college with the reputation of a thorough
collegiate course. Yet not one of us has received any
rhetorical or elocutionary training. Not one of us could state
(09:52):
a question or argue it in a successful debate. For
this reason, I have proposed the formation of this association.
In eighteen forty six, she made her first public speech
at a West Indian Independence Day celebration, where she addressed
the black community of Oberlin in a speech she titled
why do we Rejoice Today? She was given a talking
(10:15):
to by the Lady's Board for her brazenness, but her
brilliance was recognized to some degree. In eighteen forty seven,
the school asked her to write a speech for her graduation,
but she was not the one who would give that
speech that would be a male graduate, so she flatly
turned that down. But she did graduate at the ceremony
(10:35):
at the age of twenty nine. Though it might have
seemed that Lucy was at this point very well educated,
for no real opportunities before her, she did find a
place in her chosen career.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Of public speaker. She was hired in eighteen forty eight
as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society, and
she was paid six dollars a week. She traveled constantly,
which was absolutely grueling, but she was very successful because
she was really great at connecting with audiences. Her anti
slavery upbringing, and her skills in oration and writing were
(11:10):
all of use. The society was also open to letting
her use some of her time not just for abolition
and anti slavery rhetoric, but also to advocate for women's rights.
But in order to make that deal, she had to
take a reduced rate of four dollars a week because
those speeches were taking away time from her abolition speeches.
(11:31):
This meant that she was making at that point a
pretty meager income, and at the urging of many other
lecturers and speakers, she finally started charging a small fee
or passing a collection hat at her lectures.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Even with more money coming in, this was not an
easy job. Lucy became a public figure and a movement
that had a lot of hostile detractors. She had books
and eggs thrown at her, had ice cold water turned
on her, had to run from the occasional angry mob.
She adopted the practice of wearing bloomers like a lot
of other women's rights activists did, and she was jeered
(12:05):
for doing so. There were plenty of people who were
not in favor of abolition and certainly did not want
to hear that message from a woman. Newspaper writeups would
describe her as ugly or manish, and she was accused
of having abandoned her womanly purpose. But she was also
praised by people like Frederick Douglas, who said she was
(12:25):
one of the most effective advocates for the cause. Over time,
Lucy was getting so many invitations to lecture that she
left the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society job and was working
essentially as an independent orator. Coming up, we're going to
talk more about Stone's work on the Woman's Rights Convention,
and we'll get into that after we have a sponsor break.
(12:51):
Lucy was one of the organizers of the first National
Women's Rights Convention in Worcestern, Massachusetts, in eighteen fifty. This
was two years after the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention,
which we've talked about on the show before, and which
Lucy did not attend. That superlative first of the eighteen
fifty convention is based on it being considered a national convention,
(13:13):
whereas Seneca Falls was considered a local effort. Starting with
no money to host this national event, Lucy and her
fellow organizers advertised their need for donations, and contributions were
soon coming in. Everyone involved used their entire network of
connections both to get those donations and to invite attendees.
(13:35):
The lead up to the convention was difficult for Stone.
She wasn't able to be as active in the effort
as she had initially planned. Her brother Luther, who lived
in Illinois, died that summer of cholera, and his wife, Phoebe,
was pregnant. Lucy had been the only nurse maid at
his deathbed for that reason. After he died, Lucy packed
(13:56):
Phoebe up to move her to Massachusetts, but just three
days into the journey, on August twenty third, Phoebe gave birth.
Because baby was sadly stillborn, and Lucy and Phoebe stayed
in a hotel so Phoebe could regain some of her strength.
Then Lucy contracted typhoid while they were there. She did
make it to Wooster on October twenty fourth for the
(14:17):
start of the convention, though, and that convention was well attended.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
The eighteen fifty Convention is really a key moment in
the movement for women's rights, and the introduction of the
idea that everything about the way the US operated needed
to be reorganized if it was going to be made equitable.
It called for in its resolutions quote equality before the law,
without distinction of sex or color. That meant that black
(14:42):
women should be included in the efforts of the movement. Now, obviously,
in eighteen fifty this was not supported by everyone, and
it would become an issue of heated contention several years
down the road. Even in the immediate wake of the convention,
reviews were mixed. There were plenty of newspaper accounts that
spoke derisively about the attendees and called the entire event trash.
(15:06):
But even within the women's rights movement, there were concerns
even outside those disagreements involving racial equality. Prior podcast subject
Elizabeth Blackwell, for example, found the message of the entire
convention to be two quote anti Mam.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Among the attendees who signed the convention's resolution document were
many names you'll probably recognize, including some we've covered on
the show. This is not an exhaustive list, but they
included Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Earl,
Charles K. Whipple, and M. C. Goodwin. The next October
(15:43):
eighteen fifty one, there was another National Convention in Worcester.
In eighteen fifty two, it moved to Syracuse, and then
in eighteen fifty three to Cleveland. In eighteen fifty four
it was in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
The year after the first convention, Lucy was given an
audience at the Massachusetts State House, speaking before legislators and
imploring them to write full civil rights for women into
the state constitution. That same year, Lucy met Henry Brown Blackwell.
He was the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell, and he was
(16:14):
very taken with Lucy. She was at this point quite famous,
and he may have been drawn to that, but he
was also completely entranced by her quote beauty, charm, and eloquence.
As he wrote to a friend after seeing her speak,
he asked people that they had in common about her,
and while they told him she was not romantically linked
to anyone. They also told him that she was not
(16:36):
interested in becoming anyone's wife. He still pursued her, though
initially through letters, and after a month of writing back
and forth, he started hinting that she really should get
married to someone someday.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Lucy Stone's feelings on marriage were still pretty negative. In
one of her letters to Henry, she wrote, quote, I
have been all my life alone. I have planned and
executed without counsel and without control, and have shared thought
and feeling in life with myself alone. I have made
a path for my feet which I know is useful.
It brings me a more intense and abundant happiness by
(17:13):
far than comes to the life of the majority of men.
And it seems to me I cannot risk it by
any change. And then I ask, can I dare change it?
Rings an everlasting no. Henry persisted, and Lucy did soften
to him, and as the two kind of slowly fell
in love, Henry offered Lucy an uncommon kind of marriage
(17:35):
for the time. He told her he wanted one of
true equals. He wrote to her, quote equality with me
is a passion. Henry uh is often described as kind
of a romantic one. Biographer described him as falling in
and out of love with a lot of young women.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Prior to meeting Lucy, and in Lucy's case, her odd life,
famous but also a lonely outsider really fascinated him, and
although she initially told him she wanted only friendship, he
did things like go to her lectures. He actually helped
organize one of her tours, and then he invited her
to spend time in the Blackwell family home, and she
(18:12):
really loved the family, and eventually she did agree on
a marriage of equals.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Lucy remained Lucy Stone after the wedding, keeping her own
name instead of taking her husband's.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
This was not.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Initially the route she took, though She went by Blackwell
for a little while, but decided to stick with Stone
after about a year of trying out the new name
and carefully investigating the law to make sure there wasn't
a legal requirement for a wife to take her husband's name.
She asked people to address her not as missus Blackwell,
but as missus Stone. In situations where it seemed like
(18:48):
there might be a legal need to recognize the union,
she'd write her name as Lucy Stone, wife of Henry Blackwell.
Lucy and Henry carefully crafted their vows with the intent
that they would be published as an example of equal union.
There was no mention of obeyance. Elizabeth Katie Stanton wrote
to Stone after the wedding quote, nothing has been done,
(19:10):
and the women's rights movement for some time that so
rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a
woman's right to her name. Missus Stone and mister Blackwell
did jointly publish a pamphlet regarding the inequity of marriage laws,
titled protest, and it read, in part quote, while acknowledging
our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband
(19:33):
and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle,
we deem it our duty to declare that this act
on our part, implies no sanction of, nor promise of
voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage,
as refused to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being,
while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority,
(19:56):
investing him with legal powers which no honorable man one
would exercise, and which no man should possess. We protest,
especially against the laws which give the husband one the
custody of the wife's person, two the exclusive control and
guardianship of their children, three, the sole ownership of her
personal and use of her real estate, unless previously settled
(20:20):
upon her or placed in the hands of trustees. Four
the absolute right to the product of her industry.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Five. Also against the laws which give the widower so
much larger and more permanent an interest in the property
of his deceased wife than they give to the widow
in that of the deceased husband. Six. Finally, against the
whole system by which the legal existence of the wife
is suspended during marriage, so that in most states she
(20:48):
neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence,
nor could she make a will, nor sue or be
sued in her own name, nor inherit property. So, just
as a spoiler alert, this all sounds really idyllic. It
may have been for a time, but this marriage did
have its problems, and we're going to talk about some
of those in just a bit.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
In the press, the wedding and the decision to keep
Stone as her last name both got a lot of attention,
and a lot of that attention was negative, like why
would anyone want to marry Lucy Stone? She was seven
years older than Henry, and journalists wrote about her like
she was ancient. According to them, she clearly hated marriage
(21:29):
and men, so why did she even bother? And they wondered,
especially if she didn't want to take his name. Lucy
continued her lecture career and they used the Blackwell home
as their home base because they traveled so much they
didn't really have time to settle anywhere else. Lucy's letters
to friends and family show her very happy to have
someone to share her life with. Lucy also wanted a
(21:52):
family very much. She had this vision of having four children,
and she and Henry had a daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell,
on September fourteenth of eighteen fifty seven. They later expected
a second child, but Lucy miscarried and they did not
have any other children after that. When Alice was still
tiny and Lucy was stuck at home caring for an infant,
(22:13):
she decided to protest taxation by not paying property taxes.
Because as a woman, she was not represented in government,
so this isn't a case where she just didn't pay
her taxes, which is sometimes how this is written. About
This was a thought out civil disobedience effort, and she
actually wrote the tax collector in Orange, New Jersey, where
they were living at the time, and explained this she
(22:35):
would not be paying taxes because they were unjust to
half the population. As a consequence of this, the Stone
Blackwell home was rated. Many of their possessions were seized,
and then when the furniture that had been taken was
sold at auction, one of their neighbors bought it all
and returned it to them. The marriage definitely experienced some strain.
(22:56):
Henry had made some investments that didn't really pay off.
He had also gone to Chicago to work for a
friend for five months when Alice was still a baby,
and he and Lucy missed each other terribly. He had
to dip into Lucy's savings at times, and they downgraded
their home to a smaller farmhouse to try to save money. Yeah,
he wasn't like taking that money from Lucy just of
(23:18):
his own volition. They discussed it and she was like,
of course, you should take from some of the money
that I have saved up. But it still was like
a thing of you know, not quite what they had
planned financially, having a child had also slowed Stone's activism considerably.
She really did not trust anyone else to care for Alice,
so it wasn't like she could call someone to come
(23:39):
and watch the baby while she went and did work things. Then,
during the US Civil War, Lucy felt morally compelled to
say nothing on the part of the war effort, even
in support of the Union, because she was a pacifist
and thought all of it was wrong. She still supported
anti slavery efforts in other ways, including drumming up signatay
(24:00):
for abolitionist petitions. In the later years of the war,
some of Henry's investment properties had finally started to pay off.
He had purchased quite a few investment properties over the years,
and he sold them at high profits during the war,
and that gave the Stone Blackwell family a little bit
of financial security for the first time since the couple
(24:20):
had wed.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Though their finances were finally in order, though Lucy had
other challenges during this time. In eighteen sixty four, her
father died. She was often in poor health that entire year.
She worried, of course, about the future of the country,
and it also seems like she was really grappling with
her identity when she was suddenly not doing the work
(24:44):
that she had been so driven to do for so
many years.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
We're going to pause here for a moment and here
from some of the sponsors that keep the show going,
and when we come back, we will talk about Stone's
place in the rift in the women's rights movement in
the US.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
We have talked on the show before about the fissure
in the women's suffrage movement over the right to vote
being granted to black men before white women. Lucy was
mostly and will describe this more carefully in a moment
on the side of the conflict within the group that
thought it was okay for black men to gain more
rights through the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments. So, for the
(25:31):
very quickest recap, the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution,
passed by the Senate on June eighth, eighteen sixty six,
stated that everyone born in the US, including formerly enslaved people,
was a US citizen. And then the fifteenth Amendment, which
passed several years later on February twenty sixth, eighteen sixty nine,
stated that all male citizens over the age of twenty
(25:53):
one should be able to vote. This was the first
introduction of language about sex or gender into a constantitutional amendment,
and for many in the women's rights movement, they felt
that allowing this wording in the interest of conferring black
men rights would ultimately hurt the cause of women, and
specifically white women. Elizabeth Katie Stanton is often quoted for
(26:16):
her written commentary on the matter, quote if that word
mayle be inserted, it will take us a century at
least to get it out.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
But Lucy Stone saw the suffrage movement as one whole,
at least sort of, with any victory being part of
forward progress, and as a lifelong abolitionist, she was also
supportive of black men's rights and of their gaining forward
progressive ground. To be clear, though Stone had absolutely not
(26:45):
wanted abolitionists to favor the voting rights of black men
at the expense of women's suffrage, she was chagrined at
how that played out, but she did support the fifteenth
Amendment ultimately.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
As all of this was going on, there was a
very odd and unsettling move on the part of her husband,
Henry Blackwell. On January fifteenth, eighteen sixty seven, he wrote
an open letter titled quote, what the South can do,
how the Southern States can make themselves masters of the
situation to the legislatures of the Southern States, and in
(27:18):
it he makes a case that's really hard to square
with the abolitionist in women's rights values that he had
been speaking about publicly his entire life. He wrote, quote,
the population of the late Slave States is about twelve million,
eight million white, four million black. The radicals demand suffrage
for the black men on the ground named above. Very good.
(27:41):
Say to them, as mister Cowan said to the advocates
of Negro male suffrage in the district, apply your principle,
give suffrage to all men and women of mature age
and sound mind, and we will accept it as the
basis of state and national reconstruction. Consider the result from
the Southern standpoint. Your four millions of Southern white women
(28:03):
will counterbalance your four millions of Negro men and women,
and thus the political supremacy of your white race will
remain unchanged. He also made the case that black people
would eventually just leave because they would get sick of
all of this.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
It's not clear to me from this writing whether he's
sort of trying to appeal to what he thinks will
sway racists or if these are his opinions. Either way,
it's gross though.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, even if he thinks he's like playing eight level
chess and that he's ahead of them and using their
own ideas against them, putting it in writing just creates
a big problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So this is obviously a strange outlier in Blackwell's work
and makes it appear that while he may have supported
the anti slavery effort, that he also saw the black
population as inferior. Really no documentation about how Lucy felt about.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
This, No, that's like one of the great mysteries. In
eighteen sixty nine, the division in the women's movement led
to a formal split. Stone and Julia Ward Howe formed
the American Women's Suffrage Association, while Elizabeth Katie Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony launched the National Women's Suffrage Association. Both
(29:21):
of these organizations waxed and waned in their numbers over
the years, and they sort of carved out turf in
terms of who was going to advocate for what. The
AWSA focused, for example, on getting suffrage passed at the
state level, working with advocates in each state, while the
NWSAY set its sites on national suffrage rights. In eighteen seventy,
(29:42):
Lucy and Henry moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, and started working
closely with the New England Woman's Suffrage Association. The couple
also started publishing Woman's Journal, which was the American Women's
Suffrage Association periodical. When Massachusetts offered women p many strictly
regulated voting rights in eighteen seventy nine, Lucy's intent was
(30:05):
that she would register, but she would be struck from
the voter roles because she had not changed her name
to Henry's. She was told she was going to have
to sign the voting roles as Blackwell, which she refused
to do, so she did not get to vote.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
In eighteen eighty three, an echo of Lucy's past emerged
when she was asked by Oberlin College to compose a
commencement speech, just as she had when she was graduating.
This time, though she was invited to also give this speech.
She accepted the invitation and was part of the school's
fiftieth anniversary celebration. In eighteen ninety, the rift between the
(30:43):
women that had founded the American Woman's Suffrage Association and
the National woman Suffrage Association was healed in large part
by the daughters of the original founders of those organizations.
Lucy's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell and Elizabeth Gaty Stanton's daughter,
Harriet Stanton black bat worked to reunite the two groups
under the umbrella of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
(31:07):
Elizabeth Katie Stanton was its president and Susan B. Anthony
was vice president. It is pretty widely accepted that Anthony
was the actual leader of the group. In practice, Lucy
Stone was not active in the group though, because her
health had really started to decline. This story will once
again intersect with another topic that came up recently in
(31:29):
our episode on architect Louis Sullivan. That was the eighteen
ninety three Columbia Exposition. That event was the stage of
Lucy Stone's last public speech in May of eighteen ninety three.
Lucy had wanted to make additional speeches there later in
the summer, but her health just did not allow for it.
In the autumn of that year, in September eighteen ninety three,
(31:49):
Lucy was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Ever pragmatic, she very
carefully got all her affairs in order. Some of this
meant that She was admonishing Henry not to stop looking
after his own health because their daughter, Alice, who had
become an important collaborator in their work, was going to
need him. And there were well wishes that poured in
from all around the world, and Lucy assured her friends
(32:11):
that she was not afraid of dying, and that even
in the next world, she would know when women got
the right to vote. When one of her doctors told
her with certainty that she was going to die soon
and that he hoped she would approach the end with serenity,
she told him there is nothing to be unserene about.
On October eighteenth, eighteen ninety three, Lucy Stone died. Her
(32:33):
last words spoken to her daughter Alice, were make the
world better. She was cremated and her ashes were interred
at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Lucy I like her heaps, and I have many thoughts
to share on Friday about marriage and Lucy's life and
Lucy's husband. In the meantime, I have fun email fun
email from our listener James, who writes Dear Holly and
Tracy and Team. I have been a listener to your
(33:09):
podcast for the last few years and did, in fact
catch the Levi Strauss episode when it originally aired, and
I was very happy to have it as a classic
episode this weekend. I live in Butenheim, the birthplace of
Loeb Strauss. When I moved here, my American family my
dad was US American, had no end of fun at
the fact that I was going to be a Buttenheimer,
(33:31):
but they were also duly impressed by the fact that
Levi Strauss was born here. As you can see from
the pictures attached, we're celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the five oh one gene with a street
party in front of the Levi Strauss Museum. I have
also attached a picture of the birthplace, which is part
of said museum, complete with the statue they put up
a few years ago. In fact, my husband and I
(33:52):
got married in that museum. It belongs to the local
council and the rooms in the town hall are really small.
Almost exactly four years ago. Okay, that's like the coolest
place to get married and also happy anniversary. So if
any listeners are true fans, they should come and visit
the museum. Franconia is one of the most beautiful parts
of Germany and well worth a visit. Best regards and
thanks for the podcast. I am putting that on my
(34:14):
list of places that I want to go now because
it does look amazing. I want to go to the
Levistras Museum real bad. He would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or cool museums
or places we should visit. My list can get longer,
that's fine. You can do that at History podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on the
(34:36):
internet social media's as Missed in History pretty much everywhere,
and if you haven't subscribed yet, you can subscribe anywhere
you listen to your favorite podcasts, or the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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