The Free and Fearless Lucy Stone
The story of a remarkable women's rights pioneer and her legacy.
Sometimes a word’s etymology sets me back on my heels. I didn’t expect pioneer to come from paonier, "foot-soldier," an extended form of the French peon. But it makes sense. The people who forge new paths through the wilderness usually aren’t the ones the world calls its leaders—at least, not at the time. They travel on foot, poor and dusty, with only their personal strength and the help of a few comrades to rely on.
Sometimes research sets me back on my heels, too. At first I thought Alice Stone Blackwell was my main subject; then through her words, I met her mother.
Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Women's Rights
The heading above is the title of Alice Stone Blackwell’s wonderful biography of her mother. I highly recommend it.
Lucy Stone was not the most famous pioneer of abolition and women’s suffrage in the United States, but she may have been the most compelling. Like her colleagues—a handful of other brave women and men in the early 1800s—she came up against fierce and sometimes violent resistance. Uniquely, Lucy simultaneously charmed and reasoned her way through conflict. On at least one occasion, she de-thorned the brambles of bigotry with a deftly wielded etymology.
Lucy grew up on a farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, as one of nine children. At age 12, she saw her mother working herself to death and decided, “Better me than her.” She took on as many chores as she could to lighten her mother’s load. But she also snatched moments to read. She became determined to educate herself—and also, to master her fits of temper. Lucy had both strength and passion, and she was going to channel them for good.
Years later, at a time when female college students were almost unheard of, Lucy began saving and planning. One of her goals was to learn ancient Greek so that she wouldn’t have to take anyone else’s word for what the New Testament said about women’s roles. Through years of teaching children (paid a fraction of male teachers’ salaries) she scraped together enough quarters and pennies to enroll at Oberlin, the only U.S. college at the time that admitted women and African Americans. There, she studied Greek from a propped-up textbook while scrubbing the kitchen to earn her board. Lucy’s father, at first mystified and appalled by her decision to go off to college, eventually relented and paid her tuition so that she could focus on her studies.
At Oberlin, Lucy found her vocation as an orator in a time that wasn’t quite ready for her. Even the Oberlin ladies’ committee (repressed women sometimes being the harshest critics of pioneering ones) condemned her outspokenness. They grudgingly acknowledged her fine moral character and the spotless tidiness of her collars, but they wished that Lucy Stone would please just hush up.
She was hardworking, pragmatic, kind, stubborn, gentle, relentless. Her voice was somehow sweet and compelling at the same time. Though at a loss to describe it, Americans eventually would flock by the thousands to hear it. Alice Stone Blackwell wrote:
She had great power as a speaker. A little, simple country girl, she had no tricks of oratory; but she spoke with a fervor of conviction, a complete forgetfulness of self, and an extraordinary natural eloquence that swayed great audiences as the wind sways a field of grain. Mobs would sometimes listen to her when they howled down every other speaker.
A reporter for the Cincinnati Columbian qualified his account with this:
Words of hers that glow and burn, wrapped in the halo of her own soft voice and pleasant style, must lose their characteristic features when transcribed.
The reporter went on to relate one of Lucy’s legendary mic drops. A minister was lambasting her as a Jezebel for speaking in public:
"How can you possibly get over the scriptural text which says a woman should not speak in public? I advise you to look into these matters more; to study the scriptures more thoroughly.”
"I have studied them in their original. I have read them in Greek and can translate them for you.”
Had a thunderbolt fallen at the reverend's feet, he could not have looked more astounded, when she went on to say that the Greek verb, which is falsely rendered 'speak', should be rendered 'gabble.'
For Lucy, her primary missions—the vote for women and freedom and equality for Black Americans—were inseparable. They lived in the same place in her heart and refused to be partitioned. Accordingly, she broke from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony over their racism. Infuriated by the idea that Black men would receive the vote before them, those more famous suffragists and their allies worked to scuttle the Fifteenth Amendment. Lucy did not care who got uplifted first.
The two causes close to Lucy’s heart were equally likely to draw a rampaging mob at any moment. My favorite story from Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Women’s Rights is an account of one such mob. To set things in proper perspective, Lucy was tiny. (In one letter home from college, she remarked that she’d ballooned up to an unprecedented 119 lbs.)
At an antislavery meeting held in the open air in a grove on Cape Cod, a mob gathered, looking so black and ugly, and so evidently meaning mischief, that the speakers one by one got down from the platform and quietly slipped away through the crowd, till only Lucy Stone and Stephen Foster were left. Those two never feared the face of man. She said to him, "You had better run, Stephen; they are coming!" He answered, "But who will take care of you?" At that moment, the mob made a rush, and one of the ringleaders, a big Irian [?] with a club in his hand, sprang up on the platform. Lucy turned to him and said, without hesitation, "This gentleman will take care of me." It touched his feelings, and he declared that he would. Taking her upon one arm, and holding his club in the other hand, he started to march her out through the mob, who were roughly handling Mr. Foster, and such of the other speakers as they had been able to catch. On the way, she talked to him; and presently he mounted her on a stump, and stood by her with his club while she addressed the mob. She made them so ashamed of themselves that they not only desisted from further violence, but took up a collection of twenty dollars on the spot, to pay Mr. Foster for his coat, which they had torn in two from top to bottom, half of them hauling him one way and half the other.
Lucy, Henry, and Alice
We have this gripping, poignant, funny account of Lucy Stone’s life because that life contained a love story. Henry Blackwell was one of many men to ask Lucy to marry him, though probably the only one seven years her junior. She liked and respected him but refused him along with the others. She knew how few rights and protections the law granted married women, and she needed to stay free. Henry, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate and the brother of the first American woman doctor, understood Lucy’s reluctance but was determined to surmount it. He became her close friend and colleague while continuing to woo her through letters. As a fellow abolitionist, he impressed Lucy with his willingness to make a “public nuisance” of himself for the cause. As a personal correspondent, he slowly won her over with a mixture of endearments and arguments.
The man had rhetorical chops, though he sometimes veered into what now looks like desperate mansplaining. His “you should marry me because celibacy is really slavery” tactic is kind of hilarious:
To undertake [marriage] is equally a privilege and a duty. To conceive one's self precluded from assuming it, because the existing laws of society do not square with exact justice, is to subject one's self to a more abject slavery than ever actually existed. Will you permit the injustice of the world to enforce upon you a life of celibacy? The true mode of protest is to assume the natural relation and to reject the unnatural dependence….
Lucy dear, if I could express to you, properly, my view of matters and things, you would see that, as to marrying, I am right and you are wrong, and you would marry me, and be all the freer for doing so.
Lucy’s detractors hoped she would marry and thus (naturally!) retire from public speaking. In the late 1840s or early 1850s, the Boston Post published a parody of a popular song titled “Lucy Long.” The last stanza of the spoof went:
A name like Curtius' shall be his,
On fame's loud trumpet blown,
Who with a wedding kiss shuts up
The mouth of Lucy Stone!
But that’s not how things went, not by a long shot.
Lucy finally married Henry on May 1, 1855. The word “obey” did not appear in their unconventional vows. They agreed that she should keep her own, now-famous last name. And the minister read aloud a lengthy Protest statement that the couple had composed together. That Protest was so widely publicized that it played a part in getting unjust laws amended.
In other words, the “shut up” crowd was deeply disappointed.
Upon her marriage, Lucy’s father had just this to say:
Our Lucy thought there wasn't anybody in these parts good enough to marry her, so she had to fetch somebody from Worcester for it, hey?
Old New England farmers are not known for their flowery speeches.
The couple’s only child, Alice Stone Blackwell, was born on September 14, 1857.
In her biography of her mother, Alice says:
Brought up by such parents, I naturally came to share their views. In my childhood, I heard so much about woman suffrage that I was bored by it and thought I hated it, until one day I came across a magazine article on the other side and found myself bristling up like a hen in defense of her chickens. This happened when I was about twelve years old. After that I never had any doubt as to whether I believed in it.
But probably the greatest legacy from her mother was that Alice was her own woman who forged her own way. A common thread was their care for oppressed people. While her parents focused on abolition and suffrage, Alice reached farther outward to lead international humanitarian efforts. She helped found the "Friends of Armenia" society to support refugees of the Armenian genocide and raise awareness of their plight in the United States. A romantic friendship with an Armenian theology student led to co-translation work and the publication of a book of Armenian poems. Other poetry translations followed.
Yet Alice never stopped shepherding her mother’s dream of the vote for women. She played a pivotal role in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment by helping unify the efforts of the two rival suffrage organizations. She supported a wide range of progressive causes until her death in Cambridge, MA, in 1950.
Reading a good biography, I’m always sad to say goodbye. Does it have to end? Do they have to be gone, these people I’ve grown to know and love? But nothing ever really ends.
In Middlemarch, George Eliot wrote:
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Lucy, Henry, and Alice were bright enough lights that their tombs probably will never go unvisited. They lived faithfully out in the open, out loud. Thanks to all three of these pioneers, things are not so ill with us as they might have been.
After Lucy’s death, Henry wrote:
In behalf of the great principle of equality in marriage, I desire, in this hour of inexpressible bereavement, to say, with all the added emphasis of a lifetime's experience, that the Protest read and signed by Lucy Stone and myself on the first day of May, 1855, as a part of our nuptial ceremony, has been the key-note of our married life. After the lapse of more than thirty-eight happy years (how happy, I today more keenly realize than ever before), in her behalf and on my own, I wish to reaffirm that declaration.
I'm so delighted to be introduced to Lucy and Henry and Alice!
Really great post, Jody. I enjoy your writings.