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.1 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.
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