Lucy Stone: Speeches and Writings

Lucy Stone joins Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as one of the most prominent leaders in the nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement. She helped coordinate the first national American women's rights convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts. For many years, Stone earned a living as an antislavery and women's rights lecturer. She defiantly kept her maiden name to publicly protest laws discriminatory to women, decades later inspiring other “Lucy Stoners.” When the suffrage movement splintered into two groups in 1869 over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, which competed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association. Their only surviving child, Alice Stone Blackwell, followed in the family business of suffrage continuing to edit the popular Woman’s Journal, which her parents began in 1870.

In her day, Stone was a well-known antislavery and women's rights lecturer, and from 1872 until her death in 1893, she co-edited with her husband, Henry Brown Blackwell, the premier women's suffrage newspaper, the Woman’s Journal. These documents include Lucy Stone’s speeches, articles, essays, and other writings.