Collection SCA39-WA21 - Lucy Stone letters.

Lucy Stone, suffragette, was born August 13, 1818 on Cory's Hill Massachusetts. At the age of sixteen she began teaching at the district school and then enrolled at Quaboag Seminary and Wesleyan Academy. In 1839 she entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and in 1843 she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio. When she graduated in 1847 she was the first woman from Massachusetts to obtain a college degree. Stone was appointed a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1848 which allowed her to meet reformers within the Garrison wing of the abolition movement. In 1849 she conducted the first petition campaign in Massachusetts for the rights of women. The first National Women's Rights Convention was held in 1850 and Stone was one of the organizers, later being appointed to the central committee of the convention. In 1851 Stone became an independent women's rights lecturer speaking at various venues throughout the United States for the next seven years.
During the course of her lecturing Stone met and married Henry Brown Blackwell, although she continued to be known by her maiden name. Stone and Blackwell's daughter Alice was born September 14, 1857 and Stone spent less time on her political activities and more time raising her daughter. Alice would later become a leader of the suffrage movement.

By 1866 Stone was involved again in politics and helped to organize, and served on the executive committee of, the American Equal Rights Association which was to press for both African American and women's rights. In 1870 Stone and Blackwell moved to Dorchester Massachusetts to organize the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and Stone founded "The Woman's Journal", a voice of the suffrage movement.

Stone gave her last public speeches in May, 1893 at the World's Congress of Representative Women. She died October 18, 1893.