Lucy Stone: A Timeline                      Click here to close this window

1818
Lucy Stone is born to Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews Stone in West Brookfield, Mass., the eighth child of nine.

1839
Attends classes at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

1843
Begins studies at Oberlin, the only college open to women at the time.

1846
At Oberlin, she befriends Antoinette Brown, and the pair forms a secret woman's debating group. Brown Blackwell would later become the first ordained woman minister in the United States, as well as Lucy's sister-in-law.

1847
Graduates from Oberlin. Asked to write a commencement speech for her class, Stone refused, because women were not allowed, even at Oberlin, to give a public address–a male professor would have had to read it for her.

1848
Hired by the American Anti-Slavery Society to give speeches on abolition.

1850
Organizes the first Woman's Rights Convention in Worcester, Mass.

1855
Marries Ohio businessman Henry Blackwell. At the ceremony, the minister reads a statement by the bride and groom, renouncing and protesting the marriage laws of the time and announcing that she would keep her name.

1857
Gives birth to a daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. Stone takes the next decade off from full-time public speaking to raise her child.

1858
Refuses to pay property taxes on her home in protest of "taxation without representation" that women still endured, since they had no vote. The gesture was widely publicized as a symbolic gesture on behalf of women's rights.

1867
Embarks on a full-scale lecture tour to Kansas and New York, working for woman suffrage state amendments and for suffrage for blacks and women.

1867
The women's suffrage movement splits. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, decides to oppose the Fourteenth Amendment, because of the language "male citizen."

1869
Stone helps found the American Woman Suffrage Association, leading those who sought to keep the causes of black and woman suffrage together.

1870
Begins publishing a weekly suffrage newspaper, The Woman's Journal.

1872
Assumes editorship, with Blackwell, of the Journal. Stone found working on a newspaper far more compatible with family life, compared with the
lecture circuit. The Journal continues, under her daughter, Alice, through 1917.

1879
Massachusetts women are granted limited right to vote, for the school committee. Boston registrars refused Stone's vote unless she uses her husband's name.

1890
Alice Stone Blackwell, now a leader in the woman suffrage movement in her own right, engineers a reunification of the two competing organizations as the National American Woman Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president, Susan B. Anthony as vice president, and Stone as
chairman of the executive committee.

1893
A few months before her passing Stone gives a commencement speech at Oberlin on the occasion of the College's 50th anniversary.

1893
Stone dies of stomach cancer. Her last words to her daughter, Alice, were "Make the world better." She is the first person in New England to be cremated.

1921
The Lucy Stone League was founded with the stated aim of encouraging women to keep their own names. The organization was reborn twice and exists still today.

1930
Alice Stone Blackwell publishes her mother's biography, Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Woman's Rights.

Back to top