Lucy Stone - Influential Women in History

By Anon Anon

This book is part of a series on historical female figures. It features Lucy Stone (1818 - 1893), the American abolitionist and suffragist campaigner who was the first woman in America not to adopt her husband's name upon marriage. An inspirational character.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473353817

Book preview

Lucy Stone

Influential Women in History

CONTENTS

LUCY STONE

LUCY STONE.

WHEN Lucy Stone died at Dorchester, Mass., Oct. 18, 1893, the press of the whole country spoke in her praise. The Boston Herald said, She goes to her grave honored and beloved and mourned by the American people. The Boston Daily Advertiser: Her death is an irreparable loss.

The New York Independent: The death of Lucy Stone removes one of the world’s great benefactors. . . . She dies full of honor, paid to one of the most gracious of womanly women that ever lived.

The Boston Congregationalist: "Small in stature, dainty in dress, with a voice of singular sweetness, sympathetic in manner, all who came in contact with her admitted the charm of her personality. . . . Mrs. Stone’s public life was closely identified with the two interests of securing equal rights for negroes and women. . . . The essential womanliness of her nature never became the least impaired or obscured by being constantly before the world as the champion of these two causes. She died, preserving to the end the same serenity of soul and heroic patience in suffering which endeared her while living to so many hearts.

The New York Sun said: As a pioneer in the movement for the legal and political elevation of women, she had lived through ridicule, obloquy, and even persecution, until at last she was honored and reverenced as the heroine of a great, beneficent, and actually accomplished revolution. Lucy Stone’s name must be enrolled on the list of illustrious Americans. Harper’s Bazaar added its testimony to a long and able list of journals: Her life was full of earnestness, goodness, and blessedness, and the world is better that she lived.

LUCY STONE.

Lucy Stone’s life will always be an inspiration to every man or woman who is struggling for a principle; to every youth, who, poor and unaided, is working for an education; to every boy or girl who learns, through her history, the secret of that persistent, cheerful, indomitable courage and energy which bring success.

Lucy Stone was born in the town of West Brookfield, Mass., Aug. 13, 1818. Her father, Francis Stone, a farmer, as strong in character as the rocks he lived among, was, says Mr. Blackwell, the husband of Lucy Stone, well-intentioned and honest, a ‘good provider,’ who always kept his family well supplied with food, clothing, fuel, and such advantages as he thought appropriate. Like most New England farmers on rocky farms, a hundred years ago, he was necessarily a hard worker and a close economist. He expected his wife and children to be the same.

The mother of Lucy Stone, Hannah Matthews, was a gentle and beautiful woman, greatly beloved by her neighbors, and perhaps not more ruled over by her husband than other wives of the place. Mr. Stone was, indeed, better than some; for when at his marriage his wife received twenty dollars from her father’s estate, instead of keeping it as his own, as the common