Lucy Stone's Journey PDF

# 5 Lucy Stone AUGUST 13, 1818-OCTOBER 18, 1893 LEAVE WOMEN, THEN, TO FIND THEIR SPHERE. ## As a teenager, Lucy Stone was part of a sewing circle that made clothes for local boys who attended college. One day, a pioneering educator named Mary Lyon visited the women and tried to interest them in...

# 5 Lucy Stone AUGUST 13, 1818-OCTOBER 18, 1893 LEAVE WOMEN, THEN, TO FIND THEIR SPHERE. ## As a teenager, Lucy Stone was part of a sewing circle that made clothes for local boys who attended college. One day, a pioneering educator named Mary Lyon visited the women and tried to interest them in starting a fund to send girls to college. Her effort was in vain. At the end of the talk, Lucy folded up the shirt she was making and laid it on the table. She vowed she wouldn't sew one more seam of that shirt, or any other shirt, for a college boy. Why should she help boys to go to college when girls weren't allowed to attend? ## Yes, Lucy was stubborn, but that quality served her well all her life. Unafraid of her parents' opinion, Lucy announced one day that she would go to college. "Is the child crazy?" her father asked his wife. Lucy picked and sold berries and chestnuts to buy books to study for the entrance exam. She alternated studying with teaching, to earn more money. At twenty-five years old, she left Massachusetts and went off to Ohio's Oberlin College, the only mixed-gender college in the country. ## At Oberlin, women's lowly status became clear to Lucy. To pay tuition, she took jobs cleaning common rooms and washing dishes. For chores, women were paid three cents an hour, while male students earned up to ten cents an hour. With her meager pay, Lucy could afford only fifty cents a week for food. She often went hungry. ## Because of the injustices she experienced, Lucy worked to break down barrier after barrier. She chipped away at customs that prevented women from speaking in front of male students. She organized meetings for antislavery speakers, including Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster. She studied and worked so hard that her father eventually agreed to support her. ## But the inequity continued. She was chosen to write a speech for her class's graduation ceremony. There was a catch, though--speeches written by a woman had to be read by a man. Lucy declined. In 1844, she was offered a teaching position at Oberlin, which paid 8 cents an hour. Yet again, she found that men made more than she did, earning 12.5 cents an hour. She resigned in protest. Her students pressured the college to do the right thing, and, after three months on strike, she won the higher rate. ## Lucy's skill at persuasion powered her ability as a speaker. Her round face and open manner fooled people into thinking she was a pushover. In her first debate on whether women should vote, she faced off against a politician who was forced to admit that "that little blue-eyed girl in the calico gown...swept my arguments away like chaff before the wind." One of Lucy's brothers, a pastor in Massachusetts, offered Lucy her first chance to lecture on women's rights. She delivered her speech, ignoring the hissing and stomping from male hecklers in the pews. When asked whether the hostility would put an end to her speaking career, she answered, "It only shows me how much work there is for me to do." ## Lucy toured the country with the likes of Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelley Foster. She was pelted with spitballs and rotten vegetables and hosed with ice water. Yet she held her ground. Once, when she was being mobbed on stage, a man came at her with a club-she grabbed his upraised arm and, appealing to his sense of gallantry, convinced him to protect her instead. ## Expanding the reach of the Seneca Falls convention, Lucy organized the first national women's rights convention, which was held in 1850 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and dozens of conventions afterward. Lucy swore she would not marry, because to her marriage meant slavery. Even when she did eventually marry, at age thirty-seven, she kept her own last name rather than take the last name of her husband, Henry Blackwell. The couple rejected the customs that stripped married women of their rights, and she declined to be supported by Henry. She earned her own living throughout her life. ## In 1857, the couple moved into a home in Orange, New Jersey, that belonged to Lucy. When the first tax bill came a few months later, they refused to pay it-fifteen years before Abby Kelley Foster staged her tax protest. The city sold some of her belongings to pay the bill, but friends bought everything back for her. ## Lucy, along with her husband and Julia Ward Howe, cofounded the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. The next year, she began publishing The Woman's Journal, a weekly paper that aired women's views. ## At a time when men decreed that women belonged in the home, Lucy worked for a woman's right to take whatever place she chose in society. "Leave women, then, to find their sphere," she said. "And do not tell us, before we are born even, that our province is to cook dinners, darn stockings and sew on buttons." For Lucy, the woman's sphere was the entire world, and she led the way in claiming it. ## Today, many people are vegetarians or vegans, but the idea of a plant-based diet is nothing new. In Lucy's time, the Graham System was all the rage. In 1832, Sylvester Graham launched his innovative program for healthy living. He believed that you could prevent disease through a diet of vegetables, little to no meat, and whole-grain wheat flour. Have you ever had graham crackers? They're named after him! He discouraged the use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco. He urged people to wear loose clothing, exercise, take cold baths, and open their windows. He distrusted some medical practices, including bleeding patients and using medicines. Starting in her college years, Lucy followed Graham's strict regimen. Other believers included Abby Kelley Foster, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, and Susan B. Anthony. Their self-discipline served them well, as suffragists often had to survive on the bare necessities of life while on the road drumming up support for the vote.