Lucy Stone's radical move to keep her own name continued to inspire and enrage. In 1879, Massachusetts gave women a limited right to vote: for the school committee. But, in Boston, the registrars refused to let Lucy Stone vote unless she used her husband's name. She continued to find that, on legal documents and when registering with her husband at hotels, she had to sign as "Lucy Stone, married to Henry Blackwell," for her signature to be accepted as valid.
For all her radical reputation, Lucy Stone was identified in this later period with the conservative wing of the woman suffrage movement. The Woman's Journal under Stone and Blackwell maintained a Republican Party line, opposing, for instance, labor movement organizing and strikes and Victoria Woodhull's radicalism, in contrast to the Anthony-Stanton NWSA.
(Other differences in strategy between the two wings included the AWSA's following a strategy of state-by-state suffrage amendments, and the NWSA's support of a national constitutional amendment. The AWSA remained largely middle class, while the AWSA embraced working class issues and members.)
Lucy Stone did, in the 1880s, welcome Edward Bellamy's American version of Utopian socialism, as did many other woman suffrage activists. Bellamy's vision in Looking Backward drew a vivid picture of a society with economic and social equality for women.
In 1890, Alice Stone Blackwell, now a leader in the woman suffrage movement in her own right, engineered a re-unification of the two competing suffrage organizations. The National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President, Susan B. Anthony as Vice President, and Lucy Stone as chairman of the executive committee.
"I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned." 1893
Stone's voice had already faded, and she rarely spoke to large groups, but in 1893, she gave lectures at the World's Columbian Exposition. A few months later, she died in Boston of cancer and was cremated. Her last words to her daughter were "Make the world better."
Lucy Stone is less well known today than Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony -- or Julia Ward Howe, whose "Battle Hymn of the Republic" helped immortalize her name. Her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, published her mother's biography, Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Woman's Rights, in 1930, helping to keep her name and contributions known. But Lucy Stone is still remembered, today, primarily as the first woman to keep her own name after marriage, and women who follow that custom are sometimes called "Lucy Stoners."
Also: Lucy Stone Facts | Lucy Stone Pictures | Lucy Stone Quotes
Text copyright © Jone Johnson Lewis.
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