Since exercising my right to vote last month, I have been reflecting upon the work and sacrifices of the early suffragettes. The first wave of suffragists in the mid-19th century paved the way for the more radical movement in the 20th century that ultimately resulted in the 19th amendment.
I was reading today about Lucy Stone, a prominent suffragette who was present at the Seneca Falls Convention with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Lucy Stone was the first woman to graduate from college in Massachusetts, having been inspired to receive an education by Mary Lyon (the founder of Mount Holyoke) while sitting in a sewing circle of all places. After graduating, Lucy married Henry Brown Blackwell, a prominent abolitionist and brother to Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the US. Let's just talk about what a progressive feminist family: Another Blackwell brother married Antoinette Brown, the first female minister and another prominent feminist in the early women's rights movement. Those Blackwells must have had fantastic parents (father was a sugar refiner from England, mother bore 9 children, nothing too unique except that they were adamant about education for their daughters).
But what I learned today that I really wanted to share: Lucy Stone is the first known woman in the United States to have kept her last name after marriage-- "Women who continue to use their birth names after marriage are still occasionally known as "Lucy Stoners" in the U.S."
I'm a Lucy Stoner! That sounds so cool!
I always knew you were some kind of stoner. Badabing.
ReplyDeleteActually her father was really not a fantastic "liberal minded man"....
ReplyDeleteLucy Stone was born on the 13th of August, 1818, on her family's Massachusetts farm. She was the eighth of nine children, and as she grew up, she watched as her father ruled the household, and his wife, by "divine right." Disturbed when her mother had to beg her father for money, she was also unhappy with the lack of support in her family for her education. She was faster at learning than her brother -- but he was to be educated, she was not.
She was inspired in her reading by the Grimke sisters, abolitionists but also proponents of women's rights. When the Bible was quoted to her, defending the positions of men and women, she declared that when she grew up, she'd learn Greek and Hebrew so she could correct the mistranslation that she was sure was behind such verses!
Her father would not support her education, and so she alternated her own education with teaching, to earn enough to continue. She attended several institutions, including Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1839. By age 25 (1843), she had saved enough to fund her first year at Oberlin College in Ohio, the country's first college to admit both women and blacks.
I'm not talking about Lucy Stone in that section-- I'm talking about the Blackwells.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth Blackwell was born on February 3, 1821 in Bristol England, she was the third of nine children born to a sugar refiner, named Samuel Blackwell, who could afford to give his numerous sons, and also daughters, an education. Mr. Samuel Blackwell believed that his daughters should get the same education as boys so he had his daughters tutored by the house servants. In 1832, the family immigrated to the United States, and set up a refinery in New York City. The Blackwells were very religious Quakers. They believed that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God.