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Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Woman's Journal,
published this biography of her mother, Lucy Stone, in 1930,
a decade after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Reprinted now for the first time, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of
Woman's Rights is a fascinating, plainspoken document of
an important era in women's history.
Lucy Stone's biography is all the more impressive because
she has been largely left out of the history of women's
suffrage. Her leadership came in a form that was not
grandstanding or shocking but personal and mentoring. Her
daughter's book provides a vivid, unsentimental portrait of
growing up female in rural Massachusetts in the nineteenth
century, of earning a college degree, and of beginning a
lifelong advocacy for basic civil rights for all
Americans.
Often facing hostile audiences, Stone lectured all over
the country, and she led the call for the first national
woman's rights convention, which took place in Worcester,
Massachusetts, in 1850. She brought other
leaders&emdash;-for example, Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward
Howe--to the cause, and she attended antislavery conferences
with Frederick Douglass. The reissue of her biography can
kindle a vital discussion of how Stone's activism influenced
abolitionist and feminist reform ideology. Her story should
be especially remarkable to students, who may find her
struggles with keeping her own name after marriage hard to
imagine, but her successes as a female public figure and
political speaker worth emulating.
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