Born on a farm in West Brookfield, Lucy Stone was one of the very first women from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She was 25 years old before she had saved enough money to enter Oberlin, the first American college to educate women alongside men. When she graduated with honors four years later, she was invited to write a commencement address. Stone refused because she would not be allowed to read it herself. Even at Oberlin, women did not participate in public exercises with men. A few months later, Lucy Stone gave her first public address from the pulpit of her brother's church in Gardner. Soon, she began traveling the state as an agent for the American Anti-slavery Society. On weekends she lectured on abolitionism; during the week, she spoke out for woman's rights. In 1850, she helped organize the first national woman's rights convention. Held in Worcester because the city was easily accessible by train and known to be hospitable to reform, the two-day convention drew more than a thousand people to a downtown hall. Called to test the proposition that a political movement for woman's rights could garner national support, the convention was covered by both hostile and sympathetic reporters from all over the country. Over the next few years, Stone proved to be a powerful and popular orator. She earned a good living-and a national reputation-giving public lectures on the injustices faced by blacks and women. She toured the country, organizing anti-slavery and woman’s rights conventions, collecting petitions, lobbying legislators, and, whenever she had the opportunity, speaking to state legislatures. She even traveled to Ottawa to address the Canadian Parliament. In May 1851, she spoke before the Massachusetts legislature on behalf of an amendment to the state constitution giving full civil rights to women. In the gallery that day was Henry Brown Blackwell, a struggling businessman, idealist, and aspiring poet from Cincinnati. The son of a reform-minded family -- two of his sisters were pioneer physicians-Henry Blackwell set out to persuade Lucy Stone to overcome the objections she had long held to marriage. After a two-year, peripatetic courtship, he succeeded. At their wedding ceremony in April 1855, they read a protest “against the present laws of marriage [which] refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being.” In her marriage vows, Stone promised to love and honor her husband but omitted the word “obey,” and she defied custom by keeping her own name. After her marriage, Lucy Stone continued to lecture, drawing large and enthusiastic audiences. In 1857, she gave birth to her only child, Alice Stone Blackwell. When the baby was a few months old, Stone refused to pay the bill for the taxes on her house on the grounds that it was “taxation without representation.” The town responded by auctioning off her household goods. Stone curtailed her lecturing during the first years of Alice’s life and was just returning to the lecture circuit when the Civil War began. Like her fellow reformers, when war came Stone devoted all her energies to the Union cause. In 1863, she helped organize the Woman’s National Loyal League, formed to urge the immediate emancipation of all slaves and to support the war effort. As the end of the war neared, she joined her friend Susan B. Anthony in calling for a new organization that would advocate political rights, including the vote, for newly emancipated slaves and women. When the 14th Amendment passed Congress, it gave equal protection under law to the former slaves but, to the dismay of woman suffragists, it introduced the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time. Although Stone was deeply disappointed, she supported ratification of both the 14th Amendment and the 15th, which enfranchised black men. Stone’s old friends and allies Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed ratification. The result was a bitter division in the woman suffrage movement, which lasted for more than 20 years. Stanton and Anthony led one wing; Stone and Blackwell the other. From her base in Boston, Lucy Stone founded the American Woman Suffage Association, and, with the help of her husband and later her daughter, published The Woman’s Journal, the influential paper which was known as “the voice of the woman’s movement.” The two factions were not reconciled until l890, three years before her death at age 73 and three decades before American women cast their first votes in a national election. (Born August 13,1818, West Brookfield; died October 18,1893, Dorchester. Photo courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.)