“…women suffer taxation, and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to one half of the adult population, but is contrary to our theory of government.”
Lucy Stone 1818-1893
Lucy Stone 1818-1893
I’m A Lucy Stoner. Are you?
She was the first gal to get hitched and keep her own name. From then on, any gal that kept her maiden name was known as a Lucy Stoner. And she waited until she was thirty-seven years old before she even took the plunge with Henry Brown Blackwell, whose sister Elizabeth Blackwell, was America’s first female doctor. Lucy was also the first gal in America to get arrested for civil disobedience – for refusing to pay her property tax unless she was allowed to vote. The “morning star” of the women’s movement, Lucy was the eighth of nine kids and the story goes that her mother milked eight cows the night before she gave birth to Lucy. Luckily, they had a farm, and Lucy had lots and lots of farm chores, including making nine pairs of shoes a day. Imagine. Like many of her suffragist sisters, Lucy saw her mother slaving away and DID imagine – a different, better life. But no matter how hard she worked she still could not get her father to pay for her to go to college. “What is the child crazy?” he asked. When he died, he left all of his property and money to his sons and $200 each to his daughters. What a guy! Well, it took her nine years to save for college but she did it and in 1843 at the age of twenty-five she entered Oberlin – which was the ONLY college open to the gals. She was the first female in the state of Massachusetts to get a college degree. Oh – and she founded and edited the Woman’s Journal – a weekly suffragist newspaper she started with her dear hubby.