Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was a leader of the woman suffrage movement. She founded the American Woman Suffrage Association and was editor of the Women’s Journal. Lucy was one of the first women in Massachusetts to receive a college degree. Lucy’s father refused to pay for her college education (he paid for her brothers’, of course) so she worked as a teacher to earn enough money to pay her own tuition at Oberlin College. She graduated in 1847. As a leading scholar in her class, the school offered her the possibility of writing a speech for graduation which would be read out by a male classmate. She declined that offer.
She was the first woman to keep her name after marriage in the United States. Women who followed this practice were called "Lucy Stoners".
It has been argued by Barbara Berenson in her book Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers that Lucy Stone should certainly have a place in the US Capitol alongside the statues of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a leader of the women’s rights movement in America. This omission may be because Lucy spent more time working for women to get the vote rather than on self-promotion. She organized the first actual National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester in 1850. Seneca Falls, the first such convention was a regional undertaking. It was held in 1848 and had 240 participants. Lucy’s national meeting drew more than 1000 people. A rift between Lucy and those other ladies about voting rights for African Americans led Lucy to break off from the National Woman Suffrage Association to form the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Lucy was a huge abolitionist and felt the 13th Amendment, which granted voting rights to African American men was a step in the right direction. While the NWSA were unsuccessful in maintaining a publication (their paper folded within a few years) the AWSA published The Woman’s Journal weekly from 1870 to 1912. Lucy served as the editor until she passed the torch to her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. The two competing suffrage groups eventually reunited in 1890 (just before Lucy’s death).
Lucy achieved another first in death since she was the first person to be cremated in New England. She is interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in a niche just below the Lucy Stone Chapel (Walk Hill Street).
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“We protest...against the whole system by which the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage...so that she neither has a legal part in choice of her residence, nor can she make a will, nor sue or be sued in her own name nor inherit property.”— Lucy STONE/Henry BLACKWELL WEDDING VOWS
Susan Walker Fitzgerald (1871-1943) was active in the woman suffrage movement. She was the first woman Democrat elected to the Massachusetts Legislature, serving one term as a Representative. Her interest in politics started early, as she founded the Student Government Association while a student at Bryn Mawr College in 1892. Bryn Mawr proudly states it was the first student self-government association in higher ed. Fitzgerald ran (unsuccessfully) for the Boston School Committee in 1911. By the late 1870s women were allowed to vote in school committee elections in the Commonwealth, and run for those offices. After her political career, Susan became active in the international work of the General Alliance of Unitarian and Other Women.
Her home was at 7 Greenough Avenue
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“I was engaged to come here to push the civic side of activities. But I became convinced that women should have the vote in order that things may be better in civic life.”— SUSAN FITZGERALD