While considering how to convey the suspected reasoning behind Clara Barton’s nomination of Lucy Stone Blackwell, the best short phrase that keeps coming to mind is “The Original American Women’s Libber.” During my vetting process, one article on Stone-Blackwell states, “Stone was known for using her maiden name after marriage.” Unlike some of the other women ahead of their time in the 19th century, the choice did not seem to affect her marriage.
Lucy Stone
Lucy Stone, like Barton, hailed from Central Massachusetts. Working through genealogical records found no biological kinship between Barton and Stone even though only a mere 19 miles separate their hometowns. Stone also, like Barton, grew up believing she could accomplish almost anything a man could and never understood why anyone considered women inferior to men. While Barton would go on to a career in humanitarianism, Stone would promote women’s suffrage.
Barton and Stone also shared the teaching profession early in their adulthood that impacted their ideas about women’s rights. For Barton, teaching was somewhat a family occupation; both her sisters taught and her older brother Stephen superintended the Oxford, Massachusetts school system for a time. Stone also followed in her older siblings footsteps, and left the profession when paid less than her brother for substituting for him. Barton left when the public school committee in Bordentown, NJ hired a man as principal at the school she had organized and established. Neither would go back to the classroom as a teacher.
Stone received her baccalaureate degree from Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohioon August 25, 1847, becoming the first female college graduate from Massachusetts. Influenced by abolitionist and women’s suffrage lecturers such William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Grimke, and Antoinette Brown, Stone decided on a career as a public speaker. Surprisingly, the men in her family supported the idea, while Stone’s mother and sisters did not. Stone began giving anti-slavery lectures in Massachusetts, but by 1849 also spoke in New York and Pennsylvania. National recognition came by 1851.
Unlike Barton, Stone married Henry Blackwell after a two-year courtship. Blackwell became Stone’s manager and took the unusual step of a prenuptialagreement stating the couple were partners, would share costs of maintaining a household equally, and allowing Stone to keep her last name. Blackwell went so far as to include a protest of man’s superiority over his wife and vowed not to do so. The Worcester (Massachusetts) Spy published the protest and made national headlines. Stone would bear one daughter, Alice, born in 1857, who went on to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
During the 1850s and 1860s, Stone founded or helped found several national organizations beginning with the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1855, and including the Women’s National Loyal League in 1863, the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 along with Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass and others. She founded the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 with Julia Ward Howe in a split from Stanton and Anthony’s National Women Suffrage Association who only allowed women members. The two Associations would merge in 1887.
Older Lucy Stone
Stone spent much of her career writing and lobbying for state and national petitions to support her cause. She spoke to Congress in 1891 regarding women’s suffrage although women’s suffrage would remain undone until 1920. Stone also founded and edited the Woman’s Journal in 1870, which ceased publication in 1831. She also led a unaccepted movement to change women’s clothing, sporting a “bloomers” dress at public appearances early in her speaking career. Lucy Stone died at her home in Dorchester, Massachusetts on October 18, 1893.
The Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum is open on Fridays and Saturdays from 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM for walk-ins. All other times, the Museum will be open only to groups of 10+. Click here to reserve a group tour.
Opens at 11:00 AM
Last Admission at 4:30 PM
PHONE:
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Washington, D.C. 20004 Looking for our Mailing Address?
The preserved rooms are accessible by both stairs and elevator.
[She] toiled as few men could have done, stanching wounds which might otherwise have proved fatal, administering cordials to the fainting soldier, cheering those destined to undergo amputation, moistening lips parched with thirst [and closing the eyes of the dead].
An eyewitness account of Clara Barton at Antietam
The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.
Clara Barton
I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.
Clara Barton
I don’t know how long it has been since my ear has been free from the roll of a drum. It is the music I sleep by and I love it.
Clara BartonIn a letter to her father, March 19, 1861
I ask neither pay or praise, simply a soldier’s fare and the sanction of your Excellency to go and do with my might, whatever my hands can find to do.
Clara BartonLetter to Massachusetts Governor Andrew, seeking permission to go to the front, March 20, 1862
Though it is little that one woman can do, still I crave the privilege of doing it.
Clara BartonLetter to I.W. Denney, seeking permission to go to the front, March 30, 1862
I only wish I could work to some purpose. I have no right to these easy comfortable days and our poor men suffering and dying thirsting … My lot is too easy and I am sorry for it.
Clara BartonIn a letter to Mary Norton, July 4, 1862
It was a miserable night. There was a sense of impending doom. We knew, everyone knew, that two great armies of 80,000 men were lying there face to face, only waiting for dawn to begin the battle.
Clara BartonWriting about the night before the battle of Antietam
When I reached [home], and looked in the mirror, my face was still the color of gunpowder, a deep blue. Oh yes, I went to the front!
Clara BartonUpon returning from the battle of Antietam