Stone, Lucy (1818-1893)

US feminist orator and editor. Married to the radical Henry Blackwell in 1855, she gained wide publicity when, after a mutual declaration rejecting the legal superiority of the man in marriage, she chose to retain her own surname. The term ‘Lucy Stoner’ was coined to mean a woman who advocated doing the same.

Stone was born in Massachusetts, attended Oberlin College, and gave public lectures from 1847 against black slavery and for women's rights. In the 1860s she helped to establish the American Woman Suffrage Association and founded and edited the Boston Woman's Journal, a suffragist paper that was later edited by her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950).