The Rhetoric of Lucy Stone

Lucy Stone was an important and influential leader of the women's rights movement and the suffrage movement, "winning fame especially for her persuasive and moving oratory"(Zimmerman 281). She was born on a farm on August 13, 1818 in Massachusetts. Lucy's father opposed college education for women, therefore, Lucy taught school for nine years to earn enough money to attend the first co-educational institution, Oberlin College in Ohio. During this time at Oberlin, Stone had to work as a maid in the Ladies Boarding Hall to help pay her expenses. She earned three cents an hour. While at Oberlin, she organized the first debating society ever formed among college girls. She graduated in 1847.

Also in 1847, Stone gave her first women's rights lecture. Lucy soon became a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society as well as a speaker for women's rights. For the next ten years (1847-1857), she lectured throughout the country to immense audiences. Lucy Stone was a small woman with a sweet voice. She became known for her gentle manners and natural eloquence. Mobs of people would sometimes quiet down and listen to her, even when they booed and howled down every other speaker. She was also publicly known for converting Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe and Frances E. Willard to the woman suffrage movement. In 1850 she organized the First National Women's Rights Convention held at Worcester Massachusetts.

In 1855 Stone married Henry Blackwell, an active abolitionist (and a brother of the first woman doctor from America--Elizabeth Blackwell). "At their wedding, husband and wife read aloud together a protest against existing laws which prevented a married woman from exercising any control over her own property and made her legally subordinate to her husband. Lucy Stone continued to retain her own name...thus giving the name 'Lucy Stoner' to married women who retain their maiden name"(Flexner 543).

To understand what the rhetoric of Lucy Stone was like, take for example, the speech she gave in defense of Margaret Garner. "Margaret Garner was being brought to trial for the murder of her tree-year-old child. She and her husband and children had escaped from slavery in Kentucky. Recaptured in Ohio and determined not to return her family to slavery, the young wife killed one child and was in the act of attempting to kill another when she was arrested...During a recess in the trial, Stone addressed the crowd that had jammed the courtroom"(Kerr 93).

"I returned to town only yesterday or I should have been here during every day of this trial. When I came here and saw that poor figure, took her toil-hardened hand, and read her face deep suffering and ardent longing for freedom...I told her that [thousands of friends] were glad that the child of hers was safe with the angles. Her only reply was a look of deep despair--of anguish such as no words can speak.

I thought that then the spirit she manifested was the same with that or our ancestors to whom we had erected the monument at Bunker Hill-- the spirit that would rather let all go back to God than back to slavery. The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation female slaves submit. Rather tan give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so? The desire had its root in the deepest and holiest feelings of our nature--implanted alike in black and white by our common Father. With my own teeth I would tear open my veins and let the earth drink my blood rather than wear the chains the chains of slavery. How then could I blame her for wishing her child to find freedom with God and the angels, where no chains are?" Lucy Stone's journal as quoted by Cynthia Griffin Wolff in "'Margaret Garner': The Massachusetts Review, Fall 1991, Volume 32, Number 3.

Lucy Stone spoke "with such emotional force that the Kentucky owner, there to retrieve his 'property,' sat perspiring with anguish and shame. After she had finished, the owner came to stone and promised that if the court gave him a choice in the matter, he would let the woman go free. Garner was acquitted, but the owner changed his mind, and ordered her bound and brought to the ship that would return her and her children to Kentucky"(Kerr).

After the Civil War Lucy Stone would not join with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in opposing the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution which gave black males the right to vote, but did not extend this privilege to white or black females. (Flexner 543). Stone was just as much an abolitionist as she was a feminist. Why would she stand in the way of the rights of black men? She felt as though she had won half her battle when black men were granted their voting rights. Instead, Stone and her husband started campaigns to win amendments to state constitutions which would give women the right to vote. In support of their policies Lucy and her husband created a weekly newspaper, The Woman's Journal. This journal "helped make the suffrage message more acceptable to the new American middle class and set the agendas for other publications less deeply involved in the suffrage movement, but amenable to persuasion. Stone is remarkable for making the transition form a society virtually without magazines into a world of printed communication. She is also remarkable for her success in both arenas"(Jolliffe). "In 1890 the American Woman Suffrage Association merged with a rival group led by Stanton and Anthony to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Lucy Stone served briefly as chairman of its executive committee. She died on October 18, 1893, in Dorchester, Massachusetts"(Flexner 543).

Works cited

Flexnor, Eleanor. "Stone, Lucy." Collier's Encyclopedia. 1993.

Jolliffe, Lee. "Women's Magazines in the 19th Century." The Journal of Popular Culture 27(1994): 125-137.

Kerr, Andrea Moore. Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.