What About the Ladies?

Lucy Stone worked tirelessly for the improvement of women's rights in the 1800s.  She is best known as the first woman to not take her husband's name after she married.  Receiving no help from her parents, Lucy's determination to go to college was unrelenting.  She worked hard to save every penny she earned to acquire her higher education.  She attending Oberlin College in Ohio, because they were the only school accepting women at the time.  Upon graduating from Oberlin College she became active in many reform groups.  She was met with great opposition, which did not dampen her goals for equality.  Her life's work became abolition and women.  She fought to keep these two causes of women's suffrage and black rights together.  Lucy founded the American Women's Suffrage Association with her husband.  She later published a magazine titled The Women's Journal, to influence people which was known as "the voice of the woman's movement."  Unfortunately, she did not live to see the 19th amendment become law, which gave women the right to vote. Lucy Stone died in 1893. 

 

 

This is the front cover of the Women's Journal which contains suffrage news for women in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This journal was started by the famous suffragette Lucy Stone (pictured above) and her husband as a weekly newspaper in 1870. Over time it was changed from a weekly to a monthly publication with its last publication in June of 1931.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Staton were two of the most popluar and wide known suffragettes of the late 1800s.  Their influence was spread far and wide through the United States and the world. 

Susan B. Anthony, who is pictured standing, was born into the Quaker religion like lucretia Coffin Mott.  She started her early career as a teacher and worked on gaining equal pay for female teachers to be equivelant of male teachers.  Her work then led her to the temperance movement (against alcohol).  She began to distance herself from the Quakers because of their hypocritical behavior.  In addition to the temperance movement she also joined the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War.  She met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Seneca Falls, New York, where they decided to team up for the women's rights cause creating the first women's state temperance society in America.  Anthony then spoke at every National Women's Rights Convention from then on with Stanton by her side.  Like Lucy Stone, Anthony and Staton published a weekly journal titled, The Revolution, which was to help advance the womens' and African-Americans' right to suffrage.  It also promoted equal pay for equal work doctrine. 

Like Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton got her start with the anti-slavery movement in the 1840s. Stanton got her start in London when she became a great friend of Lucretia Coffin Mott.  She inspired her to join the women's suffrage movement after they were both not allowed to participate with men in an abolitionist conference.  They were told to hide out of view behind curtains.  She helped form the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 in which over 300 people attended.  She drafted the Declaration of Sentiments which she read at the convention as an inspirational tool for women's rights and abolition of slavery.  Anthony and Stanton did not meet until 1851 where they created a temperance organization together.  It was short lived, but their work on women's suffrage continued to flourish.  They make a great dynamic duo in that Anthony had the means to travel being single and having no children, but Stanton was the much better writer and orator.  Therefore, Stanton wrote many of Anthony's speeches for her.  

They remained very close friends throughout their lives.  After the Civil War, they both worked to help pass the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.  Then their focus was solely on women's rights.   Stanton and Anthony started the National Women's Suffrage Association in May of 1869.  Stanton served as president for 21 years which had shown her committment to the women's suffrage movement. 

Unfortunately, Stanton died in 1902, just short of 20 years of seeing women get the right to vote.  Even though her ideas were somewhat controversial throughout her live, she is still honored as one of the pioneers for women's suffrage. 

Lucretia Coffin Mott was born into the Quaker way of life and became a Quaker minister.  She was deeply religious and it showed throughout her life's work.  She was a strong abolitionist, in which she refused to use cotton cloth, sugar kane, or other products produced with slave labor.  She felt slavery was evil and opposed with great ferver.  Her and her husband also helped shelter runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad.  She joined the women's movement and helped Elizabeth Cady Stanton write the "Declaration of Sentiment" which stated the "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal."  She continued throughout her life to combat women's rights and abolition.  Unfortunately, she did not live to see the 19th amendment to the Constituiton ratified, but she did live to see slavery abolished.  She died in 1880.