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Lucy Stone was noteworthy for many things. She was the first Massachusetts woman to take a college degree. She was "the morning star of the woman's rights movement", lecturing for it, in the ten years from 1847 to 1857, to immense audiences all up and down the country. She headed the call for the First National Woman's Rights Convention. She converted Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe. She was the first married woman to keep her own name. She organized a nation-wide association in which those suffragists could work who did not wish to have equal suffrage mixed up with free love and other extraneous questions. She founded and edited the Woman's Journal of Boston, which was the principal woman suffrage newspaper of the United States for almost half a century. She was a striking example of single-hearted and lifelong devotion to a great idea.

Her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, had great ability, and was the one man in America who devoted his life to securing equal rights for women.

One of her sisters-in-law, Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first woman in modern times to take a medical degree. Another, the Reverend Doctor Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman in the world to be ordained as a minister. Lucy Stone was thus in close touch with the movement to open the learned professions to women. Her letters give a graphic picture of early American life, as different from the life of to-day as that of some remote foreign country.

Great obligations are due to a large number of friends who subscribed a sum of money to provide me with help while writing this biography. This enabled me to have the assistance of Mrs. Ida Porter-Boyer, who has given invaluable aid in collecting and arranging the material.

Alice Stone Blackwell

Boston, Massachusetts