“Leave women to find their sphere.”

“Leave women to find their sphere.”

“In 1879, Massachusetts allow women to vote in school elections. Lucy Stone went to register, but when she discovered that she would have to sign as Mr.s Blackwell, she refused, and so forfeited her opportunity to vote.Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony were delighted. Mr.s Stanton wrote to Mrs. Stone : "Nothing has been done in the woman's rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman's right to her name." Susan Anthony wrote that she "rejoiced that you have declared, by actual doing, that a woman has a name, and may retain it throughout her life."Some women in the movement disapproved, however, and wrote to tell her so. She replied that "A thousand times more opposition was made to a woman's claim to speak in public," and continued to use the name of Lucy Stone for the rest of her life. Those who followed her example were called "Lucy Stoners." But in spite of Lucy Stone and the Lucy Stoners, the law has been slow to acknowledge the right of a woman to her own name. More than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court would uphold an Alabama law which required a woman to use her husband's name.”

“Almost from the beginning, Lucy Stone had run-ins with the established code of female propriety. Every Sunday morning the students had to sit through a long chapel service. Lucy, who suffered from headaches, took her hat off one morning. She was charged by the Ladies' Board, which supervised the manners and morals of the coeds, with violating the Bible's teach that women must keep their heads covered in church.”

“... on May 1, 1855, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were married. Before the minister began the ceremony, Henry read the protest which he and Lucy had prepared: "While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relation of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare this act ... implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to, such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess”

“But I do believe that a woman's truest place is in a home, with a husband and with children, and with large freedom, pecuniary freedom, personal freedom, and the right to vote.”

“Now all we need is to continue to speak the truth fearlessly, and we shall add to our number those who will turn the scale to the side of equal and full justice in all things.”

“Leave women to find their sphere.”

“Henceforth the leaves of the tree of knowledge were for women, and for the healing of the nations.”

“The idea of equal rights was in the air.”

“The widening of woman's sphere is to improve her lot. Let us do it and if the world scoff let it scoff-if it sneer let it sneer.”

“I think God rarely gives to one man or one set of men more than one great moral victory to win.”