PIONEER FOR WOMEN
Witherspoon, Frances
Pioneer for Women Morning Star, a biography of lu-cy stone, by Elinor Rice Hays. Har-court, Brace & World. 339 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by Frances Witherspoon Elinor Rice Hays makes no bones about...
...In the next decades, however, with woman suffrage societies springing up across the country, momentum grew to alter the postwar Amendments so as to enfranchise the nation's women as well as its freed slaves...
...The account of his patient courtship, the Blackwell's unique marriage-ceremony with Henry reading a lengthy statement in which he foreswore any legal superiority existing laws might give him, and their devoted married life, give novelistic flavor to this admirable book...
...With the Civil War came a slowing down of the woman's movement...
...Elinor Hays pictures Lucy a small, dainty woman in sober black dress and white collar whose gentle personality and musical voice, according to contemporaries, charmed many hostile audiences...
...The time was 1847...
...In her own home Lucy found plenty to stir rebellion...
...Vilification, even physical abuse, would be the lot of its advocates...
...The Seneca Falls Convention, called by Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott, was still a year off...
...College and teaching behind her, she set forth on that speaking tour in behalf of the two causes—Negro emancipation and rights for women —which she was to pursue, with only intervals of retirement due to poor health, pretty much through her seventy-five years...
...We see her, too, as loving mother and tender wife...
...Women won voice in school elections, later in municipal contests...
...Had not Blackstone long since declared that the married woman had no legal existence...
...Working for the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Lucy Stone made connection with the Seneca Falls group for the first time at the National Woman's Rights Convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, her name heading the call, along with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and a number of Boston's Tran-scendentalists...
...Political parties and Constitutional Conventions would hear from them...
...She means to shore up a reputation too long out of balance, less through the fault of biographers, she feels, than the omissions of the two of Lucy Stone's fellow-workers most responsible for the printed record—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose History of Woman Suffrage appeared in the 1880's...
...For if the book is a full-length portrait of Lucy Stone, it is scarcely less one of her husband, Henry Blackwell, who gave up so much personal ambition to make her cause equally his own...
...The world into which Lucy Stone was born in 1818 of a large family on a poor farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, assumed the inferiority of women...
...First fired by the back-breaking drudgery of her mother, young Lucy determined to get an education the equal of any man's...
...The church would thunder, the press caricature, with Horace Greeley's New York Tribune the notable exception...
...Reviewed by Frances Witherspoon Elinor Rice Hays makes no bones about her motive in writing this important and highly readable book...
...Yet bit by bit with the years' passage, gains would be made...
...The movement was on its way, but the road would prove long and painful...
Vol. 26 • October 1962 • No. 10
