“A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost,” said Lucy Stone about the practice of women taking their husbands’ name upon marriage. Stone was one of the country’s leading suffragists, abolitionists, and lecturers, and though she did use her married name for the first year of her marriage, she changed it back to Lucy Stone as it was more in keeping with her life’s purpose - equal rights.

Stone was 36 years old when she married Henry Browne Blackwell in 1855. As a younger woman, she did not think marriage suited her independent nature. Blackwell supported his wife’s views and they started their life together by omitting the word “obey” from their marriage vows and had a Marriage Protest read aloud at the ceremony and published in newspapers.

Among her many accomplishments, Lucy Stone organized the first national Women’s Rights Convention, from which one of her speeches was published in newspapers worldwide. She helped found the AERA (American Equal Rights Association), the AWSA (American Woman Suffrage Association), and the NEWSA (New England Woman Suffrage Association). With her husband, Stone started the Woman’s Journal, a weekly newspaper, in 1870 of which Carrie Chapman Catt said years later, “The suffrage success of to-day is not conceivable without the Woman’s Journal’s part in it.”

Stone had a daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. She too became a suffrage leader. When Lucy Stone was dying of stomach cancer, admirers wrote from around the world commenting on her “lifelong fidelity to one of the world’s greatest needs – equal justice.” Just before she died, Stone whispered to her daughter, “Make the world better.”