Sisters 1 The Martyr and the Missionary: Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell     B y 1855 Lucy Stone had resisted the pleading of her suitor, Henry Blackwell, for three years. Ever since their chance meeting in Cincinnati when she had tried to cash a payment voucher from one of her lectures at his hardware store, he had pursued her -- by letter, by attendance at the annual women''s conventions (where Lucy, in her lover''s eyes, always delivered the best speech), and once by arriving, unannounced, at her family''s farm in western Massachusetts, where he waited several days reading Emerson before she returned from a lecture tour. "Let me be your friend and write to you occasionally," Blackwell implored, sending her long, engaging letters addressed to "Miss Lucy." "Love me if you can," he reiterated, adopting patient adoration as his courting strategy. "You may forget me if you will. I shall not forget you."1 By the 1850s Lucy Stone was one of the most famous women in the United States. Success as an antislavery lecturer in the late 1840s had reinforced her personal commitment to what she capitalized as "The Cause.

" At first Lucy had meant by that the abolitionist efforts of the American Antislavery Association to create a "thorough discontent" among Americans about slavery and the circumstances of "millions of slaves sighing for freedom." But to the chagrin of antislavery leaders like Frederick Douglass and Samuel May, Lucy increasingly inserted stories about the woman''s plight in her speeches until she wastold that during her lecture tours she must stick to antislaveryism on the weekends and save women''s issues for her less well-attended lectures on weeknights. In 1854, on the front page of his newspaper, Douglass accused her of being willing "to say to her antislavery principles, stand aside while I deal out truth less offensive." By no means intimidated by such censure, Lucy responded that she was a woman before she was an abolitionist.2 "My life," she informed Henry Blackwell in a letter that might have chilled a less ardent suitor''s passion, will be "an associative life . For myself I see no choice but constant conflict . made necessary by the horrid wrongs of society, by circumstances which it will be impossible to change until long after the grave has laid its cold colors over those who now live." It was the martyr''s stance -- her own suffering increased her identification with those whom she would free -- and it became Lucy''s lifelong reform habit.

"The objects I seek to attain will not be attained until long after my body has gone to ashes." And like all martyrs, Lucy Stone''s ideals were imbedded in personal history.3 Born in 1818, on her father''s farm in the Massachusetts Berkshires -- the eighth of nine children -- she had nowhere observed the pleasant intimacies of a loving marriage, or the joys of parents in shaping their children''s futures, or even the domestic security of the middle-class home that, romanticized as the female''s separate sphere, served as the essential enterprise for American women. Instead this third daughter remembered her mother''s plaintive and oft-repeated wish that Lucy and her younger sister, Sarah, had been boys. "A woman''s lot is so hard," repeated Hannah Stone. Lucy had come to agree, as she watched her mother suffer from a drunken husband''s abuse, the birth of nine children followed by the death of four, and the incessant domestic drudgery of women''s work on an isolated farm. She had seen her mother beg for pin money, not for herself, but rather to buy a ribbon for Lucy or material for her older sister Rhoda''s school dress. "I wish your life could have been happier," Lucy once wrote her mother, as she remembered how "ugly" her father had been about giving money to the women of the household.

4 By the age of twelve, Lucy had absorbed a sense of duty that obliged her to run the Stone household when her mother''s healthfailed -- to milk the eight cows that were her mother''s responsibility, to do Monday''s washing, Tuesday''s ironing, Wednesday''s butter making, Thursday''s cleaning, Friday''s weaving, and Saturday''s baking in the routinized cycle that ended only in Sunday''s brief respite. It was, as she later acknowledged, "a perverse childhood." Lucy''s father, Francis Stone, was a hard man -- as durable (he outlived his wife by four years) and impenetrable as his last name. On the nights when he and his friends drank rum and hard cider in the family parlor, Lucy and her sisters learned to avoid "his laying on the slaps," especially when he ordered them down to the cellar to bring up yet another bottle of liquor.5 And later when Stone turned to the church to stop his drinking, he refused to pray with Lucy. In this family there would be no joyful conversion of the kind popularized across the United States during the religious revivals of the Great Awakening. "He told me he would not pray, that he felt like the lions when Daniel was in the den, his mouth was shut . and when I asked him if he thought it was the angel of the Lord that shut his mouth, he did not know what it was.

" Never would the proud Francis Stone bare his soul to the daughter who challenged his beliefs on the position of women.6 While Hannah Stone and her daughters had no context for any improvement in their circumstances, Francis Stone did, in the way of fathers whose ancestors had fought in the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and in Stone''s case, Shays'' Rebellion. He was ambitious for his sons and sought for them something beyond his own life of relentless toil, first in a tannery and later on the farm outside of West Brookfield where he kept chickens, cows, and pigs and raised alfalfa and oats. Although he had little formal schooling himself, he paid for his sons'' education in Maine and later their college tuitions at Amherst; he subscribed to the Massachusetts Spy and the Antislavery Standard so that they might envision the world beyond the rocky promontory of Coy''s Hill. There his 145-acre property ended, though neither the view nor his expectations for his sons did. In his will he left his land and money disproportionately to his sons, for he expected his daughters to be supported by their husbands. Sarah, his youngest daughter, was outraged by this favoritism, but by 1864, when her father died, Lucy did not expect otherwise.7 For years the rebellious Lucy clashed with her father, even as she tried to gain his attention by good works, serving as a surrogate housekeeper, doing well in school, and even helping to repair his homemade shoes.

"There was only one will in my family and it was my father''s," Lucy Stone remembered, and it was a will enforced by insults and physical force. For a lifetime she blushed at the memory of his cruel comparison of her round face in its heaviness, rough texture, and shape to a blacksmith''s apron. It would light no sparks, he said, wondering aloud whether his daughter with the large mole above her upper lip, unlike her pretty sister Sarah, would ever find a husband among the local boys who were the only ones she knew.8 Lucy retaliated. When the congregation of the West Brookfield Congregational Church debated the issue of whether women should speak in public as the South Carolina-born abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké were doing in their lecture tours, Lucy embarrassed her father by insisting on voting, as no other woman did. Again and again she raised her hand for the affirmative, until the pastor finally rebuked her. Women might be church members, Deacon Henshaw instructed, but they were not voting members. In the end the congregation voted to accept the pastoral letter written by the leaders of the Congregational Church that condemned Angelina Grimké''s lecturing.

Women violated biblical edict if they spoke in public. The reason given was that the character of any woman who spoke in public became unnatural -- too independent and "overshadowing of the elm." Later when Lucy lectured in the West Brookfield meeting hall, her father, humiliated that any daughter of his would speak in public and even more heretically on the rights of women, buried his face in his hands. Still it pleased Lucy that a father who once called her a slut had come at all.9 When Lucy proposed to her parents that she attend Oberlin College in faraway Ohio, Francis Stone refused to help. So she began a campaign to pay her own way, teaching in the district school for sixteen dollars a month, selling chestnuts and berries, and sewing shoes in the piecework household economy that still prevailed in western Massachusetts. Sometimes she took one of her mother''s homemade cheeses to market and bargained for the highest price. It took nineyears to save the necessary seventy dollars for the first year''s room and tuition at Oberlin, but the process educated Lucy Stone in the uses of patience and determination.

Having arrived at college in the summer of 1843 after a lonely five-hundred-mile journey by railroad to Buffalo, and then by steamer across Lake Erie to Cleveland (where she slept on deck), and finally by coach to the small town of Oberlin, Ohio, twenty-five-year-old Lucy proudly reported that, "in the words of Father I passed muster."10 But the battle was not over; indeed, for Lucy Stone, the struggle never ended. Now she must find the means to pay her tuition and board for her remaining years at Oberlin, though her crowded daily schedule required that she rise at four in the morning, attend recitations of Latin, Greek, and algebra after breakfast, write compositions in the afternoon, and study in the evening. Her father was so impressed with her hard work that he agreed to a fifteen-dollar loan the next year, with the.