Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/698

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colleges. He believed also in equal suffrage and urged the abolition of slavery. The home of Mrs. Stone was the resort of abolitionist and equal suffrage lecturers, and among the guests they entertained were some of the most advanced leaders of thought, Emerson, Alcott, Wendell Phillips, Fred Douglas, Mrs. Stanton, May Livermore, Lucy Stone and a host of others. LUCINDA H. STONE, In November, 1864, Mrs. Stone gave up her department in Kalamazoo College, after toiling a score of years After leaving the college, she took up another line of educational work, that of organizing women's clubs, which are societies for the education of women. She spent some time in Boston, just after the formation of the New England Woman's Club. She returned to Michigan and transformed her old historical classes into a woman's club, the first in Michigan and the first in the West. The Kalamazoo Woman's Club, as it was named, was the beginning of the women's clubs in Michigan, and out of it have grown many of the leading clubs in the State. When the question of collegiate education for girls began to stir the public mind, Mrs. Stone was roused to the justice and importance of it, and exerted her energies and influence to forward the matter of admitting women to the University of Michigan. She fitted and sustained in her efforts the first young woman who asked admission to its halls. Now, when the annual attendance of women in Ann Arbor is recorded by hundreds, and many women graduates are filling high positions and becoming noted for their fine scholarship, Michigan University could do no more graceful and just thing than to call one of her own daughters to a professor's chair. To accomplish that Mrs. Stone is exerting her later and riper energies. The University of Michigan, in its commencement in 1891, conferred upon her the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in recognition of her valued efforts in educational work.


STONE, Mrs. Lucy, reformer, born on a farm about three miles from West Brookfield, Mass., 13th August, 1818. She was next to the youngest in a family of nine children. Her father, Francis Stone, was a prosperous farmer, a man of great energy, much respected by his neighbors, and not intentionally unkind or unjust, but full of that belief in the right of men to rule which was general in those days, and ruling his own family with a strong hand. Little Lucy grew up a fearless and hardy child, truthful, resolute, a good student in school, a hard worker in her home and on the farm, and filled with secret rebellion against the way in which she saw women treated all around her. Her great-grandfather had been killed in the French and Indian War, her grandfather had served in the War of the Revolution, and afterwards was captain of four-hundred men in Shays's Rebellion. The family came honestly by good fighting blood. Reading the Bible when a very small girl, she came across the passage which says, "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." It had never occurred to her that the subjection of women could be divinely ordained, and she went to her mother, almost speechless with distress, and asked, "Is there no way to put an end to me?" She did not wish to live. Her mother tried to pursuade her that it was woman's duty to submit, but of that Lucy could not be convinced. Later, she wished to learn Greek and Hebrew, to read the Bible in the original, and satisfy herself whether those texts were correctly translated. Her father helped his son through college, but, when his daughter wished to go, he said to his wife, "Is the child crazy?" She had to earn the means herself. She picked berries and chestnuts and sold them to buy books. For years she taught district schools, teaching and studying alternately. At the low wages then paid to women teachers, it took her till she was twenty-five years of age to earn the money to carry her to Oberlin, then the only college in the country that admitted women. Crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo to Cleveland, she could not afford a state-room and slept on deck, on a pile of grain-sacks, among horses and freight, with a few other women who, like herself, could only pay for a "deck passage." In Oberlin she earned her way by teaching during vacations and in the preparatory department of the college, and by doing housework in the Ladies' Boarding Hall at three cents an hour. Most of the time she cooked her food in her own room, boarding herself at a cost of less than fifty cents a week. She had only one new dress during her college course, a cheap print, and she did not go home once during the four years. She was graduated in 1847 with honors, and was appointed to write a commencement essay. Finding that she would not be permitted to read it herself, but that one of the professors would have to read it for her, the young w« mien in those days not being allowed to read their own essays, she declined to write it. She carried out her plan of studying Greek and Hebrew, and has since then always believed and maintained that the Bible, properly interpreted, was on the side of equal rights for women. Her first woman's rights lecture was given from the pulpit of her brother's church in Gardner, Mass., in 1847- Soon after, she was engaged to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Society. It was still a great novelty for a woman to speak in public, and curiosity attracted immense audiences. She always put a great deal of woman's rights into her anti-shivery lectures. Finally, when Power's Greek Slave was on exhibition in Boston, the sight of the statue moved her so strongly that,