Lucy Stone

(1818 - 1893)

Born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1818, Lucy Stone was the eighth of her parents’ nine children—two of whom died before she was born. During her time as a teacher, she once complained about the fact that she earned less than her brother; the school replied that they could offer “only a woman’s pay.” Stone later graduated from Oberlin, the first school in the country to admit women and black students. A popular lecturer on abolitionism and women’s suffrage—she organized the first National Women’s Rights Convention—she married in 1855 and kept her name, the first recorded American woman to do so. When she died, she became the first person in Massachusetts to have her remains cremated.