Editing Lucy Stone (section)

=== Western tour ===
On October 14, 1853, following the National Woman's Rights Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Stone and Lucretia Mott addressed Cincinnati's first women's rights meeting, arranged by [[Henry Browne Blackwell|Henry Blackwell]], a local businessman from a family of capable women, who had taken an interest in Stone. After that successful meeting, Stone accepted Blackwell's offer to arrange a lecture tour for her in the western states – considered, then, to be those west of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Over the following thirteen weeks, Stone gave over forty lectures in thirteen cities, during which a report to the [[New-York Tribune|''New York Tribune'']] said she was stirring the West on women's rights "as it is seldom stirred on any subject, whatsoever." After four lectures in Louisville, Kentucky, Stone was begged to repeat the entire course and told she was having more effect there than she could have anywhere else. An Indianapolis newspaper reported that Stone "set about two-thirds of the women in the town crazy, after women's rights, and placed half the men in a similar predicament." St. Louis papers said her lectures attracted the largest crowds ever assembled, there, filling the city's largest auditorium beyond its capacity of two thousand. Chicago papers praised her lectures as the best of the season and said they were inspiring discussion and debate in the city's homes and meeting places. When Stone headed home, in January 1854, she left behind incalculable influence.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 158-63.</ref>

From 1854 through 1858, Stone lectured on women's rights in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario.<ref>Million, 2003.</ref> Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later write that "Lucy Stone was the first speaker who really stirred the nation's heart on the subject of woman's wrongs."<ref>''Eminent Women of the Age: Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation'', Hartford, Conn.: S.M. Betts & Co., 1868, p. 392.</ref>