Editing Lucy Stone (section)

=== Divorce and "free love" ===
In 1870, at the twentieth anniversary celebration of the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, Stanton spoke for three hours, rallying the crowd for women's right to divorce. By then, Stone's position on the matter had shifted, significantly. Personal differences between Stone and Stanton came to the fore on the issue, with Stone writing "We believe in ''marriage for life'', and deprecate all this loose, pestiferous talk in favor of ''easy divorce.''"<ref name=Kerr156 /> Stone made it clear that those wishing for "free divorce" were not associated with Stone's organization AWSA, headed, at that time, by Reverend [[Henry Ward Beecher]].<ref name=Kerr156 /> Stone wrote against 'free love:' "Be not deceived—''free love means free lust.''"<ref name=Kerr156 />

This editorial position would come back to haunt Stone. Also in 1870, Elizabeth Roberts Tilton told her husband [[Theodore Tilton]] that she had been carrying on an [[Adultery|adulterous]] relation with his good friend Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore Tilton published an editorial saying that Beecher "has, at a most unseemly time of life, been detected in improper intimacies with certain ladies of his congregation."<ref>Hays, 1961, p. 232.</ref> Tilton also informed Stanton about the alleged affair, and Stanton passed the information to [[Victoria Woodhull]]. Woodhull, a free love advocate, printed innuendo about Beecher, and began to woo Tilton, convincing him to write a book of her life story from imaginative material that she supplied.<ref>Hays, 1961, p. 233.</ref> In 1871, Stone wrote to a friend "my one wish, in regard to Mrs. Woodhull, is that [neither] she, nor her ideas, may be so much as heard of at our meeting."<ref>Kerr, 1992, p. 168.</ref> Woodhull's self-serving activities were attracting disapproval from both centrist AWSA and radical NWSA. To divert criticism from herself, Woodhull published a denunciation of Beecher, in 1872, saying that he practiced free love, in private, while speaking out against it, from the pulpit. This caused a sensation in the press and resulted in an inconclusive legal suit and a subsequent formal inquiry lasting well into 1875. The furor over adultery and the friction between various camps of women's rights activists took focus away from legitimate political aims. Henry Blackwell wrote to Stone from Michigan, where he was working toward putting woman suffrage into the state constitution, saying "This Beecher-Tilton affair is playing the deuce with [woman suffrage] in Michigan. No chance of success, this year, I fancy."<ref>Hays, 1961, p. 235.</ref>