Editing Lucy Stone (section)

== Oberlin ==
In August 1843, just after she turned 25, Stone traveled by train, steamship, and stagecoach to [[Oberlin College]] in Ohio, the country's first college to admit both women and [[African American]]s. She entered the college, believing that women should vote and assume political office, that women should study the classic professions, and that women should be able to speak their minds in a public forum. Oberlin College did not share all of these sentiments.<ref>Schenken, 1999, p. 644.</ref>

In her third year at Oberlin, Stone befriended [[Antoinette Brown]], an abolitionist and suffragist who came to Oberlin in 1845 to study to become a minister.<ref>Oberlin College. Electronic Oberlin Group. Oberlin: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow... Chapter 10. [http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/OYTT/ch10.html ''Oberlin Women''.] Retrieved March 16, 2009.</ref> Stone and Brown would eventually marry abolitionist brothers and thus become sisters-in-law.

=== Equal pay strike ===
Stone hoped to earn most of her college expenses through teaching in one of the institute's lower departments. But because of its policy against employing first-year students as teachers, the only work Stone could get other than teaching at district schools, during the winter break, was housekeeping chores through the school's manual labor program. For this, she was paid three cents an hour—less than half what male students received for their work in the program. Among measures taken to reduce her expenses, Stone prepared her own meals in her dormitory room. In 1844, Stone was given a position teaching arithmetic in the Ladies Department, but, again, received reduced pay, because of her sex.

Oberlin's compensation policies required Stone to do twice the labor a male student had to do to pay the same costs. Stone frequently rose at two o'clock to fit in work and study, and she found her health declining. In February 1845, having decided to submit to the injustice no longer, she asked the Faculty Board for the same pay given two lesser-experienced male colleagues. When her request was denied, she resigned her position. Pleading with the faculty to restore Stone, her former students said they would pay Stone "what was right," if the college would not. Stone had planned to borrow money from her father, when funds ran out, but Francis Stone, moved by his daughter's description of her struggles, promised to provide money when needed. Help from home was not needed, however, because after three months of pressure, the faculty yielded and hired Stone back, paying both her and other women student teachers at the same rate paid male student teachers.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 61-62.</ref>

=== Public speaking ===
[[File:1881 LucyStone byIdaBothe Harvard.png|thumb|upright|1881 portrait of Lucy Stone]]

In February 1846, Stone intimated to Abby Kelley Foster that she was thinking of becoming a public speaker,<ref>Million, 2003, p. 65.</ref> but not until the following summer did a storm of controversy over Foster's speaking at Oberlin decide the matter for her. Faculty opposition to Foster ignited impassioned discussion of women's rights, among the students, especially of a woman's right to speak in public, which Stone vigorously defended in a joint meeting of the men's and women's literary societies. She followed that campus demonstration by making her first public speech at Oberlin's August 1 commemoration of Emancipation in the West Indies.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 69-70.</ref>

In the fall of 1846, Stone informed her family of her intention to become a women's rights lecturer. Her brothers were, at once, supportive, and her father encouraged her to do what she considered her duty.  Her mother and her only remaining sister, however, begged her to reconsider. To her mother's fears that she would be reviled, Stone said she knew she would be disesteemed and even hated, but she must "pursue that course of conduct which, to me, appears best calculated to promote the highest good of the world."<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 73-76.</ref>

Stone, then, tried to gain practical speaking experience. Although women students could debate each other in their literary society, it was considered inappropriate for them to participate in oral exercises with men; women members of the collegiate rhetoric class were expected to learn by observing their male classmates. So, Stone and first-year student [[Antoinette Brown]], who also wanted to develop skill in public speaking, organized an off-campus women's debating club. After gaining a measure of competence, they sought and received permission to debate each other, before Stone's rhetoric class. The debate attracted a large student audience, as well as attention from the Faculty Board, which, thereupon, formally banned women's oral exercises in coeducational classes.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 80-81.</ref> Shortly thereafter, Stone accepted a challenge from a former editor of a county newspaper to a public debate on women's rights, and she soundly defeated him.<ref>Million, 2003, p. 83.</ref> She, then, submitted a petition to the Faculty Board, signed by most members of her graduating class, asking that women chosen to write graduation essays be permitted to read them, themselves, as men so honored did, instead of having them read by faculty members. When the Faculty Board refused and Stone was elected to write an essay, she declined, saying she could not support a principle that denied women "the privilege of being co-laborers with men in any sphere to which their ability makes them adequate."<ref>Million, 2003, p. 82; Hays, p. 56.</ref>

Stone received her baccalaureate degree from Oberlin College on August 25, 1847, becoming the first female college graduate from Massachusetts.