Editing Lucy Stone (section)

== Woman's rights orator ==
[[File:Fanciful drawing by Marguerite Martyn of Lucy Stone speaking.jpg|thumb|250px|Fanciful 1919 drawing by [[Marguerite Martyn]] of Lucy Stone as a young woman being pelted with vegetables as she speaks. At right, jeering men spray her with a hose, and another man displays a book titled ''St. Paul Sayeth''.]]
In May 1851, while in Boston attending the New England Anti-Slavery Society's annual meeting, Stone went to the exhibit of [[Hiram Powers]]'s statue ''[[The Greek Slave]]''. She was so moved by the sculpture that when she addressed the meeting that evening, she poured out her heart about the statue being emblematic of all enchained womanhood. Stone said the society's general agent, Samuel May, Jr., reproached her for speaking on women's rights at an antislavery meeting, and she replied, "I was a woman, before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for women."<ref>''Report of the International Council of Women,'' Washington, D.C., National Woman Suffrage Association, 1888, pp. 333-34.</ref> Three months later, Stone notified May that she intended to lecture on women's rights, full-time, and she would not be available for antislavery work.<ref name="Million, 2003, p. 112">Million, 2003, p. 112.</ref>
Stone launched her career as an independent women's rights lecturer on October 1, 1851. When May continued to press antislavery work upon her, she agreed to lecture for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on Sundays. Arranging women's rights lectures around these engagements, she used pay for her antislavery work to defray expenses of her independent lecturing, until she felt confident enough to charge admission.<ref>Million, 2003, p. 113.</ref>

=== Dress reform ===
[[File:Lucy Stone in bloomers.jpg|thumb|left|250px|An engraving of Lucy Stone wearing [[Bloomers (clothing)|bloomers]] was published in 1853.]]
When Stone resumed lecturing in the fall of 1851, she wore a new style of dress that she had adopted during her winter convalescence, consisting of a loose, short jacket and a pair of baggy trousers, under a skirt that fell a few inches below the knees.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 114-16.</ref> The dress was a product of the health-reform movement and intended to replace the fashionable French dress of a tight bodice over a whalebone-fitted corset, and a skirt that dragged several inches on the floor, worn over several layers of starched petticoats with straw or horsehair sewn into the hems. Ever since the fall of 1849, when the ''Water-Cure Journal'' urged women to invent a style of dress that would allow them to use their legs, freely, women across the country had been wearing some form of pants and short skirt, generally called the "Turkish costume" or the "American dress."<ref>''Water-Cure Journal'', Oct., Dec. 1849; Jan., Feb., June 1850.</ref> Most wore it as a walking or gardening dress, but a letter writer to the National Woman's Rights Convention urged women to adopt it as common attire.<ref>''Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention, Held at Worcester, October 23 and 24, 1850''. Boston: Prentiss and Sawyer, pp. 76-77.</ref>

By the spring of 1851, women in several states were wearing the dress in public.<ref>''Lily,'' March, May, June 1851.</ref> In March, [[Amelia Bloomer]], editor of the temperance newspaper ''The Lily,'' announced that she was wearing it and printed a description of her dress, along with instructions on how to make it. Soon, newspapers had dubbed it the [[Bloomers|Bloomer dress]], and the name stuck.<ref>Noun, Louise R., ''Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Iowa,'' Iowa State University Press, 1986, pp. 16-17.</ref> The Bloomer became a fashion fad, during the following months, as women from Toledo to New York City and Lowell, Massachusetts, held reform-dress social events and festivals. Supporters gathered signatures to a "Declaration of Independence from the Despotism of Parisian Fashion" and organized dress-reform societies. A few Garrisonian supporters of women's rights took prominent part in these activities, and one offered silk to any of his friends who would make it into a short skirt and trousers for a public dress. Stone accepted the offer.<ref name="Million, 2003, p. 115">Million, 2003, p. 115.</ref>

When Stone lectured in the dress in the fall of 1851, hers was the first Bloomer most of her audiences had ever seen. But by then, the dress had become controversial. Although newspapers had initially praised the practicality of the new style, they soon turned to ridicule and condemnation, now viewing the trousers as a usurpation of the symbol of male authority.<ref name="Million, 2003, p. 115" /> Many women retreated, in the face of criticism, but Stone continued to wear the short dress, exclusively, for the next three years. She also wore her hair short, cut just below her jaw line. After Stone lectured in New York City in April 1853, the report of her speeches in the ''Illustrated News'' was accompanied by this engraving of Stone in the Bloomer dress.<ref>"Lucy Stone," ''Illustrated News,'' May 28, 1853.</ref>

Stone found the short skirt convenient, during her travels, and she defended it against those who said it was a distraction that hurt the women's rights cause. Nevertheless, she disliked the instant attention it drew, whenever she arrived in a new place. In the fall of 1854, she added a dress a few inches longer, for occasional use.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 168-69.</ref> In 1855, she abandoned the dress, altogether, and she was not involved in the formation of a National Dress Reform Association in February 1856. Her resumption of long skirts drew the condemnation of such dress-reform leaders as [[Gerrit Smith]] and [[Lydia Sayer Hasbrouk]], who accused her of sacrificing principle for the sake of pleasing a husband.<ref>Million, 2003, pp. 217-18, 235.</ref>

=== Expulsion from church ===

Stone's anti-slavery work included harsh criticism of churches that refused to condemn slavery. Her own church in West Brookfield, the First Congregational Church of West Brookfield, was one of those, having expelled a deacon for anti-slavery activities. In 1851, the church expelled Stone, herself.<ref name="Million, 2003, p. 112" /> Stone had already moved significantly away from that church's Trinitarian doctrines. While at Oberlin, Stone had arranged for her friend, Abby Kelley Foster, and her new husband, [[Stephen Symonds Foster]], to speak, there, on the abolition of slavery. Afterwards, [[Charles Grandison Finney|Charles Finney]], a prominent professor of theology at Oberlin, denounced the Fosters for their [[Unitarianism|Unitarian]] beliefs. Intrigued, Stone began to engage in classroom discussions about the Trinitarian-Unitarian controversy<ref>[[Trinitarianism]] is the traditional Christian belief that God is three persons in one, with Jesus one of those three. [[Unitarianism]] holds that God is one and that Jesus was a great teacher but not God.</ref> and ultimately decided that she was a Unitarian.<ref>Million, 2003, p. 70.</ref> Expelled from her childhood church, she affiliated with the [[Unitarian Universalist Association|Unitarian church]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/lucy-stone|title=Lucy Stone|author=Susan Ritchie|date=February 17, 2014|publisher=Harvard Square Library|access-date=March 5, 2017}}</ref>

=== Issues of divorce ===

Before her own marriage, Stone felt that women should be allowed to divorce drunken husbands, to formally end a "loveless marriage" so that "a true love may grow up in the soul of the injured one from the full enjoyment of which no legal bond had a right to keep her.<ref name=Kerr156>Kerr, 1992, p. 156.</ref> Whatever is pure and holy, not only has a right to be, but it has a right, also, to be recognized, and further, I think it has no right not to be recognized."<ref name=Hays169>Hays, 1961, p. 169.</ref> Stone's friends often felt differently about the issue; "Nettee" Brown wrote to Stone, in 1853, that she was not ready to accept the idea, even if both parties wanted divorce.<ref name=Hays169 /> Stanton was less inclined to clerical orthodoxy; she was very much in favor of giving women the right to divorce,<ref>Hays, 1961, p. 168.</ref> eventually coming to the view that the reform of marriage laws was more important than women's voting rights.<ref name=Kerr156 />

In the process of planning for women's rights conventions, Stone worked against Stanton to remove from any proposed platform the formal advocacy of divorce. Stone wished to keep the subject separate, to prevent the appearance of moral laxity.<ref name=Kerr72>Kerr, 1992, p. 72.</ref> She pushed "for the right of woman to the control of her own person as a moral, intelligent, accountable being."<ref name=Kerr72 /> Other rights were certain to fall into place, after women were given control of their own bodies. Years later, Stone's position on divorce would change.

=== Differences with Douglass ===
In 1853, Stone drew large audiences with a lecture tour through several southern states. Former slave [[Frederick Douglass]] rebuked her in his abolitionist newspaper, accusing her of achieving success by putting her anti-slavery principles aside and speaking only of women's rights.<ref>Kerr, 1992, pp. 73–74.</ref> Douglass, later, found Stone at fault for speaking at a whites-only Philadelphia lecture hall, but Stone insisted that she had replaced her planned speech that day with an appeal to the audience to boycott the facility. It took years, before the two reconciled.<ref>Kerr, 1992, pp. 75–76.</ref>

=== 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>