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By Root 2018 0

had pursued her from Cincinnati to Massachusetts (“She was born locomotive,” he complained), and vowed to “repudiate the supremacy of either woman or man in marriage,” and wrote her: “I met you at Niagara and sat at your feet by the whirlpool looking down into the dark waters with a passionate and unshared and unsatisfied yearning in my heart that you will never know, nor understand,” and made a public speech in favor of women’s rights; even after she admitted that she loved him, and wrote “You can scarcely tell me anything I do not know about the emptiness of a single life,” she suffered blinding migraine headaches over the decision to marry him.

At their wedding, the minister Thomas Higginson reported that “the heroic Lucy cried like any village bride.” The minister also said: “I never perform the marriage ceremony without a renewed sense of the iniquity of a system by which man and wife are one, and that one is the husband.” And he sent to the newspapers, for other couples to copy, the pact which Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell joined hands to make, before their wedding vows:

While we acknowledge our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife…we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.7

Lucy Stone, her friend, the pretty Reverend Antoinette Brown (who later married Henry’s brother), Margaret Fuller, Angelina Grimké, Abby Kelley Foster—all resisted early marriage, and did not, in fact, marry until in their battle against slavery and for women’s rights they had begun to find an identity as women unknown to their mothers. Some, like Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Blackwell, never married; Lucy Stone kept her own name in more than symbolic fear that to become a wife was to die as a person. The concept known as “femme couverte” (covered woman), written into the law, suspended the “very being or legal existence of a woman” upon marriage. “To a married woman, her new self is her superior, her companion, her master.”

If it is true that the feminists were “disappointed women,” as their enemies said even then, it was because almost all women living under such conditions had reason to be disappointed. In one of the most moving speeches of her life, Lucy Stone said in 1855:

From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after sources of knowledge, I was reproved with “It isn’t fit for you; it doesn’t belong to women”…In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.8

In her own lifetime, Lucy Stone saw the laws of almost every state radically changed in regard to women, high schools opened to them and two-thirds of the colleges in the United States. Her husband and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, devoted their lives, after her death in 1893, to the unfinished battle for woman’s vote. By the end of her passionate journey, she could say she was glad to have been born a woman. She wrote her daughter the day before her seventieth birthday:

I trust my Mother sees and knows how glad I am to have been born, and at a time when there was so much that needed help at which I could lend a hand. Dear Old Mother! She had a hard life, and was sorry she had another girl to share and bear the hard life of a woman…. But I am wholly glad that I came.9

In certain men, at certain times in history, the passion for freedom has been as strong or stronger than the familiar passions of sexual love. That this was so, for many of those women who fought to free women, seems to be a fact, no matter how the strength of that other passion is explained. Despite the frowns and jeers of most of their husbands and