The Game of the Name: What the Brave Lucy Stone Bequeathed to Hillary Rodham

The Washington Post; Washington, D.C.; Feb. 7, 1993
By Linda R. Monk

Lucy Stone wouldn’t have believed it. Or maybe she would. Almost 140 years after she outraged a nation - years in which women have won the vote, fairer pay and greater autonomy over their own bodies - many Americans are still unsettled when a prominent woman retains some version of her own surname after marriage.

According to the polls, a majority believes the new first lady should be known as Hillary Clinton, not her preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine the uproar if she used plain Hillary Rodham, as she did before changing to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1980. Somehow it’s okay if the first lady openly contributes to national public policy, but not okay if she does so using both her own and her husband’s surnames.

Lucy Stone would understand the first lady’s predicament. In 1855, she became the center of a national storm for keeping her surname upon marriage.

Born in Massachusetts in 1818 and educated at Oberlin College, Lucy Stone lectured widely against slavery and on behalf of women’s suffrage, helped organize the first national women’s rights convention and the American Woman Suffrage Association and published the influential Woman’s Journal. Her most famous speech was given in response to a charge that the women’s movement was “that of a few disappointed women.” Stone replied, in part:

“From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after the sources of knowledge, I was reproved with `It isn’t fit for you; it doesn’t belong to women.’ . . . I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being - every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress and the housekeeper. 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.”

Hoping to end Stone’s career in public speaking, the Boston Post published a plea for the heroic man “who with a wedding kiss shuts up/ The mouth of Lucy Stone.”
Stone in fact avoided marriage for years, rejecting several proposals. But Henry Blackwell, an abolitionist and reformer, persisted in his courtship. Blackwell, whose sister Elizabeth was the first American woman awarded an MD degree, ardently supported equal rights for women. “Their happiness is my happiness, their misery, my misery,” he once said. “The interests of the sexes are inseparably connected, and in the elevation of the one lies the salvation of the other.”

Henry Blackwell finally convinced Lucy Stone that she would not have to sacrifice her life’s work for marriage and that together they would be a formidable force on behalf of equal rights for women. But in the 1850s, marriage laws in most states followed the common-law maxim that “man and wife are one, and that one is the husband.” Blackwell sought to change that. He wrote to Lucy before their wedding: “I want to make a protest, distinct and emphatic, against the laws of marriage. I wish, as a husband, to renounce all the privileges which the law confers upon me . . . .”

When Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were married on May 1, 1855, they issued a formal protest, which was widely publicized. It rejected marriage laws that “refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.” It specifically denounced laws giving the husband “custody of the wife’s person,” exclusive control of their children, sole ownership of her personal property, sole use of her real estate and the absolute right “to the product of her industry.” They rejected laws favoring widowers over widows in division of estates. Finally, they protested “the whole system by which `the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage’ ” and declared that “marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law.”

Reaction to their protest was heated. Some opponents charged that the marriage itself was illegal. One newspaper scathingly commented: “We understand that Mr. Blackwell, who last fall assaulted a Southern lady and stole her slave, has lately married Miss Lucy Stone. Justice, though sometimes tardy, never fails to overtake her victim.”

But the most controversial aspect of Lucy Stone’s marriage to Henry Blackwell was her decision to keep her surname, which she saw as a symbol of a woman’s individuality. Stone sought the advice of several lawyers, including a future chief justice of the United States, Salmon P. Chase. All advised her that no law required a wife to take her husband’s name; it was merely a matter of custom.

So Lucy Stone decided to be known as Mrs. Stone, not Mrs. Blackwell, to the applause of the women’s rights movement. One leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, compared the traditional practice to compelling a slave to take the name of his master. “Proper self- respect demands that every woman may have some name by which she may be known from the cradle to the grave,” she said.

Ironically, keeping her surname deprived Lucy Stone of the one thing she had fought hardest for: the right to vote. In 1879, Massachusetts gave suffrage to women in school board elections if they paid a $2 tax and made a sworn statement of their taxable property. But the local registrar refused to place Lucy Stone’s name on the voting list except as Mrs. Blackwell, even though her name appeared on the assessor’s roll as Lucy Stone. On appeal, the Board of Registrars refused to accept “Lucy Stone, wife of Henry B. Blackwell,” the signature she used on legal documents. Stone chose not to vote rather than give in.

The Boston Post, which after 20 years had changed its opinion of Stone, nonetheless upheld the board’s decision: “We yield to no one in our respect for the lady who has labored with so much devotion, energy, intelligence and sincere conviction to break down the barriers which she has believed kept her sex from its full rights and privileges. {But} we hope there will be no change in the present custom by which the wife takes the name of her husband. Were this convenient arrangement to cease, almost endless family complications would ensue.”

Lucy Stone’s legacy lives on in surprising ways. In 1921, feminist and writer Jane Grant - married to the New Yorker’s Harold Ross - co- founded the Lucy Stone League, which urged women to retain their identities by using their own surnames and “Miss.” In 1951, Grant revived the Lucy Stone League and expanded its purpose to include activities “to instruct in, safeguard and extend the civil and social rights of women.” Grant died in 1972, but in 1981 her second husband bequeathed $3.5 million to the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society.

Today in 1993, the centennial of Lucy Stone’s death, women still find it difficult to keep their given names upon marriage - even though taking their husbands’ names means changing Social Security cards, drivers’ licenses and credit cards. And when my husband and I filed our first joint tax return, we discovered that his last name had been changed to mine because the IRS automatically gives both spouses the surname listed second. It took more than six months before our refund was properly processed.

All this shows that, Shakespeare notwithstanding, there is much in a name. In an age when women are still fighting to get equal pay for equal work and to have exclusive control over our own bodies, can’t we at least keep our names?

Not, of course, that doing so will be easy. I’m still trying to convince my Mississippi grandmother not to address my Christmas card to “Mrs. [husband’s name].” So hang on, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The least we owe women like Lucy Stone is our names.