By Peter F. Stevens
Reporter Staff

From her perch - actually, mansion - on Pope's Hill, a woman's voice pealed far beyond Dorchester. That suffragette's voice belonged to Lucy Stone, and her impact across America proved immense.

Dorchester has produced, throughout the centuries, a number of men and women who all found their places both on the local and national scene. By the time Lucy Stone arrived in town around 1870, she was one of America's most famous and accomplished women. The newest Pope's Hill resident had garnered fame - infamy, to men who believed a woman belonged in the home, period - as one of the nation's foremost suffragettes. As her Dorchester neighbors soon learned, the short, "rosy-cheeked" activist did the unthinkable in Victorian society by deciding to retain her maiden name rather than take that of her husband.

The suffragette of Pope's Hill was born near West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1818, the eighth of nine children. She was raised in a traditional home of the era, her wealthy father, Francis Stone, a farmer and tanner, ruling the proverbial roost. As historian Louis Filler writes, "Her mother, Hannah, accepted his [Francis's] view that a husband ruled his family by divine right."

From the start, Lucy resented females' secondary status, early in her life "expressing indignation at the preference shown an older brother despite the fact that she could learn and run faster than he." She agonized at her mother's grueling household regimen and at age 12 began getting up early to help Hannah do the family's mountain of laundry before she headed to school.

An outstanding student, Stone was frustrated by the lack of upper-level education for young women and by her father's ridicule of her desire to study such subjects as Greek and Hebrew. At the age of 16, she turned to one of the few careers open to women - teaching - and took a post at a district school. Since her father, who sent her brothers to college, refused to do the same for her at such schools as the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she resolved to pay her own way.

In 1843, having saved a little of her teacher's wages, she began studies at Oberlin College, in Ohio, paying her living expenses through teaching and domestic labor wrapped around her classes. Her father finally decided to help after she had put in two years at Oberlin, and "came to her aid." She graduated in 1847, with a reputation as "a dangerous radical…an ardent abolitionist … uncompromising on the question of women's rights."

Stone headed right back to Massachusetts, where she began lecturing against slavery and for women's suffrage. "Possessed of rare eloquence and a singularly beautiful voice," Stone was lauded as "the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question." Soon she toured the nation, making the huge sum of $7,000 in three years for her speaking engagements.

Although Lucy Stone had evinced no desire for marriage, "in order that she might give all of her energies to the cause of women's rights," she fell in love with businessman and social activist Henry Brown Blackwell, the brother of landmark physician Elizabeth Blackwell. On May 1, 1855, the couple took their vows, but "drew up a joint protest against the legal disabilities of women." The protest was Lucy Stone's keeping her own name rather than assuming her spouse's. In Stone's view, "a woman's abandonment of her name upon taking a husband was symbolical of her loss of individuality."

Mrs. Lucy Stone and her husband came to Dorchester around 1870, relocating from New Jersey due to their work in organizing the New England Woman Suffrage Association. In several ways, Dorchester was a fitting site for Stone's crusade, as many of the town's women had been active in the Dorchester Female Anti-Slavery Society and as, by 1870, a number of local women were bona fide suffragettes. In Stone, they found a vibrant voice.

On Boutwell Street, "the Lucy Stone House" would eventually become something of a suffragette shrine. The famed resident became a familiar sight to her neighbors, using her Pope's Hill mansion as a headquarters for her causes and for much of the work on the Woman's Journal, which she and her husband edited from 1872 until their deaths. The locals recalled a woman "short of stature but well-built; her cheeks were rosy throughout life; her nose was broad and tip-tilted, adding to her expression of good nature and approachableness."

Unlike the dour, pinched caricature of suffragettes that male writers and cartoonists rendered, the activist of Pope's Hill "possessed unusual personal magnetism …her eyes were bright gray; her mouth, strong and kindly."

Stone's only child, Alice Stone Blackwell, also remembered her mother in a way that many Dorchester residents would have seconded: "The general idea of a woman's rights advocate…was a tall, gaunt, angular woman, with aggressive manners, a masculine air, and a strident voice, scolding at the men. Instead, they found [Lucy Stone] a tiny woman with quiet unassuming manners, a winning presence, and the sweetest voice ever possessed by a public speaker." In Dorchester and beyond, when people heard that voice, they "would at once exclaim unhesitatingly: 'That is Lucy Stone!'"

Stone, pouring over manuscripts in her Pope's Hill study, turned the Woman's Journal into "the voice of the women's movement." However, Stone's "radical" views on the vote for women were not echoed in her conservatism regarding labor unions and strikes. A staunch Republican, Stone mistrusted the labor movement.

Neighbors who regarded Stone as an indefatigable, often controversial dynamo would perhaps have been surprised to learn that "her inner life was far from serene." Henry Blackwell wrote: "At all times of her life, Lucy was subject to occasional severe nervous headaches accompanied by days of extreme depression during which she sought absolute silence."

In 1887, the people of Pope's Hill noticed that her voice was weakening, and she suffered from agonizing rheumatism. She only spoke to small gatherings now.

Stone boarded a train in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, where she would deliver several lectures on women's rights. The speeches would prove her last such public appearances.

Shortly after returning home to Dorchester, Stone was diagnosed as suffering from a stomach tumor. Having "prepared for death with serenity and an unwavering concern for the women's cause," Lucy Stone passed away on October 18, 1893, at the age of 75.

A throng of women and men alike attended her funeral, and, in keeping with a lifetime of milestones, Lucy Stone had arranged in her will for one more: when her body was cremated at Forest Hills Cemetery, the first Massachusetts woman to graduate from college because the first person cremated in New England. Her funeral, a friend remarked, was "like a coronation."

Daughter Alice would remain a prominent figure in the women's rights movement and became the editor of the Woman's Journal. Eventually, she leased her mother's home for $1 to a Boston charitable society "so that children might breathe clean air and enjoy a day in the country" - Pope's Hill.