Alice Stone Blackwell

1857-1950

Alice Stone Blackwell was the only daughter of suffrage leader, Lucy Stone Blackwell and Henry Browne Blackwell. Blackwell's family was extremely active in the women's rights movement. Her aunt Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree from an American school and her sister-in-law, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first female minister ordained in the United States.

In 1885, after graduating from Boston University she worked for her parents' newspaper and in 1887 became editor of the Women's Column, a national suffrage bulletin. She served as the editor of the Woman's Journal, which was the most influential women's rights newspaper in America. Largely due to her efforts, Susan B. Anthony's organization merged with her mother's and she became the new association's recording secretary, a position she held for almost 20 years.

Blackwell viewed women's rights as part of and connected to many other social justice causes and movements. She became a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the American Peace Society, the Anti-Vivisection Society, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Massachusetts Total Abstinence League, the Free Trade Union, the Woman's Trade Union League, and the Committee Against Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Source: Biographies Plus, American Reformers (1985)