She could think of no satisfactory answers. At last, gathering up her courage, she asked her father to assist her to go to college like her brothers. Mr. Stone was both astonished and angry. He told Lucy that it was enough for her to learn how to read and cipher and write, as her mother did. But Lucy persisted in her determination to gain an education. She earned a little money by picking berries and gathering chestnuts, and with it she bought some books. Her mother could not help her, for, though she worked very hard, she had not a penny to bless herself with. Her husband took all that came in through their joint labors, and spent it as he thought best.
When Lucy had learned enough to fit her for teaching, she got a position in a district school at a salary of one dollar per week. A little later she was earning sixteen dollars a month, and when her brother, who received thirty dollars a month for teaching, became ill, Lucy took his place, receiving sixteen dollars for exactly the same work. The committee said that sixteen dollars was enough for a woman.
Lucy Stone studied for a while at Mt. Holyoke Seminary under Mary Lyon, and also at Wilbraham Academy, and later at Oberlin College, Ohio, which was then the only college in the country willing to admit women,—all the while paying her own tuition fees by means of teaching and doing housework in boarding houses.
When the question of slavery came into prominence, Lucy Stone quickly took her position as a friend of the slave. She taught in a school for colored people, which was established at Oberlin, and her first public speech was made in their behalf. Though severely criticized for her public speaking and obliged to bear unpleasant comment because of it, she never swerved from her idea of what she believed to be right.
Soon she was engaged by the Anti-Slavery Society, in which William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were officers, to lecture for their cause, and while doing so, traveled over the greater part of the United States, speaking both for woman suffrage and for the abolition of slavery.
But the rights of woman stood first in the heart of Lucy Stone. As a child, she had seen her mother overruled by a stern husband, who never allowed her an opinion contrary to his will, nor a penny to use without his sanction.
It may have been because of this early object lesson that Lucy Stone made up her mind never to marry; or because she thought that she could carry on her work for the advancement of women better by being entirely free. Nevertheless, she did consent to marry Mr. Henry B. Blackwell, a merchant of Cincinnati, Ohio, who overcame her objections by sharing all her views on suffrage and slavery, and they were married by Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, May 1, 1855.
Before their marriage Mr. Blackwell and Lucy signed a protest which read:
We believe that personal independence and equal human rights can never be forfeited except for crime; that marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership and so recognized by law.