45 Boutwell Street, Dorchester
The first woman from Massachusetts to receive a college degree, Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was a leading abolitionist and a pioneer in the struggle for gender equality. She played a key role in the first National Women’s Rights Convention (which took place in 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts), and helped to set up the anti-slavery Woman’s National Loyal League. Along with her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, she also founded the Women’s Journal, a national weekly newspaper based in Boston, in 1870.
It was that same year when the couple, along with their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (who would become a prominent feminist, suffragette, and humanitarian), moved to the 17-room house on Boutwell Street. Although the house was demolished in 1971, two pillars at the end of the driveway remain from Lucy Stone’s home, one of them adorned with a plaque honoring her.
Lucy Stone’s ashes are interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. There is a statue of her (along with ones of Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams) at the Boston Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue. The first U.S. woman to retain her name after marriage, she once famously said that “A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost.”
Getting there:
Red Line to Ashmont Station. Exit to Dorchester Avenue and go right (north) until Ashmont Street (about 200 feet). Take a right and continue on Ashmont past Adams Street. Take a left on Train Street, and take the third right onto Boutwell. Number 45 is on the left. (0.9 miles, about an 18-minute walk.) A bus from Fields Corner Station also passes nearby.
To learn more:
“Lucy Stone, 1818-1893,” Dorchester Atheneum website.
Sally G. McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
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