LETTER: Typed letter signed, to "My Dear Friend."
Blackwell, Alice Stone. Typed Letter Signed, Boston MA, 4 October 1919. 1 page, 8%" x 11”.
"IT IS A JOY TO KNOW THAT NATION-WIDE SUFFRAGE IS SO NEAR”
The suffragist and reformer Alice Stone Blackwell was the child of woman suffrage leader Lucy Stone and reformer Henry Blackwell, and she literally grew up in the suffrage movement. Blackwell formally joined the cause after her graduation from Boston University in 1881, writing on suffrage for the Woman's Journal, founded by her mother, and other publications and serving for nearly two decades as the recording secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Meanwhile, Blackwell also gave her support to other humanitarian and reform causes, both in the U.S. and abroad, such as Armenian refugees, the NAACP, the Anti-Vivisection Society, and the American Peace Society.
In this warm letter, written just after Blackwell's sixty-second birthday, she speaks of her own and her parents' contribution to the woman suffrage cause which was then on the verge of success. “Accept my hearty thanks for your very kind birthday remembrance," Blackwell declares. "The suffragists gave me a delightful birthday party, and there were hundreds of congratulatory letters.
"It is a joy to know that nation-wide suffrage is so near, and also to realize that so much warm good-will is felt towards me for my share in the long fight, and so much gratitude to my dear father and mother for their much greater share. If I can only make their biography worthy of them, it will be a work of real interest and inspiration.
"The Boston Suffrage Association is going to have all the birthday letters bound," she notes, "and will present me with the volume, so that it will be easy for me to turn back to them at any time and renew the pleasure that they have given me." She has signed in full, "Alice Stone Blackwell."
The Nineteenth Amendment had finally passed Congress earlier in 1919, and by the date of this letter, some seventeen states had ratified it. Final ratification would come the following August.
Blackwell lived another three decades after this, and for much of that time, she remained an activist. She became an avowed socialist in the wake of government actions taken during the post-World War I “Red Scare" and was a strong supporter of Sacco and Vanzetti. Meanwhile, she continued work on the biography of her parents that she mentions in this letter, completing it in 1930.
The letter is in very good condition.
Print Inquire
