LETTER: Autograph letter signed, to Mrs. Cheney, September 17, 1872.
Stone, Lucy. Autograph letter signed, “Lucy Stone,” to Mrs. [Ednah Dow] Cheney, September 17, 1872, one leaf of “Office of The Woman’s Journal” letterhead, with their Boston address of No. 3 Tremont Place. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
A letter revealing the construction of an important Republican women’s event, organized by Lucy Stone from the ground up.
My dear Mrs. Cheney
There is to be a meeting in Tremont Temple on Wednesday evening Sept. 25th of Republican women and their friends congratulating and ratifying the good action of the Republicans at Worcester.
We want the platform covered with women whose presence will give weight and dignity to the occasion.
Will you be there? We want you very much, with (or without) a short speech. Can you bring any other ladies whose presence would help.
Very truly yours
Lucy Stone
I hope Mrs. Cheney will allow me to advertise here as one of the speakers. Please reply by return mail.
Ednah Dow Cheney (1824-1904), writer and reformer, grew up in a household that believed in the antislavery cause and women’s rights, but she attributed her intellectual awakening to the ferment created by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and other Transcendentalists during the 1840s. Foremost, in Miss Cheney’s view, were Margaret Fuller whose “conversations” she attended; she later remarked: “I absorbed her life and thoughts, and to this day I am astonished to find how large a part of ‘what I am when I am most myself’ I have derived from her.”
Like many other Boston reformers, Cheney was deeply involved in the abolitionist movement yet her first reform effort was the establishment (with others) of a school of design for women in 1851. With the end of the Civil War, women’s rights became her abiding, if not sole, occupation. She was a founder and financial backer of the New England Women’s Club in 1868, worked to gain women access to the Boston School Committee (1863) and the right of women to vote in the election of school board members (1879). With Abby May she organized the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association and served as president 1888-1901. A key member of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (vice president 1870-1892) and the New England Woman Suffrage Association (executive committee member), she wrote many of the leaflets distributed during the fight for municipal suffrage; Alice Stone Blackwell described them as the best written on the subject (NAW).
(#6006)
Print Inquire