Woman's Rights Documents (15), compiled by Lucy Stone.
Woman’s Rights Documents, 1850-1887
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Compiled by Lucy Stone
[Suffrage]. Stone, Lucy, compiler. Woman’s Rights Documents 1850-1887 [1890].
8vo.; typescript and manuscript title page; fifteen discrete pamphlets and printed documents bound together (broadsides are tipped-in), several with original wrappers; discreet archival repair to several leaves; original marbled boards, three-quarter-calf; re-backed, retaining the original spine label stamped “WOMAN’S RIGHTS DOCUMENTS, 1850-87”; post-1887 documents tipped-in. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
Lucy Stone compiled this selection of 15 significant reports, tracts, and circulars (including one in duplicate), to document landmark events in the early history of woman’s rights in the United States.
Bound in at front is table of contents, partly typed, and partly in Stone’s autograph (based upon study of extensive holdings of Stone letters and manuscripts in the Blackwell family Papers at the Library of Congress. “Lucy Stone’s Copy” of a similar volume is at the Library of Congress, with a table of contents virtually identical to that found in the present volume, each with identical type and typewriter ink, manuscript additions in the same hand and ink, and are on paper with identical watermark. (The volume at the Library of Congress may be viewed via the internet - Library of Congress, American Memory, NPWB390.TMP; table of contents at page 1.) Similar bound gatherings are found at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and at Houghton Library at Harvard (“Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s copy, with ms. index in his hand”).
In 1890, Lucy Stone wrote to Susan B. Anthony, inviting Anthony to participate in a convention to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first national woman’s rights convention. Stone mentions that a “sheaf” of publications accumulated over the years will be distributed at the convention (the original letter is in the Blackwell Family Papers at the Library of Congress ). “Following the [1850 Worcester] convention, Stone paid to have the proceedings printed, as she would do for each of the six subsequent national conventions. She sold the booklets as woman’s rights tracts at subsequent conventions and at her lectures” (Lucy Stone, Speaking Out for Equality, by Kerr, p. 61). Frequently, Stone subsidized the costs of publication with income from speaking engagements. For example, in 1853,
[Stone’s] southern tour was highly profitable; four lectures in St. Louis netted $700; three meetings at Louisville cleared $600. Indeed, in this period Stone was earning between $500 and $1000 per week. A part of her earnings paid for printing speeches and convention proceedings as tracts. Subsidized in this way, the tracts could be ‘circulated very cheap, and hence, very far.’ (Ibid, p. 74)
Stone’s role as publisher of numerous reports, tracts, and circulars, individually, and later, through her newspaper The Woman’s Journal (which often served as a clearing house for works published by others), may account for her possession of, or access to such a “sheaf” as late as 1890.
Stone’s table of contents, with the title and first five publications with publication dates in typescript, includes an additional five in her autograph. It reads as follows:
Early Woman’s Rights Documents
Worcester, Massachusetts 1850
Cleveland, Ohio 1853
Wendell Phillips 1859
Lucy Stone before the New Jersey Legislature 1867
Woman’s Rights Almanac 1858
Mrs. Stanton before the New York Legislature 1854
Mrs. Stanton before the Constitutional Conven-
tion of New York 1867
Constitution of the American Woman Suffrage
Association 1869
Trial of Susan B. Anthony on a charge of illegal
voting 1874
Women’s Vote in Kansas 1887
The table of contents is listed neither in chronological order, nor strictly in the order in which the publications appear in this binding. Of the ten titles li
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