Lucy Stone Autograph Letter Signed Discussing Suffrage Meetings and Collective Female Political Action, 1885

Lucy Stone

Manuscripts & Autographs

Stone, Lucy. Autograph Letter Signed to Mrs. Pitman, dated January 6, 1885, documents active organizational labor within the American woman suffrage movement during the final decade before national consolidation. Written from Dorchester at a moment when suffrage leadership was negotiating strategy and institutional direction, the letter records Stone’s engagement with local meetings, financial management, and volunteer leadership. A leading abolitionist turned suffragist, Stone served as a central figure in the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which pursued state-by-state enfranchisement and maintained a mixed-gender leadership structure distinct from the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Her remark, “Only think! what might be done if others who are well felt the same spirit to, do what they could,” articulates the movement’s reliance on voluntary female labor and collective moral commitment. The letter situates suffrage work within networks of women’s social obligation, health, and mutual aid, demonstrating how political organizing was embedded in personal correspondence and domestic relationships.

Stone, Lucy. Autograph Letter Signed. Dorchester, January 6, 1885. 1 page on folded quarto sheet. In the letter, Stone expresses concern for Mrs. Pitman’s mother’s health while discussing suffrage meetings and related expenses. She notes uncertainty about whether collections covered costs, writing that she “did not expect she would pay Mrs. Cloflin,” and acknowledges the generosity of assuming responsibility for meetings: “It was very good of her to take charge of the meetings.” The letter closes with personal affection, “With kind love to your Mother and to you. Yours truly Lucy Stone.” The integration of domestic concern, financial oversight, and exhortation toward civic engagement underscores the gendered infrastructure of nineteenth-century reform activism.

Written five years before the 1890 merger of the AWSA and NWSA into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the letter belongs to the period of strategic rapprochement between rival suffrage factions. Stone had advocated cooperation with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, leading to formal unification; though in declining health by 1890, she was elected chair of the executive committee of the newly formed NAWSA. This 1885 letter reflects the sustained local organizing that made such national consolidation possible and illustrates the moral vocabulary that animated suffrage activism in the post-Reconstruction era. Light handling wear with minor folds consistent with mailing; ink strong and legible; paper clean with no significant loss; overall very good plus condition. A substantive manuscript witness to Lucy Stone’s leadership and to the everyday administrative labor underpinning the late nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement.

Item #16017

Price: $1,480.00