Blackwell, Alice Stone

Alice Stone Blackwell, (born Sept. 14, 1857, Orange, N.J., U.S.—died March 15, 1950, Cambridge, Mass.), suffragist and editor of the leading American women’s rights newspaper.

Alice Stone Blackwell was the daughter of Lucy Stone and of Henry B. Blackwell, who in turn was the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell and brother-in-law of Antoinette Brown Blackwell. Her childhood in Orange, New Jersey, and later in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was dominated by the family’s involvement in the feminist movement. She graduated with honours from Boston University in 1881 and immediately joined the editorial staff of the Woman’s Journal, organ of her mother’s American Woman Suffrage Association. While becoming the dominant force on the journal, she helped urge her mother to effect a reconciliation with the radical wing of the suffrage movement, and, on the merging of the American with Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association into the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, she became the organization’s recording secretary, a post she held until 1918. She remained chief editor of the Woman’s Journal until 1917, and during 1887–1905 she edited and distributed the “Woman’s Column,” a periodical collection of suffrage news articles, to newspapers across the country.

About the turn of the century Blackwell became interested in various other causes, especially those of various oppressed peoples. She translated and published several volumes of verse from such groups, notably Armenian Poems (1896 and 1916), Songs of Russia (1906), Songs of Grief and Gladness (1908; from Yiddish), and Some Spanish-American Poets (1929), and she wrote against czarist oppression in The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution—Catherine Breshkovsky’s Own Story (1917). Blackwell was also active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Peace Society, and the Massachusetts League of Women Voters, of which she was a founder. She supported Senator Robert M. La Follette’s Progressive Party campaign in 1924, demonstrated for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and remained to the end of her life one of the last exponents of 19th-century-style New England radicalism. In 1930 she published a biography of her mother, Lucy Stone, Pioneer in Women’s Rights.