Nationality American Cousins Kitty Barry Role Journalist | Name Alice Blackwell Uncles Samuel Charles Blackwell | |
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Movement FeminismRadical socialism Parents Lucy Stone, Henry Browne Blackwell Books Lucy Stone, Growing up in Boston's Gilded Age, Armenian poems - rendered, The Little Grandmother of the Ru, The Little Grandmother of the Ru Similar People Henry Browne Blackwell, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, Samuel Charles Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw | ||
Sitting in One Place: Alice Stone Blackwell and Tax Resistance
Alice Stone Blackwell (September 14, 1857 – March 15, 1950) was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, radical socialist, and human rights advocate.
Contents
- Sitting in One Place Alice Stone Blackwell and Tax Resistance
- Early life and education
- Career
- Humanitarianism
- Publications
- References
Early life and education
Blackwell was born in East Orange, New Jersey to Henry Browne Blackwell and Lucy Stone, both of whom were suffrage leaders and helped establish the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). She was also the niece of Elizabeth Blackwell, America's first female physician. Her mother introduced Susan B Anthony to the women's rights movement as well as being the first woman to earn a college degree in Massachusetts, first to keep her maiden name, and the first to speak about women's rights full-time.
Alice was educated at the Harris Grammar School in Dorchester, the Chauncy School in Boston and Abbot Academy in Andover. She attended Boston University, where she was president of her class, and graduated in 1881, at age 24. She belonged to Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Career
Alice is well known for her work towards women's rights. At first resisting the cause of her mother and father, she later became a prominent reformer. After graduating from Boston University, Alice began working for the Woman's Journal, the paper started by her parents. By 1884, her name was alongside her parents on the paper's masthead. After her mother's death in 1893, Alice assumed almost sole editing responsibility of the paper.
In 1890, she helped reconcile the American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman Suffrage Association, two competing organizations in the women's suffrage movement, into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The movement had become split in 1869 over disputes over the degree to which women's suffrage should be tied to African-American male suffrage. This split created the AWSA, which her parents helped organize, and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. From 1890 to 1908, Alice Stone Blackwell was NAWSA's recording secretary and in 1909 and 1910 one of the national auditors. She was prominent in Woman's Christian Temperance Union activities. In 1903, she reorganized the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in Boston.
She was also president of the New England and Massachusetts Woman Suffrage associations and honorary president of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters.
In later life, Alice went blind. She died March 15, 1950 at the age of ninety-two.
Her home in Uphams Corner is a site on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
Humanitarianism
Alice Stone Blackwell was also involved in humanitarian acts outside of the United States. In the 1890s, she traveled to Armenia, where she became passionately involved in the Armenian refugee community. She sold some of her possessions, particularly the oriental rugs from her house on Pope's Hill in Dorchester, to benefit the Armenians and feed their children, and she also provided assistance to adults looking for jobs. This is also when she discovered her interest in international literature. She translated many of the country's works into English in Armenian Poems (1896). She would continue translating literature into English, including works of Hungarian, Yiddish, Mexican, French, Italian, and Russian poetry.