Alice Stone Blackwell was an American suffragist and human rights advocate. She also was the editor of "Woman's Journal. "
Background
Alice Blackwell was born on September 14, 1857, in Orange, New Jersey, United States, the only child of Henry Browne Blackwell and Lucy Stone. Her father, who at various times sold hardware, speculated in real estate, and tried to raise sugar beets in Maine, was sympathetic to a wide range of reforms before he met and married Lucy Stone, the Oberlin-educated suffrage leader. One of Blackwell's aunts, Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first American woman to graduate from medical school; another, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first regularly ordained woman minister in the United States. As a child, Alice Blackwell remembered hating the incessant talk of woman's rights in her home, but by the time she was twelve she was already "bristling up like a hen in defense of her chickens" when anyone dared question the justice of her family's cause.
Education
Alice attended Chauncy Hall School in Boston and graduated from Boston University, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1881.
Career
After graduation Blackwell joined her parents as an editor of the Woman's Journal, a magazine Lucy Stone had founded to serve as the official organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association. The rival National Association, which published for a brief time its own periodical, Revolution, was dominated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, women who were more than willing to offend polite sensibilities for the sake of feminist principles. Lucy Stone was not. And it was only through the efforts of her daughter, Alice, that she was finally persuaded in 1890 to close ranks with those outspoken suffragists who had exposed themselves to the charge of advocating free love.
Many years later, Jane Addams suggested that Blackwell's equanimity in the face of a second split in the suffrage movement between militants and conservatives before World War I grew out of her historical perspective. This is not to say that she never took sides. In her biography of her mother, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights (1930), for example, Blackwell accused Stanton of having been willing to sacrifice woman's best interests in order to get even with orthodox clergymen. More broadminded than her mother, she still wasted no sympathy on those feminists who refused to concentrate on legal reforms.
For thirty-five years Alice Blackwell edited the Woman's Journal, gathering copy, reading proof, and writing long arguments in favor of equal rights. Beginning in 1887 she also edited the Woman's Column, a bulletin of suffrage news sent out to newspapers across the country. She produced several volumes of poetry translated from Spanish, Armenian, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Russian, in some cases by herself, more often by friends whose prose versions of the original poems she put into verse. In addition to her biography of her mother, she edited a life of Catherine Breshkovsky, The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution (1917). It was in these translations and tributes that she was able to express her deepest feelings of outrage and sympathy for the oppressed; her writings in behalf of contemporary women were less tender and more trenchant.
After retiring from the Woman's Journal shortly before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Blackwell reported that her main recreation was writing letters to other editors in support of unpopular causes. Like many prominent suffragists, Blackwell had hoped that women voters would outlaw drink, child labor, and war, and was disturbed to find that they were just as bellicose, as unresponsive to human need, and as vulnerable to the appeal of party politics as men. She felt that it was generally a misfortune when young mothers went to work: like her own mother, she was a staunch believer in home, maternal duty, and monogamy. Yet she had little patience with those housebound women who lacked the "gumption" to organize against sex-based discrimination, or any other infringement of civil liberties. Blackwell died of arteriosclerotic heart disease at the age of ninety-two in Cambridge, Massachussets. Her mother had been the first New England resident to be cremated, and in this as in so many other things she followed the family tradition. Her ashes were placed in the Lower Columbarium at Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston. Alice Blackwell's final self-abnegating wish was that her biography of her mother be placed in the library of every woman's college, and that her parents' papers be indexed for future historians.
Politics
A socialist but never a party member, Blackwell backed Robert M. La Follette for president in 1924, espoused the cause of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and protested everything from President Franklin Roosevelt's deficit spending to the trend toward longer skirts after World War II.
Membership
Blackwell was active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Women's Trade Union League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Anti-Vivisection League, the American Peace Society, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, and the Friends of Russian Freedom.
Personality
Blackwell's seriousness and intensity led her mother to hope that she would be able to understand jokes in the next world. Her father was famous for his nimble wit, and although Blackwell inherited her father's cleverness, she could never accept his philosophy of life. Shortly after her college graduation he confided to her that nothing was worth doing except as a diversion. Unable to share the humorless singlemindedness that marked her mother's lifelong crusade and yet shocked by her father's avowed opportunism, Blackwell cultivated a cutting intelligence in the woman's cause and expressed her strongest humanitarian feelings in behalf of others.