Alice Stone Blackwell
(born Sept. 14, 1857,
Orange
, N.J., U.S.?died March 15, 1950,
Cambridge
, Mass.) was a
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
.