Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 19, 1893) is a prominent American abolitionist and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women.

In 1847, Stone is the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree.

She speaks out for women's rights and against slavery at a time when women are discouraged and prevented from public speaking.

Stone is the first recorded American woman to retain her own last name after marriage.

Stone's organizational activities for the cause of women's rights yields tangible gains in the difficult political environment of the 19th century.

Stone helps initiate the first National Women's Rights Convention and she supports and sustains it annually along with a number of other local, state and regional activist conventions.

Stone speaks in front of a number of legislative bodies to promote laws giving more rights to women.

She assists in establishing the Woman's National Loyal League to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment and thereby abolish slavery, after which she helps form the largest group of like-minded women's rights reformers, the politically moderate American Woman Suffrage Association, which works for decades at the state level in favor of women's right to vote.

Stone writes extensively about a wide range of women's rights, publishing and distributing speeches by herself and others, and convention proceedings.

In the long-running and influential Woman's Journal, a weekly periodical that she establishes and promotes, Stone airs both her own and differing views about women's rights.

Called "the orator" and "the morning star of the woman's rights movement", Stone delivers a speech that sparks Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's suffrage.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes that "Lucy Stone was the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question."

(Blackwell, Alice Stone.

Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights.

Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001, p.

94.)

Together, Anthony, Stanton, and Stone have been called the 19th century "triumvirate" of women's suffrage and feminism.

(Library of Congress.

American Memory.

American Women, Manuscript Division.

Women's Suffrage: The Early Leaders.

Retrieved on November 26, 2012.)