Lucy Stone

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) was an abolitionist, suffragist, and one of the most electrifying public speakers in 19th-century America. She grew up on a Massachusetts farm, watched her brothers get sent to college while she was told to stay home, and decided that was not going to work for her. She taught school, saved her own money, and enrolled at Oberlin College — graduating at 29 as the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree.

She then chose public lecturing as her career — a wildly unconventional choice for a woman at the time. Crowds of hundreds, sometimes thousands, came to hear her speak on abolition and women's rights. The reception wasn't always warm. She was pelted with rotten vegetables, doused with icy water through a stage window, and regularly shouted down by angry mobs. Lucy Stone pulled her shawl tighter and kept talking. Every. Single. Time.

When someone at an anti-slavery meeting questioned why she kept bringing up women's rights, Lucy replied simply: "I was a woman before I was an abolitionist." She went on to co-found the American Woman Suffrage Association, launch the Woman's Journal newspaper, and organize the first national women's rights convention — all while out-earning most of the male lecturers around her.