When she was about twelve years old, she saw her mother's health giving way under the hard work, and quietly made up her mind that, if some one must be killed by overwork, she could be spared better than her mother. A strong and resolute child, she took upon herself as many as she could of her mother's burdens. The school was so far away that the children took their lunches with them and stayed till the afternoon. Now, rising very early on Monday mornings, Lucy would do the washing for the family of ten or twelve persons, hang out the clothes to dry, walk a mile to school, walk back at noon and bring the clothes in, and return for the afternoon session. She toiled early and late. Even her robust health suffered under the strain and she grew weak and pale. In those days paleness was admired. To be pale was to look "delicate." She hid her fatigue from her mother. When so tired that she could hardly stand, she would slip upstairs and lie down for a few minutes; but if she heard her mother's foot on the stair, she would at once spring up and pretend to be busy. At night, after the work was done, she sat up to study.
Things kept happening that strengthened her zeal for equal rights. Mary Lyon, the pioneer of education for women in New England, was raising money for Mount Holyoke Seminary. She spoke before the sewing circle of the West Brookfield church and told of the great lack of educational opportunities for girls. Lucy listened, her heart growing hotter and hotter within her. The sewing circle was working to educate a theological student, and Lucy was making a shirt. She thought how absurd it was for her to be working to help educate a student who could earn more money toward his own education in a week, by teaching, than she could earn toward hers in a month; and she left the shirt unfinished and hoped that no one ever would complete it.
Her father did not like to buy schoolbooks for her. He told her she could use her brother's. Once he refused to get her a necessary textbook, which he thought quite superfluous for a girl. "I went to the woods, with my little bare toes, and gathered chestnuts, and sold them for money enough to buy the book. I felt a prouder sense of triumph than I have ever known since," she said, when telling the story. After that, when she wanted books, she picked berries and nuts and sold them. She joined with other ambitious pupils to secure a college student as teacher for the school, so that they might learn more than the ordinary branches.
The teacher boarded with the Stone family. Once, when he saw Lucy go out into the pasture, catch the horses, bring them in and harness them, he told her that she ought to be a missionary's wife and live at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. This young man awakened in Lucy the first stirrings of the tender passion; but she kept her feelings strictly in her own breast. Her mind was made up never to marry.
She was not beautiful. Her father said, "Luce's face is like a blacksmith's apron; it keeps off the sparks." She told him with indignation that she did not mean to marry, and that she wished her face was even plainer. Yet, in spite of her irregular features, she was very attractive. She had a pretty figure, a beautiful rosy complexion, which remained with her through life, bright gray eyes, good teeth, a profusion of dark brown hair, unusually fine and silky, which was very little gray at her death, much personal magnetism, and a singularly sweet voice. She had also a mind as bright and swift as quicksilver, and that indescribable something which radiates from a character strong, simple and sincere. Many hearts were drawn to her. Until her marriage, which took place late in life, she never lacked wooers.
She joined the Orthodox Congregational Church of West Brookfield while still in her teens. The subject of slavery was agitating the churches more and more. William Lloyd Garrison had started his paper, the Liberator, in Boston, and the Governors of Virginia and Georgia had written to the Mayor of Boston, recommending that it be suppressed. They were surprised to learn that there was no law under which this could be done. The Mayor, who had never heard of the Liberator, sought for Garrison, and told the Governors that he and his paper were not worth notice; that his office was an obscure hole and his only visible auxiliary a Negro boy.
But the subject would not down. Soon after Lucy joined the West Brookfield church, Deacon Henshaw was expelled from it for his antislavery activities. A series of church meetings was held in regard to his case. Lucy did not know that women who were church members could not vote in church meetings, and when the first vote was taken, she held up her hand with the rest. The minister, a tall, dark man, stood watching the vote. He pointed over to her, and said to the person who was counting the votes, "Don't you count her." The man asked, "Is n't she a member?" The minister answered, "Yes, but she is not a voting member." The accent of scorn in his voice touched her to the quick. Six votes were taken in the course of that meeting, and she held up her hand every time. She held it up again, with a flash in her eyes, when she recalled the incident upon her deathbed, and thought how great the change had been since the time when "that one uncounted hand" was the only visible protest against the subjection of women in church and State.
Father Stone did not approve of Lucy's wish to go on with her studies. He thought she had had quite schooling enough for a girl. She told him that if he would lend her a small sum of money, to enable her to keep on a little longer, she would then be qualified to teach; and he agreed to do so, taking her note for the amount. As she was a minor, the note was not legally valid; but she did not know that, and, if she had, she would of course have paid the debt just the same.
At sixteen she began to teach district schools at a dollar a week, "boarding around ", as was the custom. She soon became known as a successful teacher. She got larger and larger schools, until her salary reached sixteen dollars per month, which was considered very good pay for a woman.
Once she was engaged to teach the "winter term" of the school at Paxton, Massachusetts, which had been broken up by the big boys throwing the master out of the window head first into a deep snowdrift. Generally women were not thought competent to teach in the winter, because then the big boys were released from farm work and were able to attend. She soon had this difficult school in perfect order, and the big boys who had made the trouble became her most devoted lieutenants; yet she received only a fraction of the salary paid to her unsuccessful predecessor.
When Abby Kelley lectured in West Brookfield, she invited Lucy to sit in the pulpit with her. Lucy refused, partly because her hair had got all blown about on the three-mile ride from the farm to the village, and partly from a lingering traditional feeling, which she knew to be quite irrational, that the pulpit was too sacred a place for her to enter. Abby Kelley's comment was, "Oh, Lucy Stone, you are not half emancipated! "
She was teaching school in North Brookfield in 1837, when the General Association of the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts held their Quadrennial Conference there, and issued a "Pastoral Letter" to the churches under their care, warning them against discussing slavery, and especially against letting women speak in public. This remarkable document called attention to "the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent injury." It especially deplored "the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Such proceedings, it predicted, would open the way to "degeneracy and ruin."
In those days, the Orthodox Congregational Church was supreme in Massachusetts, and the word of its clergy carried immense weight. The Pastoral Letter was read in all the churches. At the Conference in North Brookfield the floor of the church was black with ministers, and the gallery was filled with women and laymen. While the Letter was read, the Reverend Doctor Blagden walked up and down the aisle, turning his head from side to side and looking up at the women in the gallery with an air that seemed to say, "Now! Now we have silenced you! " Lucy sat in the gallery with her cousin. She said, in after years, "I was young enough then so that my indignation blazed. My cousin said that her side was black and blue with the indignant nudges of my elbow at each aggravating sentence; and I told her afterwards that, if I ever had anything to say in public, I should say it, and all the more because of that Pastoral Letter."
This Pastoral Letter, which was satirized by Whittier in a stirring poem, was called out by the lectures of Sarah and Angelina Grimke against slavery, and the deep impression they made.
The Grimke sisters were the first American women to lecture against slavery or for woman's rights