Lucy Stone League facts for kids
The Lucy Stone League is an organization that supports women's rights. It was started in 1921. Their main idea is: "A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost." This group was the first to fight for women to be allowed to keep their own name after getting married, and to use it legally.
The League was one of the first feminist groups to come from the women's voting rights movement. They became well-known for helping women keep their own names and use them legally.
The group was named after Lucy Stone (1818–1893). She was the first married woman in the United States to keep her birth name her whole life. She got married in 1855. The New York Times newspaper called the group the "Maiden Namers." Their first meetings were held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, including their founding meeting on May 17, 1921.
The person who started the Lucy Stone League was Ruth Hale. She was a journalist and writer in New York City. Ruth Hale was married to a newspaper writer named Heywood Broun. She went to court to challenge any government rule that wouldn't recognize a married woman by the name she chose to use. In her house, the only one called Mrs. Heywood Broun was the cat!
The League became so famous that a new term, Lucy Stoner, became common. It meant anyone who believed a wife should be allowed to keep and use her own name. This term even ended up in dictionaries. Women who chose not to use their husbands' last names were also called Lucy Stoners.
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Who Were the Members?
The group welcomed both women and men. Some of the early members were:
- Franklin Pierce Adams, a newspaper writer
- Heywood Broun, a newspaper writer
- Janet Flanner, a writer for The New Yorker from Paris
- Zona Gale, an author and playwright from Wisconsin. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. She also worked for women's rights.
- Jane Grant, a reporter for New York Times. She was married to Harold Ross, who started The New Yorker, and she helped start The New Yorker too.
- Ruth Hale, a journalist and publicist
- Fannie Hurst, an author
- Beulah Livingstone, who promoted silent movies
- Anita Loos, a playwright and author
- Neysa McMein, an artist who drew pictures
- Solita Solano, a writer and editor who wrote about plays
- Sophie Treadwell, a playwright and journalist
Many members of the League also went to the Algonquin Round Table, a famous gathering of writers and artists. Since many members wrote for a living, they often wrote about the group in New York City newspapers.
Many other well-known women were "Lucy Stoners" and kept their names after marriage, even if they weren't known members of the League. These included Isadora Duncan (a dancer), Amelia Earhart (a famous pilot), Margaret Mead (a scientist who studied cultures), Edna St. Vincent Millay (a poet), Georgia O'Keeffe (an artist), and Frances Perkins (the first woman to be a part of a U.S. President's cabinet).
The First Period of the League
Ruth Hale's first big challenge with the government started in 1920. She wanted to get a passport from the U.S. State Department in her own name, just like any man. The League won this fight five years later, in 1925. The first married woman in the United States to get a passport in her own name was Doris Fleischman, who was married to Edward Bernays.
An earlier win for the group happened in May 1921. Ruth Hale was able to get a real estate deed (a document showing ownership of land or a building) in her birth name instead of Mrs. Heywood Broun. When it was time to change the ownership of an apartment building, Hale refused to be listed as Mrs. Heywood Broun. The papers were changed to Ruth Hale.
In the 1920s, the League also fought for other rights for married women in the U.S. They wanted women to be able to do things in their own names, like:
- Check into a hotel
- Have bank accounts and sign checks
- Have a phone account or a store account
- Get an insurance policy or a library card
- Register to vote and actually vote
- Get a copyright for their work
- Receive paychecks
Today, we might take these rights for granted. But the legal right for a married woman in the U.S. to use her own name (instead of her husband's name) was often denied by officials and courts. This continued until a court decision on October 9, 1972.
The first version of the League didn't last very long. The group's lawyer, Rose Bres, died in 1927. By 1931, Ruth Hale became sad and passed away in 1934. By the early 1930s, the Lucy Stone League was no longer active.
The Second Period of the League
The League was started again in 1950 by Jane Grant and twenty-two former members. Their first meeting was on March 22, 1950, in New York City. Grant quickly got the Census Bureau to agree that a married woman could use her maiden surname (her birth name) as her official name in the census.
However, women in the U.S. still faced legal problems with many officials and courts until the U.S. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment on March 22, 1972. This event, along with research by women lawyers, led to the important court decision on October 9, 1972.
So, in the 1950s and 1960s, before 1972, the "new" League changed its focus. It started to include all types of unfair treatment against women in the U.S. The League became an early version of the National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1976, the Lucy Stone League joined the International Alliance of Women, which works for equal rights.
The restarted League worked as a group that researched and shared information about the status of women. It offered college scholarships and set up libraries about feminism in high schools. It worked for gender equality (fairness between genders) in legal, economic, educational, and social areas.
By the early 1990s, the Lucy Stone League was still giving nursing scholarships and holding an annual meeting. However, other groups like the National Organization for Women (started in 1966) had largely taken over the work on gender equality issues.
The Third Period of the League
A modern version of the League began in 1997. By this time, the League's activities had stopped. When Morrison Bonpasse (1947–2019), a past president of the League, read a report saying the League was "no more," he was inspired to restart it. He shifted the focus back to name equality, which was not a main focus for NOW. This led to the re-launching of the League's website (lucystoneleague.org) with a new board and its current president, Ms. Cristina Lucia Stasia.
Also, there was a group of women in New York who were still active under the name "Lucy Stone League." This group was a member of the International Alliance of Women from 1976 to 2021. They hosted a big international meeting in New York City in 1999.
See also
- Gender equality
- Lucy Stone
- Married and maiden names
- Matrilineal
- Matriname
- Patrilineal
- Women's rights
General literature
- Jane Grant, Confession of a Feminist, in The American Mercury, vol. LVII, no. 240, Dec., 1943 (microfilm), pp. 684–691. This article gives more background on the formation of the League.
