Women of the Week

Reformer Lucy Stone and author Harriette Newell Woods Baker are this week's Women of the Week.   

•  To learn about them by viewing their items, please click on their images.  

• To read their biographical sketches in A Woman of the Century, please click on the highlighted page number(s) to the left of their images.

Reformer Lucy Stone was born near West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818.  She graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, with honors.  

Early in her career, she was an Antislavery lecturer, but Lucy's lifelong passion was advocating for women's suffrage.  Lucy gave her first women’s rights lecture in Gardner in 1847.  Very active in the cause, she founded the American Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869 with Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison,  George William Curtis, and other reformers.  Lucy founded  Woman’s Journal and edited it for many years.

Stone was married to Henry B. Blackwell, although she kept her own name, and was the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell.

Harriette Newell Woods Baker, an Andover, Massachusetts native, was born on August 19, 1815.

Better known by her pseudonyms "Madeline Leslie" and "Aunt Hattie," Harriette was an author, editor, playwright and publisher.  As her A Woman of the Century profile notes, Baker penned "nearly two-hundred moral and religious tales" (46).  Tim, The Scissors Grinder was an extremely popular work. She also wrote Reminiscences and Records of My Father, Leonard Woods, D. D., of Andover.  In addition to her books and play, she also wrote for the Boston Recorder, the Congregationalist, Harper's Magazine, the New York Observer, The Puritan, and Youth's Companion.

Later in life, Harriette wrote her autobiography: Leslie, Madeline.  The autobiography of a very remarkable woman / edited by Walter Baker.  London : A.T. Roberts, 1894.   She passed away in Brooklyn, New York on April 26, 1893.