Lucy Stone League
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lucy Stone League is a women’s rights organization founded in 1921. Its motto is "My name is the symbol for my identity and must not be lost." It was the first group to fight for women to be allowed to keep their maiden name after marriage – and to use it legally.
It was among the first feminist groups to arise from the suffrage movement to gain attention for seeking and keeping individual rights.
The group took its name from Lucy Stone (1818-1893), the first woman in the United States to carry her own name through life, despite the fact that she was married in 1855. The group held its first meetings, debates and functions at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The New York Times called them the "Maiden Namers."
The founder of the Lucy Stone League was Ruth Hale, a New York City journalist and critic. The wife of New York World columnist Heywood Broun, Hale challenged in federal court any government edict that would not recognize a married woman by the name she chose to use. Her first battle was to get a passport issued to her by the U.S. State Department in her own name. Ultimately, the first American woman to get a passport issued to her was Esther Sayles Root, the wife of the newspaper columnist Franklin Pierce Adams.
The group was open to women and men; some early members were:
- Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
- Heywood Broun, columnist
- Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker
- Jane Grant, New York Times reporter, wife of Harold Ross (founder of The New Yorker)
- Ruth Hale, journalist and publicist
- Fannie Hurst, author
- Beatrice Kaufman, editor, wife of playwright George S. Kaufman
- Beulah Livingstone, silent movie publicist
- Anita Loos, Playwright-author
- Neysa McMein, Illustrator
- Solita Solano, drama critic, editor, writer
- Michael Strange (aka Blanche Oelrichs), actress-playwright, wife of John Barrymore
Many of the members of the group were among the Algonquin Round Table; these members frequently wrote about the group in New York City newspapers.
An early victory for the group came in May 1921 when Hale got a real estate deed issued in her maiden name, and not in her married name, Mrs. Heywood Broun. When the time came to transfer the title of the Upper West Side apartment building, Hale refused to go on record as Mrs. Heywood Broun; the papers were changed to Ruth Hale.
In March 1922, the Lucy Stone League was the first to fight a New York City ordinance that tried to forbid women from smoking in public places. The group helped stamp out the ban before it could be enforced.
On the national level, the Lucy Stone league fought for two key decisions: that female employees of the federal government who wish to be on the federal payroll cannot enroll under their maiden names (1924); and the right for a woman to get a copyright under her own name and not her husband’s name (1926-1927). The league was successful in helping women get these rights granted to them.
Although Hale died in 1934, the group did not. After some inactivity, it was reformed in 1997.
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During the 1960s, the Lucy Stone League operated as a non-political, non-partisan center of research and information on the status of women. It sponsored scholarships, organized and supported memorial libraries, maintained archives for women, and worked for sexual equality in legal, economic, educational, and social relationships.
