Bust of Lucy Stone
Title/Subject: Lucy Stone (American, 1818-1893)
Artist: Anne Whitney (American, 1821-1915)
Date: 1892 (original)
Type: sculpture
Medium: bronze (cast from original)
Dimensions: 22.5" h x 16" w x 9" d
Collection: Objects Collection (RG 35)
Location: Archives and Special Collections Goodrich Room
Lucy Stone was in her time the most admired and politically effective of the pioneer feminists. As a student at Oberlin College from 1843, graduating with the A.B. in 1847, Stone declared her intention to become a lecturer for women’s rights following her graduation. Employed at first by the New England Anti-Slavery Society, she divided her time between speaking for women and against slavery, and her lectures often drew crowds of two and three thousand. In 1850 she was instrumental in organizing the first national woman’s rights convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts.In 1855 Stone married Henry Blackwell, brother of the medical doctors Elizabeth and Emily, but not without publishing a joint protest against the marriage laws that gave the husband control over his wife and property. She kept her own name rather than take her husband’s—one of the first to adopt this means of protest—although the brooch at her throat in the sculpture carries Henry Blackwell’s initials. Stone gave her last lectures at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893—where the original marble bust by Anne Whitney was on exhibit—and died shortly afterwards at her home in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Anne Whitney ranks as one of the most distinguished of nineteenth-century American sculptors. She was a sculptor of portrait busts and figures, particularly concerned with the theme of social justice. Her sense of social justice was reinforced by work in New York with Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor of medicine in modern times, and encounters with her family, in which there were women adopting unusual roles. She had studied anatomy at a Brooklyn hospital and continued this during the Civil War. From 1867 to 1871 she was in Rome, and her allegory of the city as an old beggar woman is today her best-known work.
On her return to America, Whitney opened a studio in Boston and began to achieve public success from 1873 with a statue for the Capitol. Two years later her anonymous entry won a competition for a monumental figure of Charles Sumner, American statesman and anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts. (In 1856 Sumner addressed the Senate on the explosive issue of whether Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state; a House Democrat entered the Senate chamber and beat Sumner into unconsciousness.) When the judges of the competition to execute a statue of Sumner discovered the winner was a woman, they gave the commission to a male finalist. Twenty-five years later, her model was cast in bronze and erected at Harvard (now in the Boston Public Garden).
Whitney participated in the major expositions of the period, with seven works at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The latter included commissioned busts of four outstanding women of the century, including the marble bust of Lucy Stone, which was installed in the Boston Public Library after the exposition closed. The bronze copy was gifted to Oberlin College in 1987, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the founding of coeducation at Oberlin, and dedicated to faculty member Marlene Deahl Merrill.
Sources
Robert S. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College from Its Foundation Through the Civil War, vol. 1 (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1943).
Penny Dunford, A Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America Since 1850 (Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) [text on Whitney adapted from Dunford's entry].
"The Caning of Senator Charles Sumner," United States Senate website, accessed 1/18/2021.
Related Collections
Lucy Stone student file, Records of Graduates and Former Students (RG 28)
Marlene Deahl Merrill Papers (RG 30/250)
The Oberlin Sanctuary Project (digital exhibit)
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