The Lucy Stone League is a women’s rights organization founded in 1921. Its motto is "My name is the symbol of my identity and must not be lost".[1] It was the first group to fight for women to be allowed to keep their own maiden name, or birth name, after marriage—and to use it legally.[2]
It was among the first feminist groups to arise from the suffrage movement, and gained attention for seeking and preserving women's own-name rights, such as the particular ones which follow in this article.
The group took its name from Lucy Stone (1818–1893), the first woman in the United States to carry her birth name through life, despite her marriage in 1855. The New York Times called the group the "Maiden Namers". The group held its first meetings, debates and functions at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, including its founding meeting on 17 May 1921.[3]
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, Ruth Hale challenged in federal court any government edict that would not recognize a married woman, such as herself, by the name she chose to use.[2] The only one in her household called Mrs Heywood Broun was the cat.[4]
The League became so well-known "that a new phrase was invented for a person who believes a wife should keep her name – a Lucy Stoner, a phrase that eventually got into the dictionaries."[5]
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The group was open to women and men. Some early members were, in alphabetical order:[6]
Some of the members often attended the Algonquin Round Table.[7] Since many League members wrote for a living, they could and did write frequently about the group in New York City newspapers.[8]
There were many well-known women who were Lucy Stoners and kept their names after marriage but were not known to be League members, such as (listed alphabetically) Isadora Duncan (dancer), Amelia Earhart (aviation celebrity), Margaret Mead (anthropologist), Edna St. Vincent Millay (poet), Georgia O'Keeffe (artist), Frances Perkins (first woman appointed to any U.S. cabinet), and Michael Strange (poet, playwright, actress) – aka Blanche Oelrichs – aka the wife of actor John Barrymore.[9]
The founding of the League was presented above, in the introduction.
Ruth Hale's first battle (begun in 1920) with the government was to get a passport issued to her by the U.S. State Department in her own name – just as for any man.[10] Victory was attained five years later in 1925, by the League, when "the first married woman in the United States to get such a passport" was Doris Fleischman,[11] the wife of Edward L. Bernays.[12]
An earlier victory for the group came in May 1921 when Hale got a real estate deed issued in her birth name rather than Mrs. Heywood Broun.[13] 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.
The League pioneered and fought for other married women's rights, in the 1920s U.S., to do each of the following in their own names: to register at a hotel,[14] to have bank accounts and sign checks,[15] to have a telephone account or a store account or an insurance policy or a library card, [16] to register (to vote) and to vote,[17] to get a copyright,[18] and to receive paychecks.[19] These rights are taken for granted today – but the legal right of a married woman in the U.S. to use her own name (and not her husband's name) was wrongly denied by many officials and even in the courts until a crucial 9 Oct 1972 court decision,[20] as described and documented fully in the 1977 book Mrs Man, by Una Stannard.[21]
In its first incarnation the League was short lived. The group's lawyer, Rose Bres, died in 1927; by 1931 "Ruth Hale was seriously depressed, believing as she did that 'a woman is through after forty'," and she died in 1934. By the early 1930s the Lucy Stone League was inactive.[22]
The League was restarted in 1950 by Jane Grant, plus twenty two former members, its first meeting being on 22Mar50 in New York City. Promptly, Grant "got the Census Bureau to agree that for the purpose of census-taking a married woman had the right to have her maiden surname officially recognized as her real name (The New York Times, April 10, 1950)."[23]
But the "legal stone wall" that U.S. women ran into with many officials and even in the courts – wrongly, as mentioned above – persisted and worsened until the U.S. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment on 22 Mar 1972 (never ratified by the U.S.).[24] This crucial 1972 event, plus the researching of and documentation of past legal cases by assiduous women lawyers, led to the above-mentioned crucial 9 Oct 1972 court decision.[25]
So in the 1950s and 1960s period, prior to 1972, the "new" League had to change its approach – it widened its focus and "concerned itself with sex discrimination in general"; the League "was a proto – National Organization for Women" (NOW).[26]
The reborn League operated as a non-political and non-partisan center of research and information on the status of women. It sponsored college scholarships and set up feminist libraries in high schools. It worked for gender equality in legal, economic, educational, and social relationships.[27] [28]
As of the early 1990s the Lucy Stone League "still gave nursing scholarships and hosted a combination annual meeting and strawberry festival" – "though many of its issues were taken over by NOW (1966) and other women's groups."[28] [29]
A modern version of the League was started in 1997, as follows: By 1997 the activities of the League had ceased and a report was published that "Alas, the League is no more."[30] When he read this report, Morrison Bonpasse, a past-president of the League, was "inspired" to restart the League, at the same time shifting the focus back to name equality – which was/is not addressed by NOW. This restart eventually became "the re-launching of the website (lucystoneleague.org) under the direction of a new board and its current president Ms. Cristina Lucia Stasia. The website's current aim is to educate and to address issues regarding name change equality."[28] (The new board includes Morrison Bonpasse, as one learns on the website by clicking on the tab "Contact".)[31] There is, however, a group of women in New York who are still active under the name "Lucy Stone League" and this group has been a dues paying affiliate of the International Alliance of Women (http://www.womenalliance.org) for decades. It hosted the IAW Trienniel Congress in New York City in 1999.
For more information about the current activities of the League, see the website itself, including the activity descriptions within the source file "LSL History" already used as a history source.[32] For example, the website's stated goals include:
The website states that the Lucy Stone League "plans to remain in operation until its goals are achieved". [34]