[Blackwell]. American reformer, antislavery and woman’s-rights leader, born in West Brookfield, MA, on the 13th of August 1818. Her father refused her the college education that she so eagerly desired, but she earned enough to carry her through Oberlin College, where she graduated in 1847. She immediately went on the lecture platform as an advocate of abolition and of woman’s rights, and her remarkable voice and commanding eloquence often held in check the most disorderly audiences. In 1855 she married Dr. Henry B. Blackwell (1824–1909), a prominent abolitionist and advocate of woman’s rights, who agreed that she should keep her maiden name; after 1870 he assisted his wife in the management of the Woman’s Journal of Boston, of which she became editor in 1872. She allowed her New Jersey property to be sold for taxes, and then published a pamphlet on “taxation without representation.” She campaigned for woman’s suffrage amendments in Kansas (1867), Vermont (1870), Michigan (1874), Colorado (1877) and Nebraska (1892). She died in Dorchester, MA, on the 18th of October 1893. Her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950), carried on, with her father, the Woman’s Journal after 1893, and in 1885–1905 edited the Woman’s Column.
Her husband’s sisters, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) and Emily Blackwell (1826–1910), were prominent physicians. The former graduated at the Geneva Medical College, Geneva, NY, in 1849, receiving the first physician’s degree granted to a woman in the United States, and studied in Philadelphia, in Paris and in London, where she began to practise in 1869. She died at Hastings on the 1st of June 1910. Emily Blackwell graduated at the Medical Department of Western Reserve University in 1854; in 1853, with her sister, she founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children; and she was for many years dean of the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary which she and her sister established in 1865.
