Lucy Stone

I agree that Sojourner Truth should be included with the Stanton, Anthony, Mott statue (April 1) but feel Lucy Stone should also be included. (For many years women who did not change their names when they married were called “Lucy Stoners,” after Lucy started the practice.) She started speaking out, nationally, for abolition and woman’s suffrage in 1847. She was a mentor for both Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt.

Anthony was not a very good student, as she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton split the women’s movement into two groups over policy differences with Stone.

Stone kept to her plodding ways and saw women being increasingly allowed to vote at school board, town council and county office levels. She also established the Woman’s Journal, which gained worldwide readership.

In the 1890s, after nearly 50 years of working for women’s rights and seeing no successor to her organization she effected a recombination of the two organizations. In 1893, her dying words to her only child, a daughter, were, “Make the world better.” She was the first person in Massachusetts to be cremated. How can the women’s movement leave Stone out?

FRED R. BROOKS

Santa Monica

* Talk about revisionist history! To have a likeness of Sojourner Truth imposed on the 1921 statue of the suffragists would be nothing more than making a fantasy out of two hard-fought political battles of women’s rights.

The white suffragists featured on the marble statuary in question devoted 72 years to their battle to get women the right to vote. Rightly or wrongly, they did not want to “complicate” their argument by including black women (or immigrant women for that matter) in the fight.

None of this denigrates the importance of Sojourner Truth, the black former slave who spoke up for franchising all women. Her 1851 speech in which she addressed the matter of women’s rights and then asked “And ain’t I a woman?” was a galvanizing force for abolitionists and feminists.

But she did not work alongside Lucretia Mott, Stanton or Anthony, mainly because they were afraid that the all-white male Senate would not be willing to accept both women’s rights and blacks’ rights.

Let’s give Sojourner Truth her own statue--she deserves it. But please do not delay any longer the transfer of the suffragists’ statue to the Rotunda.

ELLEN TAYLOR

Claremont