Blackwell was born in East Orange, New Jersey to Henry Browne Blackwell and Lucy Stone, both of whom were suffrage leaders and helped establish the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). She was also the niece of Elizabeth Blackwell, America's first female physician.[2] Her mother introduced Susan B. Anthony to the women's rights movement and was the first woman to earn a college degree in Massachusetts, the first to keep her own last name after getting married, and the first to speak about women's rights full-time.[3]
Blackwell is well known for her work towards women's rights. At first resisting the cause of her mother and father, she later became a prominent reformer.[6] After graduating from Boston University, Alice began working for the Woman's Journal, the paper started by her parents. By 1884, her name was alongside her parents on the paper's masthead. After her mother's death in 1893, Alice assumed almost sole editing responsibility of the paper.[7]
She was also president of the New England and Massachusetts Woman Suffrage associations and honorary president of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters.[8]
In later life, Blackwell went blind.[9] She died March 15, 1950, at the age of ninety-two.[3]
Blackwell holding a copy of Woman's Journal, around 1910.
Alice Stone Blackwell
Humanitarianism
Alice Stone Blackwell was also involved in humanitarian acts outside of the United States. In the 1890s, she traveled to Armenia, where she became passionately involved in the Armenian refugee community. She sold some of her possessions, particularly the oriental rugs from her house on Pope's Hill in Dorchester,[11] to benefit the Armenians and feed their children, and she also provided assistance to adults looking for jobs. This is also when she discovered her interest in international literature. She translated many of the country's works into English in Armenian Poems (1896). She would continue translating literature into English, including works of Hungarian, Yiddish, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian poetry.[7][12]
Publications
Growing Up in Boston's Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872–1874
Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights (published 1930, reprinted 1971)
Some Spanish-American Poets translated by Alice Stone Blackwell (published 1929 by D. Appleton & Co.)
Armenian Poems translated by Alice Stone Blackwell (1st vol., 1896; 2nd vol., 1917). OCLC4561287.
Songs of Russia (1906)
Songs of Grief and Joy translated from the Yiddish of Ezekiel Leavitt (1908)
^"Alice Blackwell's diary reveals 19th C. Dorchester, Boston from a Pope's Hill perspective". Dorchester Community News.
^Leonard, John (1914). Woman's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, 1914–1915. New York City: American Commonwealth Company. p. 104.