Set of Six Stock Certificates for shares in The Proprietors of The Woman's Journal Corporation.
Taking Stock In Women’s History:
Six Certificates Of Stock In “The Woman’s Journal,”
1870-1911, Signed By Major Suffrage-Abolitionist Figures
(Stone, Lucy and Henry Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell). Set of six stock certificates for shares in The Proprietors of The Woman’s Journal corporation.
Six distinct 10 1/4” x 5 1/4” multicolored printed sheets, each representing a share or shares in The Woman’s Journal; each sheet signed by the purchaser and by a number of suffrage officials, as detailed below; heavily annotated on versos and rectos by numerous suffrage officials, with details of purchase and transfer of stocks often noted on attached pages, affixed with glue to certificate forms; the certificates have been occasionally folded but are otherwise fresh and bright, the print and holograph notations on them perfectly legible. Together in a specially built cloth folding box.
The Woman’s Journal was the first regular woman’s rights periodical in America. Its publication was the crowning achievement of Lucy Stone’s long and distinguished feminist career. HAWH notes:
Stone’s most active and lasting contribution to the women’s movement is The Woman’s Journal, which she founded in 1870 and edited until her death in 1893. This extraordinary archive of women’s history provided a weekly chronicle of woman’s progress—political, vocational, economic, cultural, and legal—both in the United States and abroad...[for] over sixty one years... (p. 578; see also pp. 77-8, 672)
As the political arm of the National American Woman Suffrage Organization, The Woman’s Journal printed meeting and convention addresses and notes, reported on national and international news, published columns and editorials on the suffrage struggle, as well as poems, stories, and book reviews. Regular contributors included Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison, T.W. Higginson, and, of course, Stone and her husband Blackwell. After Stone’s 1893 death her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell assumed responsibility for producing and editing the journal, which was renamed The Woman Citizen; contributors to this new incarnation of the periodical read like a virtual Who’s Who of early modern feminism: Susan B. Anthony, Anna Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt were only a few of the names on its ever-expanding masthead.
These six stock certificates, the majority of which date from the first year of The Woman’s Journal’s production, provide a rich documentation of women’s history in the making. The very existence of such stocks—which list at $50 a share—and the impetus behind them, is of course intriguing to modern feminist scholars and merits further study. Equally fascinating is the list of signatories on the stocks themselves: Officers signing on behalf of the corporation include E.D. Draper (President) and Henry Blackwell (Treasurer), who are replaced in later certificates by Alice Stone Blackwell (President) and Fanny Garrison (Treasurer). The Blackwells were of course the father-daughter team responsible for production of The Woman’s Journal after originator Lucy’s death; Fanny Garrison, later Fanny Garrison Villard, was the daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and was herself a major suffrage figure. Purchasers of the stocks include Anna Lodge, mother of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge; William B. Stone, presumably a Blackwell relative; Samuel E. Sewell, the Massachusetts abolitionist and longtime suffrage supporter; Armenia White, Massachusetts activist, friend of Garrison, and organizer of an 1868 women’s rights convention at Concord; and Agnes Ryan, business manager of The Woman’s Journal during its early years. For some stocks, more than one purchaser is listed, and we can see evidence of a stock’s trading history; particularly interesting in this regard are the stocks transferred from the original owners to Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association—do these perhaps provide evidence of a polit
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