A Dangerous Lady

Lucinda Hinsdale Stone was a passionate advocate for women’s education, even when it threatened her reputation and caused her pain. Records at the Bentley show how her tireless work in the face of adversity changed women’s lives across the state of Michigan.

By Madeleine Bradford

It was a chilly January evening in Ann Arbor when Lucinda Hinsdale Stone heard the news.

It was 1870, and U-M’s regents had made a groundbreaking decision: for the first time, women could officially be admitted to the University.

This was a moment Stone had been waiting for. A lifelong teacher, and an advocate for women’s education, she’d been pushing for U-M to admit women for years. She went straight from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo and told Madelon Stockwell that she should apply to U-M immediately. Stockwell had been one of Stone’s pupils at Kalamazoo College. Stone knew she was bright enough to succeed.

At her former teacher’s urging, Stockwell became the first woman to be officially admitted to U-M, accepted less than a month after the resolution had been passed. Stone later described Stockwell as “a lone star,” representing the dawn of a new era—one that the older woman had worked for tirelessly.

She and her husband were some of the earliest advocates for coeducation in Michigan, according to the biography, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone: Her Life Story and Reminiscences, by Belle Perry.

It took tremendous effort; Stone wrote to newspapers, gave speeches, and sent endless letters. “The world is surely setting toward the higher education of women. The power of the pickaxe on the hardest soil consists in that it works with the law of gravitation on its side,” Stone wrote, according to her biographer.

Archived books, papers, and newspaper clippings show how fervently Stone advocated for women’s education. She knew better than anyone just how desperately some women wanted to attend a university, and how badly it hurt when they couldn’t.

A Thing Never Heard Of

Stone was an intensely curious child growing up in the early 19th century. She inherited her father’s habit of questioning other peoples’ assumptions, and her mother’s habit of reading. Although her father died before she was three years old, she was raised on stories about his opinionated nature from religious neighbors in her hometown of Hinesburg, Vermont, who told her he’d disagreed with the local church and therefore “gone to hell.”

Her greatest joy was waking up early to watch the sunrise over the mountains. This gave her time to think, write, and study, away from the hustle and bustle of her family. Her house was full; Lucinda was the youngest of 12 children. She would remain an early riser all her life.

“At first I pursued my study of Greek covertly,” she wrote in her chapter of the 1874 essay compilation book The Education of American Girls. Soon, however, she wanted more.

So, at 13 years old, she applied to the local preparatory school, Hinesburg Academy. “It was a thing never heard of before for a girl—and caused much discussion—but her desire was finally granted through the courtesy of the principal, Dr. Stone. . . . Merely to express such a wish was considered fairly revolutionary,” the 1914 Kalamazoo Telegraph reported. The principal would affect her life in more ways than one.

Stone studied alternately at Hinesburg Academy and the local Ladies Seminary. Her childhood pastor encouraged her to enter advanced classes with “these young men fitting for college” at Hinesburg, according to her account in the 1891 Detroit Tribune. She wrote that she “found it entirely easy to keep up with them, besides pursuing at least two studies which they did not take into their curriculum.”

She desperately wanted to learn more. But when she said, “Oh, I wish I could go to college,” her classmates teased her until she cried. “It was a very dangerous thing for a girl to aspire toward a higher education, or even to wish she might go to college then,” she wrote.

The doors of higher education were closed to her. She never forgot how that rejection stung.

From Its Primary Principles Utterly Wrong

Denied further schooling for herself, Stone decided to provide education to others; after teaching briefly at Burlington Academy, she traveled to Natchez, Mississippi, to work as a governess and teacher, in 1837.

While teaching in Natchez, she witnessed the brutal reality of slavery. She was horrified to learn that the white parents of the children she taught, who acted friendly toward her, also beat the African American people that they enslaved. The violence left her heartbroken.

“From her own observations and experiences in those antebellum days Lucinda Hinsdale formed the opinion that slavery was from its primary principles utterly wrong,” the Kalamazoo Evening News wrote in a summary of her life, in 1900, preserved at the Bentley.

The teacher who formerly held her position, an anti-slavery advocate, had fled the area, fearing lynching. The three years Stone spent in Mississippi transformed her into an ardent lifelong abolitionist.

Consider Their Education Finished

Stone moved away from the South, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she married the former principal of her preparatory school, the Reverend James Andrus Blinn Stone, in 1840.

The newlyweds moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Stone’s husband taught at the Newton Theological Seminary. Shortly afterward, in 1843, they moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. They would have three children.

At the time, U-M had “branch schools” that acted as preparatory schools for young men intent on attending the university. The Kalamazoo branch also acted as the equivalent of high school for young women.

Stone found herself teaching as the “principal of the ladies’ department,” while her husband led the Kalamazoo branch school, which had recently merged with a local Baptist Institute.

“There were about an equal number of young men and young women studying beautifully together, the girls always keeping up fully with the boys, until the boys went to the University, and the girls were supposed to consider their education finished,” Stone wrote.

She added: “The question often pressed itself upon me, why should co-education stop here, just at the door of our University?”

Branching Out

In 1845, U-M’s regents decided to cut the appropriations funding the branch school. Over the next decade, Stone and her husband transformed the school into Kalamazoo College, using their own money to fund the “women’s department.”

Stone was unpopular with the school’s Baptist leadership. Not only did she teach women many subjects also learned by men, but she also asked pupils to read Byron, who was seen by the academy’s elders as not Christian enough. Furthermore, a copy of the Atlantic Monthly (considered improper due to articles about politics and abolition) was spotted on her desk.

Compounding matters, the college buildings had been costly. James Stone was blamed for the deficit.

The Stones resigned from Kalamazoo College in 1863, and Lucinda Stone created a “Ladies Seminary” in her own home. Many of the women attending Kalamazoo College left with her.

According to Stone’s biographer, leaders from the college pleaded with her to either return or close her school, which was out-competing them among local young women. She refused. Her school expanded.

According to the book Emancipated Spirits: Portraits of Kalamazoo College Women, Kalamazoo College’s president warned her there would be reprisals. Soon, rumors were spread about her husband’s alleged affairs. Some quickly proved false; a letter with supposed “proof” was revealed as a forgery. Still, the community turned on the Stones, as accusations flew. Lucinda Stone claimed not to believe them.

She kept teaching until her home burned down on Christmas in 1866, in a chimney fire that engulfed the upper floors, then spread. With no water in the nearby wells, and with cold causing the firefighters’ equipment to freeze and clog, their home was lost. It was enough to set Stone on a journey abroad.

She remained focused on education and traveled through Egypt, England, Syria, Greece, and beyond, teaching women about art and history, sometimes accompanied by her husband and sons, who otherwise spent their time running the Kalamazoo Telegraph newspaper.

From the late 1860s through the 1880s, she wrote about her travels, published under her initials in newspapers like the Kalamazoo Telegraph and the Detroit Post and Tribune. Her writing helped readers in Michigan imagine places they had never seen.

Her travel descriptions also reveal Stone’s contradictory views about other cultures. She insisted that everyone attending her traveling classes be respectful of local traditions, saying, “I count nothing human foreign to me.” Yet she could be prejudiced, describing women in “portions of the East” as “primitive,” without a hint of the respect she prized so highly.

Mother of Women’s Clubs

Even at home in Kalamazoo, Stone knew very well that things were not perfect; not all women could access the education they wanted.

While working at the branch school in Kalamazoo, she started the Kalamazoo Ladies Library Association for women, and hosted talks by national experts on abolition and suffrage. But she wanted to do more.

So, across the mid-to late-19th century, she embarked on a quest to establish women’s clubs across the state of Michigan. According to her biographer, these clubs “fostered art, history, and literature study, lecture courses, and an intelligent interest in the best in current literature,” providing opportunities for lifelong learning.

Stone became famous as the “mother of women’s clubs.”

“These are established in almost every little village in our state,” the Detroit Post and Tribune wrote in 1883, describing the women’s club movement as “truly a new renaissance, of which it may be said, ‘dux femina facti,’” a Latin phrase meaning: “a woman leads the events.”

Growth is the Law of Every True Life

Stone’s impact on U-M went beyond the enrollment of Madelon Stockwell. U-M granted her an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy in 1890, fulfilling Stone’s lifelong dream of a degree. That same year, at the age of 75, she helped charter the Michigan Women’s Press Association.

Then she found a new cause: advocating for women to be allowed to become professors at U-M.

She lived to see it happen. In 1896, 55 years after male professors taught U-M’s first students, Dr. Eliza Mosher became the first woman officially granted the title of professor by the university.

After Stone died at home in Kalamazoo in 1900, women’s organizations across Michigan donated scholarships in her honor. A Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, and a senior faculty award at U-M, are named after her today.

Stone shaped the lives of women across the state of Michigan. Every woman who attends U-M benefits from her relentless advocacy for women’s admission. Kalamazoo College, which she helped transform, is a highly ranked liberal arts college. True to Stone’s prediction, a majority of colleges across the U.S. are coeducational.

“Growth is the law of every true life,” she told a reunion of her former students in 1885. “No tomorrow should find us where we are today.”

You can read Stone’s writing in archived newspapers including the Kalamazoo Telegraph, and her biography, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone: Her Life Story and Reminiscences. You can also explore the Lucinda Hinsdale Stone photograph collection, the book Emancipated Spirits, and the Lucinda Stone Vertical File, at the Bentley Historical Library.