The Lucy Stone League

One hundred years ago today … The Lucy Stone League was (as it still is) an activist organization devoted to the rights of women to use their birth names (their so-called “maiden names”) for official and professional purposes. The newly-formed League had just scored a public victory when its president, the journalist and occasional actor Ruth Hale, was listed by her birth name on a real estate deed, alongside the birth name of her husband, critic Heyward Broun. According to the Times, “The transaction [was] unique in the dusty tomes which record the city's realty transactions'.' The article also reports that “Miss Hale,” as it names her, had forgone an overseas trip because the US government “refused to issue a passport to her under her maiden name” (“Maiden Namers Score A Victory,” New York Times, 15 May 1921, p.9).

One hundred years ago today, the Brooklyn Citizen ran a feature on the League, written by Marian Hale (no relation to Ruth). 

The article quotes Ruth Hale extensively. “My name [is a] symbol of my identity and must [not be] lost; there is no justification for [a custom] that demands that a [woman] merge her identity with her [husband.” (Note: the reproduction is cropped; the brackets above indicate guesses at the missing words.)

About her recent battles, Ruth Hale says:

There is absolutely no law which gives the Government the right to keep a woman in this country unless she uses her husband’s name. There is no law that takes property away from a woman who has shares in it with her husband, even if her maiden name, and nothing but her maiden name, is signed to the papers.

(Marian Hale, “Married Women Are Determined to Rettin their Maiden Names,” Brooklyn Citizen, 24 May, 1921)

The founding members of the Lucy Stone League, as listed by the Citizen, included luminaries such as writers Jane Grant and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Also included is writer Fannie Hurst, who had over the previous year publicly challenged several traditional aspects of marriage; in 1920 she announced that she had been married to pianist Jacques Danielson for a year of “trial marriage.” Hurst and Danielson kept separate residences and Hurst her birth name. (“ ‘Trial Marriage’ by Fannie Hurst,” Brooklyn Times Union, 4 May 1920, p. 7.)

Note: Hurst has appeared in NY1920s on multiple occasions, for example posts for June 4th and July 3rd of 1920.

– Jonathan Goldman, May 24, 1921

TAGS: women history, feminism, law, passport, marriage, names