"Recounting the story of America's antebellum woman's rights movement through the efforts of Lucy Stone (1818-1893), this account differs dramatically from those that focus almost exclusively on Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Million examines the social forces of the 1830s and 1840s that led Stone to become a woman's reformer and her early agitation as a student at Oberlin College, including what may well be the nation's first "strike" for equal pay for women." "She worked tirelessly during the 1850s, not only as the movement's "silver-tongued" orator, but also as the organizer and manager of the National Woman's Rights Conventions, champion of coeducation, instigator of nationwide petitioning efforts, and first person to plead for women's equal legal rights before a body of lawmakers." "Million also details the trials of motherhood that eventually led Stone to pass leadership of the movement to Anthony and Stanton on the eve of the Civil War."--Jacket.