The offices of the Woman’s Journal, the newspaper published by the American Woman Suffrage Association, and the New England Women’s Club, one of the first clubs for women in the country, were in another building on this site. Edited by Lucy Stone (1818-93), the Journal chose office space as close to the seat of power—the State House—as possible. Stone petitioned annually for woman suffrage. Stone had been one of the first Massachusetts women to receive a college degree when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847. When she married Henry Blackwell she became the first married woman to officially keep her maiden name, leading to the late nineteenth-century coining of the term “a Lucy Stoner” to mean a woman who stood up for her rights. Lucy Stone is one of three women chosen to be portrayed in the Boston Women’s Memorial and one of six to be memorialized in the State House. Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), Stone’s daughter, edited the Journal in a building on Copley Square for twenty-five years until suffrage was granted in 1920.
In 1973, a trade union for women office workers named 9 to 5 held its first monthly meetings in this building now owned by the Paulist Fathers. A member decided to organize after her boss walked into the office and said, “Well, I guess there’s no one here.”
