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A Woman of the Century: A Crowdsourcing Project of the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

August 11 - August 17

Women of the Week

Journalist Mary Agnes Dalrymple Bishop and reformer Lucy Stone are this week's Women of the Week.   

  •  To learn about them by viewing their items, please click on their images.  

  • To read their biographical sketches in A Woman of the Century, please click on the highlighted page number(s) to the left of their images. 

Mary Agnes Dalrymple Bishop larger.jpg

BISHOP, Mrs. Mary Agnes Dalrymple

August 12, 1857

journalist

Springfield, MA

p. 86

Mary Agnes Dalyrmple Bishop was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on August 12, 1857.  Her family moved to Grafton, Massachusetts when she was less than two years old.  Mary Agnes began writing for local papers at age eleven and was editor of The Grafton Herald when she was just sixteen. 

After graduating from high school, she taught in the public schools of Grafton and Sutton, Massachusetts  for many years  Mary Agnes also lectured frequently in her area and acted in home dramas, often as Lady Macbeth  She continued writing and was a frequent contributorm although often an anonymous one, to Youth’s Companion and other periodicals

Mary Agnes was one of the earliest members of the  New England Woman’s Press Association , attending meetings since 1886, and she served on its Executive Committee.  Writing of her career at the time that the New England Woman's Press Association began, she noted that she was a ""regular correspondent of the Boston Globe and with the Associated Press" (Lord, 23). Some of her colleagues in the New England Woman's Press Association were Estelle M. Hatch, Sallie Joy White, Kate Tannatt Woods, Alice Stone Blackwell, Cora Stuart Wheeler, Helen Maria Winslow, and Lavinia Stella Goodwin, Esther T. Housh, Maud Howe Elliott, and Lucy Stone.

In 1887, Mary Agnes became editor on the Massachusetts Ploughman.  As her A Woman of the Century profile notes:

“The position offered her had never been taken by a woman, and, indeed, the work that she did was never attempted previously, for she had the charge of almost the entire journal from the first.  A few months after she accepted the position, the proprietor died, and the entire paper was in her hands for six months.” (A Woman of the Century, p. 86)


Mary Agnes married Frederick Herbert Bishop, a Boston businessman, in 1889, and the couple lived in Wollaston Heights, Massachusetts.  She continued her editorial work and was a practical reportorial stenographer.  In addition, Mary Agnes still found time to pursue her literary career.

She served as "toastmistress" at a New England Press Association tribute to journalist Mary Boyle O'Reilly in 1917.  Helen Maria Winslow introduced O'Reilly, who spoke about her journalistic activities during World War I at this Hotel Bellevue event.  The next year, she represented the New England Woman's Press Association at a woman's conference in Arkansas.
Lucy Stone (2).jpg

STONE, Mrs. Lucy

August 13, 1818

reformer

West Brookfield, MA

p. 693-695

Reformer Lucy Stone was born near West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818.  She graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, with honors.  

Early in her career, she was an Antislavery lecturer, but Lucy's lifelong passion was advocating for women's suffrage.  Lucy gave her first women’s rights lecture in Gardner in 1847.  Very active in the cause, she founded the American Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869 with Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison,  George William Curtis, and other reformers.  Lucy founded  Woman’s Journal and edited it for many years.

Stone was married to Henry B. Blackwell, although she kept her own name, and was the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell.

August 11 - August 17