The Dorchester Historical Society and Merrill Kohlhofer, a ranger for the National Parks of Boston’s social justice team, will remember Lucy Stone this Sunday at 2 p.m. at the society’s home on Boston Street.

Stone, a West Brookfield, Mass., native, was a longtime Dorchester resident who was in the forefront of the women’s rights movement in the mid-1800s. The first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree (Oberlin, Class of 1847), Stone also supported the abolitionist cause in the years leading up to the Civil War.

According to a profile in the Dorchester Atheneum, Stone pursued her education without financial support from her family and, at age 16, began teaching for a dollar a week.

At Oberlin, she was viewed as a “dangerous radical,” gaining notoriety for her abolitionist views, as well as her “uncompromising” position on the importance of women’s rights. She turned down the opportunity to deliver the commencement speech because Oberlin’s policy prevented her from reading it aloud. A man would have had to do so on her behalf.

Stone was a chief organizer of the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester in 1850, and the speech she gave at the convention—shortly after recovering from typhoid fever, according to the Atheneum—received national attention. 

She married hardware merchant and abolitionist Henry Browne Blackwell in 1855, but declined to take his last name. In 1969, the family moved to Dorchester where she partnered first with her husband, then with her daughter, Alice, to publish the Women’s Journal beginning in 1870. 

She died in 1893 at age 75.

Later, one of Dorchester’s elementary school buildings was named in her honor. The property is now home to the Roxbury Prep Lucy Stone Campus.