Talk:Lucy Stone League

The current Lucy Stone League

Is this even a legitimate organization? Their website provides no information on any of their activities. No meetings, no sponsored lectures, no group literature or press releases. Not even a list of League officers or prominent members. The Wikipedia page claims that an older version of the League sponsored scholarships and the like, but there's no evidence on the current group's website that they do any of that. All that they *do* do, that I can see, is charge $19 for membership (with no membership benefits, and no indication of what the fee is to be used for) and they get cash from Amazon.com by referrals to books the LSL apparently didn't have anything to do with producing. It looks to me like somebody just set this up to earn a little cash from referrals and whoever might be dumb enough to send them a check. I'm concerned that by giving them an aura of legitimacy, Wikipedia is facilitating a con. 71.129.81.136 16:40, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

• Hi, anonymous, I can help you or any similar person, as follows. Click on their website's Contacts tab, and you get a list of League officers. As you can see in their linked recent Boston Globe article, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/02/14/the_ms_myth/ , the League's president is now a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. If you do read that article, you'll see that the League is alive and well. But I don't know what they actually do, aside from the info in the article and whatever else you and I (both) can find on the web. For7thGen (talk) 19:30, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
• Just a quick update, after updating the article itself... I hope you might now imagine for yourself what the officers and board are doing, for an average of a few hours/week or however much time they can spend: perhaps figuring out how to educate people and otherwise attain their website goals – and then doing it. Enjoy, For7thGen (talk) 04:33, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Updating and documenting this LSL article

• The following is a duplicate of my entry on User:K72ndst's talk page:

K72ndst, I am very glad that you wrote the article Lucy Stone League (on 2Jan06), thank you, thank you. I am in the process of providing some source references for it, and updating it – to help WP readers. Can you please provide a source, a citation of some sort, some evidence verifying your two sentences which follow, in quotes? (I have worked hard to find any evidence, with no success.)

• "In March 1922, the Lucy Stone League was the first to fight a New York City ordinance that tried to forbid women from smoking in public places. The group helped stamp out the ban before it could be enforced."

The best would be for you to just insert the reference into the article yourself, rewriting the quoted sentences if needed. Alternatively, you might choose to help in this matter on the article's talk page. Or, you could help via a message on my talk page so I'll be aware of it. If I do my update before any help from you, I may move the quoted two sentences to the talk page of the article, parking them there to await your help in this matter. Thanking you on behalf of the WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 19:40, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Lucy Stoner defined and Federal payroll enrollment

Thank you for your work and your message. I had just taken this article off of my watchlist, so I'm glad you posted the message.

Definitions vary. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Merriam, 1966) (a primary-source dict. for English as used in U.S.) gives two definitions: a "female advocate of women's rights" and a "married woman who uses her maiden name as a surname". I don't have many dictionaries from the older decades, but American Heritage Dict. (3d ed.) and Shorter Oxford Eng. Dict. ([4th] ed.), both from the early 1990s, omit the word. I'll accept your definition as appropriate for the Jane Grant beginning-of-article reference and as encompassing what's in Merriam-Webster's. But, unless LSL's membership was composed mostly of men, I disagree that, "in the 1960s, almost none of the LSL members were Lucy Stoners", if the word by 1966 came to mean 'female advocates of women's rights'. The key is probably that the editors of Merriam-Webster's probably did not ask LSL for definitions but derived them from literature available to the editors, including examples of word usage in context, which is how primary-source dictionaries generally are compiled. So, the word (or phrase) had come to have the dictionary's meanings and members likely were Lucy Stoners.

Looking at an old revision, I was puzzled by one sentence about LSL's national work and "enroll[ing]" for the "federal payroll" as likely being the opposite of what was intended, but I see the sentence has been chucked, so it presumably doesn't need a review for rewriting.

Thanks again. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:34, 1 July 2010 (UTC)