"I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex"

The statement joins the fight against slavery to a broader ethic of universal compassion. By pledging to “plead” not only for enslaved people but for “suffering humanity everywhere,” Lucy Stone enlarges the moral frame: injustice is not an isolated wrong but a network of injuries that diminish the entire human community. The verb “plead” carries legal and spiritual resonance, an advocate before court and conscience, signaling both argument and moral witness.

Yet the universality is paired with a particular obligation: “Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.” That adverb narrows the beam without dimming the light. Stone refuses a single-issue reform while recognizing that women’s subordination is a distinct, systemic problem requiring focused, sustained work. “Labor” underscores effort rather than sentiment; progress will come through organizing, persuasion, and institutional change, not mere sympathy. “Elevation” suggests more than kindness; it calls for structural uplift, education, property rights, legal personhood, access to professions, and the vote, so that women move from guardianship and silence to equal citizenship.

There is also a strategic wisdom in linking these causes. Aligning women’s rights with abolition confronts the shared roots of domination, ownership, disenfranchisement, and control over bodies and labor, while asserting that the credibility of any reform depends on its consistency. If freedom is indivisible, then the measure of justice for one group becomes the promise for all.

The phrase “everywhere” reaches beyond the nation to a human horizon, suggesting that moral responsibility is not bounded by geography or custom. Stone anticipates later insights about interconnected oppressions: race, gender, class, and status are entwined, and a blow against one form of tyranny weakens the others. The statement is thus a manifesto of scope and priority, universal in sympathy, particular in duty, urging a reformer’s life built on breadth of concern and depth of commitment.