By Chris Harding

As abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone lay dying on Pope's Hill in 1893, her last articulate words to her daughter, women's rights activist Alice Stone Blackwell, were, "Make the world a better place." This ideal has been adopted as a theme by the creators of the Boston Women's Memorial, which will be dedicated this coming Saturday, October 25, at 1 p.m. on the Back Bay's Commonwealth Mall.

The tenth and last remaining block of the Mall (between Fairfield and Gloucester streets) will become the site of the Mall's first memorial to pay tribute to women. This will be only the second monument to historic female figures on city property, the first being 1999's "Step On Board," the Harriet Tubman statue in the South End created by former Dorchester resident Fern Cunningham.

The three-figure monument has been more than a decade in the making. In 1992, a task force came together reflecting the ethnic diversity of Boston women and encompassing neighborhood civic leaders, educators, historians, community activists, and representatives of the Boston Women's Heritage Trail. In 1994, the task force announced their selection of correspondent Abigail Adams, publisher Lucy Stone, and poet Phillis Wheatley as subjects for the memorial, citing "their strong Boston identities, their places in national history, their collective passion for social justice, and their ability to inspire and impact society through their writings."

These criteria are amply reflected in the life of Lucy Stone who lived in Dorchester from 1869 until her death in 1893, lecturing and editorializing on women's and abolition issues, continuing to innovate even after her death. In July 1998, prominent New York sculptor Meredith Bergmann was commissioned to create the memorial, in the form of bronze figures with inscribed light-colored granite pedestals on darker granite bases.

In the tradition of the approachable figures of Mayor James Michael Curley and Red Auerbach in the Quincy Market, these life-sized figures are set on the ground were passers-by can interact and possibly be photographed next to them. According to the sculptor's conception, each woman is shown in a pose that reflects the use of language in her life, and instead of standing on her pedestal, she is shown as having come off it and having put it to use for her work. Lucy Stone is depicted while laying out The Woman's Journal, the foremost woman's suffrage publication of her era which she founded and which she and her husband co-edited. Phillis Wheatley appears to be writing poetry at her "desk."

Joyce Linehan, Ashmont resident and co-coordinator of this weekend's Dorchester Open Studios, hails this honor.

"I am thrilled that Lucy Stone will be immortalized on Commonwealth Mall, and that the history of Boston's women is starting to be represented in art," Linehan says. "I've always been proud of the fact that Lucy Stone lived and worked in Dorchester, because it seems fitting that the first woman in the Massachusetts to have received a college degree should be identified with a neighborhood where many women, like me, are the first in their families to receive a college degree."

The Boston Women's Heritage Trail has developed a curriculum to support the Memorial by continuing to educate Boston Public School children about these three pioneers, one of several adjunct programs that help "make the world a better place."