Women's rights activist, abolitionist, and religious reformer, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA. A child of Quaker parents, she was early impressed by her mother's and other Nantucket women's active roles while menfolk were away on voyages. The family moved to Boston (1804), and she attended and then taught at a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, NY (18089). After she moved again with her family to Philadelphia, she married James Mott, a former teacher at the Poughkeepsie school who had now joined her father's hardware firm.
By 1821, she became a Quaker minister, noted for her speaking abilities, and in 1827 she and her husband went over with the more progressive wing of the Friends. She was strongly opposed to slavery, and advocated not buying the products of slave labour, which prompted her husband, always her supporter, to get out of the cotton trade (c.1830). An early supporter of William Lloyd Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society, she often found herself threatened with physical violence due to her radical views. She and her husband attended the famous World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London (1840), the one that refused to allow women to be full participants. This led to her joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton in calling the famous Seneca Falls Convention, NY in 1848 (at which, ironically, James Mott was asked to preside), and from that point on she was dedicated to women's rights and published her influential Discourse on Woman (1850). While remaining within the Society of Friends, in practice and beliefs she actually identified increasingly with more liberal and progressive trends in American religious life, even helping to form the Free Religious Association in Boston (1867).
While keeping up her commitment to women's rights, she also maintained the full routine of a mother and housewife, and continued after the Civil War to work for advocating the rights of African-Americans. She helped to found Swarthmore College (1864), continued to attend women's rights conventions, and when the movement split into two factions in 1869, she tried to bring the two together.
Lucretia Coffin Mott (January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) was an American Quaker, abolitionist, social reformer and proponent of women's rights.
Biography
Lucretia Coffin was born into a prominent Quaker family in Nantucket, Massachusetts. In 1811, Lucretia married James Mott, another teacher at the school.
Lucretia and her husband were both opposed to the slave trade and were active in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Lucretia Mott was one of the first Quaker women to do advocacy work for abolition.
Mott's letters reflect her regular travels in the mid-nineteenth century throughout the East and Midwest as she addressed various reform organizations such as the Non-Resistance Society, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women as well as the quarterly and yearly Quaker meetings. Forceful and intelligent, her letters also reflect Mott's character and Quaker background.
Like many Hicksite Quakers including Hicks, Mott considered slavery an evil to be opposed.
It should be noted that Quakers, when compared to other religious and social groups in America since its founding, were unusual in their equal treatment of women.
Mott was successful in her abolitionist lobbying and punctuated her career with teaching the ropes of representative government's political advocacy to women coming up as women's and abolitionist advocates.
Mott spoke at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London, England in June 1840. In spite of her status as one of six women delegates, Mott was not formally seated at the meeting because she was a woman. Stanton became angry when she couldn't see Mott as she spoke, as women in the audience were required to sit in a roped-off section hidden from the view of the men in attendance. Mott and Stanton became well acquainted at the convention, and Stanton later recalled: "We resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women." However, it was not until 1848 that Mott and Stanton organised the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York
The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 was the first American women's rights meeting. Stanton's resolution that it was "the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise" was passed, and this became the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years. While Elizabeth Cady Stanton is usually credited as the leader of that effort, it was Mott's mentoring of Stanton and their work together that organized the event.
Mott parted with the mainstream women's movement in one area, that of divorce. The more conservative Mott opposed any signifcant legal change in divorce laws.
Mott's theology was influenced by Unitarians including Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing as well as early Quakers including William Penn.
Elected as the first president of the American Equal Rights Convention after the end of the Civil War, Mott strove a few years later to reconcile the two factions that split over the priorities between woman suffrage and black male suffrage. Anthony and Lucy Stone over the immediate goal of the women's movement: suffrage for freedmen and all women?
In 1850 Mott wrote Discourse on Woman, a book about restrictions on women in the United States.
In 1864 Mott and several other Hicksite Quakers incorporated Swarthmore College, which today remains one of the premier liberal-arts colleges in the United States .
In 1866 Mott joined with Stanton, Anthony, and Stone to establish the American Equal Rights Association.
She was posthumously inducted into the U.S. National Women's Hall of Fame.
Biographical Excerpts
1) Carl Schurz first met Lucretia Mott in 1854.
2) Editorial, Time and Tide (1926-07-09)
Quotes
"It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. " -Lucretia Mott
"We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth." -Lucretia Mott
"The cause of Peace has had my share of efforts, taking the ultra non-resistance ground - that a Christian cannot consistently uphold, and actively support, a government based on the sword, or whose ultimate resort is to the destroying weapons. " -Lucretia Mott
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