Lucretia Mott
American Reformer
1793 – 1880

Lucretia Mott, an American reformer, born at Nantucket, MA, and educated in the Friends’ School near Poughkeepsie, NY, where she met James Mott, whom she married.

She soon became prominent as a preacher in the Society of Friends and was chosen a minister. Later she became an ardent advocate of emancipation, and helped to organize the Female Anti-Slavery Society, of which she became leader. As the feeling against abolitionists grew in intensity, many more timid Quakers began to deprecate any discussion of slavery by one of their ministers, and Mrs. Mott was regarded with suspicion and dislike.

In 1840, at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, to which both James and Lucretia Mott had been chosen delegates, the question of the equal participation of women in the proceedings of the convention came up, and after some discussion all women were excluded. This action led Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to first discuss the women’s rights movement which they launched eight years later at a convention in Seneca Falls, NY., called “to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women” and when a “Declaration of Sentiments” was passed, modelled [sic] on the Declaration of Independence.

But abolition and women’s rights, while they received the greater share of Mrs. Mott’s attention, were not the only movements in which she was interested, for all that promised to uplift humanity or to break the fetters of ignorance and tradition received her warmest support.

Almost to the end of her long life of eighty-seven years, she made frequent journeys to visit distant meetings or to attend conventions called to consider the elevation of woman, the promotion of temperance, and the establishment of universal peace.

Lucretia Mott was a Unitarian Quaker, a woman of high moral character and uncommon intelligence, and a noble worker in the cause of human progress.

~*~

Reference: Famous Women; An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women By Joseph Adelman. Copyright, 1926 by Ellis M. Lonow Company.