Lucretia Mott

Like most Quakers, Mott considered slavery to be evil. Inspired in part by minister Elias Hicks, she and other Quakers refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slavery-produced goods. In 1821, Mott became a Quaker minister. With her husband's support, she traveled extensively as a minister, and her sermons emphasized the Quaker inward light or the presence of the Divine within every individual. Her sermons also included her free produce and anti-slavery sentiments. In 1833, her husband helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society.

By then an experienced minister and abolitionist, Lucretia Mott was the only woman to speak at the organizational meeting in Philadelphia. She tested the language of the society's Constitution and bolstered support when many delegates were precarious. Days after the conclusion of the convention, at the urging of other delegates, Mott and other white and black women founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Integrated from its founding, the organization opposed both slavery and racism, and developed close ties to Philadelphia's Black community. Mott herself often preached at Black parishes. Around this time, Mott's sister-in-law, Abigail Lydia Mott, and brother-in-law, Lindley Murray Moore, were helping to found the Rochester Anti-Slavery Society (see Julia Griffiths).

Amidst social persecution by abolition opponents and pain from dyspepsia, Mott continued her work for the abolitionist cause. She managed their household budget to extend hospitality to guests, including fugitive slaves, and donated to charities. Mott was praised for her ability to maintain her household while contributing to the cause. In the words of one editor, "She is proof that it is possible for a woman to widen her sphere without deserting it."[9]

Mott and other female activists also organized anti-slavery fairs to raise awareness and revenue, providing much of the funding for the movement.[10]

Women's participation in the anti-slavery movement threatened societal norms. Many members of the abolitionist movement opposed public activities by women, especially public speaking. At the Congregational Church General Assembly, delegates agreed on a pastoral letter warning women that lecturing directly defied St. Paul's instruction for women to keep quiet in church.(1 Timothy 2:12) Other people opposed women's speaking to mixed crowds of men and women, which they called "promiscuous." Others were uncertain about what was proper, as the rising popularity of the Grimké sisters and other women speakers attracted support for abolition.

Mott attended all three national Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women (1837, 1838, 1839). During the 1838 convention in Philadelphia, a mob destroyed Pennsylvania Hall, a newly opened meeting place built by abolitionists. Mott and the white and black women delegates linked arms to exit the building safely through the crowd. Afterward, the mob targeted her home and Black institutions and neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As a friend redirected the mob, Mott waited in her parlor, willing to face her violent opponents.[11]

Mott was involved in a number of anti-slavery organizations, including the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (founded in 1838), the American Free Produce Association, and the American Anti-Slavery Society.

1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention.[12] Move your cursor to identify delegates or click the icon to enlarge

In June 1840, Mott attended the General Anti-Slavery Convention, better known as the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, in London, England. In spite of Mott's status as one of six women delegates, before the conference began, the men voted to exclude the American women from participating, and the female delegates were required to sit in a segregated area. Anti-slavery leaders didn't want the women's rights issue to become associated with the cause of ending slavery worldwide and dilute the focus on abolition.[13] In addition, the social mores of the time denied women's full participation in public political life. Several of the American men attending the convention, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, protested the women's exclusion.[14] Garrison, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, William Adam, and African American activist Charles Lenox Remond sat with the women in the segregated area.

Activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry Brewster Stanton attended the convention while on their honeymoon. Stanton admired Mott, and the two women became united as friends and allies.

One Irish reporter deemed her the "Lioness of the Convention".[15] Mott was among the women included in the commemorative painting of the convention, which also featured female British activists: Elizabeth Pease, Mary Anne Rawson, Anne Knight, Elizabeth Tredgold and Mary Clarkson, daughter of Thomas Clarkson.[16] Benjamin Haydon the painting's creator had intended to give Mott a prominent place in the painting. However during a sitting on 29 June 1840 to capture her likeness, he took a dislike to her views and decided to not use her portrait prominently.[17]

Encouraged by active debates in England and Scotland, Mott also returned with new energy for the anti-slavery cause in the United States. She and her husband allowed their Philadelphia-area home, called Roadside, in the district now known as La Mott, to be used as a stop on the Underground Railroad.[18] She continued an active public lecture schedule, with destinations including the major Northern cities of New York City and Boston, as well as travel over several weeks to slave-owning states, with speeches in Baltimore, Maryland and other cities in Virginia. She arranged to meet with slave owners to discuss the morality of slavery. In the District of Columbia, Mott timed her lecture to coincide with the return of Congress from Christmas recess; more than 40 Congressmen attended. She had a personal audience with President John Tyler who, impressed with her speech, said, "I would like to hand Mr. Calhoun over to you",[19] referring to the senator and abolition opponent.

Lucretia Mott, at 49 years old (1842), at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Mott and Cady Stanton became well acquainted at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention. Cady Stanton later recalled that they first discussed the possibility of a women's rights convention in London.

Women's rights activists advocated a range of issues, including equality in marriage, such as women's property rights and rights to their earnings. At that time it was very difficult to obtain divorce, and fathers were almost always granted custody of children. Cady Stanton sought to make divorce easier to obtain and to safeguard women's access to and control of their children. Though some early feminists disagreed, and viewed Cady Stanton's proposal as scandalous, Mott stated "her great faith in Elizabeth Stanton's quick instinct & clear insight in all appertaining to women's rights."[20]

Mott's theology was influenced by Unitarians including Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing as well as early Quakers including William Penn. She thought that "the kingdom of God is within man" (1749) and was part of the group of religious liberals who formed the Free Religious Association in 1867, with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise,[21] Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

In 1866, Mott joined with Stanton, Anthony, and Stone to establish the American Equal Rights Association. The following year, the organization became active in Kansas where black suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote, and it was then that Stanton and Anthony formed a political alliance with Train, leading to Mott's resignation. Kansas failed to pass both referendums.

Mott was a founder and president of the Northern Association for the Relief and Employment of Poor Women in Philadelphia (founded in 1846).

In 1848, Mott and Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, at Seneca Falls, New York.[22] 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 despite Mott's opposition. Mott viewed politics as corrupted by slavery and moral compromises, but she soon concluded that women's "right to the elective franchise however, is the same, and should be yielded to her, whether she exercises that right or not."[23] Mott signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

Despite Mott's opposition to electoral politics, her fame had reached into the political arena even before the July 1848 women's rights convention. During the June 1848 National Convention of the Liberty Party, 5 of the 84 voting delegates cast their ballots for Lucretia Mott to be their party's candidate for the Office of U.S. Vice President. In delegate voting, she placed 4th in a field of nine.

Over the next few decades, women's suffrage became the focus of the women's rights movement. While Cady Stanton is usually credited as the leader of that effort, it was Mott's mentoring of Cady Stanton and their work together that inspired the event. Mott's sister, Martha Coffin Wright, also helped organize the convention and signed the declaration.

Noted abolitionist and human rights activist Frederick Douglass was in attendance and played a key role in persuading the other attendees to agree to a resolution calling for women's suffrage.[24]

The biological justifications of race as a biologically provable basis for difference gave rise to the stigma of innate, naturally determined inferiority in the 19th century. In 1849, Mott's "Sermon to the Medical Students" was published:[25][26]

"May you be faithful, and enter into a consideration as to how far you are partakers in this evil, even in other men's sins. How far, by permission, by apology, or otherwise, you are found lending your sanction to a system which degrades and brutalizes three million of our fellow beings."

In 1850, Mott published her speech Discourse on Woman, a pamphlet about restrictions on women in the United States.[27]

Lucretia Mott, lecturer, woman suffragist, [ca. 1859–1870]. Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library.

After the Civil War, Mott was elected the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization that advocated universal suffrage. She resigned from the association in 1868 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony allied with a controversial businessman named George Francis Train. Mott tried to reconcile the two factions that split the following year over the priorities of woman suffrage and Black male suffrage. Ever the peacemaker, Mott tried to heal the breach between Stanton, Anthony and Lucy Stone over the immediate goal of the women's movement: suffrage for freedmen and all women, or suffrage for freedmen first?

• Architect of the Capitol. "Portrait Monument of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony". Washington, D.C.: Architect of the Capitol.
• Bacon, Margaret Hope (1999). Valiant friend: the life of Lucretia Mott. New York, New York: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. ISBN 9781888305111.
• Faulkner, Carol (May 10, 2011). Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-0500-8.
• The Free Religious Association (1907). Proceedings at the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Association. Boston: Adams & Company. pp. 30–31.
• Friedan, Betty (2001), "The enemies without and the enemies within", in Friedan, Betty (ed.), Life so far, New York: Touchstone, p. 221, ISBN 9780743200240
• Haydon, Benjamin Robert (1840). "The anti-slavery society convention". Retrieved July 19, 2008.
• Haydon, Benjamin Robert (1841). "The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840". National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG599, Given by British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1880
• Jacoby, Susan (2005). Freethinkers: a history of American secularism. New York: Metropolitan/Owl. p. 95. ISBN 9780805077766.
• Korte, Gregory (April 21, 2016). "Anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman to replace Jackson on $20 bill". USA Today. Retrieved August 7, 2016.
• Lockard, Joe. "A Sermon to the Medical Students, 1849". The Antislavery Literature Project. Archived from the original on March 24, 2011. Retrieved June 18, 2006.
• McMillen, Sally Gregory (2008). Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-518265-1.
• Mott, Lucretia (December 17, 1849). "Discourse on Woman". National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. American Memory, Library of Congress.
• Phil Wallace Payne (September 30, 2011). Writes of Passage: Threads in the Fabric of Our Times. Xlibris Corporation. p. 20. ISBN 978-1-4653-4861-6.
• "The Seneca Falls Convention". National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Archived from the original on June 3, 2013. Retrieved March 6, 2014.
• Rodriguez, Junius P. (2011), "Entries, O–W", in Rodriguez, Junius P. (ed.), Slavery in the modern world: a history of political, social, and economic oppression, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LCC, ISBN 9781851097883
• "1860 Founders and the Quaker Tradition". Swarthmore College. Archived from the original on September 30, 2015.
• "Treasury Secretary Lew Announces Front of New $20 to Feature Harriet Tubman, Lays Out Plans for New $20, $10 and $5". US Department of the Treasury. April 20, 2016. Retrieved December 11, 2017.
• The Washington Post Staff (April 9, 1909). "Mott School Completed". The Washington Post.