Lucretia Mott

Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, N 5th & Arch Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Mott, the "foremost white female abolitionist in the United States", called for the immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people,[4][24] after she visited Virginia in 1818.[10] 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.[25] In 1833, she and her husband helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society.[26] It was an organization for men, but she was invited to their first convention as a guest. She formed and was a leader of the Female Anti-Slavery Society, which merged with the male-centric organization in 1839.[10] Mott, a founding member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society,[27] 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.[28] Mott and other female activists also organized anti-slavery fairs to raise awareness and revenue, providing much of the funding for the movement.[29]

Philadelphia abolitionists, Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1851. Standing left to right are Mary Grew, Edward M. Davis, Haworth Wetherald, Abigail Kimber, Miller McKim, and Sarah Pugh. Seated left to right are Oliver Johnson, Margaret Jones Burleigh, Benjamin C. Bacon, Robert Purvis, Mott, and James Mott.

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.[30]

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."[31]

1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention.[32] 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. Despite 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 did not want the women's rights issue to become associated with the cause of ending slavery worldwide and dilute the focus on abolition.[33] In addition, the social mores of the time denied women's full participation in public political life.[34] Even so, Mott "made many telling addresses" at the convention.[3] Several of the American men attending the convention, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, protested the women's exclusion.[34] Garrison, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, William Adam, and African American activist Charles Lenox Remond sat with the women in the segregated area.[35] 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.[36]

One Irish reporter deemed her the "Lioness of the Convention".[37] 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.[38] Benjamin Haydon, the painting's creator, had intended to give Mott a prominent place in the painting. However, during a sitting on June 29, 1840, to capture her likeness, he took a dislike to her views and decided to not use her portrait prominently.[39]

Encouraged by active debates in England and Scotland,[40] and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,[13] 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.[40] 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", referring to the senator and abolition opponent.[41][42] In 1855, with several other female abolitionists, Mott participated in the transportation of Jane Johnson, an enslaved woman, to Boston after Johnson, with the aid of William Still, Passmore Williamson and others, had emancipated herself, while passing through Philadelphia on a trip from North Carolina to New York with her master, in accordance with Pennsylvania law.[43]

Sculptor Lloyd Lillie's "The First Wave" statues in the Women's Rights National Historical Park Visitor Center. On the far left are Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass (with Lucretia Mott and James Mott not visible behind them); of the two women in the front, the one on the right is Martha Coffin Wright; the man and woman standing together in the rear are Thomas M'Clintock and Mary Ann M'Clintock. The others are unidentified.

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 a 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."[44]

Mott was a founder and president of the Northern Association for the Relief and Employment of Poor Women in Philadelphia (founded in 1846).[45] In 1850, Mott published her speech Discourse on Woman, a pamphlet about restrictions on women in the United States.[46]

In 1848, Mott and Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, at Seneca Falls, New York.[47][48] 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."[49] 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.[50] Mott signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.[51]

Despite Mott's opposition to electoral politics, her fame had reached into the political arena. During the June 1848 National Convention of the Liberty Party, 5 voting delegates cast their ballots for Lucretia Mott to be their party's candidate for the Office of U.S. Vice President,[52] making her the first woman to run for that position.[47]

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:[53][54]

"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."

Lucretia Mott, c. 1859–1870, Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library.

In 1866, after the Civil War, the American Equal Rights Association was founded, with Mott serving as the first president of the integrated organization.[44] The following year, Mott and Stanton became active in Kansas where black suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote. The Equal Rights Association, with male and female members, favored male suffrage. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association for women only.[55]

• 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 (1989). Mothers of feminism : the story of Quaker women in America. San Francisco : Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0062500465.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Bacon, Margaret Hope (1999). Valiant friend: the life of Lucretia Mott. New York: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. ISBN 978-1888305111.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Faulkner, Carol (2011). Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0812205008.
• 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 978-0743200240
• Haydon, Benjamin Robert (1840). "The anti-slavery society convention". Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. 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 978-0805077766.
• 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 978-0195182651.
• Mott, Lucretia (December 17, 1849). "Discourse on Woman". National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. American Memory, Library of Congress.
• "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 978-1851097883
• Soriso, Carolyn (2002). Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature 1833–1879. University of Georgia Press.
• "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.