Lucretia Coffin Mott
Abolitionist Political and Social Reformer


Let Our Lives Be In Accordance With Our Convictions of Right, Each Striving to Carry Out Our Principles

Lucretia Mott
From a sermon delivered at the Cherry Street Meeting in Philadelphia, September 30, 1849. In Lucretia Mott Speaking , edited by Margaret Hope Bacon

Political and social reformer Lucretia Coffin Mott was born on January 3 , 1793 in Nantucket, Massachusetts . Inspired by a father who encouraged his daughters to be useful and by a mother who was active in business affairs, Lucretia Mott agitated for the oppressed while raising six children. Over the course of her lifetime, Mott actively participated in many of the reform movements of the day including abolition , temperance , and pacifism. Most importantly, however, she inaugurated the woman suffrage movement .

Mott's commitment to women's equality was strengthened by her experience as a student and teacher in Poughkeepsie , New York. While at a Quaker boarding school there, she was struck by the fact that "the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that when they became teachers, women received but half as much as men for their services…The injustice of this was so apparent," Mott recalled in an autobiographical sketch, "that I early resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed."

After marrying fellow teacher James Mott in 1811, she resided in Philadelphia. Both Mott and her husband were ardent abolitionists and members of the Society of Friends . After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 , the Mott home became a station on the underground railroad. Mott's insight and abilities as a speaker resulted in her 1821 recognition as a minister. By the 1830s, Mott traveled widely lecturing against war, intemperance, and slavery.

Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at an 1840 meeting of the World Anti-Slavery Conference in London. Though delegates to the convention, Mott and Stanton were denied the right to participate because of their gender. They agreed that the status of women must be advanced.

In 1848, Mott and Stanton launched the woman's rights movement in the United States by calling the Seneca Falls Convention . The Declaration of Sentiments signed by Stanton, Mott, and other participants called for the extension of basic civil rights to women. These included the right to vote and the right to hold property.

On the centennial of American independence, Mott and the National Woman Suffrage Association renewed their call for women's equality in their 1876 Declaration and Protest of the Women of the United States . The document called for impeachment of United States leaders on the grounds that they taxed women without representation and denied women trial by a jury of peers.

Though women did not receive the right to vote for another forty years after Mott's 1880 death, she lived to see fulfillment of several demands set forth in the Declaration of Sentiments. By 1880, for example, most states granted a woman the right to hold property independent of her husband, and several state and private colleges admitted women.

 

Women
Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869
In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century

Lucretia Mott American Reformer Wife of a Quaker Minister Slavery Abolitionist
Lucretia Mott American Reformer
Wife of a Quaker Minister Slavery Abolitionist

18 in. x 24 in.
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Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott
This landmark volume makes widely available for the first time the correspondence of the Quaker activist Lucretia Coffin Mott. Scrupulously reproduced and annotated, these letters illustrate the length and breadth of her public life as a leading reformer while providing an intimate glimpse of her family life.

An invaluable resource on an extraordinary woman, these selected letters reveal the incisive mind, clear sense of mission, and level-headed personality that made Lucretia Coffin Mott a natural leader and a major force in nineteenth-century American life.


Lucretia Mott

Dedicated to reform of almost every kind--temperance, peace, equal rights, woman suffrage, nonresistance, and the abolition of slavery--Mott viewed woman's rights as only one element of a broad-based reform agenda for American society. A founder and leader of many antislavery organizations, including the racially integrated American Antislavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-slavery Society, she housed fugitive slaves, maintained lifelong friendships with such African-American colleagues as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and agitated to bring her fellow Quakers into consensus on taking a stand against slavery.

Mott was a seasoned activist by 1848 when she helped to organize the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention, whose resolutions called for equal treatment of women in all arenas. Mott tried to pursue a neutral course when her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony disagreed with other woman's rights leaders over the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal rights for freedmen but not for any women. Her private views on this breach within the woman's movement emerge for the first time in these letters.

An active public life, however, is only half the story of this dedicated and energetic woman. Mott and her husband of fifty-six years, James, raised five children to adulthood, and her letters to other reformers and fellow Quakers are interspersed with the informal "hurried scraps" she wrote to and about her cherished family.


Kindle Available
Grimke Sisters
The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition

A landmark work of women's history originally published in 1967, Gerda Lerner's best-selling biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimke explores the lives and ideas of the only southern women to become antislavery agents in the North and pioneers for women's rights. This revised and expanded edition includes two new primary documents and an additional essay by Lerner. In a revised introduction Lerner reinterprets her own work nearly forty years later and gives new recognition to the major significance of Sarah Grimke's feminist writings
A landmark work of women's history originally published in 1967, Gerda Lerner's best-selling biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimke explores the lives and ideas of the only southern women to become antislavery agents in the North and pioneers for women's rights. This revised and expanded edition includes two new primary documents and an additional essay by Lerner. In a revised introduction Lerner reinterprets her own work nearly forty years later and gives new recognition to the major significance of Sarah Grimke's feminist writings
Kindle Available
Lizzie Stanton
You Want Women to Vote, Lizzie Stanton?

Grade 3-6. Fritz applies her gift for creating engaging, thorough historical literature to a larger-than-life historical figure. Stanton was a radical among radicals, and this objective depiction of her life and times, as well as her work for women's rights, makes readers feel invested in her struggle. An appealing, full-page black-and-white drawing illustrates each chapter. For students who need a biography, this title should fly off the shelves with a minimum of booktalking. And it is so lively that it is equally suitable for leisure reading.?
92 Years
Recollections of 92 Years, 1824-1916

When the indomitable Meriwether was banned from her home by Union soldiers because her husband was a Confederate officer, she spent the next two years bartering for food and shelter for herself and her three young sons. After the war, Meriwether embarked on a decades-long career as an author and advocate for the equality of women, keeping up the crusade until her death in 1916--the year congressional support for women's suffrage emerged.

Civil War Women
Women Civil War Soldiers
Womens Sufferage
Civil War Music History
Colored Troop Pictures
Civil War Picture Album
Documents of the War
Kids Zone Causes of the War
Kids Zone Underground Railroad
Civil War Exhibits
Civil War Timeline
State Battle Maps

American Civil War Book Titles

Jailed for Freedom
by: Doris Stevens

Dramatic documentation of women's struggle to win the vote is brought to light by a firsthand witness who reveals, among other facts, the imprisonment, vilification and brutality women experienced during their fight

The Vanderbilt Women: Dynasty of Wealth, Glamour and Tragedy
The fascinating lives of three generations of Vanderbilt women who dominated New York society from the middle of the eighteenth century through the twentieth. Of special interest are the discovery of unpublished letters

Century of Struggle: The Womans Rights Movement
Young suffragists who helped forge the last links in that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended. It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women

Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869
In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century

The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from History of Woman Suffrage, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association

Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Two heroic women who vastly bettered the lives of a majority of American citizens. For more than fifty years they led the public battle to secure for women the most basic civil rights and helped establish a movement that would revolutionize American society

Inez
The Life and Times of Inez Milholland


Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the Era Debate, 1921-1929
Amy E. Butler expertly deals with the ERA, Equal Rights Amendment, and two of the more important figures in the early ERA debate.

Civil War History Documentary DVD Movie Titles
       
       

Sources:
U.S. Library of Congress
U.S. National Park Service
Federal Citizen