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.