Lucretia Coffin Mott
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.

 

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.


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
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.?
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.

American Civil War Women
Womens Civil War Reading Titles
American Civil War Recipes
Civil War Exhibits
Civil War Timeline
State Battle Maps

Young Heroes of History Series -Reading level: Ages 9-12

Send 'Em South is an adventure story that brings the two conflicting worlds of North and South together. In the years just prior to the Civil War, David Adams grows up in the middle of two worlds. His father is an Irish immigrant who is ridiculed and ignored by the people of Boston. His mother is an abolitionist who has dedicated her life to ending slavery. David, as the son of these two, finds himself an outcast amongst his friends and even his family.
The second in Alan N. Kay's Young Heroes of History series, On the Trail of John Brown's Body, is every bit as good as the first. Whereas that book juxtaposed the plight of a slave family and a northern family filled with abolitionists and sympathetics, this book follows the adventures of two boys and their fathers as they journey to the Kansas Territory in the days when John Brown cast the longest shadow in the land.
Disgusted by the violence of the John Brown raid, George Adams adopts the state of Virginia and its cause as his own. The war does not go well for the South, and when the North's cannons destroy the city, George is horrified. Then, when he finds a poor starving girl, George realizes that he is the only one that can save her. Off to Fight is a story of growing up. It is a story of the brutality of war and the kindness that takes place in the middle of such horrors.
During the Civil War, Mary Adams wants to do more than work at the aid society so she sets out for the front lines, where she cleans the wounds of Lynn Rhodes and then conceals the fact that Lynn is female. When the secret is revealed, the teens must reevaluate their roles and determine how best they can help as women in a man's world. Mention of historical figures and places allows readers to learn facts in an easy-to-read format. A bibliography and historical photographs are included.

Books
Civil War
Womens Subjects
Young Readers
Military History

DVDs
VHS
Civil War Games
Music CDs

 

ADDITIONAL READING

This book is a concise, interpretive account of the life of Clara Barton from her childhood in Massachusetts through her feats of heroism during the Civil War, her founding of the American Red Cross, which she led for 20 years, and her bitterly contested ejection from office which clouded her last days
This volume by the team of Cynthia Klingel and Robert B. Noyed looks at the life of "Clara Barton: Founder of the American Red Cross." Following the standard four chapter format, we learn how Barton spent her early years as a teacher, became the Angel of the Battlefield during the American Civil War, worked to have United States be part of the International Red Cross, and then served as the first President of the American Red Cross. Young readers are going to be hard pressed to name many Americans, of either gender, who have been responsible for helping more people than Clara Barton
Reading Level 9-12
Clara Barton: Founder of the American Red Cross
Reading Level 4-8

From School Library Journal
Grade 5-9 This biography relates Barton's accomplishments, making it clear how extraordinary her activities were for a woman of her time. Whitelaw makes use of her subject's original diaries from the Library of Congress, along with her published work. The chapters consist of easy, short sentences, lots of footnotes, and some direct quotes. Occasionally a box offers interesting incidental information. The black-and-white photographs and drawings are sharp with good contrast.

Card catalog description
Follows the life of the nurse who served on the battlefields of the Civil War and later founded the American Red Cross.

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