Lucretia Mott
From Free net encyclopedia
Current revision
Image:Lucretiamott2.jpg
Lucretia Mott (January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) was the first major American women's activist in the early 1800s and is credited as the first "feminist", but more accurately, the launcher of women's political advocacy. She was a Quaker, a women's rights proponent, and an abolitionist.
Mott was born Lucretia Coffin in Nantucket, Massachusetts. She was a first cousin four times removed of Benjamin Franklin's. At the age of thirteen Lucretia was sent to a boarding school run by the Society of Friends. She eventually became a teacher at the school. Her interest in women's rights began when she discovered that male teachers at the school were paid twice as much as the female staff.
In 1811 Lucretia married James Mott, another teacher at the school. Their first child died at age 5. Ten years later, she became a Quaker minister. Lucretia and her husband were both opposed to the slave trade and were active in the American Anti-Slavery Society.
She moved to Philadelphia in 1821. She quickly became known for her persuasive speeches against slavery. Prior to her own involvement, many Quaker men had been involved in the abolitionist movement in the very early 1800s. Lucretia Mott was one of the first Quaker women to do advocacy work for abolition.
She and her husband followed Elias Hicks in the "Great Separation" of 1827, opposing the more evangelical and orthodox branch.
Mott's letters reflect her regular travels in the mid-nineteenth century throughout the East and Midwest as she addressed various reform organizations such as the Non-Resistance Society, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women as well as the quarterly and yearly Quaker meetings. Her letters not only express the thoughts of a public figure but they also show the anxieties and joys of a nineteenth-century woman. Forceful and intelligent, her letters also reflect Mott's character and Quaker background.
Like many Hicksite Quakers including Hicks, Mott considered slavery an evil to be opposed. They refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slavery-produced goods. With her skills in ministry she began to make public speeches for abolition. From her home in Philadelphia, she began to travel, usually accompanied by her husband who supported her activism. They often sheltered runaway slaves in their home.
It should be noted that Quakers at that time were unusual in their equal treatment of women compared to other religious and social groups in America since its founding. They had a rich history and singular respect from the majority of American people of those times, mostly due to their advocacy and martyrdom for being conscientious objectors to war, and later their anti-slavery efforts.
Mott was successful in her abolitionist lobbying and punctuated her career with teaching the ropes of representative government's political advocacy to women coming up as women's and abolitionist advocates. In the 1830s she helped establish two anti-slavery groups.
Mott and her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled by steamship to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. In spite of their status as delegates, the pair was not seated at the meeting because they were women. Stanton later recalled: "We resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women. However, it was not until 1848 that Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organised the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. 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, and this became the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years.
The Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 was the first women's right's meeting. Mott was a signatory of the Declaration of Sentiments. While Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are usually credited as the leaders of that effort, it was Mott's mentoring of Stanton and their work together that organized the event. Lucretia's sister, Martha Coffin Wright also helped organize the convention and signed the declaration. Mott parted with the mainstream women's movement in one area, that of divorce. At that time it was very difficult to obtain divorce, and fathers were given custody of children.
Mott's theology was influenced by Unitarians including Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing as well as early Quakers including William Penn. She taught that "the kingdom of God is within man" (1849) and was part of the group of religious liberals who formed the Free Religious Association in 1867, with Rabbi Wise and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Elected as the first president of the American Equal Rights Convention after the end of the Civil War, Mott strove a few years later to reconcile the two factions that split over the priorities between woman suffrage and black male suffrage. Ever the peacemaker, LCM tried to heal the breach between Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone over the immediate goal of the women's movement: suffrage for freedmen and all women? or suffrage for freedmen first?
In 1866 Mott joined with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone to establish the American Equal Rights Association. She was a leading voice in the Universal Peace Union also founded in 1866. The following year, the organization became active in Kansas where Negro suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote.
In 1850 Mott wrote Discourse on Woman, a book about restrictions on women in the United States. She became more widely known after this. When slavery was outlawed in 1865, she began to advocate giving black Americans the right to vote. She remained a central figure in the women's movement as a peacemaker, a critical function for that period of the movement, until her death in 1880.
She was posthumously inducted into the U.S. National Women's Hall of Fame.
About Lucretia Mott
1) Carl Schurz first met Lucretia Mott in 1854. He described her in his autobiography published in 1906.
Lucretia Mott, a woman, as I was told, renowned for her high character, her culture, and the zeal and ability with which she advocated various progressive movements. To her I had the good fortune to be introduced by a German friend. I thought her the most beautiful old lady I had ever seen. Her features were of exquisite fineness. Not one of the wrinkles with which age had marked her face, would one have wished away. Her dark eyes beamed with intelligence and benignity. She received me with gentle grace, and in the course of our conversation, she expressed the hope that, as a citizen, I would never be indifferent to the slavery question as, to her great grief, many people at the time seemed to be.
2) Editorial, Time and Tide (1926-07-09)
- Feminism, like any other great movement, proceeds at varying paces and in varying forms in different countries. Few things are more enlightening than a study of the inter-reactions of the feminist movement in the two great English speaking peoples during the past seventy or eighty years. It is curious how closely related have been the movements on the two sides of the Atlantic. Each has continually learnt from the other. Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century, the feminist movement owed its next big impetus (in the eighteen forties and fifties) to Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, of New England. It was Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton who organised the first Equal Rights Convention which was held in New York in 1848; and it was Lucretia Mott who laid. down the definite proposition which American women are still struggling to implement today: 'Men and Women shall have Equal Rights throughout the United States.' A few years later Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer Suffragist, came into the American movement.
It was not till the eighteen sixties that the political feminist movement came alive in Great Britain. Dame Millicent Fawcett was even in those early days one of the leading names connected with it. The British suffragists pushed forward enthusiastically for some twenty years, but the failure to achieve success in 1885, when the third Reform Bill was passed giving the agricultural labourer the vote, seemed to take the heart out of our early suffragists, and the movement died down again. Meanwhile, in the nineties the American women were full of life and enthusiasm, winning victory after victory in State after State.'
In 1902 Susan B. Anthony came to England and stayed with Mrs. Pankhurst in Manchester. The result of that visit was far-reaching. All unwittingly the old pioneer handed back the torch to the British suffragists. 'It is unendurable,' declared Christabel Pankhurst after her departure, 'to think of another generation of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose any more time. We must act.' Those words heralded the birth of the British militant movement. From that moment onwards British feminists went forward without pause till the outbreak of war in 1914 and when that time came (although the actual Bill was not passed until 1918) the first instalment of victory was virtually won.
Meanwhile in America by 1912 things had died down to very much the same state as the English movement has been in since 1918. Votes had been achieved in a considerable number of States, the feeling was widespread that a partial victory was good enough for the moment and that complete victory would come all in good time without much further trouble. And then in 1912 Alice Paul, lit by the fire of the English militant movement, returned to America - and America woke up. It took the Americans just eight years from that date to achieve complete political equality; but they were under wise leadership (Alice Paul will surely go down to history as one of the great leaders of the world), and when they did achieve political equality they did not make the mistake of supposing that that was the end. They turned back to the 'declaration of sentiments' laid down by Lucretia Mott in 1848 and they realised that political equality was only the first step on the path which they had chosen and that there could be neither halting nor relaxing their pace until they had come to the end of that path.