Born to Quaker parents in Nantucket, a sailing center were even married women spent a great deal of time without a man in the home, Mott learned self-dependence as a child. After attending school in Boston and Poughkeepsie, she worked in a school as a virtually unpaid teacher, an experience that made her aware of the world's view of women. In 1811, she married James Mott, a liberal Quaker like herself, who supported her in her work.

      While bearing and raising six children, Mott both spoke in public and preached as part of her Quaker ministry. One of the early Quakers to oppose slavery, she began boycotting Southern products in the 1820s, a true hardship which meant finding alternatives to cotton, sugar, rice, and other staples. According to Black leader Robert Purvis, she predated William Lloyd Garrison as an anti-slavery activist and she spoke in "colored churches as early as 1829".

      A founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), she served as president of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society even before most women considered joining such organizations. Needless to say, putting her conscience above her respect for the law, she made her home a stop on the underground railroad in the 1850s.

      Chosen as a delegate to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, Mott, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women, was refused seating as a delegate because of her sex. Eventually this meeting would led to the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention and the beginning of the 19th century American woman's rights movement.

      When abolitionism finally lead to Civil War, Mott -- like so many of the Society of Friends -- found her pacifist principles in conflict with her desire to end slavery. Mott served as vice-president of the Pennsylvania Peace Society, raising money for the education of the free and the newly free, and for Swarthmore College, a co-educational institution founded by Quakers in 1864.

      After the war, she served as first president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization devoted to securing the vote for the ex-slave and, some believed, for women. When the American Woman Suffrage Association split in 1869, Mott did not take sides but attempted to work with both sides.

      Widowed in 1868, for the remainder of her life, Mott continued to work for justice, liberty, and equality for all both in the North and the South.

      For her early work in the 19th century American abolitionist and woman's rights movements, Lucretia Coffin Mott occupies a place on any list influential women of the millennium.

Reference

      Doris Weatherford, American Women's History: An A to Z of Organizations, Issues, and Events, Prentiss Hall, 1994

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