biography
| name: |
Mott, Lucretia
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née Coffin
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1793–1880)
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| biography:
| Women's rights activist, abolitionist, and religious reformer, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA. A child of Quaker parents, she was early impressed by her mother's and other Nantucket women's active roles while menfolk were away on voyages. The family moved to Boston (1804), and she attended and then taught at a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, NY (1808–9). After she moved again with her family to Philadelphia, she married James Mott, a former teacher at the Poughkeepsie school who had now joined her father's hardware firm. By 1821, she became a Quaker minister, noted for her speaking abilities, and in 1827 she and her husband went over with the more progressive wing of the Friends. She was strongly opposed to slavery, and advocated not buying the products of slave labour, which prompted her husband, always her supporter, to get out of the cotton trade (c.1830). An early supporter of William Lloyd Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society, she often found herself threatened with physical violence due to her radical views. She and her husband attended the famous World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London (1840), the one that refused to allow women to be full participants. This led to her joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton in calling the famous Seneca Falls Convention, NY in 1848 (at which, ironically, James Mott was asked to preside), and from that point on she was dedicated to women's rights and published her influential Discourse on Woman (1850). While remaining within the Society of Friends, in practice and beliefs she actually identified increasingly with more liberal and progressive trends in American religious life, even helping to form the Free Religious Association in Boston (1867). While keeping up her commitment to women's rights, she also maintained the full routine of a mother and housewife, and continued after the Civil War to work for advocating the rights of African-Americans. She helped to found Swarthmore College (1864), continued to attend women's rights conventions, and when the movement split into two factions in 1869, she tried to bring the two together. |
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