Lucretia Mott: Behind the Barrier in London, Then Seneca Falls

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Lucretia Mott was born in 1793 on Nantucket, where whaling kept men at sea for years and women like her mother ran businesses and trade with Boston. At 13 she went to a Quaker boarding school in New York and was teaching there by 15, when she learned male teachers were paid far more for the same work. She married a fellow teacher, moved to Philadelphia, raised five children to adulthood, and by her late 20s was a recognized Quaker minister in the Hicksite branch, which held that an inward light lives in every person. She boycotted cotton and cane sugar made by enslaved labor, helped found anti-slavery societies, ran fundraising fairs, and sheltered people on the Underground Railroad. In 1838, as a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, she and other women linked arms and walked out through the crowd.

At the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the men voted to exclude women delegates and seated them behind a barrier. There Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and in 1848 they organized the Seneca Falls Convention. Mott at first opposed Stanton's resolution for women's votes, seeing the Constitution as corrupt for protecting slavery, until Frederick Douglass argued the vote was the lever that protected every other right. That year she received five delegate votes for vice president at a Liberty Party convention. In 1866 she became the first president of the American Equal Rights Association and tried to hold the movement together when the 15th Amendment split it. She died in 1880 at 87.

• She calmly waited in her parlor as the mob that burned Pennsylvania Hall turned toward her house.
• A reporter at the London convention described her as a lioness.
• In 1849 she addressed medical students and condemned scientific cover for racism.
• She helped found a medical college for women and the coeducational school now known as Swarthmore.
• At her silent Quaker funeral, a mourner asked who was left to speak now that their greatest preacher was gone.