Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Mott was a Quaker minister and abolitionist who was refused a seat at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because she was a woman, and who afterward helped call the Woman's Rights Convention that met at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848.
She lived from 1793 to 1880. She was a national figure in the antislavery movement before there was an organized women's rights movement: a recorded minister of the Society of Friends who preached against slavery from the pulpit, refused to buy goods made by enslaved labor, and helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, an organization of Black and white women formed because the men's antislavery societies would not admit women as members.
The Quaker ministry that made Mott a public speaker
Mott's ministry, not her politics, is what first put her on a platform. She was born on Nantucket into a Quaker family named Coffin and educated at the Nine Partners boarding school in New York, where she stayed on to teach and found that the men on the staff were paid more than the women for the same work. The Society of Friends recorded her as a minister, which in that body meant a recognized gift for speaking in meeting rather than a salaried office. It gave her what almost no other American woman of her generation had: a lawful reason to address a mixed audience, and decades of practice at it.
Her religion also cost her. Mott sided with the Hicksite Friends in the separation that divided American Quakerism, and orthodox meetings closed against her. She went on preaching, in Friends meetings and in hired halls, and refused sugar and cotton produced by enslaved labor as daily practice rather than declaration. When a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia after an antislavery meeting had been held there, the crowd moved on toward her house. Her one substantial published lecture, Discourse on Woman, was written as an answer to a public address that had argued women were unsuited to public life.
The refusal in London in 1840, and how Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met
The refusal in London came at the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, which voted that the women sent as delegates from the United States would not be seated. Mott was among them. The women were placed behind a partition at the side of the hall, and William Lloyd Garrison, who arrived after the vote had been taken, declined his own seat and sat with them rather than on the floor. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was in London that year as well, not as a delegate, and the two women met there.
What happened next is where most accounts run ahead of the evidence. The familiar version has Mott and Stanton agreeing on a London street to hold a women's rights convention as soon as they reached home. That version comes from Stanton, writing long afterward, and the convention did not meet until 1848. What is documented is smaller and still enough: they met, they talked at length about the legal standing of women, and when they were in the same room again in Waterloo, New York, a convention was called within days.
What Mott did to bring about Seneca Falls in July 1848
To bring Seneca Falls about, Mott supplied the one thing the meeting did not otherwise have, which was a name people would travel to hear. The convention was called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier, and the advertisement said that Mott would speak. The women who called it were Mott, Stanton, Mott's sister Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Jane Hunt.
The convention sat at the Wesleyan Chapel on 19 and 20 July 1848. James Mott took the chair, since it was thought improper for a woman to preside over a mixed meeting. The Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, was read out and adopted, and it drew one hundred signatures: sixty eight women and thirty two men. Its central charge was set out in the form the Declaration of Independence had used against the king.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
What Mott got wrong about the demand for the vote
Mott got the vote wrong, and she got it wrong in the room where it mattered. Eleven resolutions were put to the convention. All of them passed unanimously except the ninth, the one demanding the elective franchise, and by Stanton's later account Mott told her while the resolutions were being prepared that such a demand would make the meeting look ridiculous. Mott was not alone in that view; the ninth resolution was the only one that had to be argued for at all. Frederick Douglass spoke for it and it carried by a narrow margin. The resolution Mott doubted is the one the rest of the campaign was built on, and the line from it runs to the Nineteenth Amendment, certified on 26 August 1920.
What Mott is wrongly credited with
- Writing the Declaration of Sentiments. Stanton drafted it. Mott spoke to it and pressed the convention on the exclusion of women from the pulpit, but the text was Stanton's work.
- Calling the convention on her own. Stanton, Wright, M'Clintock and Hunt called it with her, and it met in Seneca Falls because Stanton lived there, not because Mott did.
- Recruiting Susan B. Anthony. Anthony was not at Seneca Falls and did not meet Stanton until afterward; she came into the movement through temperance work.
- Being a suffragist first. Mott's first cause was abolition, she never set it down, and she treated the two claims as one question.
Mott after Seneca Falls: the national conventions and the split of 1869
After Seneca Falls, Mott moved onto the national circuit that the convention started. The first National Woman's Rights Convention met at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, and the annual meetings that followed carried the argument from state to state and brought forward speakers such as Sojourner Truth, who spoke at Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851.
When the American Equal Rights Association was formed in 1866 to press for the vote without distinction of sex or color, Mott was chosen to preside over it. The association did not hold. In 1869 the movement broke in two over the Fifteenth Amendment: the National Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Stanton and Anthony in May, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Lucy Stone and others in November. Mott attached herself exclusively to neither and went on appearing for both. She died in 1880, and the two associations did not merge again until 1890, as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.