Lucretia Mott

Lucretia Mott: 1793-1880

Mott, a great orator, dedicated her life to speaking out against gender inequality and ending slavery. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848. Mott and Stanton attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in England in 1840; but they were banned because they were female. This angered them and is what triggered the organization of the women’ rights convention. Mott helped write the Declaration of Sentiments presented at that convention.

After the Civil War, Mott was elected the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization that advocated universal suffrage. She resigned from the association in 1868 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony allied with a controversial businessman named George Francis Train. Mott tried to reconcile the two factions that split the following year over the priorities of woman suffrage and Black male suffrage. Ever the peacemaker, Mott tried to heal the breach between Stanton, Anthony and Lucy Stone over the immediate goal of the women's movement: suffrage for freedmen and all women, or suffrage for freedmen first?

QUOTE: ”I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave…if our principles are right why should we be cowards?”