Queer Places:
Roadside, Latham Park, Elkins Park, PA 19027
Fair Hill Burial Ground
Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, USA
Lucretia
Mott (née Coffin;
January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) was a U.S.
Quaker, abolitionist, women's
rights activist, and social
reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in
society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World
Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. In 1848 she was invited by Jane
Hunt to a meeting that led to the first meeting about women's rights. Mott
helped write the Declaration
of Sentiments during the 1848 Seneca
Falls Convention. Her speaking abilities made her an important
abolitionist, feminist, and reformer. When slavery was outlawed in 1865, she
advocated giving former slaves who had been bound to slavery laws within the
boundaries of the United States, whether male or female, the right to vote.
She remained a central figure in the abolition and suffrage movement until her
death in 1880. Mott was a Quaker preacher early in her adulthood.
Sarah Pugh never wore cotton or ate sugar because both of these
were produced by slaves. On Sundays Sarah would sit on the porch, knitting, to
protest against the rigid Sabbatarianism of Philadelphia, together with her
friend Lucretia Mott, co-organizer with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the famous
1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, the first public women’s rights
meeting in the United States.
Lucretia Mott at the age of 49 (1842), at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
A photograph of the Executive Board of the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society taken in 1851. Standing, from left to right, are Mary Grew, E. M. Davis, Haworth Wetherald, Abby Kimber, J. Miller McKim, and Sarah Pugh. Seated, from left to right, are Oliver Johnson, Mrs. Margaret
Jones Burleigh, Benjamin C. Bacon, Robert Purvis, Lucretia Mott, and James Mott.
Lucretia Coffin was born January 3, 1793,[1] in Nantucket, Massachusetts,
the second child of Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin.[2] Through
her mother, she was a descendant of Peter
Folger[3] and Mary
Morrell Folger.[4] Her
cousin was Framer Benjamin
Franklin, while other Folger relatives were Tories.[5]
She was sent at the age of 13 to the Nine
Partners School, located in Dutchess
County, New York, which was run by the Society
of Friends.[6] There
she became a teacher after graduation. Her interest in women's
rights began when she discovered that male teachers at the school were paid
significantly more than female staff.[7] After
her family moved to Philadelphia, she and James Mott, another teacher at Nine
Partners, followed.[8]
In 1864, Mott and several other Hicksite
Quakers incorporated Swarthmore
College near Philadelphia, which remains one of the premier liberal
arts colleges in the country.[25]
Mott was a pacifist, and in the 1830s, she attended meetings of the New
England Non-Resistance Society. She opposed the War with Mexico. After the
Civil War, Mott increased her efforts to end war and violence, and she was a
leading voice in the Universal
Peace Union, founded in 1866.[26]
On April 10, 1811, Lucretia Coffin married James
Mott at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia. They had six children. Their
second child, Thomas Mott, died at age two. Their surviving children all
became active in the anti-slavery and other reform movements, following in
their parents' paths. Her great-granddaughter May
Hallowell Loud became an artist. Mott died on November 11, 1880 of
pneumonia at her home, Roadside, in Cheltenham,
Pennsylvania. She was buried near to the highest point of Fair
Hill Burial Ground, a Quaker cemetery in North Philadelphia. Mott's
great-granddaughter served briefly as the Italian interpreter for American feminist Betty
Friedan during a controversial speaking engagement in Rome.[27]
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