Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793 -1880) A Quaker minister, abolitionist and pioneer in the movement for women’s rights. While speaking at the Women’s Rights Convention in 1853, Lucretia Mott paid this tribute to the Quaker women of Nantucket: “Look at the heads of these women; they can mingle with men; they are not triflers, they have intelligent subjects of conversation.” In the Friend’s Society, Mott described her experience as “...so thoroughly imbued with women’s rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day.”
In 1804 at the age of 15, Lucretia Mott was an assistant unpaid teacher at a Friend’s boarding school when she noted the fact that “even experienced women teachers were paid less than half of what men received.” She became so outraged by this injustice that she resolved to change the unequal conditions of women in general. Her classmates called her a “spitfire” which lay beneath her Quaker sweetness and serenity and at times broke through throughout her life”.
(Note: There is an interesting “split” in this description of her personality which implies that both qualities are not particularly welcomed together as a “whole” personality. The word tomboy in our current language suggests the same and in conversation with my daughter, I am aware that the descriptor “feisty” in relation to Elizabeth Warren also implies the same split.)
It is also worth noting that unlike some spouses, “James Mott shared all of his wife’s convictions, supported her in all unpopular causes, and by accompanying her on speaking tours lent her public appearances a ‘respectability’ which other feminist lecturers lacked.”
Lucretia Mott began as an abolitionist from 1825 until Emancipation and she never knowingly used cotton cloth, cane sugar or any other product of slavery. In 1833 she was instrumental in the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society which at first did not admit women to its membership. In response, she formed an auxiliary and became its leading spirit until the policy of excluding women was dropped. In 1840, she was one of several American women delegates to the World’s Anti-slavery Convention in London. Even though women were barred from the proceedings, she became known as “the Lioness of the Convention.”
From this organization, it became a natural segue for Lucretia to join the movement for women’s rights. Fortuitously, it was at this London convention that she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the two women “struck by the irony of a ‘world convention’ which had opened by excluding representatives of half the human race, found they had a common concern to promote the rights of womankind.” They took action eight years later by organizing a Convention for Women’s Rights in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. For it they composed the Declaration of Sentiments which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence. In addition to supporting suffrage, Lucretia also focused on other rights of women--equal educational opportunities, equal wages, greater employment opportunities and all political rights given to men. These arguments were presented in her Discourse on Women written in 1850. At this juncture, she departed from Quakerism and moved to the liberal religious group, the Unitarians. She lived to be 87 and for more than 50 years she had dedicated herself to emancipation—of the Negro from slavery, of American Women from an inferior status, and of the human mind from the narrowness in religion. From her beginnings in the Quaker faith, she became one of the first, “most consistently effective woman ever to play a major role in the American reform tradition.” p.595, NAW.
Lucy Stone (1818 - 1893) was a feminist, abolitionist and suffragist. “Even as a child she resented the assigning of women to an inferior role, expressing indignation at the preference shown an older brother despite the fact that she could learn and run faster than he.” p. 387, NAW. Lucy’s causes came directly from her own personal observations and experiences with the limitations placed on women.
- She resented her lack of a vote in the Congregational Church and when she read in the Bible that men should rule women, she suspected inaccuracy in translation and determined to go to college to study Greek and Hebrew, an ambition her father dismissed as “utterly ridiculous for a girl.” In 1843 at the age of 25 she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, a school noted for its introduction of the co-educational system. It was here because of her Greek and Hebrew studies that she did indeed find that crucial passages in the Bible in respect to women’s roles had been misconstrued.
- Another injustice, slavery, came to her attention through attendance at anti-slavery lectures and reading anti-slavery publications.
- At 16 her salary of a dollar a week impressed upon her the disparity between women’s and men’s wages.
- While in college, Lucy wanted to become a public speaker, but found those activities were closed to women. She practiced secretly before friends and became a formidable speaker.
Lucy Stone’s persistence and determination to receive her choice of education, led to her 1847 graduation with honors becoming the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree. She was asked to write the commencement address, but declined because she was not allowed to speak it. (36 years later she was an honored speaker at Oberlin’s semi-centennial jubilee.)
Lucy Stone went on to speak out for the abolitionist cause, but her feminism took precedence stating, “I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women.” Her natural eloquence, stirred her listeners, but the notoriety from her speaking engagements led the Unitarian Church to expel her. At the 1850 Women’s Rights Convention two years after Seneca Falls, she made a speech that converted Susan B. Anthony to the cause.
An interesting sidelight was that she was determined not to marry, but Henry Blackwell convinced her that she could be perfectly free within marriage and that two could advance a cause better than one. After their marriage, she kept her own name which created the phrase, a “Lucy Stoner” which denoted a married woman retaining her maiden name. She went on to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in their efforts to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and in 1866 she helped organize the American Equal Rights Association that pressed for suffrage for both negros and women.
Following prodigious efforts in many states, Stone assisted in founding the New England Women’s Suffrage Association under the presidency of Julia Ward Howe. She became the leading spirit in the New England wing of the suffrage movement which ultimately split from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s movement, the former feeling that “race, color, or previous conditions of servitude was enough while the latter felt that those rights should specifically name women. In addition, the former wanted to focus on states and the latter wanted a national stage. Thus, both the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association were created in 1869.
Stone went on to edit he “Woman’s Journal” with her husband, Henry Blackwell, and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, for 47 years. The publication was considered the ‘voice of the women’s movement’. In the end, though not easily, the two groups were reunited as the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890 with Stone as Chairman of the Executive Committee, Stanton as President and Anthony as Vice President of the new organization. It was Alice Stone Blackwell who led the successful negotiations for the merger.
Some recently published books that through different approaches, convey the scope and depth of the Suffragist Movement.
Wagner, Sally Roesch, Editor, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, 2019.
Ware, Susan, Why they Marched, Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right To Vote, 2019.
Weiss, Elaine, The Women’s Hour, The Great Fight To Win The Vote, 2019.