Heroes you should know: Lucretia Mott

“If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?”
-Lucretia Mott


Lucretia Mott (January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) has been called “the first voice of American women.” She was a Quaker, an abolitionist, a minister, a women’s rights activist, and a social reformer.

Her activism was first ignited by her discovery that male colleagues at the Nine Partners Quaker Boarding School she taught at were being paid three times what females doing the same work were paid. In protest she left, along with her future husband James, and moved to Philadelphia.
There she would marry, raise six children, and become a Friends minister. She also travelled and spoke extensively on issues of justice and human dignity, led a boycott of cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slavery-produced goods, and co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

And she was utterly fearless.

As an angry mob began destroying the building where the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was being held in 1837, Mott defiantly linked arms with black and white delegates and led a procession out of the hall and through the street. And when the mob found where she lived, and threatened to burn her house down as well, Mott calmly sat in her parlor and called their bluffs.

Before and during the Civil War, she also hid runaway slaves in her home.

Mott demonstrated courage as well in confronting her own abolitionist community. In 1840 she was one of six women elected to be delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, England. But before the convention began the men voted to exclude the women from participating, and forced them to sit in a segregated area. The excuse given was that abolitionist leaders didn’t want the issue of women’s rights to distract from the issue of ending slavery. Still, Mott had enough of an impact to earn the nickname “the lioness of the convention” by journalists present.

Fundamentally Lucretia Mott understood that one justice issue could not in good conscience be separated from another. And she would spend the next forty years challenging inconsistencies and prejudices in political and religious circles alike. Her list of causes included full citizenship and voting rights for blacks, women’s political, economic, and marital rights, and the peace movement. She also served as a mentor to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (with whom she founded the American Equal Rights Association).

Like few before her, and few sense Lucretia Mott practiced what she preached. And this country is a far better place for it.

She is a hero you should know.