Lucretia Mott

In 1811, Lucretia Coffin married James Mott at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia. Together they had six children. They lost their second child, Thomas Coffin at age two.

Mott died of pneumonia at her home in Pennsylvania and was buried in the Quaker Fairhill Burial Ground, North Philadelphia. She is commemorated in a sculpture by Pablo Picasso at the Carrier Dome, Syracuse.

Lucretia Coffin was born on January 3, 1793 in Nantucket, Massachusetts, as the second child of eight children to Anna and Thomas Coffin. Her father was a seaman while her mother ran a store.

After the capture of his ship by a Spanish man-of-war, her father retired from the sea in 1803 and the next year moved the family to Boston, where he became a merchant.

At thirteen, sent to the Nine Partners Quaker Boarding School in Dutchess County, New York, run by the Society of Friends, she became an avid follower of Elias Hicks, a fiery Quaker abolitionist.

Lucretia became a teacher's assistant at Nine Partners and was troubled by the unfairness in salary differences between male and female instructors. Here, she met teacher James Mott, the grandson of Nine Partners' superintendent.

The family moved in 1809 to Philadelphia, where Thomas Coffin entered into business, investing all his capital in a factory for the manufacture of cut nails, a new product of the Industrial Revolution.

James Mott boarded with the family and became her father's partner and married Lucretia. In 1815, her father died, leaving her mother with heavy debts. The Motts also suffered financial hardship.

Anna Coffin set about shopkeeping again, and Lucretia taught school while James worked in his uncle's cotton mill, sold plows, and worked as a bank clerk before entering the wholesale business.

James boycotted slave products and traded in wool rather than cotton. Lucretia suddenly began speaking in Meeting, simply but powerfully, and in 1821 she was formally recognized as a minister.

In 1848, Mott and Stanton organized the first public women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Mott signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments on women's "right to the elective franchise”.

In 1850, she published her speech, Discourse on Woman, about restrictions on women. She declared that God intended that man and woman be equal and proved her points from anecdotes in the Testaments.