Lucretia
Coffin was
born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on 3rd January, 1793. At the age
of thirteen Lucretia was sent to a boarding school run by the Society
of Friends. She eventually became a teacher at the school. Her
interest in women's rights began when she discovered that male teachers
at the school were paid twice as much as the female staff.
In 1811 Lucretia married James Mott, another teacher at the school.
Ten years later, she became a Quaker minister.
Lucretia and her husband were both opposed to the
slave trade and were active in the American
Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1840, Mott and her friend, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, travelled to London as
delegates to the World
Anti-Slavery Convention. Both women were furious when they,
like the British women at the convention, were refused permission
to speak at the meeting. Stanton later recalled: "We resolved
to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society
to advocate the rights of women."
However, it was not until 1848 that Mott and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton organised the Women's Rights
Convention at Seneca Falls. Stanton's resolution that it was "the
duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred
right to the elective franchise" was passed, and this became
the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years.
In 1866 Mott joined with Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, and Lucy Stone to establish
the American Equal Rights Association. The following year, the organisation
became active in Kansas where Negro suffrage and woman
suffrage were to be decided by popular vote.
Lucretia
Mott,
who remain active in the woman's rights
movement into her seventies, died in Abington on 11th November, 1880.
(1)
Carl
Schurz
first met Lucretia Mott in 1854. He described her in his autobiography
published in 1906.
Lucretia
Mott, a woman, as I was told, renowned for her high character, her
culture, and the zeal and ability with which she advocated various
progressive movements. To her I had the good fortune to be introduced
by a German friend. I thought her the most beautiful old lady I had
ever seen. Her features were of exquisite fineness. Not one of the
wrinkles with which age had marked her face, would one have wished
away. Her dark eyes beamed with intelligence and benignity. She received
me with gentle grace, and in the course of our conversation, she expressed
the hope that, as a citizen, I would never be indifferent to the slavery
question as, to her great grief, many people at the time seemed to
be.
(2)
Editorial, Time
and Tide
(9th July, 1926)
Feminism, like any other great movement, proceeds at varying
paces and in varying forms in different countries. Few things are
more enlightening than a study of the inter-reactions of the feminist
movement in the two great English speaking peoples during
the past seventy or eighty years. It is curious how closely related
have been the movements on the two sides of the Atlantic.
Each has continually learnt from the other. Beginning with
Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century, the feminist movement
owed its next big impetus (in the eighteen forties and fifties)
to Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, of New England. It
was Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton who organised the
first Equal Rights Convention which was held in New York in
1848; and it was Lucretia Mott who laid. down the definite proposition
which American women are still struggling to implement
today: 'Men and Women shall have Equal Rights throughout
the United States.' A few years later Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer
Suffragist, came into the American movement.
It was not till the eighteen
sixties that the political feminist movement came alive in Great Britain.
Dame Millicent Fawcett was even in those early days one of the leading
names connected with it. The British suffragists pushed forward enthusiastically
for some twenty years,
but the failure to achieve success in 1885, when the third Reform
Bill was passed giving the agricultural labourer the vote, seemed
to take the heart out of our early suffragists, and the movement died
down again. Meanwhile, in the nineties the American women were full
of life and enthusiasm, winning victory after victory in State after
State.'
In 1902 Susan B. Anthony
came to England and stayed with Mrs. Pankhurst in Manchester. The
result of that visit was
far-reaching. All unwittingly the old pioneer handed back the torch
to the British suffragists. 'It is unendurable,' declared
Christabel Pankhurst after her departure, 'to think of another generation
of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose
any more time. We must act.' Those words heralded the birth of the
British militant movement. From that moment onwards British feminists
went forward without pause till the outbreak of war in 1914 and when
that time came (although the actual Bill was not passed until 1918)
the first instalment of victory was virtually won.
Meanwhile in America by
1912 things had died down to very much the same state as the English
movement has been in since 1918. Votes had been achieved in a considerable
number of States, the feeling was widespread that a partial victory
was good enough for the moment and that complete victory would ' come
all in good time without much further trouble. And then in 1912
Alice Paul, lit by the fire of the English militant movement, returned
to America - and America woke up. It took the Americans just eight
years from that date to achieve complete political equality;
but they were under wise leadership (Alice Paul will surely
go down to history as one of the great leaders of the world),
and when they did achieve political equality they did not make
the mistake of supposing that that was the end. They turned
back to the 'declaration of sentiments' laid down by Lucretia
Mott in 1848 and they realised that political equality was
only the first step on the path which they had chosen and that
there could be neither halting nor relaxing their pace until they
had come to the end of that path.
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