Lucretia Mott PDF

# Lucretia Coffin Mott January 3, 1793 - November 11, 1880 ## I Am No Advocate of Passivity Lucretia Coffin was never afraid to break the rules. One day at boarding school, a boy was locked in a closet without his dinner for misbehaving. Eleven-year-old Lucretia and a friend sneaked through hallw...

# Lucretia Coffin Mott January 3, 1793 - November 11, 1880 ## I Am No Advocate of Passivity Lucretia Coffin was never afraid to break the rules. One day at boarding school, a boy was locked in a closet without his dinner for misbehaving. Eleven-year-old Lucretia and a friend sneaked through hallways and stairwells to the boys' side of the school, where they slipped bread and butter under the door for him. They got back without being caught! Lucretia grew up on the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts. Her father was a ship captain who was away from home often, leaving her mother in charge of the family store. When her mother traveled to Boston to buy goods for the store, Lucretia managed the house and cared for her brothers and sisters. The Motts were a Quaker family. Quakers believe that everyone has a divine inner spirit and that anyone who feels the leading of this spirit can speak in church. Because of this belief, Lucretia was used to hearing women speak boldly. As an adult, Lucretia became a traveling Quaker speaker herself. In the early 1800s, Lucretia taught at a school in Millbrook, New York, where she had been a student. She saw that girls weren't getting the same education boys were, and that female teachers were paid less than males. "I resolved to claim for myself all that an impartial Creator had bestowed," she said. Lucretia began to speak out against slavery, believing it should be abolished immediately. Not everyone agreed. Some thought the church should stay out of it, while others believed it should happen more slowly. Some even thought slaves should be sent away to another country. But Lucretia stood firm. "If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?" she said. ## In 1840 In 1840, Lucretia went to London with her husband, James Mott, for the World Anti-Slavery Convention. But the male delegates didn't want female delegates there. For an entire day the women listened to men argue about whether they could participate. "The discussion grew more bitter, personal, and exasperating every hour," one woman noted. Finally, the men voted that women couldn't speak and had to sit behind a curtained rail. Lucretia received more education than most girls of her time. Quakers believed in treating boys and girls the same. Still, by age fifteen, she had finished school and become a teacher. Outraged, Lucretia and the other women built a fire in the central hearth of their hotel and kept it burning through the night. In the middle of June! Disgusted - and no doubt sweating up a storm - some of the men fled the hotel. That day, Lucretia saw that women were being denied a role in public life. She realized that men had to stop telling women what they could and couldn't do. Laws and traditions would not change until women had a voice. At the convention, Lucretia met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young newlywed who shared her outrage. In 1848, they met again at a friend's house in Seneca Falls, a small town in central New York State. There, a group of five women discussed the ways men controlled women's lives. They decided to hold a two-day meeting at the town's Wesleyan Methodist chapel. They placed an ad in the local paper for "a Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman." On July 19, 1848, more than three hundred people showed up. Streets were clogged with horses, wagons, and people. Even some men wanted to attend. Did the women bar the doors? No! They didn't treat men the way women had been treated in London. At the convention, the organizers presented a paper patterned after the Declaration of Independence called the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal," it began. In a long list of societal ills and action points, the document described how men oppressed women and how women intended to change things. It introduced the idea of women's equality with men and a woman's claim to all the rights of an American citizen. Oddly enough, a demand for the woman's vote was hotly debated. Some people - even Lucretia - believed that focusing on the vote alone would take attention away from other issues, such as property rights and access to education. Others even believed that women weren't smart enough to vote or that they could simply convince men to vote for their causes. Dressed in her black and white Quaker dress and bonnet, Lucretia was a motherly figure who put everyone at ease, even when her ideas sounded radical. Her speech was peppered with quaint "thee's" and "thou's" in the Quaker way, making hers a calming voice in a time of rising unrest. Quakers were pacifists who believed they shouldn't take part in a government that could declare and engage in war, even by voting. But Lucretia didn't consider civil rights battles as wars to shrink from. "I am no advocate of passivity," she said. "Quakerism, as I understand it, does not mean quietism." Today, Lucretia Mott is considered a founder of the American women's rights movement. ## In the United States In the early 1800s, women couldn't vote, serve on a jury, or be a witness in court. Girls were rarely educated beyond elementary school, and, until 1837, not a single college that admitted men would admit women. If they worked, women generally were teachers or held menial jobs. Most people believed a woman should stay at home, caring for her husband and children. A married woman was the property of her husband. She could not own land, sign contracts, or keep her earnings, even if she just sold eggs or butter. She didn't even own her own clothes! If her husband was violent, an alcoholic, or gambled away their home, the law wouldn't step in. Only a man could divorce, and the husband got sole custody of any children. Our nation's Constitution wasn't clear on exactly who could vote. In fact, New Jersey's constitution, written in 1776, allowed some unmarried women to vote, but that right was taken away in 1807. From then on, voting in this country was considered a man's right, especially after the Fourteenth Amendment entered the word "male" into the Constitution in 1868, giving voting rights only to men.