Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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Reviled by her opponents, Mott was hailed by her friends as a pious, benevolent, self-sacrificing woman, the perfect nineteenth-century wife, mother, and grandmother. Such perfection has intimidated historians and biographers. Despite her iconic status in the history of the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements, there have been only two scholarly biographies of her in the last sixty years. In the most recent biography, Valiant Friend, published in 1980, Margaret Hope Bacon argues, “Victorians made a living legend of Lucretia Mott, emphasizing her sweetness and calm.” Bacon tried to correct this image, focusing on the repressed anger that drove Lucretia’s activism and threatened her health, only to be undermined by her publisher, who proclaimed Mott a “gentle Quaker” on the cover.7
Mott’s very real devotion to her family further complicates efforts to rescue her from sainthood. In 1884, Anna Davis Hallowell published a joint biography of her grandparents, James and Lucretia Mott, Life and Letters. In many ways, Hallowell’s instinct to meld the two biographies was correct. The couple’s private and public lives were deeply intertwined. Lucretia and James were married for almost fifty-seven years. They had five children who lived to adulthood. James was an important abolitionist in his own right. Very deliberately, however, Hallowell emphasized “the domestic side” of Lucretia Mott. She wanted to “offset the prevailing fallacy that a woman cannot attend to public service except at the sacrifice of household duties.”8 Like other Quaker ministers, Mott’s religious calling required her to balance her vocation and her family life. Ironically, her ministry made her more economically dependent than other female activists. Since Lucretia could not accept any pay for preaching, a sin denounced by the Society of Friends in their phrase “hireling minister,” she relied on James for financial support.9 Lucretia was a traditionalist in other ways as well. She used her married name for her entire adult life, for example, even after it became fashionable among other women’s rights activists, including her sister Martha Coffin Wright, to include their maiden names. Nevertheless, Hallowell’s description of Mott’s homemaking skills—particularly in cooking Nantucket delicacies and sewing rag carpets—softens her radicalism.10
To borrow one of her favorite terms, Mott has become a “cipher.”11 She used the word to describe women’s invisibility in the nation, neither citizen nor chattel. Its other meaning, a code or puzzle, also describes Mott. Unlike many of her fellow activists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Mott did not leave a significant body of published writings. She did not keep a diary, except for during one three-month period. The first scholarly edition of her correspondence, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, Holly Byers Ochoa, and myself, reveals letters filled with family news rather than introspection. And she rarely commented on her oppressive public image as a domestic saint.12
Without abandoning the private realm, this biography shifts attention back to Mott’s public life, and places her at the center of nineteenth-century struggles for the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. As a leading abolitionist and women’s rights activist, Mott also illuminates the complex personal and political connections between the two movements. With black abolitionists, Mott and her allies in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society were among the first and most important advocates of the controversial doctrine of immediatism. Mott was also one of the earliest and most visible supporters of women’s rights. When other white female activists prioritized women’s suffrage, however, Mott insisted that feminism must include racial equality.13
Mott was the foremost white female abolitionist in the United States. An anti-slavery purist who advocated immediate emancipation, moral suasion, abstinence from slave-made products, and racial equality, Mott was in the interracial vanguard of the anti-slavery movement. Historians usually associate this radical position with William Lloyd Garrison, but, in many ways she was more Garrisonian than Garrison himself. One of a small group of women present at the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, Mott’s conversion to immediate abolition predated Garrison’s by several years. For thirty-six years, she and the white and black members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society urged abolitionists to be uncompromising in their opposition to slavery. Lucretia’s remarkable history with this interracial organization provides a crucial correction to recent scholars, who exclude women by privileging the radicalism and egalitarianism of political abolitionists and revolutionaries.14
One of the founders of the transatlantic women’s rights movement, Mott’s deep interest in feminism never trumped her support for abolition or racial equality. The latest studies of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement rightly focus on the racism of most post-Civil War suffragists. This postwar narrative of conflict between feminists and abolitionists also influences the way historians tell the story of the birth of the women’s rights movement. According to legend, the meeting of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 precipitated the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. In this version, the women’s rights movement began with male abolitionists’ rejection of Mott and other female delegates to the convention.15 Rather than a reaction to sexism, however, Mott’s recounting of the London convention suggests that women’s rights were a logical extension of interconnected humanitarian concerns. She also believed the snub of the female delegates less important than the convention’s anti-slavery goals. Eight years later at Seneca Falls, Mott urged convention participants to consider the relationship between women’s rights and other reforms, including anti-slavery, prison reform, temperance, and pacifism. After the American Civil War, as other activists split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, she and her allies in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society fought segregation on Philadelphia’s railway lines and streetcars.
Though Mott’s name is inextricably linked to the Society of Friends, her birthright membership only partially explains her involvement in abolition, women’s rights, peace, and other reforms. The Society of Friends believed that the divine light of God was in every human being. From their beginnings in seventeenth-century England, this doctrine allowed Friends to accept women as preachers and elders. It also contributed to American Quakers’ slow and agonizing rejection of slavery in the eighteenth century. Throughout her life, Mott argued that the inner light was “no mere Quaker doctrine.”16 But her relationship to the Society of Friends was contentious. To her dismay, Quakers tempered their faith in the individual conscience with a series of hierarchical meetings; they also appointed elders and ministers to discipline members. After she was recognized as a minister in 1821, Mott supported the divisive preacher Elias Hicks, who criticized the Quaker leadership for invoking the authority of Scripture over the inner light, abusing their disciplinary power, and betraying their anti-slavery testimony.
The political aftermath of the American Revolution also shaped Lucretia’s anti-authoritarianism. On her native Nantucket, Lucretia learned of whaling captains and female ministers who challenged the legitimacy of traditional political and religious powers. While Quaker schools educated her in the evils of slavery, the diverse whaling industry brought Lucretia and her family into contact with the ongoing conflicts over slavery and free labor in post-emancipation Massachusetts. Her religious and political dissent coalesced during a period of protracted schism in the Society of Friends and democratic upheaval in American politics. Following the Separation of 1827, dividing American Quakers into “Hicksite” and “Orthodox,” even the more radical Hicksites repudiated Mott’s broad attack on all forms of hierarchy, though they never disowned her, fearing her speaking ability might be lost to them. Mott believed she could do more good as a member of the Society of Friends than as a religious come-outer. Preaching the primacy of the inner light, she challenged her fellow Quakers, and all Americans, to break the bonds of sectarianism, elitism, and slavery.17
A determined egalitarian, Mott was still human. She was witty, outgoing, and a steadfast friend. She was also overly modest, critical, and stubborn. Though she could not abide division among her allies, she loved a good argument. And Mott was an ideologue. Her allegiance to the founding principles of the American Anti-Slavery Society was unyielding. Much to the annoyance and frustration of other abolitionists, Mott chastised anyone who deviated from these ideals. Her preference for principles over pragmatism had a real—and undoubtedly negative—impact