Lucretia Mott Biography

Lucretia Mott was a Quaker minister who was active in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States. She was born to the prominent Coffin family on the whaling island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. In her teens she attended a Quaker school in New York where she met her future husband, James Mott. They married in 1811 and moved to Philadelphia, and it was there that she became first a prominent speaker in her church and then (in 1821) a Quaker minister. Her husband was a successful trader, and this allowed Lucretia Mott to travel and speak more widely in the eastern and new midwestern United States. In 1848 she helped to organize the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and was the first to sign the famous Declaration of Sentiments which resulted. After the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, Lucretia Mott remained a key figure in the women’s suffrage movement until her death at age 87 in 1880.