What Lucretia Mott Means to Me
By Jamie Stiehm '82
(At left: Lucretia Mott)
Lucretia and I go back 15 years, to the day in 1983 I decided to write my senior history thesis on the Quaker whose blue eyes sparkled from beneath a bonnet in the portrait that once graced Parrish Parlors.
Worthy Lucretia Mott was elevated to her rightful place in the pantheon of U.S. history in June 1997, when a statue depicting her and two otherwomen's rights leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was dedicated in the Capitol rotunda. The three knew each other; Mott represents the start of the suffragette story, Stanton the middle, and Anthony &endash; well, the beginning of the end.
At the dedication a chorus of schoolgirls sang while light streamed through the Capitol dome, which Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine called "the epicenter of American democracy." Snowe said, "What adorns the rotunda matters" and expressed the hope that other heroines of history, such as Sojourner Truth, would not be far behind.
Maryland Congresswoman Constance Morella, who led the Promethean battle to bring the statue upstairs after Congress had let it languish in the dark crypt of the Capitol for 76 years, opened her speech by saying, "Welcome home!" to the three women.
It's worth noting that two of the three, Mott and Anthony, were Quakers. Also notable is that not one of them lived to see the day that women would vote, notwithstanding Anthony's last words spoken in public before her death in 1906: "Failure is impossible!" Mott died in 1880, four decades before women were enfranchised in 1920, the cause she championed the last 30 years of her life.
Better late than never that this all-around social do-gooder, who by rights should be a heroine to American schoolgirls, is finally in the same room as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One can only guess at the conversations that their ghosts could hold in the dark, after the lights go off.
Where would we all be without the unwavering vision of this extraordinary woman who became a Quaker minister in Philadelphia at age 28? (This was not unusual for a woman in the Religious Society of Friends, but it was a rare distinction for someone so young.) Married to a merchant and a mother of two at the time, by 1821 she had already emerged as a gifted public speaker on the burning social issues of the day.
Let me tell you about Lucretia and what she means to me. She was born on Nantucket, an isolated whaling island where most of the men were away for years at a time on their voyages. That left women to take care of the day-to-day business not just of households but the entire island economy. So far away from the mainland did largely Quaker Nantucket seem that it stayed neutral during the Revolutionary War.
Nantucket women had no other choice but to be sturdy and self-reliant in the best American sense of the word. As a Quaker girl born in 1793, Lucretia Coffin was never exposed to the social myth that portrayed women as helpless, fragile beings. Moreover, women's weighty responsibilities fostered a sense of camaraderie among them.
It was on Nantucket that her deep-rooted Quaker conception of absolute human equality was planted, ideas that later inspired her activism in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. She drew no distinction between black and white, male and female, and did not put one cause before the other.
Some historians have written of the suffragette movement as an afterthought or offshoot of abolitionism. Mott shows us otherwise. For her the two were one, all of a piece, and both sprang from her Quaker and Enlightenment beliefs in universal equality.
Abolitionism, if anything, showed how unenlightened the world was when it came to women. During the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, Mott as a female delegate was barred from speaking or voting. William Lloyd Garrison joined her "behind the bar" as a protest.
London was a landmark for another reason: That was where the great "meetings of the minds" took place between Mott and Stanton. "Mrs. Mott and I walked home, arm in arm.... We resolved to hold a convention and form a society to advocate the rights of women," said Stanton, who cherished the memory.
Eight years later, in 1848, came the historic Seneca Falls, N.Y., convention, when for the first time women demanded the full rights of citizenship in a declaration of their own. Mott was the main speaker at Seneca Falls. She often emphasized that women want "nothing as favor but as right."
Meanwhile, the Mott house in Philadelphia was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass never forgot his first sight of Lucretia Mott, when he heard her speak in Lynn, Mass., and marveled at her presence and spirit "on every line of her countenance." Douglass became as engaged in the long quest for women's rights as Mott was in abolitionism.
Imagine what a bitter irony, then, to be denied suffrage even after the Civil War was won. First things first, men said. Republicans called it "the Negro's hour." Wait your turn, ladies, until the next century rolls around.
And that is the reason the marble statue looks unfinished &endash; because these women's work was never done. In fact, even in 1997, it took private contributions from citizens &endash; about $80,000 &endash; to get the statue, sculpted by Adelaide Johnson in 1920, from the Capitol crypt to the rotunda. Still, Congress did not approve a permanent place, reserving the right to remove it after a year &endash; and Congress has still not voted to give the suffragettes a permanent home there.
But now that it is there for folks from all over the United States to admire, Lucretia will no longer be the best-kept secret of Swarthmore College, which she helped found in 1864. Sometimes it seems she's a secret even at Swarthmore. Recently I met a student with a double major in women's studies and religion who had never heard of her. But perhaps that's because her portrait no longer hangs in Parrish. Too valuable for such public display, it has been removed to the confines of the Friends Historical Library.
That brings me to why I love Lucretia so much: the wholeness of her world view. You name it &endash; she was there on every front of social progress, just the opposite of today's single-issue narrow-mindedness.
As one history of Quaker women notes: "She spoke in Boston on women's rights, visited state legislatures to ask for stronger action against slavery, toured the South, and laid the groundwork for a new Philadelphia charity" &endash; not to mention American Indian rights and supporting Irish hand-loom workers in a strike for higher wages.
She came, she saw, and she changed the world in the Quaker way: slowly but surely.
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