Crossword:

Get your fill

Convention, in Seneca Falls in 1848.

Yet while the right to vote became the central cause of the 1848 convention, Mott had no plans to cast a ballot herself. Indeed, she was generally uninterested in American electoral politics, which she believed had been corrupted by the government’s continuing support of slavery. “Far be it from me to encourage women to vote or to take an active part in politics in the present state of our government,” Mott said in 1849. “Her right to the elective franchise, however, is the same [as man’s], and should be yielded to her whether she exercises that right or not.” As the Civil War erupted, Mott called President Abraham Lincoln a “miserable compromiser” because he was reluctant at first to emancipate slaves in Southern states, and even punished Union military leaders—including Mott’s son-inlaw—who freed slaves in the Southern territories over which they had taken control.

Through her speeches and organizing, Mott established a template for women’s rights long before that struggle coalesced into a formal movement and radicalized generations of women—including Alice Paul, author of the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923—who would work to achieve Mott’s vision of equality.

“When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin and John Knox had,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton said in 1881, the year after Mott’s death, “it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.”

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Mott was never willing to sacrifice racial equality for women’s rights—or even for her family’s livelihood. When her husband found success as a cotton merchant after years of struggling to provide for their five children, Mott convinced him to swap cotton for wool, a textile that wasn’t made with slave labor.

“I do not want to show my faith by my words, or by my Quaker bonnet,” Mott once said. “I want that we may all show our faith by our works.”