Book description
Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial
women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists
like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles
for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a
gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges
to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs,
and her fellow Quakers.
In the first biography of Mott in thirty years, historian Carol
Faulkner reveals the motivations of this radical egalitarian from
Nantucket. Mott's deep faith and ties to the Society of Friends do not
fully explain her activism-her roots in post-Revolutionary New England
also shaped her views on slavery, patriarchy, and the church, as well
as her expansive interests in peace, temperance, prison reform,
religious freedom, and Native American rights. While Mott was known as
the "moving spirit" of the first women's rights convention
at Seneca Falls, her commitment to women's rights never trumped her
support for abolition or racial equality. She envisioned women's
rights not as a new and separate movement but rather as an extension
of the universal principles of liberty and equality. Mott was among
the first white Americans to call for an immediate end to slavery. Her
long-term collaboration with white and black women in the Philadelphia
Female Anti-Slavery Society was remarkable by any standards.
Lucretia Mott's Heresy reintroduces readers to an amazing
woman whose work and ideas inspired the transformation of American society.
"This much-needed, coherently argued, and beautifully written
biography does justice to Mott's centrality to the history of
antislavery, woman's rights, Quakerism, and Philadelphia."-Lori
D. Ginzberg, author of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life
Carol Faulkner is Associate Professor of History at the Maxwell
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, and
author of Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement,
also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
