Mott, Lucretia Coffin (1793–1880)

US antislavery and women's rights leader. She helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Growing frustrated by the exclusion of women in abolitionist efforts, she later devoted herself to gaining equality for women. Together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she organized the Seneca Falls Convention, the country's first women's rights meeting.

Mott was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and studied and then taught at a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York 1808–09. She married James Mott, a former teacher at the school, in 1811, and became a Quaker minister, known for her eloquent speeches, in 1821. She published Discourse on Women in 1850 and helped found Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1864.

In 1827 Mott, with her husband, went over to the more progressive wing of the Friends. She had become strongly opposed to slavery and one of the chief advocates of refusing to buy any products of slave labour; her husband, always her supporter, had to get out of the cotton trade in about 1830. She became an early supporter of William Lloyd Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society, and she often found herself threatened with physical violence due to her radical views. She and her husband attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, which refused to allow women to be full participants. This rebuttal led to her joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton in calling the Seneca Falls Convention (at which, ironically, James Mott was asked to preside), and from that point on Lucretia Mott was dedicated to women's rights.

While remaining within the Society of Friends, in practice and beliefs she actually identified increasingly with more liberal and progressive trends in American religious life, even helping to form the Free Religious Association in Boston in 1867. While keeping up her commitment to women's rights, she also maintained the full role of a mother and homemaker. She continued after the Civil War to work for advocating the rights of African Americans. She continued to attend women's rights conventions, and when the movement split into two factions in 1869, she tried to bring the two together.