Lucretia Coffin Mott

Born Nantucket, Massachusetts

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention that launched the women's movement in the United States. As a Quaker and like most reformers in this era, she was drawn to the antislavery cause, helping to found Philadelphia's Female Anti-Slavery Society. This experience convinced her that women had a special role in reform movements and that the struggle for women's rights would be essential for reform causes in America. She urged women to "go on-not asking favors, but claiming as a right the removal of all hindrances to her elevation in the scale of being."