Swarthmore College Bulletin (June 1998) - ITS

O U R B A C K P A G E SWhat Lucretia MottMeans to MeBy Jamie Stiehm ’82Lucretia and I go back 15 years, tothe day in 1983 I decided to writemy senior history thesis on theQuaker whose blue eyes sparkledfrom beneath a bonnet in the portraitthat once graced Parrish Parlors.Worthy Lucretia Mott was elevatedto her rightful place in thepantheon of U.S. history inJune 1997, when a statuedepicting her and two otherwomen’srights leaders, ElizabethCady Stanton and SusanB. Anthony, was dedicated inthe Capitol rotunda. The threeknew each other; Mott representsthe start of the suffragettestory, Stanton themiddle, and Anthony—well,the beginning of the end.At the dedication a chorusof schoolgirls sang while lightstreamed through the Capitoldome, which Sen. Olympia J.Snowe of Maine called “theepicenter of American democracy.”Snowe said, “Whatadorns the rotunda matters”and expressed the hope thatother heroines of history,such as Sojourner Truth,would not be far behind.Maryland CongresswomanConstance Morella, who ledthe Promethean battle tobring the statue upstairs afterCongress had let it languish inthe dark crypt of the Capitolfor 76 years, opened herspeech by saying, “Welcomehome!” to the three women.It’s worth noting that twoof the three, Mott and Anthony,were Quakers. Also notable is thatnot one of them lived to see the daythat women would vote, notwithstandingAnthony’s last words spokenin public before her death in 1906:“Failure is impossible!” Mott died in1880, four decades before womenwere enfranchised in 1920, the causeshe championed the last 30 years ofher life.Better late than never that this allaroundsocial do-gooder, who byrights should be a heroine to Americanschoolgirls, is finally in the sameroom as George Washington andAbraham Lincoln. One can only guessat the conversations that their ghostscould hold in the dark, after the lightsgo off.Where would we all be without theunwavering vision of this extraordinarywoman who became a Quakerminister in Philadelphia at age 28?Lucretia Mottwas neverexposed to thesocial myththat portrayedwomen as helpless,fragile beings.(This was not unusual for a woman inthe Religious Society of Friends, but itwas a rare distinction for someone soyoung.) Married to a merchant and amother of two at the time, by 1821 shehad already emerged as a gifted publicspeaker on the burning socialissues of the day.Let me tell you about Lucretia andwhat she means to me. She was bornon Nantucket, an isolated whalingisland where most of the men wereaway for years at a time on their voyages.That left women to takecare of the day-to-day businessnot just of households but theentire island economy. So faraway from the mainland didlargely Quaker Nantucketseem that it stayed neutralduring the Revolutionary War.Nantucket women had noother choice but to be sturdyand self-reliant in the bestAmerican sense of the word.As a Quaker girl born in 1793,Lucretia Coffin was neverexposed to the social myththat portrayed women as helpless,fragile beings. Moreover,women’s weighty responsibilitiesfostered a sense of camaraderieamong them.It was on Nantucket that herdeep-rooted Quaker conceptionof absolute human equalitywas planted, ideas that laterinspired her activism in theabolitionist and women’srights movements. She drewno distinction between blackand white, male and female,and did not put one causebefore the other.Some historians have writtenof the suffragette movementas an afterthought or offshootof abolitionism. Mottshows us otherwise. For herthe two were one, all of a piece, andboth sprang from her Quaker andEnlightenment beliefs in universalequality.Abolitionism, if anything, showedhow unenlightened the world waswhen it came to women. During theWorld Anti-Slavery Convention in Londonin 1840, Mott as a female delegatewas barred from speaking or voting.FRIENDS HISTORICAL LIBRARY OF SWARTHMORE COLLEGE64 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN