Utente:Brunokito/Sandbox65

Lucretia Mott, 49 anni (1842), alla National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Lucretia Mott, nata Lucretia Coffin (Nantucket, 3 gennaio 1793 – Contea di Montgomery (Pennsylvania) (La Mott), 11 novembre 1880), è stata un'insegnante statunitense, quacchera, abolizionista, attivista per i diritti delle donne e riformatrice sociale e suffragetta. L'idea di riformare la posizione della donna nella società l'aveva maturata quando era tra le donne escluse dalla Convenzione mondiale contro la schiavitù tenutasi a Londra nel 1840. Nel 1848 fu invitata da Jane Hunt ad un incontro che portò al primo incontro pubblico sui diritti delle donne, la Convenzione di Seneca Falls, durante la quale fu scritta la Dichiarazione dei Sentimenti..

Il Portrait Monument nella U.S. Capitol rotunda, di Adelaide Johnson (1921), presenta da sinistra i leader del suffragio Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony e Lucretia Mott

Le sue capacità oratorie la resero un'importante abolizionista, femminista e riformatrice; era stata una predicatrice quacchera all'inizio della sua età adulta. Sostenne la concessione del diritto di voto (suffragio) alle persone di colore, sia maschi che femmine. La sua casa con James era una fermata sulla Underground Railroad. La Mott aiutò a fondare il Female Medical College of Pennsylvania e lo Swarthmore College e raccolse fondi per la Philadelphia School of Design for Women. Rimase una figura centrale nei movimenti di riforma fino alla sua morte nel 1880. La zona intorno alla sua residenza di lunga data a Cheltenham Township è ora conosciuta come La Mott, in suo onore.

Prima infanzia e istruzione

Lucretia Coffin was born January 3, 1793, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the second child of Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin. Her father, Capt. Thomas Coffin was a descendant of one of the original purchasers of Nantucket Island and carried on his forefather's occupation as a whale-fisherman. Her mother ran the family mercantile business and traded in Boston for goods in exchange for oils and candles from the island. Lucretia often ran small errands for her mother, scouring the wharves for supplies and aid for her family.Through her mother, she was a descendant of Peter Folger, a missionary on Nantucket in the mid-1600s. Her cousin was Benjamin Franklin, one of the Framers of the Constitution, while other Folger relatives were Tories, those who remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution.

In 1803, at the age of 10, her father moved the Coffin family to Boston to become a merchant. She was sent at the age of 13 to the Nine Partners School, located in Dutchess County, New York, which was run by the Society of Friends (Quakers). James Mott, who would become her husband, was her teacher there. At the age of 15, she became a teacher there after graduation and learned that male teachers at the school were paid significantly more than female staff, which ignited her interest in women's rights. She was also interested in fighting slavery as a child. After her family moved to Philadelphia in 1809, she and James Mott followed in 1810. James became a merchant in the city.

Vita privata

James and Lucretia Mott, 1842

On April 10, 1811, Lucretia Coffin married James Mott at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia. James was a Quaker businessman who shared her anti-slavery interests, supported women's rights, and helped found Swarthmore College. They raised six children, five of whom made it to adulthood.

Mott died on November 11, 1880, of pneumonia at her home, Roadside, in the district now known as La Mott, Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. She was buried at Fair Hill Burial Ground, a Quaker cemetery in North Philadelphia. At her funeral, a long silence took place. It was broken when someone asked, "Who can speak? The preacher is dead."

Ministero

In 1821, at age 28, Mott was recognized by her Friends Meeting ("recorded") as a minister. By then she had been preaching for at least three years.. She summarized her perspective by stating: "I always loved the good, in childhood desired to do the right, and had no faith in the generally received idea of human depravity." Mott traveled throughout the United States — New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and Indiana — and to England. Rare for the time, Mott was among a group of single and married women, including Jane Fenn Hoskens and Elizabeth Fry, who traveled as part of their Quaker ministry. She was described as a woman of "gentle and refined manners and of great force of character." Her sermons emphasized the Quaker inward light or the presence of the Divine within every individual, as preached by Elias Hicks. Mott and her husband followed Hicks' theology, which became the focus of a schism among Quakers who divided into either Hicksite or Orthodox. The Hicksites, the liberal branch, were sometimes considered to be Unitarian Quakers. The Hicksites were more prone to be part of social reform moments, including abolitionism and the fight for women's rights. Other Hicksite Friends were Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul. Mott's sermons included her free produce and other anti-slavery sentiments.

Mott's theology was influenced by Unitarians including Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing as well as early Quakers including William Penn. She believed that "the kingdom of God is within man" (1749). Mott was among the religious liberals who formed the Free Religious Association in 1867, with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Abolizionista

I primi sforzi contro la schiavitù

Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, n. 5° e Arch Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Mott, the "foremost white female abolitionist in the United States", called for the immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people, after she visited Virginia in 1818. Mott was also a Garrisonian, and like most Hicksite Quakers, considered slavery to be immoral and called for its immediate cessation. Inspired in part by minister Elias Hicks, she and other Hicksite Quakers refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slavery-produced goods. In 1833, she and her husband helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was an organization for men, but she was invited to their first convention as a guest. She formed and was a leader of the Female Anti-Slavery Society, which merged with the male organization in 1839. Mott, was also a founding member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and, with other white and black women, founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833 by Mott and other Quaker abolitionists. Integrated from its founding, the organization opposed both slavery and racism and developed close ties to Philadelphia's Black community. Importantly, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was part of a growth in the number of women's antislavery groups that began to emerge in the 1830s. Additionally, Mott and other female activists also organized anti-slavery fairs to raise awareness and revenue, providing much of the funding for the movement.

Abolizionisti di Filadelfia, Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1851. In piedi da sinistra a destra ci sono Mary Grew, Edward M. Davis, Haworth Wetherald, Abigail Kimber, Miller McKim e Sarah Pugh. Seduti da sinistra a destra ci sono Oliver Johnson, Margaret Jones Burleigh, Benjamin C. Bacon, Robert Purvis, Lucretia Mott e James Mott.

Mott attended all three national Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women (1837, 1838, 1839). During the 1838 convention in Philadelphia, a mob destroyed Pennsylvania Hall, a newly opened meeting place built by abolitionists. Mott and the white and black women delegates linked arms to exit the building safely through the crowd. Afterward, the mob targeted her home and Black institutions and neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As a friend redirected the mob, Mott waited in her parlor, willing to face her violent opponents.

Amidst social persecution by abolition opponents and pain from dyspepsia, Mott continued her work for the abolitionist cause. She managed their household budget to extend hospitality to guests, including fugitive slaves, and donated to charities. Mott was praised for her ability to maintain her household while contributing to the cause. In the words of one editor, "She is proof that it is possible for a woman to widen her sphere without deserting it."

Convenzione mondiale contro la schiavitù

In June 1840, Mott attended the General Anti-Slavery Convention, better known as the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, in London, England. Despite Mott's status as one of six women delegates, before the conference began, the men voted to exclude the American women from participating, and the female delegates were required to sit in a segregated area. Anti-slavery leaders did not want the women's rights issue to become associated with the cause of ending slavery worldwide and dilute the focus on abolition. In addition, the social mores of the time denied women's full participation in public political life. Even so, Mott "made many telling addresses" at the convention. Several of the American men attending the convention, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, protested the women's exclusion. Garrison, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, William Adam, and African American activist Charles Lenox Remond sat with the women in the segregated area. Activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry Brewster Stanton attended the convention while on their honeymoon. Stanton admired Mott, and the two women became united as friends and allies.

One Irish reporter deemed her the "Lioness of the Convention". Mott was among the women included in the commemorative painting of the convention, which also featured female British activists: Elizabeth Pease, Mary Anne Rawson, Anne Knight, Elizabeth Tredgold and Mary Clarkson, daughter of Thomas Clarkson. Benjamin Haydon, the painting's creator, had intended to give Mott a prominent place in the painting. However, during a sitting on June 29, 1840, to capture her likeness, he took a dislike to her views and decided to not use her portrait prominently.

Underground Railroad and other activities

Encouraged by active debates in England and Scotland, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Mott also returned with new energy for the anti-slavery cause in the United States. She and her husband allowed their Philadelphia-area home, called Roadside, in the district now known as La Mott, to be used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. She continued an active public lecture schedule, with destinations including the major Northern cities of New York City and Boston, as well as travel over several weeks to slave-owning states, with speeches in Baltimore, Maryland and other cities in Virginia. She arranged to meet with slave owners to discuss the morality of slavery. In the District of Columbia, Mott timed her lecture to coincide with the return of Congress from Christmas recess; more than 40 Congressmen attended. She had a personal audience with President John Tyler who, impressed with her speech, said, "I would like to hand Mr. Calhoun over to you", referring to the senator and abolition opponent. In 1855, with several other female abolitionists, Mott participated in the transportation of Jane Johnson, an enslaved woman, to Boston after Johnson, with the aid of William Still, Passmore Williamson and others, had emancipated herself, while passing through Philadelphia on a trip from North Carolina to New York with her master, in accordance with Pennsylvania law.

Women's rights

Overview

Statue "The First Wave" dello scultore Lloyd Lillie nel Centro Visitatori del Parco Storico Nazionale dei Diritti delle Donne. All'estrema sinistra si trovano Elizabeth Cady Stanton e Frederick Douglass, con Lucretia Mott e James Mott, non visibili dietro di loro; delle due donne davanti, quella a destra è Martha Coffin Wright, l'uomo e la donna in piedi insieme nella parte posteriore sono Thomas M'Clintock e Mary Ann M'Clintock. Gli altri non sono identificati.

Women's rights activists advocated a range of issues, including equality in marriage, such as women's property rights and rights to their earnings. At that time, it was very difficult to obtain a divorce, and fathers were almost always granted custody of children. Cady Stanton sought to make divorce easier to obtain and to safeguard women's access to and control of their children. Though some early feminists disagreed, and viewed Cady Stanton's proposal as scandalous, Mott stated "her great faith in Elizabeth Stanton's quick instinct & clear insight in all appertaining to women's rights."

Lucretia Mott was brought up in the Quaker tradition and many of her beliefs derived from her faith. As such, she rejected Christian beliefs which held that Christian scripture condoned slavery and gender inequality. In a speech Mott Said "The laws given on Mount Sinai for the government of man and woman were equal, the precepts of Jesus make no distinction. Those who read the Scriptures, and judge for themselves, not resting satisfied with the perverted application of the text, do not find the distinction, that theology and ecclesiastical authorities have made, in the condition of the sexes."

Mott was a founder and president of the Northern Association for the Relief and Employment of Poor Women in Philadelphia (founded in 1846). In 1850, Mott published her speech Discourse on Woman, a pamphlet about restrictions on women in the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, Mott and Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, at Seneca Falls New York. Stanton's resolution that it was "the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise" was passed despite Mott's opposition. Mott viewed politics as corrupted by slavery and moral compromises, but she soon concluded that women's "right to the elective franchise however, is the same, and should be yielded to her, whether she exercises that right or not." Noted abolitionist and human rights activist Frederick Douglass was in attendance and played a key role in persuading the other attendees to agree to a resolution calling for women's suffrage. Mott signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

Despite Mott's opposition to electoral politics, her fame had reached into the political arena. During the June 1848 National Convention of the Liberty Party, 5 voting delegates cast their ballots for Lucretia Mott to be their party's candidate for the Office of U.S. Vice President, making her the first woman to run for that position.

Sermon to the Medical Students

The biological justifications of race as a biologically provable basis for difference gave rise to the stigma of innate, naturally determined inferiority in the 19th century. In 1849, Mott's "Sermon to the Medical Students" was published:

"May you be faithful, and enter into a consideration as to how far you are partakers in this evil, even in other men's sins. How far, by permission, by apology, or otherwise, you are found lending your sanction to a system which degrades and brutalizes three million of our fellow beings."

American Equal Rights Association

Lucretia Mott, c. 1859-1870, Collezione Biglietti da Visita, Boston Public Library.

In 1866, after the Civil War, the American Equal Rights Association was founded, with Mott serving as the first president of the integrated organization. The following year, Mott and Stanton became active in Kansas where black suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote. The Equal Rights Association, with male and female members, favored male suffrage. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association for women only.

Educational institutions

Intending to create educational opportunities for women, Mott helped found the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia). She was a fund-raiser for the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.

Pacifism

Mott was a pacifist, and in the 1830s, she attended meetings of the New England Non-Resistance Society. For several years, she was president of the Pennsylvania Peace Society. She opposed the War with Mexico (1846–1848). After the Civil War, Mott increased her efforts to end war and violence, and she was a leading voice in the Universal Peace Union, founded in 1866.

Legacy

Designazioni
Pennsylvania Historical Marker

Nome Ufficiale	Lucretia C. Mott
Tipo	Lungo la strada
Criteri	Diritti civili, Governo e politica, Governo e politica del XIX secolo, Religione, Metropolitana, Donne
Data stabilita	1 maggio 1974
Luogo	Pennsylvania Route 611 a Latham Pkwy., N di Cheltenham Ave., Elkins Park
Indicatore del luogo	Nelle vicinanze si trovava "Roadside", la casa dell'ardente quacchera Lucretia C. Mott (1793-1880). La sua opera più importante è stata la lotta contro la schiavitù, i diritti delle donne, la temperanza e la pace.

Francobollo commemorativo degli Stati Uniti del 1948, della Seneca Falls Convention intitolato 100 anni di progresso delle donne: 1848-1948. Da sinistra Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucretia Mott.

Susan Jacoby wrote, "When Mott died in 1880, she was widely judged by her contemporaries - even many who had opposed her brand of abolitionism and who continued to oppose equal rights for women - as the greatest American woman of the nineteenth century."

The first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1881, states, “THESE VOLUMES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED TO THE Memory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Martineau, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Josephine S. Griffing, Martha C. Wright, Harriot K. Hunt, M.D., Mariana W. Johnson, Alice and Phebe Carey, Ann Preston, M.D., Lydia Mott, Eliza W. Farnham, Lydia F. Fowler, M.D., Paulina Wright Davis, Whose Earnest Lives and Fearless Words, in Demanding Political Rights for Women, have been, in the Preparation of these Pages, a Constant Inspiration TO The Editors”.

The Camp Town section of Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania, which was the site of Camp William Penn, and of Mott's home, Roadside, was renamed La Mott in her honor in 1885.

Mott is commemorated along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in Portrait Monument, a 1921 sculpture by Adelaide Johnson at the United States Capitol. Originally kept on display in the crypt of the US Capitol, the sculpture was moved to its current location and more prominently displayed in the rotunda in 1997.

A version of the Equal Rights Amendment from 1923, which differs from the current text, was named the Lucretia Mott Amendment. That draft read, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The United States Post Office issued a stamp titled 100 Years of Progress of Women: 1848–1948 in 1948 on the centennial of the Seneca Falls Convention, featuring Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Lucretia Mott. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton on left, Carrie Chapman Catt in middle, Lucretia Mott on right.)

In 1983, Mott was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In 2005, Mott was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame, in Peterboro, New York.

In 2015, P.S. 215 Lucretia Mott, in Queens, New York City, closed; it was named for her.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced in 2016 that an image of Mott will appear on the back of a newly designed $10 bill along with Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession. Designs for new $5, $10 and $20 bills will be unveiled in 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of American women winning the right to vote via the Nineteenth Amendment.

The Lucretia Mott School in Washington D.C. was named after her.

The Lucretia Mott room in the Friends House in London is named after her, as is the Lucretia Mott room in the Friends Center in Philadelphia, and the Lucretia Mott room in Swarthmore College (formerly called the conference room Parrish E 254).

Bibliografia

• Architect of the Capitol, Portrait Monument of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, su aoc.gov, Architect of the Capitol.
• Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of feminism : the story of Quaker women in America, San Francisco : Harper & Row, 1989, ISBN 978-0062500465.
• Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant friend: the life of Lucretia Mott, New York, Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 1999, ISBN 978-1888305111.
• Faulkner, Carol, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0812205008.
• The Free Religious Association, Proceedings at the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Association, Boston, Adams & Company, 1907, pp. 30–31.
• Betty Friedan, Life so far, Touchstone, 2001.
• Benjamin Robert Haydon, The anti-slavery society convention, su npg.org.uk, 1840.
• Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, in NPG599, Given by British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1880, 1841.
• Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: a history of American secularism, New York, Metropolitan/Owl, 2005, 95, ISBN 978-0805077766.
• Gregory Korte, Anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman to replace Jackson on $20 bill, su usatoday.com, April 21, 2016.
• Joe Lockard, A Sermon to the Medical Students, 1849, su antislavery.eserver.org.
• Sally Gregory McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0195182651.
• Lucretia Mott, Discourse on Woman, in National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, American Memory, Library of Congress, December 17, 1849.
• The Seneca Falls Convention, su npg.si.edu.
• Junius P. Rodriguez, Slavery in the modern world: a history of political, social, and economic oppression, Santa Barbara, California, ABC-CLIO, LCC, 2011, ISBN 978-1851097883.
• Carolyn Soriso, Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature 1833–1879, University of Georgia Press, 2002.
• Treasury Secretary Lew Announces Front of New $20 to Feature Harriet Tubman, Lays Out Plans for New $20, $10 and $5, su treasury.gov, US Department of the Treasury, April 20, 2016.
• The Washington Post Staff, Mott School Completed, April 9, 1909.
• Otelia Cromwell, Lucretia Mott, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1958.
• Lucretia Mott, her complete speeches and sermons, New York, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0889469686.
• James and Lucretia Mott, life and letters., Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884.
• Lloyd C. M. Hare, The Greatest American Woman, Lucretia Mott, New York, The American Historical Society, 1937.
• Selected letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0252026744.
• Nancy C. Unger, Mott, Lucretia Coffin, su anb.org, American National Biography Online, February 2000.
• (EN) Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: Volume II; Key Texts of the Early Feminists, ABC-CLIO, 26 settembre 1989, ISBN 978-1-4408-5109-4. URL consultato il 20 luglio 2024.
• (EN) Lucretia Coffin Mott, Discourse on Woman, Da un libro, Capitolo 6, senza impaginazione, testo continuo, 1849. Ospitato su Google Books.

Voci correlate

• Storia del femminismo
• Suffragette
• Women's Social and Political Union
• Suffragio femminile negli Stati Uniti d'America

Collegamenti esterni

• (EN) Mailing Address: 136 Fall Street Seneca Falls, NY 13148 Phone: 315 568-0024 Contact Us, Lucretia Mott - Women's Rights National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service), su www.nps.gov. URL consultato il 20 luglio 2024.
• (EN) The Lucretia Mott Papers Project, su www.mott.pomona.edu. URL consultato il 20 luglio 2024.
• (EN) Collection: Mott Manuscripts | Archives & Manuscripts, su archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu. URL consultato il 20 luglio 2024. Ospitato su https://www.swarthmore.edu/friends-historical-library Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.
• (EN) Lucretia Mott, in Find a Grave.