Lucretia Mott's Heresy
Описание книги
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 such as 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 a generation, 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.
Отрывок из книги
Lucretia Mott’s Heresy
Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
.....
Though Coggeshall expressed her uneasiness with Barnard’s views, her visit to Nantucket brought Lucretia into vicarious contact with a female minister who was not afraid to challenge the Quaker elders or their growing faith in the Bible, and who became an example for the young girl. This influence was reinforced when Lucretia later attended Nine Partners Boarding School in Hudson, New York, run in part by Barnard in the 1790s. Yet Barnard’s story also suggested the costs of female dissent. Anne Mott, Lucretia’s mother-in-law, sent her various papers relating to Hannah Barnard’s disownment, including “Hannah Barnard’s creed, opposed to any ‘scheme of salvation.’” After reading (and undoubtedly rereading) them, Lucretia passed these papers on to other Friends until they were lost.35
Like all Quaker children in Nantucket, Lucretia also learned to hate slavery and admire the economic principles underlying the whale fishery. At Quaker school in 1797, she first saw British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s widely distributed image of the packed slave-ship Brookes, which made such an impression that she told her children and grandchildren about it. First printed by the thousands in 1789, the diagram, showing 482 slaves crowded into a ship for transport from Africa to Jamaica, remained a powerful weapon in the anti-slavery movement. The image probably arrived in Nantucket via a Quaker ship captain. Nantucket’s close economic ties to Britain intersected with religious ties to English Quakers, who dominated the anti-slavery movement there. Alternatively, British sailors may have passed on copies of the image to their American counterparts when socializing in port.36
.....