Discourses & Sermons

Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) was, for half a century, one of the boldest and most beloved voices in American reform. Born on Nantucket into a plain seafaring Quaker world where women’s usefulness was simply assumed, she carried that assumption into a life that unsettled the nation: an unpaid Quaker minister who preached without notes, a founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, a leader at Seneca Falls in 1848, and a fearless advocate who faced down mobs to plead the cause of the enslaved. She spoke almost always extempore, trusting the moment; what survives of her preaching we owe chiefly to reporters who took her words down as they fell.

This Friends Illuminated edition gathers seven of those addresses. They range across the whole of her concern. In an Autobiographical Sketch she traces the roots of her convictions back to the island culture that shaped her. In a Sermon to the Medical Students she sets aside creed and controversy to press upon young men a religion of practical goodness and a living conscience against slavery. The Likeness to Christ and The Abuses and the Uses of the Bible set the living example of Jesus and the free use of conscience against the tyranny of texts and forms. Not Christianity, but Priestcraft dismantles the claim that the subjection of woman rests on divine authority. And her Remarks to the Anti-Slavery Society on John Brown show her as she called herself — “the most belligerent non-resistant.”

At the center stands the Discourse on Woman — her most famous address, delivered in reply to a lecture that would keep woman in a “narrow sphere.” Ranging from Scripture to Blackstone’s laws of coverture, Mott argues that woman’s subjection is the work not of nature or of God but of custom, miseducation, and unjust law, and calls for equal education, equal wages, open professions, and the political rights of woman: “She asks nothing as favor, but as right.” The text is presented here in lightly modernized English, with the plain speech of Friends preserved where she used it, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.