Lucretia Mott

August is the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Month. To celebrate the passing of the 19th Amendment in August 18 1920 , that gave women the right to vote, we focus the next profiles to four women who dedicated themselves to fight for the rights of women to let their votes count.

It was not a victory for all, African American women were not allowed to vote in many Southern states until 1965.

A Quaker and early abolitionist, Lucretia Mott was a pioneer social reformer and a key founder of the organized women’s rights movement in the United States.

Rebuffed as a delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because of her sex, Mott still managed to make her views known.

She took up the cause of women’s rights in the U.S., and she and fellow suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton called a convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York “to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women.”

Mott helped write the meeting’s “Declaration of Sentiments” modeled on the Declaration of Independence, stating that “all men and women are created equal.”

After the Civil War, she was elected the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, which championed universal suffrage for freed slaves and all women.