- Page 194 →Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), an early abolitionist, went to the 1840 World Antislavery Convention in London as a delegate, but was refused a seat because she was a woman. Along with a young colleague whom she greatly influenced, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she responded with historic rebellion. The two of them organized the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Mott went on rebelling the rest of her years—as a women’s rights leader, Quaker minister, anti-sectarian, pacifist, temperance reformer, defender of Indians and immigrants … and a mother of six. At an 1856 women’s rights convention in New York, she said: “As the poor slave’s alleged contentment with his servile and cruel bondage only proves the depth of his degradation, so the assertion of woman that she has all the rights she wants, only proves how the restrictions and disabilities to which she has been subjected have rendered her insensible to the blessings of true liberty.”
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