Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott

Author: Edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer
With the Assistance of Holly Byers Ochoa, Associate Editor, and Carol Faulkner, Editing Fellow
Inside the work and private life of the legendary reformer
Cloth – $59
978-0-252-02674-4
Publication Date
Cloth: 01/01/2002
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About the Book

This landmark volume collects Lucretia Mott's correspondence for the first time, highlighting the length and breadth of her work as an activist dedicated to reform of almost every kind and providing an intimate glimpse of her family life.

Mott’s achievements left a mark on reform movements from abolition to women's rights. The letters cover her work in these causes as well as her founding of key antislavery organizations; her friendships with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; her efforts to bring Quakers into the abolitionist movement; and her part in organizing the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention. Other correspondence cover her fifty-six-year marriage, the five children she raised to adulthood, and informal insights and news with and about her cherished family.

An invaluable resource, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott reveals the incisive mind, sense of mission, and level-headed personality that made this extraordinary figure a major force in nineteenth-century American life.

About the Author

Beverly Wilson Palmer is a research associate at Pomona College and the editor or coeditor of numerous documentary editions, including Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons and The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner.

Reviews

"This admirably edited and handsomely published book is a great contribution to printed scholarly resources for 19th-century history. Lucretia Mott was engaged in several of the central social and political movements of that century, and her correspondence opens views into them, especially abolition, women's rights, and religion and Quakerism. But one will also find comments on domestic life and childrearing, public events, pacifism, and Indian rights. . . . Palmer included as much scholarly apparatus as a reader could want."--Choice

"This scrupulously annotated volume makes widely available for the first time the correspondence of the nineteenth-century Quaker activist who was dedicated to numerous reform movements, including temperance, peace, equal rights, woman suffrage, nonresistance, and the abolition of slavery."--Documentary Editing

"While scholars will rejoice in this volume, lay readers, too, will find the letters entertaining and inspiring. Beverly Palmer has done the Religious Society of Friends a real service."--Friends Journal

Blurbs

"Finally, a chance to see the full range of ideas, concerns, words of Lucretia Mott, the first foremother of the U.S. feminist movement. Beverly Palmer has performed an enormous service, for Lucretia Mott's many appreciators and for many others, who will now know the historical significance of this great "woman."--Ellen Carol DuBois, editor of The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches