American history's first heroine

Don't be fooled by the bonnet.

American history's first heroine is associated with Philadelphia, the city of museums, statues, and halls memorializing the men who founded the republic. But there's little in brick or marble to honor Lucretia Mott, who changed the country's fractious public square in the 1840s and 1850s with a radical vision.

The Philadelphia Quaker with the penetrating gaze and gorgeous voice, which rose like a river, became a champion for slave emancipation and women's rights. Her fame went way beyond the city. Mott traveled with her husband, James, and hushed listeners from Boston to Baltimore, Virginia to Ohio. She was the main speaker at Seneca Falls, N.Y., where the first women's rights convention was held. Mott crossed lines of region, religion, color, class. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist orator and publisher, praised her: "The very sight of her, a sermon . . . bearing a message of light and love."

Born Lucretia Coffin on ruggedly beautiful Nantucket Island in 1793, when George Washington was president, Mott outlived Abraham Lincoln. For a Nantucket Quaker girl, raised to speak out as the spirit moved her, her family's faith opened up her talent.

In Washington, on a winter night in 1843, former President John Quincy Adams invited Mott to speak to members of Congress. Adams thought she might move the minds of lawmakers who were Southern slave owners. Mott packed the pews of the Unitarian church and urged those there to free their slaves, quoting Isaiah. They listened, spellbound, and her talk made the newspapers. Mott was "the flower of Quakerism," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote home to Concord, Mass.

That was 20 years ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln knew he could not have signed that document without the work of abolitionists who laid the ground - and Underground Railroad tracks - for freedom. Their decades-long nonviolent resistance had shifted public opinion. But it was a long campaign.

Today it's hard to capture Mott's spark. We know she was a great speaker - but not so much a writer - and this may be why she gets lost in translation, even in Philadelphia.

Mott's life lesson is that a woman's words helped to light the country in its darkest period. Yes, she was well-off and a mother of five who could have had an easier life. But she nearly had her house burned down by a mob, and more conservative Friends frowned at her. Still, she would not be silenced - on slavery or women's rights, a longer struggle. The two causes were one to her.

The men who elegantly designed the republic utterly excluded Mott and all women and blacks from democratic participation. So she worked outside the political system, standing on moral ground. It was her lifelong quest to create social inclusion, to make room for all as equals in democracy.

Mott died at 87 in 1880, and she and James rest at Philadelphia's Fair Hill Burial Ground. Thousands walked at her funeral. As someone said: "Lucretia has outlived her persecutors."