Lucretia Mott (Douglas-Lithgow, 1914)

Lucretia Mott.  Lucretia Mott, daughter of Thomas and Anna Coffin, was born on Nantucket, January 3, 1793, and died near Philadelphia, November 11, 1880, in her 88th year.  A long life but nobly lived; an ideal type of pure womanhood distinguished by many virtues, an all-pervading force for good, characterized by lofty intelligence, genuine philanthropy, and sublime spiritual fervor, a magnetic personality which attracted and never repelled, and a sweet voice which expressed itself only in golden words.  Such was Lucretia Mott, moral reformer, abolitionist, humanitarian, as noble a woman as any country ever produced, and the first woman in America to advocate female suffrage.  As a direct descendant of the Folger and Coffin strain, she inherited nothing that was not beneficent.  Educated in Boston, and subsequently in New York State, she ultimately lived with her parents in Philadelphia, where, at the age of eighteen, she married James Mott, in whom she met her hallowed affinity, and brought up a family of five children with exemplary care and maternal affection. She became an eminent minister of the Society of Friends, an eloquent moral reformer, a profound and active sympathizer with human suffering irrespective of class or creed, and she has been happily described as "The bright morning star of intellectual freedom in America." Who can estimate the beneficent influences of such a life?  Can time or death destroy them?  A thousand times No!  For they are linked with divineness and immortality.