Lucretia Mott's Heresy

Carol Faulkner’s new biography of Lucretia Mott is most welcome. Although Margaret Hope Bacon’s Valiant Friend (1980) introduced Mott to modern readers, no scholar since then has attempted to capture both the public and the private woman or, more importantly, to place her life story within the context of recent historiography and feminist biography. Faulkner is the ideal historian for her subject. Not only did she serve as editor (with Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa) of the valuable collection Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (2002) but she is also fully versed in the relevant historical fields and knows how to weave the various strands of Mott’s life into a compelling portrait. Mott did not make her biographer’s task easy; except for a three-month period in 1840, she kept no diary, and although, like her compatriot Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she often spoke publicly, unlike Stanton, she seldom wrote for publication. Faulkner has more than met the challenge; her book is interesting and well written, offering fresh perspectives at every turn on Mott’s roles within Quakerism and the antislavery and women’s rights movements while also providing glimpses of her personal life

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