Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons ed. by Christopher Densmore et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons ed. by Christopher Densmore et al. Mary T. Freeman Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons. Edited by Christopher Densmore, Carol Faulkner, Nancy Hewitt, and Beverly Wilson Palmer. ( Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 264 pp. Illustrations, index. $75.) Lucretia Mott was one of the most widely renowned speakers of her time, known as much for "her inspiring and provocative words as for her principled and courageous actions" (xi). But Mott did not write down her speeches and sermons, preferring to speak spontaneously, in the Quaker tradition, guided by the inner light. Such a practice presents a conundrum to modern scholars, who have rightly placed Mott among the greatest reformers of the nineteenth century but who have thus far lacked a comprehensive collection of her intellectual contributions. [End Page 109] This new volume is an authoritative record of Mott's spoken works. The editors have mined archival sources, newspapers, and other printed accounts to identify a total of about 190 lectures, from which they have selected and reproduced sixty speeches. The result spans from Mott's first brief public remarks at the Twelfth Street Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia in 1818 to her address at the thirtieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention in Rochester, New York, in 1878, when Mott was eighty-five years old. Editorial annotations reveal Mott's milieu: the audiences to whom she spoke, the allies and opponents to whom she responded, and the literary reference points she used to support her arguments. The editors offer a sensitive assessment of Mott's oratory as distinct from her letters in terms of both form and content. Mott's speeches and sermons represented the public face of her activism; unlike her correspondence, her lectures seldom mentioned household affairs. Furthermore, the records of Mott's speeches come to readers from third parties. The imperfect nature of such sources for faithfully capturing Mott's words is apparent when, for example, a stenographer noted, "a few words towards the close of this sermon were not heard distinctly" (68), or when a journalist summarized Mott's comments at the Seneca Falls women's rights convention in just a few sentences. The editors embrace such idiosyncrasies. In doing so, they demonstrate their archival resourcefulness and illuminate the character and context of Mott's public orations. The wide array of causes for which Mott spoke—including abolition, temperance, peace, religious freedom, and education—were intertwined in her mind as part of a larger campaign for the extension of liberty and democracy into all realms of society. Mott's speeches and sermons, in which she often invoked multiple, intersecting causes, serve as compelling evidence of the overlapping and international dimensions of nineteenth-century activism. The repetition of themes in Mott's lectures underscores the power of her radical vision, elevating her as a major intellectual figure and ratifying the editors' admirable ambition to unify the broad scope of her reform work in a single volume. The editors pose a strong challenge to the old-fashioned image of Mott as a quiet, retiring Quaker. Mott's provocative ideas, her eloquent arguments, and her occasionally sharp tongue are on display on every page. She often reminded her audiences that the principle of nonresistance was not equivalent to the acceptance of injustice. Mott's speeches demonstrate that her pacifism did not preclude her from constant, vigorous agitation. [End Page 110] Mary T. Freeman University of Maine Copyright © 2019 Clearance Center, Inc.