Slavery and "The Woman Question" Lucretia Mott's Diary of Her First Visit to Great Britian to Attend the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 Supplement No. 23 to the Journal of the Friends' Historical Society.
[Mott, Lucretia]. Tolles, Frederick B. (editor). Slavery and “The Woman Question” Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 Supplement No. 23 to the Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society. Haverford, Pennsylvania: Friends' Historical Association; and London, Friends' Historical Society, 1952.
8vo; gray wrappers printed black (perfect bound); frontispiece illustration; wrappers somewhat age-toned and worn with closed tear at head and tail of spine; generally very good.
First edition. With an introduction by the editor. James Mott used his wife’s diary as well as his own notes when writing his Three Months in Great Britain (1841); later Ann Davis Hallowell in her 1884 biography of her grandparents reproduces a portion of the diary. However, the diary itself remained in the hands of Lucretia’s descendants until 1946 when it was donated to Swarthmore College’s Friends Historical Library. This is the first printing of Mott’s account of this momentous journey in its entirety.
Mott records her observations with clarity and crispness. Her terse notes, generally phrases rather than complete sentences, report what she saw, those she met, the events she witnessed with economy. When she writes, “Elizabeth Stanton daily gaining in our affections,” the effect is of Mott pausing to emphasize the impact of the young woman on both husband and wife. The diary, of course, affords an intimate glimpse into Lucretia Mott’s habits and thinking. (She is strikingly practical. She prefers to eat the cherries so abundant in the gardens of Sir Walter Scott’s home while “the girls were hastening to sentimentalize & gather flowers over Scott’s grave.”) Though only latterly printed, the diary records a landmark event in women’s history; after all as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton exchanged ideas “a grand project took shape in their minds—nothing less than the emancipation of half the human race.”
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