Another of the famous anti-slavery women of the United States was Lucretia Mott. She, too, was a Quakeress, as were a very considerable proportion of the women who first took up the Abolitionist movement. At one time the Puritan inhabitants of New England, who had fled from their homes in Europe to escape persecution, instituted the most cruel persecution against the Quakers and all sects who differed from the Puritan creed. The persecuted are often only too ready to become persecutors in their turn. Lucretia Mott’s ancestors, the Coffins, descended from the ancient Devonshire family of that name, had fled before this Puritan persecution to the island of Nantucket to the east of Massachusetts. Here Lucretia was born in 1793, and here her childhood was passed till she was eleven, when her father removed to Boston, Massachusetts. Lucretia and her younger sister, spoken of in her father’s letters as “the desirable little Elizabeth,” had opportunities of education at Boston that would have been quite out of the question in the primitive island of their birth. At the age of eighteen Lucretia married James Mott, and her home henceforward was at Philadelphia. Partly for the sake of educating her own children, and partly with the view of helping her mother, who had been left a widow with five children to support, Lucretia Mott opened a school. When she was about thirty years of age she began gradually to be drawn into work of a more public kind, through her deep interest in many moral movements of her time. Foremost among these stood the anti-slavery agitation; she travelled many thousands of miles, speaking and lecturing for the anti-slavery cause. It was then, even in America, quite a novelty for women to take an active part in public movements, and some of the more old-fashioned of the Abolitionists did not approve of the participation of Lucretia Mott and other women in the work. But Garrison was always, from the first, as eager for the equality of women as he was for the emancipation of the slaves; and he felt too deeply what the anti-slavery cause in England and America owed to women to tolerate their being set on one side without any recognition of their work. However, at first only a minority held this view, and the difficulty which some men felt in working with women caused Lucretia Mott to form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At the first meeting of this society, none of the ladies felt competent themselves to take the chair, so they elected a negro gentleman to that position, a choice which Mrs. Mott explained a few years later in the following words: “Negroes, idiots, and women were in legal documents classed together; so that we were very glad to get one of our own class to come and aid us in forming that society.”