Lucretia Coffin Mott was born a Quaker in Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1793. At the age of 13, Lucretia Coffin was sent to a co-educational Quaker school in New York where she met her future husband James Mott. From 1808-1810 she was an assistant teacher, before she moved to Philadelphia where she lived for the rest of her life.
In 1811 Lucretia Coffin married James Mott. James Mott worked in the cotton and wool trade, but later focused only on the wool trading as a protest against the slavery-dependent cotton industry in the South. Between 1812 and 1828 the Motts had six children.
In 1818 Lucretia Mott began to speak at Quaker meetings and in 1821 she became a minister in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia.
The Quaker tradition allowed women to take public positions on a variety of social problems in which Mott's husband encouraged her to do. In the 1830s Mott was elected as a clerk of the Philadelphia Women's Yearly Meeting.
In the 1820s there was a split between the more conservative Quakers and the less orthodox followers of Elias Hicks. In 1827 Mott and her husband followed the Hicksite branch. It allowed free interpretation of the Bible and reliance on inward guidance. She often spoke in Unitarian churches.
Mott engaged in many travels throughout the East and Midwest while she addressed many reform organizations such as Non-Resistance Society, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and Quaker meetings. .
In 1840 Mott was chosen as one of six women delegates to go to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in England. She and the other women delegates were refused seats, which influenced Mott to seek for equality of all women.
In 1848, Mott was first to sign the women's Declaration of Sentiments, which called for equal treatment of women. Until her death, Lucretia Mott remained a leader in women's rights organizations.
Before the Civil War, Mott's home became a station for Underground Railroad.