Lucretia Mott worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in planning the Seneca Falls Convention. Mott was an electrifying speaker, coming from Europe where she was a well known Quaker preacher. She didn’t mince words and spoke powerfully and directly to women’s rights, adding the radical note needed to light the fires of equal rights and abolition, “the world has never seen a truly great nation because in the degradation of women the very foundations of life are poisoned at the source.”

Women legislators worked for years to get a statue of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the Capitol rotunda. In spring of 1977, they finally succeeded. At the dedication ceremony, Representative Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.) quipped to the statue, “Well sisters, it’s going to be very hard to put you back in the basement now.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.