In an age when women were not expected to think about public issues, Lucretia Mott not only contemplated them, she also spoke out on them. A capable Quaker minister, she was an ardent foe of slavery, and by the early 1830s, having founded the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia, she was rapidly becoming a familiar sight on the abolitionist podium.

Mott's commitment to freeing blacks deepened her awareness of the limits that society placed on her sex. In 1848 she was in Seneca Falls, New York, as a chief organizer of the first American convention called in the name of female equality. Out of that meeting sprang the women's suffrage movement.

Probably begun in early 1841, this portrait was to serve as the basis for a print of Mott that a New York publisher hoped to market. The print, however, never materialized, and the likeness remained in Mott's family until it came to the National Portrait Gallery in 1974.