Lucretia Mott and Other Warped Histories
Lucretia Mott was a real person. I was surprised a couple of years ago to discover she was not quite the woman I had been taught. Apparently, when you are the youngest child in the brood and your older siblings are bright, impressionable, and anxious to impress with the incredible knowledge that they learned in school, you might need to do some “fact-checking” on your own at some point.
I don’t mean to decry the 1950s school system in upper state New York, but both Patty and I distinctly remember the map of “Latiny” that our brother, Stan, drew for his 5th grade class. Latiny, of course, was the country where was invented and spoken the language of Latin. As I recall, it looked strangely like a boot. At the time, we lived across the road from the Niagara River, several miles downstream from the Falls.
Stan, of course denies ever telling us about Latiny.
“Everyone KNOWS it was ITALY, not LATINY.”
Yeah, right. That’s NOT what he told US!
But, Patty was no better when she excitedly tried to teach me all about the marvelous Lucretia Mott who had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survived! Indeed, Patty and I spent hours upon hours on cold winter or rainy stormy days playing make-believe stories about Lucretia Mott with our dolls and all of their accouterments. We wore out the carpet on the stairs sliding down them as if they were Niagara Falls. And we dressed up all of our dolls in ALL of the layers of their clothes and loaded them on the dog sleds (doll bed or inverted chairs) to mush to the Arctic to deliver the serum for anthrax to save everyone’s lives, even though our husbands were lost and missing in the blizzard.
She must have mixed up a few of her history lessons. It was only recently that I researched Lucretia Mott, whom I’d heard of only through Patty. At no time when I studied history, government, or Civics in California, Rhode Island, or Virginia did anyone ever mention Lucretia Mott, Patty’s greatest heroine since 4th grade.
It turns out, Mrs. Mott never tumbled down Niagara Falls. She was an American Quaker abolitionist and early feminist social reformer, and a cousin of Benjamin Franklin. She didn’t even live in New York, but was from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. I think our make-believe play involved Lucretia at the Erie Canal, Niagara Falls, and saving the settlers in historic Alaska.
It was all great fun, but I’m glad I didn’t try to write a report for school based on what Patty taught me between ages 4 and 5. To be fair, she was only three years older than I was, but those three years made her AWESOME!
Patty did grow up to be a politically liberal anthropologist not unlike Lucretia Mott.
I grew up to be largely confused, ever trusting my elders. Now that I am asking a lot of questions, they don’t seem to like me as much.