Mott helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, one of the earliest interracial women's abolitionist organizations in the U.S.
On December 4, 1833, Lucretia Mott helped establish the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, becoming one of its founding members and a leading voice within the organization. This came just two days before the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which women were barred from formal membership—prompting Mott and her allies to create their own parallel organization.
What made this society remarkable was its interracial composition: Black and white women worked together as founding members, a rarity in antebellum America where segregation pervaded even reform movements. The society organized petition drives, held anti-slavery fairs to raise funds, published abolitionist literature, and provided a critical training ground for women's organizational and public leadership skills.
This was a genuine first—among the earliest women's anti-slavery societies in the nation—and it directly connected the fight against slavery to the emerging fight for women's rights, since many members, Mott chief among them, recognized parallels between the oppression of enslaved people and the legal and social subordination of women. The society's activism laid important groundwork for the women's rights conventions that would follow fifteen years later, and Mott's leadership here cemented her reputation as a formidable organizer and orator.