Mary Ann M’Clintock

Feminist / Abolitionist

1800-1884

Quaker activist Mary Ann M’Clintock was a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, alongside Lucretia Mott. She lived in Philadelphia with her husband Thomas M’Clintock, a pharmacist and fellow abolitionist, for 17 years. She was considered a minister and leader in the Quaker community.

In 1836 she and her husband moved to Waterloo, New York, where the M’Clintocks joined a network of Quaker abolitionists and in 1842 became founding members of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society.

In addition to her work as an abolitionist, M’Clintock was an organizer of the First Women’s Rights Convention and hosted planning meetings for the women’s rights movement in her home in Waterloo. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several others, M’Clintock drafted the Declaration of Sentiments and helped plan the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• Founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society
• Founding member of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society
• One of the authors of the Declaration of Sentiments
• Helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention

FINAL WORDS: “I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton later said of the meeting at M’Clintock’s house that spurred the Declaration of Sentiments.

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Photo by NPS / Wikimedia Commons