The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights (Bestselling Women's History)

by Dorothy Wickenden

Her parents, Anna Folger Coffin and Thomas Coffin, were Quaker descendants of two of the first English settlers who had fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony rather than submit to the fines, floggings, and prison terms the Puritan clergy imposed on anyone who bucked church dogma. The women of Nantucket took for granted their equality with men. Mary Coffin Starbuck, Martha’s great-great-grandaunt, ran the island’s first general store, out of her house on Fair Street, and traded with the Wampanoag Indians: tools, cloth, shoes, and kettles in exchange for fish and feathers. In 1708, Starbuck organized the island’s first meeting of the Society of Friends, and she became a minister, a position closed to women of other denominations. The Nantucket Quakers opposed slavery, which was legal in all thirteen colonies, holding early meetings to advocate abolition. As financiers of the whaling business, they were at once frugal and profit-minded. The Coffin family was a matriarchy, headed by Martha’s mother, Anna, and Martha’s tiny but indomitable sister, Lucretia Coffin Mott, who was fourteen years older than she was. Anna kept her own small store and taught her children to oppose slavery and to practice “the Nantucket way,” the egalitarian social and business relations followed