What are some important details about Francis Cabot Lowell and Lucretia Mott? How were these figures involved in reform?

Francis Cabot Lowell was a Massachusetts-based businessman who developed the textile industry by creating and leading the Boston Manufacturing Company. The town of Lowell, which became the center of textile manufacture in the United States, is named after him. Lowell opened his first textile mill in 1814, at Waltham in Massachusetts, and he specifically targeted women in his recruitment campaigns. This is significant because it created economic opportunities for women at a time when they...

Francis Cabot Lowell was a Massachusetts-based businessman who developed the textile industry by creating and leading the Boston Manufacturing Company. The town of Lowell, which became the center of textile manufacture in the United States, is named after him. Lowell opened his first textile mill in 1814, at Waltham in Massachusetts, and he specifically targeted women in his recruitment campaigns. This is significant because it created economic opportunities for women at a time when they were generally dependent upon (and subservient to) their fathers and husbands. While Lowell paid these mill girls less than men, he also offered them a host of educational and religious opportunities, as a means of self-betterment. Lowell died three years later, in 1817. (See the first reference link for more information).

In contrast, Lucretia Mott was a Massachusetts-born Quaker who pioneered the abolition of slavery. Supported by her husband, James, Lucretia spoke at anti-slavery events across the United States throughout the 1820s and 1830s and was a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She was also a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840, but was only admitted as a visitor after the all-male panel refused to allow her attendance in such a capacity. This blatant sexism propelled Mott into the world of women's rights and, alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott organized the first convention for women's rights which took place in Seneca Falls in 1848. According to American National Biography, Mott believed that giving women the right to vote was crucial in achieving equality and she actively encouraged the reform of laws to improve women's education, property access and admission into the professions. (See the second reference link provided). She died in 1880.