Wright, Martha Coffin (1806–1875)

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Wright, Martha Coffin (1806–1875)

American women's rights leader. Born on December 25, 1806, in Boston, Massachusetts; died from pneumonia on January 4, 1875, in Boston; daughter of Thomas Coffin, Jr. (a merchant and ship's captain) and Anna (Folger) Coffin; sister of suffragist Lucretia Mott (1793–1880); educated at Kimberton Boarding School near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; married Peter Pelham, on November 18, 1824 (died 1826); married David Wright (a lawyer), in 1829; children: (first marriage) Marianna Pelham (b. 1825); (second marriage) Eliza Wright Osborne (b. 1830, a suffragist), Matthew Tallman Wright (b. 1832), Ellen Wright (b. 1840, a suffragist), William Pelham Wright (b. 1842), Frank Wright (b. 1844), Charles Wright (b. 1848).

Martha Coffin Wright, the youngest of eight children, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1806. Her father and mother were descendants of Tristram Coffyn and Peter Folger, respectively, two of the original settlers of Nantucket Island in 1662. Both of her parents were devout Quakers and raised the family within the church community known as the Society of Friends. Wright's family had moved from Nantucket to Boston in 1804, two years before her birth. When she was three, however, the family moved once again, this time to Philadelphia where her father Thomas Coffin, Jr., thought they might find a cultural environment better suited to the practice of their religion. When Martha's father died a few years later, her mother Anna Folger Coffin operated a boardinghouse and small shop to support her large family.

After three years in boarding school, Martha fell in love with Peter Pelham, an army captain and one of her mother's boarders. Although Captain Pelham was not a Quaker, which elicited objections from Martha's family, the couple married on November 18, 1824, and soon thereafter moved to Florida. Two years later, however, Peter died and Martha returned to her family in Philadelphia with her baby daughter, Marianna Pelham , who had been born in August 1825. Ousted from the Quaker faith because of her marriage, Wright maintained many of the Quaker characteristics and grew to have little affinity for organized religion.

During the following year, Wright entered into an engagement with Julius Catlin, the brother of the famous painter George Catlin. This was short-lived as neither had the financial means for marriage. In 1827, she moved with her mother to Aurora, New York, where she taught in a school that her mother had opened there. It was in Aurora that Martha met and married a lawyer from Philadelphia, David Wright. The two lived in Aurora until 1839, and then moved to Auburn, New York, where they remained for many years. During this time they had six children together, two of whom, Eliza Wright Osborne and Ellen Wright , became active in the women's suffrage movement in their adult years.

Martha Wright's long career in the women's movement began in 1848 when she worked with her sister Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in organizing the first convention for women's rights in the United States. The conference took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in July of that year. Wright continued to organize and lead women's rights conventions over the following years, serving as secretary of a convention in Syracuse in 1852, vice-president of a convention in Philadelphia in 1854, and then president of three different conventions in 1855. She also presided over the New York State Woman's Rights Committee's tenth annual women's rights convention held in New York City in 1860. Over the years she played an important role as an advisor to Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , both of whom were her good friends. When the movement split after the Civil War, Wright remained loyal to both Anthony and Stanton during those turbulent years, and helped them organize the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and the National Women's Suffrage Association in 1869.

Although Wright published only a few magazine articles on women's rights, she was known to have written poetry, sketches, and short stories. In 1874, she was elected president of the National Women's Suffrage Association; however, she died the following year of pneumonia while on a visit to a daughter in Boston.