Nantucket Women’s History

Nantucket has a long and proud history of empowering women. Mary Starbuck led the way in promoting the adoption of Quakerism on the island in the years around 1700. From the 1720s to the 1820s, the Quaker tenets valuing equality and education, created conditions for women to be community and family leaders. Women were in the forefront in the fight for abolition and equal rights. Consequently, it is little surprise that some of the nation’s leading figures in the struggle for women’s suffrage had direct Nantucket roots.