The Life and Work of Hannah Mather Crocker

​Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) was born into the prominent Mather and Hutchinson families in Boston. A staunch supporter of the principles of the American Revolution, she advocated radical ideas about the education and rights of women. Notably, Crocker believed that girls should receive an education equal to that of boys. She also argued that, if given the opportunities men were afforded, women would be their equals in virtue, intellect, and achievement.

 Crocker was born on 27 June 1752 in her parents' seventeenth-century home on Moon Court near North Square in Boston. Her father was the Congregationalist minister Samuel Mather, son of the more famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather. Her mother was Hannah Hutchinson, sister to Thomas Hutchinson, who served as Governor of Massachusetts at the start of the Revolution. Fairly little is known about her early life as of yet, but in her later years she recorded in her Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston some personal anecdotes that suggest she became a young woman of exceptional character and action. In one tale recounted in her Reminiscences, she remembered smuggling letters out of British-occupied Boston at the onset of the revolution in 1775. Concealing the letters under her dress, she defiantly dared a British soldier to search her—which he declined. Crocker reported that she successfully delivered the letters from her father to a leader of the American forces, Joseph Warren.

To read more visit the Hannah Mather Crocker Society’s website here