Zipporah Potter Atkin was born in Colonial Boston to enslaved parents. In Massachusetts of the mid-1600s, children of slaves were considered free upon birth, though it is unknown how she remained free throughout her life. By 1670, Atkins had inherited money from her father, which he received from his former owner, Captain Robert Keayne. At 25, she used her capital to purchase property in the North End neighborhood of Boston, today part of the Rose Kennedy Greenway, making history as the first recorded black person to own land in what will become the United States of America. While it is impressive on its own, what makes it even more extraordinary, is that Atkins was a single woman when purchasing the land. In addition, the full ownership of the property remained hers after she got married, at a time when men had control over their wives. In 1693, Atkins sold part of her land for 100 pounds, and after six years, she sold the rest of it for 25 pounds. She signed the deed with her initials, which indicates that she knew how to read and write at a time when most black people in colonial America were illiterate. Atkins’ story was discovered in 2009 by Dr. Vivian Johnson, who found Atkins’s deed to the house and a 1676 map that indicated the location of her property. Though Johnson’s research has revealed many of Atkins’ unprecedented achievements, there are still many unknown details. Read more...

Sarah Josepha Hale was born and raised in Newport, New Hampshire. Her parents were advocates for equal education, and in her home-school classes, her mother, and later by herself with the books of her Dartmouth student brother, she learned everything she could, from Latin and geography to philosophy and literature. As a young adult, she worked for a few years as a schoolteacher until she married David Hale at 23. Her husband supported her motivation to learn and encouraged her to publish her writings in local newspapers. In 1822, her husband died, and at 34, Hale published her first poetry collection, “The Genius of Oblivion,” to earn money to support her five children. Five years later, her first novel, Northwood, was published both in the US and the UK – making her one of the first American woman novelists as well as one of the first novelists to write about anti-slavery. The novel was a success, and not long after, Hale became the editor of the Ladies’ Magazine in Boston. In 1833, while working at the magazine, she published another poetry collection titled ‘Poems for Our Children’ that included the timeless nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ As a daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran, Hale was patriotic from birth, supporting patriotic and humanitarian organizations. She was an active member of the Boston Ladies’ Peace Society, and in 1833 she founded the Seaman’s Aid Society, an organization that employed wives of sailors who died at sea. The organization later expanded into a Mariners House that included a sailors’ boarding house as well as a day nursery and a school for seamen’s daughters. At 49, Hale started editing the Godey’s Lady’s Book journal, located in Philadelphia. During the 40 years she served in this position, she became one of the most influential voices of her time. More than 150,000 subscribers throughout the country have read her columns, essays, and poems. The vast range of topics she covered included clothes, interior design, cooking, literary criticisms, abolishing slavery, and child welfare. Hale used her platform to promote causes she believed in, especially women’s education, employment for women, the rights of women as property owners, and the acceptance of women physicians. As an editor, she supported American writers and insisted on publishing works of emerging authors and poets, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, Emma Willard, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Since 1846, Hale wrote to every president, proposing to them the idea of celebrating Thanksgiving as a unifying national event. In 1863, after 17 years of promoting the holiday, President Lincoln accepted her initiation and declared that the fourth Thursday of November would be “A National Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” Hale died in her home in Philadelphia when she 91 years old. Read more...

Born in NYC, the 4th of 7 children. Her father was a prominent banker, and her mother was a poet who died when Howe was 5 years old. Howe attended school until the age of 16, and afterward, she educated herself, reading books her brother brought from Europe, attending lectures, and learning foreign languages. Thanks to her father’s social status, she was acquainted with noted writers, such as Charles Dickens and Margaret Fuller. Her love of poetry began at a young age, and by the age of 20, she had already published essays anonymously in literary magazines. At age 24, she married the physician and the founder of the Perkins School for the Blind (which accommodated Hellen Keller), Samuel Gridley Howe, who was 18 years older than her. Their marriage had many difficulties, as Howe’s husband did not support her writing and socializing and wanted her to be a homemaker, although he relied on her editing and writing for his newspaper. Hints of their troubled marriage can be found in the plays and poems she wrote. They got separated after 9 years of marriage. Howe’s first poetry collection “Passion-Flowers” was published anonymously when she was 34 years old, and 4 years later, she published her second collection, “Words for the Hour”, also not signed with her name. In 1861, Howe wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, a poem that became the hymn of the Union during the Civil War. She received only 4 dollars for publishing the poem. After the war, Howe dedicated her life to activism and promoting women’s rights. She co-founded and led many women’s organizations, including the New England and Massachusetts Suffrage Association, the American Woman Suffrage Association, the Association of American Women, the Association for the Advancement of Women, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Howe also helped establish the Woman’s Journal of the AWSA, which she edited for 20 years. In 1872 she wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” – an essay calling all women to join for world peace. Later she advocated for establishing a national Mother’s Day. Howe never stopped writing, and throughout her life, she published poems, essays, lecture collections, children’s fictions, travel books, biographies, and even music. Read more...

Zakrzewska was born to Polish immigrant parents in Berlin, Germany. She was an extraordinarily brilliant child, and after leaving school at 13, she accompanied her mother to treat patients and learn to be a midwife. After repeating rejections, she enrolled in the school for midwives at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. She graduated at 22 years old and was nominated to the chief midwife with the rank as a college professor, the first woman to hold the position. Zakrzewska kept her position for only six months before she was forced to resign due to complaints of a female’s idea in this position. In 1853, she immigrated to the United States, hoping to find better opportunities to practice medicine as a woman. When she was 27 years old, she graduated from Medical School Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to NYC to open her practice. She also assisted Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (the first woman physician in the US) to found the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and worked there as a physician and a manager. Two years later, Zakrzewska accepted the position of a resident physician and professor of obstetrics and diseases of women and children at the New England Female Medical College in Boston. Three years later, she resigned after realizing that the college founder was only interested in training midwives and not female doctors. That same year in 1862, Zakrzewska founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children, an institute that provided not only clinical care but also training for female nurses and physicians. She worked in several positions in the hospital, as well as in her private practice. Over the years, the hospital expanded to contain 8 buildings and a professional nursing school. Zakrzewska died in her home 3 years after she retired. Read more...

Born Mary Jane Tiernan in Connecticut, and in her 20s moved to Boston to develop her advertisement and copyrighting career. Being a successful copywriter served her social activist work, as she explained: “Poor people need public relations, too.” Her first encounter with the issue of homeless women was while she volunteered at St. Philip’s/Warwick House, a Boston-based Catholic Civil Rights and Anti-War Movement Ministry. Tiernan noticed that there were no specific shelters for women and that they had to dress as men for their protection and to be allowed in. In 1974, she opened the first US women-only homeless shelter, “Rosie’s Place”, which in time also provided women with support, solutions and aids in different fields of life. She was the founder or helped to found many organizations which are still active and growing till this day. Among them are the Boston Food Bank, the Boston Women’s Fund, My Sister’s Place, and Victory House. Kip Tiernan died of cancer in 2011 leaving a strong and ongoing legacy of social justice. Read more...

Annie Cohen emigrated from Riga to the United States as a child. She was married to Max Kopchovsky and had three little children, when she stumbled upon an opportunity to become rich and famous, and promote feminism, all together. At the decade of America’s bicycle hype, she took on the challenge presented by two Boston businessmen to be the first woman to cycle around the world. Without prior cycling experience, she set for the road in 1894. 15 months later, she returned home as an international sensation, even though she skipped large parts of the journey by sailing. Her biggest talent was for storytelling: she reported back about a range of exotic and mostly fictitious adventures. Nonetheless, the gift of imagination secured her a series of lectures and a newspaper column upon her return. Another skill which she demonstrated was entrepreneurship: she adopted the name Londonderry as part of a paid sponsorship by a water company and used herself and her bike as a mobile billboard in France. At the end of the 19th century, Annie Londonderry was an icon of the “new woman” – an independent, liberated, and self-reliant person. Her story was soon forgotten, but after her great-grandnephew discovered that her brief death notice in the 1947 New York Times read: “devoted grandmother of Mary”, he published a book about her, 60 years after her death. Read more...

Even though she spent the first 28 years of her life in slavery, and English was not her first language, Sojourner Truth became one of the most well-known public speakers of the 19th century, advocating for equality between sexes and races. She became famous for broadening the notion of activism beyond the white, educated, middle-class women who primarily made up the suffrage movement. Born as Isabella Baumfree into slavery, one of 10 or 12 children in a Dutch-speaking community in New York. Most of her siblings were sold to different owners, and she learned about them from her mother’s stories. From childhood, she was sold between four masters and suffered abuse, neglect, and even rape. In 1826, She escaped with her infant daughter, Sophia, after her master broke his promise to free her, leaving her four older children behind. The Van Wagenen family from New Paltz, NY, hosted her after the escape and bought her freedom for $20. When her previous master sold her five-years-old-son, Peter, to a new owner in Alabama, she, with the help of the Van Wagenens, sued him at the New York Supreme Court and won; she is one of the first black people to sue a white man in a United States court and prevail. She spent her first decade as a free woman doing household work in New York City. In 1843, she followed God’s calling to become a preacher, changed her name to Sojourner Truth, and till she passed away, she toured the country advocating for various reform causes, including the abolition of slavery, peace, and women’s suffrage. In 1850, she dictated her biography and William Lloyd Garrison published it, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave; she bought her first home in Florence, MA, and spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, MA. A year later, at Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, she gave her most famous speech, which in later years got the title “Ain’t I a Woman?” This speech was one of the many that followed. Throughout her career, she lectured everywhere she went, from small gatherings to large conventions, advocating for African-American women’s equal rights, voting rights, and property rights. In 1867, Truth made Battle Creek, MI, her home base, purchased a house, and settled there with her daughters. Till her last days, she never stopped preaching her truth.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Sojourner Truth with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers.   Read more...

Mary Kenney was born to a family of Irish immigrants in the railroad town of Hannibal, Missouri. Her father died when she was 14, and she had to find a job to support her disabled mother. She worked as a bookbinder 11 hours a day, six days a week. Following the job, she moved to Iowa and then to Chicago. There she was exposed to the gender wage gap: she was paid $7 a week when filling in for a male worker, but the management refused her demand to get his salary of $21 a week. At the age of 26, she organized the female bookbinders of Chicago into The Women’s Bindery Union no. 1. It was a first step in a dynamic lifetime career as a trade union leader, which included her appointment as the first woman general organizer of the American Federation of Labor. O’Sullivan moved to Boston and at the age of 30 got married to a fellow labor activist. After the premature death of their firstborn, the couple had three children. Eight years into their marriage, her husband was run over in an accident. The young widow, now a single mother, continued her unionist work, which included advocating for suffrage and pacifism. In 1903, she co-founded the National Women’s Trade Union League and served there a secretary for nine years. When she was 50 years old, she was appointed as a factory inspector by the Massachusetts State Board of Labor and Industries – a position which she held for 20 years, until retiring at 70. O’Sullivan visited her parents’ homeland Ireland at 62 as a delegate of the Women’s Peace Conference. When she died, she left a draft of an autobiography, which was never published. Read more...

Lucy Stone grew up in a rural household that practiced patriarchy, and so she devoted her life to women’s liberation. She saved money for nine years, by working as a teacher and a housekeeper, to fund her higher education. Stone enrolled in Oberlin Collegiate Institute, Ohio – the first college in the US where female and black students could study together. She co-founded a secret debating society for women, who met in the woods. At the age of 29, she became the first woman from Massachusetts to graduate with a Bachelor degree. Her talent for public speaking took her touring the country, advocating for women’s rights and speaking against slavery. In 1850 she took part in organizing the National Woman’s Rights Convention, attended by more than 1,000 participants. The convention attracted international attention when advocating for the rights of black women. She took her politics home as well, and when marrying Henry Brown Blackwell, she decided to keep her last name. She was the first married woman in the US to keep her maiden name, and those who followed her used the term “Lucy Stoner,” popular for married women who didn’t change their family names after their husbands.’ The couple established and edited the Woman’s Journal, the newspaper of the “American Woman Suffrage Association.” She was the first person cremated in Massachusetts.   Read more...