Laura Clay was born in White Hall, Kentucky. Her parents were abolitionists, and her mother, who supported women’s rights, insisted that her six children, including her four daughters, would receive a good education. During the Civil War, she attended a girls’ school in Lexington and Mrs. Sarah Hoffman’s Finishing School in NYC. Afterward, she returned home and helped her mother run the estate. In 1878, her parents divorced, and her mother, who inherited White Hall, remained homeless since the law in Kentucky enabled men to claim all their wives’ property in case of a separation. It led Clay and her sisters to join the women’s rights movement. Clay also joined the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Club and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In 1881, her sister Mary Barr Clay (who later served as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association – AWSA) and Lucy Stone, then president of the AWSA, appointed Clay, at 32, to chair the organization’s annual meeting in its first time to be held in Louisville, Kentucky. Following the convention, she co-founded the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association, the first suffrage organization in the South. In 1888, Clay and her sisters founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) and served as its first president for 24 years. Under her leadership, the organization worked tirelessly to improve the legal status of women. Among its many achievements are protecting married women’s property, wages to women, joint guardianship of children, raising the age of marriage consent for girls from 12 to 16, establishing juvenile courts, requiring state women’s mental facilities to have female doctors on staff, persuading Central University and Transylvania University to admit women students, and inspiring the University of Kentucky to build its first women dormitory. In the next decade, Clay became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and worked alongside some of the movement’s most prominent figures, including Alice Stone Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Lloyd. She gave speeches throughout the country promoting women’s suffrage and founding suffrage societies in various states. Soon, she was appointed chair of NAWSA’s Southern Committee and, in 1896, was elected as its auditor. In 1903, she was elected chair of the organization’s new Increase of Membership Committee, serving there for 20 years. Clay believed that the states should grant women voting rights, so in 1913, she left the KERA and the NAWSA, opposing Susan B. Anthony’s support of a federal amendment. In 1916, she was appointed vice-president-at-large of the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, which also supported the states’ rights approach over the federal amendment. She continued to be active in various women’s rights organizations, and in 1920, at 71, she established the Democratic Women’s Club of Kentucky. In the last decade of her life, she left the public eye and focused on promoting women’s rights in her Episcopal church, where she worked on allowing women delegates to church councils. She died at the age of 92. Read more...

Anne Henrietta Martin was born in Empire, Nevada, and grew up in Reno. Graduating from Bishop Whitaker’s School for Girls at 19, she went to study history at the University of Nevada and then for a second B.A. and M.A in history from Stanford University. In 1897, at 22, she founded Nevada State University’s history department, heading the department for two years before resuming her studies at Columbia University, Chase’s Art School in NYC, the University of London, and the University of Leipzig. Then, she worked as an art history instructor at the University of Nevada for several years. In 1909, at 34, Martin took a leave of absence and traveled to Asia and Europe. While in England, she became associated with leaders of the suffrage movement, joined the socialist Fabian Society, and became an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), working alongside Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst. She organized meetings and street protests and published short stories and political articles under the pen name of Anne O’Hara. In the fall of 1911, she returned to Nevada, joined The Equal Franchise Society, and was elected as its president the following year. Under Martin’s leadership, the campaign for women’s rights prospered. She went on a speaking tour throughout the state, convincing male voters to enfranchise women. Her goal was achieved on November 3rd, 1914, when women’s suffrage passed by popular vote in Nevada. Following her success, she was asked to join the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) but left for the more militant organization of the National Woman’s Party, elected as its first national chairman in 1916. In addition to this position, Martin served as president of the Nevada Women’s Civic League and the delegate to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. At 43, Martin decided to exercise her new right and became the first woman to run for US Senate. She ran as an independent candidate representing Nevada in 1918 and 1920, addressing various social topics, such as labor issues and the nationalization of railroads and other public utilities. Though she lost twice, she did win 18% of the vote in 1918 and 20% in 1920. In 1921, Martin moved to Carmel, California. For the next 30 years, she advocated for social causes, women’s equality, and farmers’ markets, believing it would benefit both consumers and laborers by eliminating the cost of middlemen. She died at the age of 76. Read more...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to free parents. At 3, both of her parents had died, and she went to live with her maternal aunt and uncle, who were civil rights activists and abolitionists. She attended the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which her uncle had founded, and at 13, began to work as a nursemaid for a Quaker family who owned a bookshop. In her free time, she continued her education by herself, reading the books in the shop and sharpening her writing skills. At 14, she began publishing her poems in antislavery journals, such as Frederick Douglass’ The Liberator. In 1845, at 20, she published her first verse collection, titled Forest Leaves. At 26, she moved to Wilberforce, Ohio, where she taught domestic science at Union Seminary, a school for free African-Americans, where she was the first female teacher. After two years, she moved to teach at another school in York, Pennsylvania, joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and continued to publish her poems. In 1854, at 29, she delivered her first antislavery speech called The Elevation and Education of Our People, which received praise. Afterward, she embarked on a two-year lecturing tour in Maine, in which she often recited from her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. She became a popular orator, and over the next eight years, she gave lectures across the US and Canada. She published essays, novels, and short stories, in which she wrote about the observations of her traveling, expressing her thoughts about racism, abolition, feminism, temperance, and classism. In 1860, at the age of 35, she married Fenton Harper. When he died four years later, she resumed her lectures and began to connect with women’s rights advocates, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1866, at the National Woman’s Rights Convention, she gave a speech titled We Are All Bound Up Together, calling for the inclusion of Black women in the suffrage movement, emphasizing that Black women were facing racism in addition to sexism. The next day, the attendees formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to advocate for African-Americans’ and women’s right to vote. In the short time the AERA operated, Harper served on its Finance Committee. In 1870, following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote, Harper began to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mobile, Alabama, to encourage as many people to use their right to vote. She detailed her encounters with the newly freed men and their struggles in her poem collection, Sketches of Southern Life. In the next two decades, Harper was involved in numerous reform organizations. She headed the Colored Section of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, served as the director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, and co-founded the National Association of Colored Women alongside Harriet Tubman and Margaret Murray Washington, later serving as its vice president. During this time, she continued to publish her work, including 12 books and countless essays and articles. She died of heart failure at the age of 85. Read more...

Frances Lillian Willard was born in Franklin, California, to a family of ranchers. Her parents were abolitionists, woman suffrage supporters, and temperance advocates. At 15, after insisting on receiving a formal education, she was sent to a boarding school in Pittsfield, Maine. After graduation, she joined her family that by then moved to Verde Valley in the Arizona Territory. There, she worked as a teacher in several rural communities. At the age of 24, she married John Lee Munds, and a few years later, the couple moved to Prescott, where her husband became the county sheriff. Munds rejected the notion of a “women’s sphere” – a belief that women need to focus on domestic life, and she continued working after having children. She joined the Arizona Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Arizona Equal Suffrage Association on her arrival to Prescott. In 1898, at the age of 32, she was elected secretary of the organization. This position allowed her to reach out to Mormon women to increase supporters for the territorial legislature to pass a suffrage bill. Devoted to the cause, she was among the few women who attended legislative sessions, lobbying for women’s issues. In 1903, the suffrage bill passed in the Arizona Congress but got vetoed by the territorial Governor. In 1909, at 43, Munds was elected president of the Arizona Equal Suffrage Association. In the following year, at Arizona constitutional convention, she introduced a proposal to grant women’s suffrage, but it did not pass and left out the state’s constitution. In 1912, after Arizona joined the Union and became a state, Munds once again pushed for women’s right to vote and managed to gather enough men to support her ballot initiative for women’s suffrage. This time, her efforts finally paid off, and on November 5, 1912, Arizona became the 8th state to grant women the right to vote. In 1914, at the age of 48, Munds was elected to the Arizona state senate, representing Yavapai County, becoming the first woman senator in Arizona and the second state senator in the US alongside fellow senator Rachel Berry. During her two-year term in office, Munds served on the Land Committee and chaired the Committee on Education and Public Institutions. She also introduced and passed two bills – increasing the widow tax exemption and raising the minimum marriage age to 16 for women and 18 for men. In 1918, Munds ran for Secretary of State but was defeated in the primaries. Afterward, she retired from public life but remained active in local politics and women’s issues for the rest of her life. Munds died at the age of 82. Read more...

Born Lydia Chapin to a wealthy family in Mendon, Massachusetts. At 19, she married Josiah Taft, and they settled in nearby Uxbridge. There, Taft’s husband was one of the wealthiest landowners of the town and its largest taxpayer. He was among the town’s leaders and served as a selectman and town moderator. In 1756, her eldest son died, and soon after, her husband. At 44, Taft became a wealthy widow with underage children. Her husband’s death occurred just before an important town vote on the financial support of the ongoing French and Indian War. At the time, women were not allowed to vote, but the town needed many supporters to vote for the war funding. With no adult man to represent the Taft family, the people of Uxbridge granted Taft the right to vote as a proxy of her late husband. During an open town meeting on October 30th, 1756, Taft voted in favor of funding the British regiments engaged in the war. On that day, Taft made history as the first recorded woman to legally vote in colonial America, preceding the ratification of the 19th amendment in 164 years. In the following years, Taft had voted in two more town meetings – in 1758 and 1765. Taft died at the age of 66. Read more...

Mary Latimer was born in DeKalb County, Georgia. At age 16, she graduated from the Southern Masonic Female College, and at 20, she married Nicholas A. McLendon and moved to Atlanta, Georgia. In 1868, McLendon became involved in the Georgia Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as well as at the Georgia Women’s Suffrage Association. In the 1880s, she founded the Francis Willard chapter of Georgia Women’s Christian Temperance Union, one of the union’s most active chapters. In 1894, she founded the Atlanta chapter of Georgia Women’s Suffrage Association – the second local woman suffrage organization in the state. Two years later, she was elected president of the organization, serving in this position for three years, and again from 1906 until she passed away in 1921. McLendon was a loud advocate for both causes, persuading WCTU members to endorse women’s right to vote. She argued that women would use their vote to pass social reforms, such as raising the age of consent for girls, abolishing child labor, hiring female guards for female prisoners, and instituting mandatory school attendance. McLendon witnessed the passage of both of her causes – the ratification of the 18th amendment in 1918 and the 19th amendment in August 1920. In November 1920 election, the state authorities denied women to exercise their right to vote because they did not register to vote by the deadline. And so, at the age of 80, in the last year of her life, she continued to work tirelessly to ensure that the women of Georgia could vote. Read more...

Lillian Wald was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a liberal Jewish family. When she was 11 years old, the family moved to Rochester, New York, where she attended a private boarding school. From a young age, she excelled in math, science, arts, and languages, and at 16, she applied to Vassar College but was rejected because of her young age. At age 22, she witnessed a nurse assisting her sister to give birth, and she decided to become one. She attended the New York Hospital’s School of Nursing, and then, the Woman’s Medical College. She worked at the New York Juvenile Asylum, taking care of the orphans as well as teaching a home nursing class for poor immigrant families in the Lower East Side, NYC. Wald was determined to bring affordable health care to those in need. She left school and moved to a room in the Lower East Side so she could be close to her patients. She coined the term “Public Health Nurse” to describe her work with the community and began to advocate for nursing in public schools. Her efforts led the New York Board of Health to establish the first public nursing system in the world, and Wald was appointed as the first president of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing. She promoted a national health insurance plan and established a nursing insurance partnership with an insurance company, which later replicated to other corporate projects. Wald believed that every city resident is entitled to health care, regardless of race, gender, or social status. That in mind, in 1895, she founded the Henry Street Settlement – a not-for-profit organization providing health care, social services, nurses’ training, and educational programs for the community. Within 13 years, the organization had 18 district centers, and by 1913 it had branches throughout NYC, taking care of thousands of patients. The settlements also provided employment opportunities for women, enabling them to have a career outside the house and become independent. In 1902, Wald initiated the first American public-school nursing program in NYC. She founded the National Child Labor Committee as well as the Women’s Trade Union League and served on its executive committee. Wald was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and held its first public conference at the Henry Street Settlement. In 1915, she co-founded the Henry Street Neighborhood Playhouse for the theater arts. Ahead of her time, Wald was an early advocate against child labor and was one of the Child Labor Committee’s prominent leaders, promoting federal child labor laws. As a women’s rights activist, she organized campaigns for NYC suffrage, and as a pacifist, she argued against the entry of the US into WW1, joined the Woman’s Peace Party, co-founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and served as president of the American Union Against Militarism. But when the US entered the war, she chaired the American Red Cross Committee on Community Nursing and represented the US at International Red Cross meetings. In 1933, after suffering a stroke, she retired to her house in Westport, Connecticut. She died at 73 of a cerebral hemorrhage. A few months after she passed away, more than 2000 people attended her memory ceremony at Carnegie Hall, in which the president, governor, and mayor delivered massages in her memory. In her lifework, Wald paved the way to the public health care of today. Read more...

Adelina “Nina” Otero Warren was born near Los Lunas, New Mexico. Her family was among the early settlers in New Mexico, and her parents were part of the Hispanic elite. When she was 2 years old, her father was killed by an Anglo squatter. A few years later, her mother married an English businessman, and she grew up in a multicultural environment. She was influenced by her mother, who was an advocate for social and educational developments and served as the director of Santa Fe’s Board of Education. At 16, the family relocated to Santa Fe, where she became a socialite. At the age of 26, she married Lieutenant Rawson D. Warren, a cavalry officer who was nine years older than her. Though the marriage did not last long, she kept her x-husband’s last name and called herself a widow, so she would not be stigmatized as a divorced woman.   At 31, Nina moved to NYC to keep house for her brother. There, she became active in Anne Morgan’s settlement house, working alongside the famous suffragist Alice Paul and organizing crafts programs for working-class women. Two years later, her mother died, and Nina returned to Santa Fe to take care of her half-siblings. Upon her arrival, she started working for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Soon she became the first Mexican-American state leader of the Congressional Union in New Mexico, raising support from the Spanish-speaking community as well as from the English-speaking community. Using her family connections, she was a successful lobbyist for voting in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment, and she had a key role in its ratification in 1920. In 1922, at the age of 41, Nina ran as the Republican Party nominee for New Mexico to the US House of Representatives – The first Latina to run for the US Congress. During her campaign, she spoke Spanish and advocated for the improvement of education, health care, and welfare services, as well as for the preservation of Hispano heritage and culture. Ultimately, she lost the election by less than 9%, probably because it was discovered that she was a divorcee, not a widow. In 1917 Nina was appointed as the Santa Fe Superintendent of Instruction – one of the first women to serve as government officials in New Mexico. In her 12 years in office, she worked tirelessly to improve the education of Hispano. Read more...

Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, to free African-Americans and abolitionists parents. Her father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and their home was a refuge for fugitive slaves. When she was 10 years old, it became illegal for African-Americans to receive education in Delaware, so the family moved to Pennsylvania, where she attended a Quaker Boarding School. At 16, after graduating high school, she established a school for black children in East Chester, and later she taught in several cities, including NYC. At the age of 27, the family moved to Canada, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed everyone to capture free slaves and returning them to their masters. As a natural-born activist, Shadd became an outspoken advocate for full racial integration and encouraged African-Americans to immigrate to Canada. She founded a school for both black and white children, and in 1852, she published a pamphlet titled “Notes on Canada West,” in which she discussed the benefits and the opportunities that wait for African-Americans in Canada. In 1953, she established “The Provincial Freeman” – the first anti-slavery newspaper, which made her the first female journalist in Canada and the first black female editor in North America. In its seven years of publication in Canada and the US, it explored a variety of topics, from immigration to world events and culture. Her unorthodox approach toward immigration made her a controversial figure in her community, and it almost cost her speech at the Philadelphia Colored Convention of 1855. When Shadd was 33, she married Thomas F. Cary, and when he died four years later, while she was pregnant with their second child, she returned to the US. During the Civil War, she served as a recruiting officer, enlisting black volunteers for the Union Army. After the war, she settled in Washington, DC, where she worked as a teacher while attending evening classes at Howard University Law School. In 1883, Shadd graduated at the age of 60 and became the second black woman in the US to earn a law degree. She never stopped writing, publishing articles in numerous newspapers, including The People’s Advocate and the National Era. Shadd was also a women’s rights activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1880, she established the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise – an organization promoting equal rights of African-American women. She died at the age of 70 from stomach cancer. Read more...

Louise DeKoven was born in Chicago, IL, as an only child to an elite family. Although she had a privileged and wealthy life, she grew up with social conscience, dedicating herself to the community. At 16, after graduating from Dearborn Seminary, she taught Sunday school at St. James Episcopal Church, working with unprivileged boys and establishing a boy’s club for them. There, she became frustrated with the church’s boundaries for women. At 27, she married Joseph Tilton Bowen, and their mansion at Astor St. became a gathering place for social and political meetings. At the age of 35, she started working at the Hull House settlement house, where she led its Women’s Club and eventually served as its trustee and treasurer, a position she held for 53 years. She was the organizations’ primary donor, and in 1912, after her husband had died, she founded a summer camp for the children of Hull-House and donated 72 acres for its establishment. When Jane Addams died, she became the president of the Hall House. She used her status and connections to influence politicians and to raise money for various social causes. She was one of the most influential people to advocate for a juvenile court in Chicago. When it opened in 1899, it became the first juvenile court in the US, and she immediately became a member of its committee, then its top officer, and when it reorganized into the Juvenile Protective Association, she was appointed as its first president. In the 35 years she held this position, she examined various issues, including racial prejudice, working conditions, and prostitution. She was also a women’s rights activist, serving in numerous organizations in key positions, including president of the Chicago Equal Suffrage Association, auditor of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, vice president of the Illinois Suffrage Association, and president of the Chicago Woman’s Club. During WW1, she was the only woman appointed to the Illinois Council of Defense, in which she coordinated women throughout the state to support the war effort. In 1916, amid a rainstorm, she led a march of 5000 women to the Republican National Convention in Chicago. This parade of women demanding their civil right to vote marked a shift in the approach toward the cause and the movement. After the ratification of the 19th amendment, she worked tirelessly, convincing women to register to vote and encouraging them to run to public office. She remained active until she died at the age of 94. Read more...