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...

Carol Elizabeth Moseley was born and raised in a segregated neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. While in high school, her parents got divorced, and she moved in with her grandmother. After graduation, she studied Political Science at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Afterward, she studied law at the University of Chicago, earning her Juris Doctor degree at 25. While at law school, she met Michael Braun, and the couple married in 1973. In the same year, Moseley Braun began to work as a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s office in Chicago, dealing primarily with civil cases. After four years, she took time off to be at home with her newborn son till her neighbors recruited her to run for the state legislature. She served for 10 years, promoting health care, gun control, and education reform. In 1988, when Moseley Braun was elected to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, she became the first African-American to serve in an executive position in Cook County. In November 1992, after defeating her Democratic opponent, Moseley Braun ran in the primary election for the US Senate. On her win, she became the first African-American woman to be elected to the US Senate, the first African-American US Senator from the Democratic Party, and the first female Senator from Illinois. In her single term as Senator, she supported social causes, such as minority rights, pro-choice bills, child support bills, and budgets for job training of youth and senior citizens. A year after losing the re-election, she was nominated as the US Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. In 2003, Moseley Braun began her campaign for the Democratic Party presidential elections, though She dropped out of the race after reaching third in the DC primary. In 2005, she ran for mayor of Chicago, finishing fourth with only 9% of the votes. Since the early 2000s, Moseley Braun teaches political science in numerous institutes, including DePaul University and Northwestern University. Read more...

Verda Mae Freeman Welcome was born in Uree (today called Lake Lure), North Carolina. In her teens, after her mother died, Welcome had to finance her education, working in menial jobs during the day and attending school in the evening. At 22, she moved to Baltimore, Maryland, studying at Coppin State Teachers College. After graduation, she began her decade-long teaching career and met and married Dr. Henry C. Welcome. Welcome continued her education, earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Morgan State College and a master’s degree in history from New York University. As an educator at Baltimore’s public school system during the 1930s, Welcome felt the discrimination and racism toward her and witnessed her students’ lack of opportunities. She became an activist in her community, joining various organizations, including the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the National Urban League, and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. In 1945, at the age of 39, Welcome was elected president of the Northwest Improvement Association, improving local services for the people, as a higher frequency of garbage collection and police protection. In 1958, Welcome ran as an independent democratic candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates, representing the Fourth District of Baltimore City. When she won the election, 51 years old Welcome became the first African-American woman to serve in this position. In her three years tenure, she worked to improve civil rights services for the state’s citizens. She promoted the ratification of the fourteenth amendment, advocated for gun and smoking laws, permissive interracial marriage law, and improved the access of blind citizens to public housing. In 1962, at the age of 55, Welcome was elected to the Maryland State Senate – the first African-American to serve as a Senator in Maryland State Senate and the second African-American woman in the US to be elected to a state senate. In this position, Welcome continued her work toward equal rights, promoting issues such as eliminating Maryland’s racial segregation laws, equal pay for equal work, illegal employment practices, harassment of welfare recipients, and discrimination in public accommodations. In 1969, Welcome called for establishing the Maryland Commission on Negro History and Culture (today called Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture) to collect and preserve the history of the state’s black population. Welcome served in MD Senate for 20 years until she retired in 1982. She died eight years later, at the age of 83. Read more...

Hattie Wyatt was born and raised in rural Tennessee. As a kid, she worked on the family farm and general store. Though her family did not have the means, she received higher education with the help of her aunt’s fortune. She attended Ebenezer College, and at 14, she transferred to Dickson Normal College, receiving her B.A degree at 18. After graduation, she worked as a teacher for several years until she married Thaddeus Caraway, and the couple moved to Jonesboro, Arkansas. There, Caraway took care of the household and children while her husband practiced law and became involved in politics. In 1912, her husband was elected to the United States House of Representatives and then as Senator for Arkansas. When he died unexpectedly in 1931, 53 years old Caraway was appointed to fill his seat, becoming the second woman seated in the US Senate. In the following month, when she won the special elections, she became the first woman elected to the Senate. Within a few months in Senate, she achieved another “first” – the first woman to preside over the Senate. Upon the 1932 elections, she announced her intentions of running for a full term. She won the general elections, becoming the first woman elected to serve a full term as a US Senator. In Senate, Caraway supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, including veterans and organized labor, she apposed isolationism, and was a member of various committees, including Commerce, Agriculture, and Forestry, and Enrolled Bills and Library, in which she served as the chair. In the 1938 election, she became the first woman re-elected to the Senate. During WW2, she encouraged women to contribute to the war effort. In 1944, she lost the re-election at the age of 66 and vacated her seat after 14 years in Senate. Afterward, she was appointed by Roosevelt to the Employees’ Compensation Commission, and two years later, she was assigned by President Truman to the Employees’ Compensation Appeals Board, on which she served until 1950 after suffering a stroke. She passed away that year, at the age of 72. Read more...

Catherine Cortez was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. She studied finance at the University of Nevada, Reno, and then law at the Gonzaga University School of Law. In 1995, she became the chief of staff of the former Nevada Governor Bob Miller, as well as served as an assistant to the United States Attorney General. During that time, she married Paul Masto, a former Special Agent in the US Secret Service. In 1999, Cortez Masto moved to Washington, DC, for a few years to work as a federal prosecutor. In 2006, 42 years old Cortez Masto won the state Attorney General’s elections, serving full two-term after winning the re-election of 2010, the second woman to serve as Nevada Attorney General. In this position, she focused on social issues such as sex trafficking, elder abuse, domestic violence, and the methamphetamine epidemic. As state attorney general, Cortez Masto investigated a nationwide mortgage-fraud, which the settlement of the case brought to the state more than $1.9 billion. In 2016, Cortez Masto ran for a seat at the US Senate. In her campaign, she asserted topics such as immigration reform, protecting Social Security and Medicare, and raising the minimum wage. She won with 47% of the votes, and when she took office, Cortez Masto became the first Latina in the US Senate and the first woman to represent Nevada. While in office, she advocates for gun control, pro-choice, and federal government limitations on greenhouse gas emissions. She is a member of numerous committees, including the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the Committee on Finance, and the Committee on Indian Affairs. In her efforts to promote women and children, Cortez Masto introduced two bills addressing missing, murdered, and trafficking of Native Americans and Alaska Natives, as well as introduced the Interdiction of Protection of Child Victims of Exploitation and Human Trafficking Act, providing tools for law enforcement officers to recognize and rescue exploited children. Read more...

Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan, Maine, the oldest of six children. To support her parents, she began working at the age of 12 at a local retail store. At high school, in addition to playing as the captain of the school’s girls’ basketball team, she worked as a telephone operator, where she met her future husband, Clyde Smith, a local politician who was 21 years older than her. After graduation, she taught for a short time at a one-room school and coached the girls’ basketball team at her old high school. At the age of 21, she joined the staff of the Independent Reporter magazine, working as a circulation manager. During this time, she became active at the local women organizations, co-founding the Skowhegan chapter of the Business and Professional Women’s Club, serving as the editor of the organizations’ magazine, and later as its president. At 31, she was appointed the treasurer of the New England Waste Process Company while holding a full-time job as an office worker at a local textile mill. In 1930, when she is 33 years old, Chase and Clyde Smith got married, and she became more involved in politics. In that year, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee, in which she served until she moved to Washington, DC, following her husband’s election to the US House of Representatives. Smith was more than the wife accompanying her husband, she worked as his secretary and speechwriter. In 1940, her husband fell ill, and he asked her to run in his stead in the coming election. After he passed away a few months later, in 1940, she won the special election, becoming the first woman elected to US Congress from Maine. Three months later, she was elected again for a full two-years term, and for the next eight years, she was re-elected three more times. During her service, she developed an interest in military and national security issues, she served on the Naval Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee. She played a key role in the passage of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which enabled women to serve as regular members of the armed forces, not only at war times, as well as giving them rank, privileges, and equal pay. Smith was known as a moderate Republican, braking ranks with her party and supporting President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. In the summer of 1948, Smith announced her candidacy for the US Senate, and when she won the general elections she became the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, as well as the first woman to represent Maine in the US Senate. In Congress, Smith was the first one to criticize Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt. In a fifteen-minute speech, which became known as the “Declaration of Conscience,” she protected citizens’ rights to criticize, to protest, to hold unpopular beliefs, and to have independent thought. Following the speech, McCarthy removed her from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, replacing her with Senator Richard Nixon. Not holding her opinions, she advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, for which she was referred to as “the devil in disguise of a woman” by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1964, at the age of 67, Smith announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Although she lost every primary election, she made history by being the first woman in the US to run as a presidential candidate for a major party. Afterward, she channeled her efforts toward Medicare, civil rights, and education funding. She was the first (and to this day the only) woman to chair the Senate Republican Conference, she promoted the foundation of the space program, and served as a charter member of the Senate Aeronautical and Space Committee. In 1973, after losing the re-election for her Senate seat, Smith retired from political life. She taught at various colleges as a visiting professor, and returned to Skowhegan, where she supervised the construction of the Margaret Chase Smith Library Center – the first library to focus on the work of a female Member of Congress. Smith passed away at the age of 97. Read more...

Martha Hughes Cannon was born in Clwyd, Wales, UK. When she was three years old, her family, who converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, immigrated to the US. They stayed in NYC for a few months before settling in Salt Lake City, Utah. Three days after their arrival, her father had died, and in the following year, her mother married the Mormon pioneer, James Patten Paul. At the age of 14, she taught for a year before learning to typeset. She then worked in various papers and magazines, including the Women’s Exponent, a suffrage publication edited by Emmeline B. Well, who encouraged her to become a doctor. At age 16, Hughes began taking pre-med night classes at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah), from which she graduated five years later with a degree in chemistry. Afterward, she continued to medical studies at the University of Michigan with the church blessing and financial support. After graduation, she practiced for a short time in Algonac, Michigan, before moving to Philadelphia to further her studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the only woman in her class. At that same time, she also learned Pharmaceuticals, Science, and Oratory, graduating at the age of 25 with four degrees. Upon her return to Salt Lake City, Hughes opened a private practice, and not long after, she was appointed by the LDS Church as the first resident physician of the new Deseret Hospital. There, she established a nurse training school and gave lectures on obstetrics. At the age of 27, she married Angus Munn Cannon, a Mormon polygamist who was 23 years older than her, and she became the fourth wife out of six. After her husband was sent to jail for been a polygamist and afraid of the option to testify against her husband, she exiled herself and her oldest daughter and stayed in Europe until the warrant against her had expired two years later. When she returned to Salt Lake City, Hughes became a prominent figure at the Utah Women’s Suffrage Association, giving public speeches and participating in suffrage conferences alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She believed that polygamous marriage is a feminist act that provides more freedom to women than a monogamous marriage. In 1896, Utah had restored women’s right to vote, and Hughes decided to run for state senator. She was 39 years old and became the first woman in the US to be elected as a state senator. In the four years Hughes held office, she authored numerous legislative bills promoting public health and sanitation. She lobbied for regulating working conditions for women and girls, education for children with disabilities, and pure food. She helped found the first state board of health and served as a board member. In that position, she established a commission to regulate contagious disease and tried to prevent unvaccinated children from attending school. In 1889, Hughes had her third child, and she did not run for a third term. She continued to serve at the Utah Board of Health, at the Utah State School for the Deaf and Dumb, and in 1902, she was appointed as a member of the psychology section of the Medico-Legacy Society of New York. In later years, she moved to California, where she served as vice president of the National Congress of Tuberculosis, and after her husband died, she settled in LA, where she passed away at the age of 65. Read more...

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California. Both of her parents were immigrants, her mother from India, and her father from Jamaica. Growing up in Berkeley, California, during the civil rights movement, she saw the lawyers as the architects of change and decided to become one. In kindergarten, she traveled daily from the predominantly black neighborhood she lived in, to a school in Thousand Oaks as part of desegregation efforts. When she was 7 years old, her parents got divorced, and 5 years later, she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal, Canada. There she had her first political initiative – protesting against a policy that banned children from playing on the lawn of their apartment building. After high school, Harris returned to the US to attended Howard University, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and economics. While in school, she held her first campaign as a class representative of the student council. Harris also chaired the economics society, led the debate team, and was a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. At 22, she moved to California to study Law at Hastings College, where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. At the age of 25, after passing the bar examination, Harris began a career at the deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California. In this position, she prosecuted cases of sexual abuse, drug trafficking, and gang violence. In 1998, she began to work as an assistant district attorney for the San Francisco district attorney and then as City Attorney at San Francisco City Hall. In 2004, Harris took over her former employer, becoming the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, the first woman as well as an African-American woman. In 2010, she was elected as the Attorney General of California and once again made history for being the first woman and the first person of color serving in this position. In-office, she prosecuted cases of guns, drugs, and human trafficking, she defended the Affordable Care Act, protected the climate change law, helped win marriage equality, and created the Open Justice platform – a public online criminal justice database. In 2015, Harris declared her candidacy for the US Senate, in her campaign, she called for the protection of women’s reproductive rights, increase the minimum wage and immigration and criminal-justice reforms. In 2017, when she was sworn as US Senator for California, she became the first South Asian-American and second US African-American woman senator. After taking office, Harris began serving on various committees, including the Committee on the Judiciary, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. At the beginning of 2019, she announced her nomination for the Democratic presidential election, but by the end of the year, she decided to quit the race. On August 11th, 2020, Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential elections, announced her as his vice-president, and at 55, Harris became the first woman of color to run as the vice-presidential nominee for a major party ticket. Biden-Harris won the 2020 elections. January, 20th, 2021, was Harris’s first day as the first female Vice President of the US. Read more...

Born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood, she was redirected from a Jewish religious school to a private Catholic high school to learn discipline. She initially wanted to study medicine but ended up graduating Stanford University with a degree in History and Political Science. Feinstein’s political career had many firsts, starting with being the first woman to head the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco. She also had her share of disappointments, as when she lost twice the elections for the position of mayor of San Francisco. Several years after, following the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, whom she found shot to death, she replaced Moscone in the office, and later elected to stay in the position. In 1992, together with Barbara Boxer, she became one of California’s first female senators and continued in conceiving achievements when she became the first woman to assume the role of the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, as well as the first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Today she is the oldest member of the Senate. Her most significant contribution was leading six years review of the CIA’s use of torture. Feinstein is one of the wealthiest senators of the US, with an estimated net worth of $58 million. The reports attribute a large portion of her wealth to her third husband, investment banker Richard C. Blum. Her only daughter, Katherine Feinstein, is a former Superior Court judge. She died on September 29th, 2023, at the age of 90. Read more...

Elizabeth Ann Herring grew up in a lower-middle-class family in Oklahoma. She excelled in debate and got a scholarship to George Washington University. At 19, she paused her studies to start a family with her high school sweetheart and devoted herself to raising a daughter and a son. Only later in life did she resume her career – got a Doctor of Law degree, started lecturing in Rutgers School of Law, University of Texas Law School, and University of Pennsylvania Law School. Warren became well known as Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert. In her public work, she served as an adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission and was appointed as a special adviser to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She published several books, including two popular volumes about middle-class economics, co-authored with her daughter. The two made the bold statement that “sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before.” In 2012 she ran for Senate and became the first female Senator from Massachusetts. She was re-elected in 2018. In 2019 she declared herself as a candidate for president. The official launch of her campaign was made in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The location was chosen to reference the historic 1912 labor strike led by immigrant women textile workers. In March 2020 (during Women’s History Month), Warren suspended her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination, following a disappointing showing in early primary contests. Elizabeth Warren shaped her political agenda around wealth re-distributive policies: criticizing Wall Street after the financial crisis, proposing a wealth tax and free childcare. She is one of the wealthiest presidency candidates with over $2.59 million worth. Read more...