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...

Nampeyo was born in Hano, a Hopi Reservation on the First Mesa in Arizona. Her mother was Tewa and her father Quootsva, and she grew up with her mother’s corn clan. As a child, she learned the art of pottery from her Hopi grandmother, becoming one of the finest potters at First Mesa. After mastering contemporary pottery making in styles such as Polacca and Crackleware, Nampeyo began to experiment with the ancient designs and forms of Hopi pottery. She visited the ruins of ancient Hopi villages, coping designs of prehistoric and protohistoric pottery pieces, and applying them to her work. She also used ancient techniques to brighten and smoothen the clay and combined five different clays instead of the common use of two types of clays. Nampeyo’s innovation and integration of the old with the new created a unique and original style of pottery. In 1875, a trader named Thomas Keam opened a post at First Mesa, where 16 years old Nampeyo sold her pottery, soon earning a steady income from her work. Within a few years, she became known for her “old Hopi pottery.” In 1898 Nampeyo’s husband traveled to Chicago to exhibit her pottery, which afterward her fame spread, and her art became a collector’s item both in the US and in Europe. At the begging of the 20th century, Nampeyo settled for a few years at the Grand Canyon Lodge. She created and sold her work in a Hopi House, a tourist attraction that included a museum, theater, a curio shop, and living space for Native American artists. In this period, she was diagnosed with trachoma, which damaged her sight. By 1925, she was almost blind, though she continued to create pottery by touch and instructing her husband and daughters how to paint the finished vassals. She died at the age of 83, but her works are presented in museums worldwide. Read more...

Patricia Ann Vaughn was born in Holbrook, Arizona. She was half Yavapai and half Hualapai. When Patricia was 14 years old, her mother passed away, and she and her brother moved to live with their grandparents – the chief and chieftess of the Yavapai-Prescott Tribe. She attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs school, and after graduating from Prescott High School, she studied at Haskell University in Lawrence, Kansas. She majored in anthropology and took courses in psychology and public speaking at the University of Kansas. In her 20’s, she married Ernest McGee, a Korean War veteran. For the following years, she worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs finance division and then in public health at Peach Springs, Arizona. At the age of 40, McGee followed her grandmother’s advice and joined the tribal government, where she worked as its secretary-treasurer. Two years later, she was elected as Vice President of the tribal government, serving for two terms. In 1972, she was elected president, a position she held for 20 years – from 1972 to 1988 and then from 1990 to 1994. As president, her focus was on economic development and educational programs. She managed to secure government funds for a tribal community center that would include a library and will preserve the language and the tribal’s cultural history, and she co-founded the Yavapai Language Program. She obtained millions of dollars to build a resort and conference center on the reservation, leased tribal lands for shopping centers, and negotiated for a water settlement with the government, which provided the tribe water allocations. In 1992, she signed the first agreement permitting gaming in Arizona. In addition to her role as president, McGee was a member of the national and state Inter-Tribal Chairman Association of Arizona and served on the State Civil Rights Advisory Board as well as on the National Advisory Council on Indian Education. Read more...

Born in El Paso, Texas and spent most of her childhood in her family’s ranch in Arizona. The schooling options in the area were limited, so she moved to live with her grandparents, where she studied at Radford School for Girls. O’Connor finished high school two years early, and at sixteen, she was admitted to Stanford University and earned her BA in Economics. By the age of 22, she already earned her law degree from Stanford University. Though she had impeccable qualifications, O’Connor had a hard time finding a job as an attorney due to bias and discrimination against women in the legal field. She turned down a paying job offer as a secretary and worked for free for the county attorney of San Mateo County, California. When she was only 24 years old, O’Connor moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to work as a civilian attorney for the US Army Quartermaster Corps for three years. When she returned to the USA, she opened her own law firm. At 35, she began working as the Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, and four years later she was appointed to the Arizona State Senate as a Republican to fill a vacate seat. After one year in this position, she was elected to the State Senate for a full term. O’Connor was reelected twice and served as the first female majority leader of any state senate. At the age 45, she was elected as a Superior Court justice in Maricopa County and afterward, was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals in Phoenix. At the age of 51, O’Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, becoming the first female justice to serve on the United States Supreme Court. As a Supreme Court justice, she emphasized the significance of equal-protection, promoted women’s interests, amended inequalities against women, and was a swing vote in cases regarding abortions and harassment against women. After 25 years of serving as a supreme justice, O’Connor retired to care for her husband, but she remained active both in court and in advocating for civic education for the youth. Read more...

Rose Eudora Collom was born in Georgia in 1870. She attended Lindenwood College and trained as a teacher, and a few years after she got married and the couple moved to Gila County in Arizona, where her husband worked in a mine. Collom, then 44 years old, found herself in an isolated area, spending her days cooking and mending clothes. She said that there was nothing for her to do except sit and gaze out the window. To relieve her boredom, she began taking long walks around the area and study the local plants, started collecting seeds, cuttings and specimens, and wrote her observations. To deepen her knowledge, Collom ordered botany books and wrote to notable botanists. She became an expert on Arizona flora and was acknowledged by renowned botanists. She also discovered several unknown plants and had new observations on the environmental conditions and their effects on the native Arizona plants. Collom had a belief that some high altitude plants can adapt themselves to lower altitudes, and by proving this theory, she encouraged the use of native species in landscaping private gardens and beside highways. At 68, she started a correspondence with the co-founder of the Grand Canyon National History Association, who offered her a research grant to collect specimens in the Grand Canyon area. By accepting the grant, she became the first paid botanist of the Grand Canyon National Park, as well as serving as the Horticultural Chairman of the Arizona Federation of Garden Clubs, and a member of the Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society. Due to her contribution in this field, several plant species are named after her. Read more...