Category: Activist / page 6

Crystal Eastman
Crystal Eastman


Crystal Catherine Eastman was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She was a leader in the women's suffrage movement, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Eastman was born on June 25, 1881, in Marlborough, Massachusetts. She graduated from Vassar College in 1903, received an M.A. in sociology from Columbia University in 1904, and received a law degree from New York University Law School in 1907. Her first job was researching labor conditions in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the […]
Shirin Ebadi
Shirin Ebadi


Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, former judge and human rights activist who founded the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. In 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts for democracy and human rights, especially for the rights of women and children. She was the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. Ebadi was born in Hamadan, Iran, on June 21,1947. She graduated from the University of Tehran with a law degree in 1969 and then with a doctorate degree in […]
Marian Wright Edelman
Marian Wright Edelman


Marian Wright Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her career in the mid 1960s. As the first Black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. Edelman was born June 6, 1939, in Bennetsville, South Carolina. In l968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People's Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research […]
Frances “Sissy” Farenthold
Frances "Sissy" Farenthold


Frances Tarlton "Sissy" Farenthold is a politician, attorney, activist and educator who placed second in nomination for the office of vice president of the United States at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the first woman to be seriously considered as a vice-presidential candidate in the United States. Farenthold was born on October 2, 1926 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Her grandfather, Judge Benjamin D. Tarlton, Sr., served as chief justice of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals, a state legislator and a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. […]
Rebecca L Felton
Rebecca L Felton


Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent suffragist and temperance advocate but also a white supremacist and an advocate of segregation and lynching, was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, as a senator for Georgia. Appointed to fill a vacancy, she served only 24 hours. Felton was born on June 10, 1835, in De Kalb County, Georgia. She graduated from Madison Female College in 1852. In 1953, she married William H. Felton, a state legislator, physician, Methodist minister and planter. She began her political career as his campaign […]
Mary Fisher
Mary Fisher


Mary Fisher is an artist, author and HIV/AIDS activist, best known for her speech at the 1992 Republican Convention. She delivered "A Whisper of AIDS" during a time that many stereotypes were associated with the disease, and she presented a powerful challenge to her own party. She since has founded the Mary Fisher Clinical AIDS Research and Education (CARE) Fund at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as well as been a representative for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Sources: Mary Fisher (n.d.). “About” Mary Fisher. Retrieved […]
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn


Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born on August 7, 1890, in Concord, New Hampshire. She was born into a radical, activist family; her father was a socialist and her mother was a feminist. She grew up in poor, industrial New England towns before her family settled in the blue-collar Bronx section of New York City. Flynn became active in socialist groups and gave her first public speech at the age of sixteen. As a result of her involvement in political affairs, she was expelled from her high school in 1907. Her […]
Abby Kelley Foster
Abby Kelley Foster


Abby Kelley Foster was an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Kelley was born on Jan. 15, 1811, in Pelham, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family. After completing high school, she became a teacher, moving to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1836. Known by her colleagues and the public as, simply, “Abbyy Kelley,” she became interested in abolition after attending a lecture by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn, a chapter of Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. She served as the chapter's first delegate to the national convention of […]
Marie Foster
Marie Foster


Marie Foster was a civil rights activist who helped African Americans in Selma, Alabama, register to vote. She was also a founding member of the Dallas County Voters League and a local organizer of the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery. Foster was born on October 24, 1917, near Alberta, Alabama. Her mother moved Foster and her siblings to Selma to get an education. Dropping out before completing high school, Foster married and raised three children after the death of her husband. She eventually completed high school, attended junior college, […]
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan


Women's rights leader and activist Betty Freidan was born in 1921 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. A summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1942, Friedan trained as a psychologist at University of California, Berkeley, but became a suburban housewife and mother in New York, supplementing her husband's income by writing freelance articles for women's magazines. After conducting a survey of her Smith classmates at a 15-year reunion, Friedan found that most of them were, like she was, dissatisfied suburban housewives. During five more years of researching history, psychology, sociology and […]