Category: Activist / page 6

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 […]
Lenora B Fulani
Lenora B Fulani


Lenora Branch Fulani is an American psychologist, psychotherapist and political activist. In the 1988 presidential election, she became the first woman and the first African American to appear on the ballot in all fifty states and received more votes for president in a U.S. general election than any other woman before her. Fulani was born on April 25, 1950 in Chester, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Hofstra University in 1971, earned a master's degree from Columbia University's Teachers College, and earned a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the City University of […]
Frances D Gage
Frances D Gage


Frances D. Gage was a leading activist in the anti-slavery, woman's rights and temperance movements in the United States. Gage was born on October 12, 1808 in Marietta, Ohio. On January 1, 1829, she married James L. Gage, an abolitionist lawyer who supported her activism throughout their marriage. Gage was among the first to support voting rights for all citizens without regard to race or gender, and she supported suffrage for newly freed African American women along with the men during the Reconstruction. In 1851, her introduction of Sojourner Truth […]
Matilda J Gage
Matilda J Gage


Matilda Joslyn Gage, suffragist and writer, was born in Cicero, New York, on March 24, 1826. Gage's father provided her early education, which included mathematics, Greek, and biology, after which she attended the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. She married Henry H. Gage, a merchant, in 1845; they had five children, although one son died in infancy. The couple later moved to Syracuse and Manlius before finally settling in Fayetteville, New York. Gage's activism in women's rights began at the National Woman's Rights Convention in Syracuse in September 1852. […]