Category: Historical (born before 1900)

Sadie Lewis Adams
Sadie Lewis Adams


Sadie Lewis Adams was a teacher, suffragist and clubwoman. Adams was born on February 24, 1872, in Staunton, Virginia. She earned a teaching certificate from Hartshorn Memorial College in Richmond, and taught in the Staunton Public School system until her marriage in 1892. In 1910, Adams and her husband moved to Chicago, Illinois. She became active in volunteer activities and women's clubs, including the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first African American suffrage organization in Chicago. After Illinois granted women the right to vote in local elections in 1914, Adams was […]
Jane Addams
Jane Addams


Jane Addams was a settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She was the second woman and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931, and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Addams was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. Her father, John Addams, was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party and served as an Illinois State Senator from 1855 to 1870. He was friends […]
Nina Evans Allender
Nina Evans Allender


Nina Evans Allender was a political cartoonist and suffragist. She served as the official cartoonist for Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party. Allender was born in Auburn, Kansas, in 1872. Her mother, Eva, left her father and moved to Washington, D.C. with Nina and her sister to work at the Department of the Interior. Allender married an Englishman as a young woman, but he abandoned her after a short while. She then took a job at the Treasury Department and pursued art more seriously. She studied art at the Corcoran School […]
Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson
Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson


Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson was a poet, writer and public speaker who often gave speeches on the experience of Black women and their right to vote. She spoke about the issues of Black women but was an advocate for all genders and races. She worked alongside suffragists to campaign for the first woman’s suffrage referendum. Anderson was born on March 1, 1843, in Michigan City, Indiana, to one of two Black families in the community. At age 12, she was noticed for her poetic talent and was invited to attend […]
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony


Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was brought up in a Quaker family with long activist traditions. After teaching for fifteen years, she became active in temperance. Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to speak at temperance rallies. This experience, and her acquaintance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to join the women's rights movement in 1852. Soon after she dedicated her life to women's suffrage. After they moved to Rochester in 1845, members of the Anthony family were active […]
Annie Arniel
Annie Arniel


Annie Arniel was a suffragist, women's rights advocate, and member of the Silent Sentinels who picketed the White House in 1917. Arniel was born in May 1873 in Harrington, Delaware. She married in 1891 and was widowed in 1910, thereafter supporting herself and her daughter as a factory worker. In 1914, Arniel and her daughter participated in a Washington, D.C., suffrage parade. The same year, she served as a delegate for the Delaware Equal Suffrage Association to the National American Woman Suffrage Association's annual convention. In 1915, she served as […]
Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balch


Emily Greene Balch was an American sociologist, political scientist and economist, and a leader in the women’s peace movement. She received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1946 jointly with John Raleigh Mott for her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Blach was born January 8, 1867, in Jamaica Plain, now part of Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1889, a member of the first graduating class there. She completed an independent study in sociology from 1889-1890, used a fellowship from Bryn […]
Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune


Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was born July 10, 1875, near Mayesville, South Carolina, the 15th of 17 children. Scholarships enabled her to attend Scotia Seminary and then Moody Bible Institute. Turned down when she applied to go to Africa as a missionary, Bethune returned to the South. She met and married Albertus Bethune, and began to teach school. In Daytona, Florida, in 1904, Bethune scraped together $1.50 to begin a school with just five pupils. She called it the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. A gifted […]
Irene Moorman Blackstone
Irene Moorman Blackstone


Irene Moorman Blackstone was an African American businesswoman, club member and suffragist who is remembered for her role in bringing racial cooperation into the New York suffrage campaign and for her work to prevent discrimination against African Americans in attaining socioeconomic and political equality. Blackstone was born in 1872 in Virginia. She began her career as a sub-agent in the brokerage business, then worked for the Metropolitan Mercantile and Realty Company. She later supported herself as a newsdealer in Harlem. Blackstone was a member of the women's auxiliary of the […]
Alice Stone Blackwell
Alice Stone Blackwell


Alice Stone Blackwell was a nineteenth century suffragist, journalist, feminist and human rights advocate. Born on September 14, 1857, Blackwell was the only child of reformers Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell. She belonged to a family of pioneering women. Her aunts Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Blackwell were two of the country’s first female physicians and her aunt Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the first woman to be ordained as a minister in the U.S. Because her parents were both sought-after speakers on abolition and woman suffrage, Blackwell often stayed with […]