Category: Historical (born 1920 or before) / page 11

Margaret Chase Smith
Margaret Chase Smith


Margaret Chase Smith served as a U.S. representative from Maine from 1940-1949 and a U.S. senator from 1949-1973. Smith was the first woman to serve in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the first woman in Maine to serve in Congress. Smith was also the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for president by a major party. Smith was born in Skowhegan, Maine, on December 14, 1897. After graduating from high school, she worked as a teacher, telephone operator, office manager for a woolen […]
Mary Louise Smith
Mary Louise Smith


Mary Louise Smith devoted more than 60 years to improving the political process at the local, state and national level. A native of Eddyville, Iowa, Smith began working in politics in the 1950s in Eagle Grove. Although she twice ran for and won a seat on the Eagle Grove School Board, she decided that the organizational work of politics most appealed to her. In 1964, Smith was elected as Republican national committeewoman for Iowa and served until 1984. She served as the chair of the Republican National Committee from 1974 […]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton


Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American leader in the women's rights movement who, in 1848, formulated the first organized demand for woman suffrage in the United States. Stanton received a superior education at home, at the Johnstown Academy, and at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, from which she graduated in 1832. While studying law in the office of her father, Daniel Cady, a U.S. congressman and later a New York Supreme Court judge, she learned of the discriminatory laws under which women lived and determined to win equal rights for […]
Rowena Edson Stevens
Rowena Edson Stevens


Rowena Edson Stevens was born on April 25, 1852, near Columbus, Wisconsin. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in 1873, a member of Iowa's State first graduating class. She taught school in Iowa and Nebraska from 1873 to 1876, then married John Stevens, a 1872 graduate of Iowa State. The Stevens family lived in Ames from 1876 to 1893, then moved to Boone, Iowa. Stevens was a strong supporter of women's suffrage. She served as president of the Political Equality Club in Ames […]
Maria W. Stewart
Maria W. Stewart


Maria W. Stewart was a African American teacher, lecturer and activist. She was one of the first American women of any race to speak to a "mixed" audience of men and women and the first African American woman to publish a political manifesto. Stewart was born in 1803 in Hartford, Connecticut, to free African American parents. Orphaned by age 5, she served as an indentured servant to a minister until age 15, receiving no formal education. Between ages 15-20, Stewart supported herself as a servant, eventually moving to Boston. She […]
Lucy Stone
Lucy Stone


Lucy Stone, abolitionist and women's rights activist, was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1818. At the age of 16, after completing local schools, she taught and saved money for advanced study. She attended nearby Mount Holyoke Seminary for one term in 1839, but returned home to attend to the illness of a sister. Stone waited until 1843 to enroll at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College); upon her graduation in 1847, she became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a bachelor's degree. Stone gave her first […]
Bertha von Suttner
Bertha von Suttner


Bertha von Suttner, writer and peace activist, was the sixth person and the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1905. Suttner was born June 9, 1843, in Prague, Austria, to a noble family. Her father died before her birth, and she was raised by her mother, whose financial mismanagement necessitated that Suttner, at age 30, take a position as teacher-companion to the Suttner daughters. There, she fell in love with her charges' brother, Arthur, who was seven years her junior. She left employment with the family and […]
Mary Burnett Talbert
Mary Burnett Talbert


Mary Burnett Talbert was an African American civil rights and anti-lynching activist and suffragist. Talbert was born on September 17, 1866, in Oberlin, Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1886, the only African American woman in her graduating class. After college, she was a teacher at Bethel University in Little Rock, Arkansas, then became assistant principal of Union High School in Little Rock, the highest position held by an African American woman in the state. In 1891 she moved to Buffalo, New York, after […]
Emma Tenayuca
Emma Tenayuca


Emma Tenayuca was a labor activist in Texas during the 1930’s, best known for her passionate speeches. Born on December 21, 1916, in San Antonio, Texas, Tenayuca started her activism early. She was arrested during a protest in 1933, at just 16 years old. She graduated from Brackenridge High School in 1934. After high school, Tenayuca founded two international ladies' garment workers unions and was involved in the Worker's Alliance of America and Woman's League for Peace and Freedom. She organized a protest over the beating of Mexican migrants by […]
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa


Mother Teresa was one of the great servants of humanity. She was an Albanian Catholic nun who came to India, founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, and attained Indian citizenship. Her selfless work among the poverty-stricken people of Kolkata (Calcutta) is an inspiration for people all over the world and she was honored with Nobel Prize for her work. Mother Teresa's original name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. She was born on August 27, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia. Her father was a successful merchant and she was youngest of the […]