Category: Historical (born before 1900) / page 2

Katherine Blake
Katherine Devereux Blake


For more information about Blake's mother, Lillie Devereux Blake, visit her profile here: https://wp.las.iastate.edu/cattcenter-awpc/directory/lillie-devereux-blake/ Katherine Devereux Blake was an educator, author, and second-generation suffragist. Blake was born on July 10, 1858, in New York City to suffragist Lillie Devereux Blake and her first husband, Frank Umsted. She graduated from Normal College, now Hunter College, in 1876 and worked in the New York City public school district for her whole career. Initially a teacher, Blake became the principal of the Girls Department of Public School 6 in 1894. P.S. 6 was […]
Lillie Devereux Blake
Lillie Devereux Blake


For more information about Blake's daughter, Katherine Devereux Blake, visit her profile here: https://wp.las.iastate.edu/cattcenter-awpc/directory/katherine-devereux-blake/ Lillie Devereux Blake was an author and suffragist. Blake was born on August 12, 1833, to a prominent Virginia family. After her father’s death in 1837, the family moved to Connecticut and she was privately tutored and participated in the social whirl of their town. She married Frank Umsted in 1855 and, after the birth of their first daughter, turned to writing as a creative outlet. Her second daughter, Katherine, who would herself become a suffragist, […]
Amelia Jenks Bloomer
Amelia Jenks Bloomer


Amelia Jenks Bloomer was a temperance activist, suffragist and editor. Bloomer was born on May 27, 1818, in Homer, New York. Though she received only few years of formal education, she worked briefly as a teacher in Homer and then, after to moving to live with her sister in Waterloo, New York, she worked for several years as a live-in governess for a family. She married David Bloomer of Seneca Falls in 1840. She became active in the Seneca Falls political and social community, joined the local women’s Temperance Society, […]
Sue M. Wilson Brown
Sue M. Wilson Brown


Sue M. Wilson Brown was a clubwoman, civil rights activist and suffragist in Iowa. Brown was born on September 8, 1877, in Staunton, Virginia. She moved with her family to a coal mining camp near Buxton, Iowa, an integrated coal mining town in Mahaska County, and graduated from high school in Oskaloosa. She married S. Joe Brown, a lawyer in Buxton, in 1902 and they moved to Des Moines. Brown joined the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, and from 1907 to 1909 she edited the Iowa Colored Woman, the […]
Nannie Helen Burroughs
Nannie Helen Burroughs


Nannie Helen Burroughs was a suffragist, religious leader, educator, and social activist in the early 20th century. Born May 2, 1879 in Orange, Virginia to a pair of former enslaved people, Burroughs moved to Washington, D.C. with her mother after her father died. Although she excelled in school, she was rejected for a position teaching public school. Some historians believe this was a result of colorist discrimination against Burroughs’ darker complexion. Burroughs, instead, worked as a bookkeeper and editorial secretary for the National Baptist Convention (NBC). Climbing the ranks of […]
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Mary Ann Shadd Cary


Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an abolitionist, journalist, suffragist and educator. She was also the first female African American newspaper editor in North America after starting the Black newspaper The Provincial Freeman. Shadd Cary was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1823 into a free African American family and was the oldest of 13. Shadd Cary moved to Canada later in her life but continued her work with her newspaper, a weekly publication for African Americans, by frequently traveling back to the U.S. to gather information for the paper. After the […]
Empress Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great


Catherine II was the empress of Russia from December 25, 1761, until her death on November 17, 1796. Known as Catherine the Great, she was the longest-reining empress of Russia. Catherine’s greatest accomplishments include establishing educational reform, championing the arts, and extending Russia’s borders in the largest territorial gain since Ivan the Terrible. Catherine was born on May 2, 1729, as Sophie Friederike Auguste. She grew up in Stettin, Poland, as a minor German princess. Upon request of the Russian Empress Elizabeth, Sophie traveled to Russia to meet the Grand […]
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt


Carrie Lane Chapman Catt—an Iowa State University alumna who devoted most of her life to the expansion of women's rights around the world as well as international peace—is recognized as one of the key leaders of the American women's suffrage movement. Her superb oratory and organizational skills led to ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote in August 1920. Catt was born on January 9, 1859, in Ripon, Wis., the second of three children of Lucius and Maria (Clinton) Lane. In 1866, […]
Septima Poinsette Clark
Septima Poinsette Clark


Septima Poinsette Clark was an educator and civil rights activist who developed a citizenship education program designed to eliminate illiteracy and get people ready to register and vote that played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Clark was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was a former slave but her mother, born in Charleston but raised in Haiti, had never been enslaved. After graduating from high school in 1916, Clark worked as a school teacher in a rural school […]
Coralie Cook
Coralie Franklin Cook


Coralie Franklin Cook was an African American suffragist, orator and scholar. Descended from a woman enslaved by President Thomas Jefferson, Cook was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1861 to Albert and Mary Elizabeth Edmondson Franklin. She graduated from Storer Normal School in 1880. After a few years of teaching at her alma mater, she moved to Washington, D.C., and served as the head of the Home for Colored Orphans and Aged Women for five years. In 1899, she married George William Cook, an academic and NAACP member, and joined the […]