Category: Historical (born 1920 or before) / page 3

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 […]
Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson


Rachel Carson was a marine biologist, environmentalist and author who demonstrated to the world the impacts of using fertilizers and pesticides on the environment. Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her M.A. in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on […]
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 […]
Mary Jane Coggeshall
Mary Jane Coggeshall


Mary Jane Coggeshall (January 17, 1836 - December 22, 1911) of Des Moines, Iowa, was known as "the mother of woman suffrage in Iowa." Coggeshall was born in Indiana and moved to Des Moines in 1865 with her husband and children. In 1870, she was a charter member of both the Polk County Woman Suffrage Society and the Iowa Women Suffrage Association. She served as the IWSA president in 1890, 1891 and 1903-1905, and then as honorary president from 1905-1911. She also served as president of the Des Moines Equal […]
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 […]
Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Wideman Dowsett
Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett


Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett was a Hawaiian suffragist and political leader. Born on March 28, 1861, to German coffee planter and cabinet minister Hermann A. Widemann and Hawaiian chieftess Mary Kaumana Pilahiulani, Dowsett grew up during the last years of Hawaiian independence. Due to her father’s position as a cabinet minister, her 1888 wedding to Jack Dowsett, a businessman and politician, was attended by both King Kalākaua and Queen Kapi’olan. After the United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and annexed the island during the years of 1898 to 1900, Hawaiian […]
Anne Dudley
Anne Dallas Dudley


Anne Dallas Dudley was a Tennessee suffragist and one of the most prominent leaders in the Southern suffrage movement. Born on November 13, 1876, into a prominent Nashville family, Dudley attended Ward Seminary High School and Price’s College. In 1902, she married banker and insurance broker Guilford Dudley, and went on to have three children. Ignoring the inherent constraints that came with being a wealthy woman of high social standing, Dudley co-founded the Nashville Equal Suffrage League and led several “May Day” suffrage parades. She included her children in these […]