Category: Historical (born 1920 or before) / page 5

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. […]
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi


Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi served as the prime minister of India for three consecutive terms (1966 to 1977) and a fourth term (1980 to 1984). She adhered to the quasi-socialist policies of industrial development that were begun by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. As prime minister, Gandhi established closer relations with the Soviet Union, depending on that nation for support in India's long-standing conflict with Pakistan. Gandhi was born November 19, 1917. She attended Visva-Bharati University, West Bengal, and the University of Oxford. In 1942, […]
Helen Hamilton Gardener
Helen Hamilton Gardener


Helen Hamilton Gardener was an author, suffragist and civil service official. Gardener was born as Alice Chenoweth on January 21, 1853, in Winchester, Virginia, and grew up in Washington, D.C., Indiana and Ohio. She graduated from Cincinnati Normal School in 1873, and worked as a teacher for two years until her marriage to Charles Smart, the school commissioner of Ohio. They moved to New York City in 1880, where she lectured on sociology at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and wrote for local newspapers under several masculine pseudonyms. […]
Edna Fischel Gellhorn
Edna Fischel Gellhorn


Edna Fischel Gellhorn was a Missouri suffragist, reformer and philanthropist. Born in St. Louis in 1878, Gellhorn became involved in the Missouri suffrage campaign in 1910, serving in the St. Louis and Missouri Equal Suffrage Leagues and helping to organize suffrage demonstrations. In 1919, Gellhorn cast the deciding vote to open up the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League to African Americans. Gellhorn’s most famous accomplishment was a 1916 demonstration known as the “Golden Lane,” where thousands of suffragists, clad in “suffrage yellow,” lined the streets and distracted from the Democratic […]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman


Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a lecturer, writer, economist and leading theorist of the women’s movement in the United States. Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. Her paternal great-grandfather was Calvinist preacher Dr. Lyman Beecher and her great-aunts were novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, women's education advocate Catherine Beecher, and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. Gilman's father abandoned the family, leaving them in poverty. Although Gilman received little formal education, she did attend the Rhode Island School of Design for two years. In 1884 she married artist Charles W. […]
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman


Emma Goldman was a political anarchist, writer and speaker who advocated for causes such as free speech, birth control, women's equality and worker’s rights. Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno, Russia, to a poor Jewish family. Due to her family's poverty, Goldman had to leave school and work. As a teenager, she began studying the ideas of Russian populists and nihilists. In 1885, she emigrated to Rochester, New York, with an older sister to avoid being forced into marriage by her father. Working as a seamstress in […]
Ella T. Grasso
Ella T. Grasso


Ella T. Grasso served as governor of Connecticut from 1975 to 1980. She was the first woman governor of Connecticut and the first woman to be elected governor of a U.S. state without having been the spouse or widow of a former governor. Grasso was born on May 10, 1919, in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics and sociology in 1940 and master's degree in 1942, both from Mount Holyoke College. During World War II, she served as assistant director of research for the War Manpower […]
Charlotte Forten Grimké
Charlotte Forten Grimké


Charlotte Forten Grimké was an African American teacher, author, abolitionist and suffragist. Born on August 17, 1837, to a family of prominent Philadelphia abolitionists, Charlotte Forten Grimké receive an excellent education from tutors as she was barred from attending a segregated school. At the age of 17, she was sent to Salem, Massachusetts, to be educated further at the Higginson Grammar school and then the Salem Normal School, where she enjoyed great success. After graduation, she found a job as a teacher at Eppes Grammar School. It was in Salem […]
Sarah Moore Grimké
Sarah Moore Grimké


Sarah Moore Grimké was a nineteenth-century abolitionist, suffragist and orator. Born on November 26, 1792, to a family of wealthy slaveholders in Charleston, South Carolina, Grimké learned the evils of slavery at an early age. As a child, she tried to teach some of the enslaved people how to read on their plantation until her father discovered and forbade her from continuing. After an 1819 visit to Philadelphia with her father where she met several Quaker abolitionists, Grimké moved there and became a Quaker in 1821. A few years later, […]
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer


Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader. She was the first woman from Mississippi to be an official delegate at a national party convention and the first African American since the Reconstruction period. Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of 20 children in a family of sharecroppers. She attended school through the sixth grade, then dropped out to work as a sharecropper. In 1961, without her knowledge or consent, she was sterilized as part of Mississippi's plan […]