Category: Historical / page 5

Marie Foster
Marie Foster


Marie Foster was a civil rights activist who helped African Americans in Selma, Alabama, register to vote. She was also a founding member of the Dallas County Voters League and a local organizer of the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery. Foster was born on October 24, 1917, near Alberta, Alabama. Her mother moved Foster and her siblings to Selma to get an education. Dropping out before completing high school, Foster married and raised three children after the death of her husband. She eventually completed high school, attended junior college, […]
Frances D Gage
Frances D Gage


Frances D. Gage was a leading activist in the anti-slavery, woman's rights and temperance movements in the United States. Gage was born on October 12, 1808 in Marietta, Ohio. On January 1, 1829, she married James L. Gage, an abolitionist lawyer who supported her activism throughout their marriage. Gage was among the first to support voting rights for all citizens without regard to race or gender, and she supported suffrage for newly freed African American women along with the men during the Reconstruction. In 1851, her introduction of Sojourner Truth […]
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 […]
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall


Jane Goodall was a British primatologist, ethologist, and environmentalist, known for her groundbreaking study of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London, England, developing a fascination for animals at a young age. In 1960 she began her research under the guidance of anthropologist Louis Leakey, revolutionizing the understanding of primate behavior by documenting chimpanzees making and using tools—an ability once thought unique to humans. Over the decades, Goodall expanded her work beyond field research to global conservation and advocacy. She […]
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 […]