Category: Historical (born before 1900) / page 8

Ernestine Rose
Ernestine L Rose


Ernestine Louise Rose was born January 13, 1810, in Piotrkow, Poland. A rabbi's daughter, she received more education than was common for women at that time. After her mother's death when Rose was 16, her father arranged a marriage without her consent. Rose refused the match and successfully sued to retained her inheritance from her mother. At 17, she left home for Berlin, where she supported herself by tutoring and marketing perfumed papers of her own invention. She studied the texts of the great religions and concluded that all were […]
Nellie Tayloe Ross
Nellie Tayloe Ross


Nellie Davis Tayloe Ross served as the 14th governor of Wyoming from 1925 to 1927 and director of the U.S. Mint from 1933 to 1953. Ross was the first woman to serve as an American governor and the first to serve as director of the U.S. Mint. Ross was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 29, 1876. She attended a teacher-training college for two years and taught kindergarten for several years. Her husband, William B. Ross, was governor of Wyoming from 1923 until his death on October 2, 1924. […]
Gertrude Rush
Gertrude Rush


Gertrude E. Rush was a lawyer, civil rights activist, suffragist and author, and the first African American female lawyer in Iowa. Rush was born on August 5, 1880, in Navasota, Texas. After graduating from high school in Quincy, Illinois, she was a teacher from 1898 to 1907. In 1907, Rush married Des Moines attorney James B. Rush and began studying law with him while working in his office. She earned a Bachelor of Arts at Des Moines College (now Des Moines University) in 1914 and a law degree through correspondence […]
Mary Safford
Mary A. Safford


Mary Augusta Safford, a Unitarian minister and suffragist, was the leader of a group of female Unitarian ministers known as the “Iowa Sisterhood” that founded Unitarian congregations across the Midwest. Safford was born on December 23, 1851, near Quincy, Illinois. She studied for a year at the University of Iowa before leaving due to illness. She returned to Illinois and worked as a teacher while studying on her own. After speaking at the annual meeting of the Iowa Unitarian Association in Humboldt, Iowa, in 1880, Safford was ordained by the […]
Margaret H Sanger
Margaret H Sanger


Margaret Sanger was proponent for scientific contraception (birth control) and family planning, but also a supporter of eugenics. Sanger was born on September 14, 1884, in Corning, New York, into a Roman Catholic family as one of eleven children. Sanger was greatly influenced by her father's political views in support of women's suffrage and tax reform, although these and other beliefs caused the family to be seen as radical in the eyes of their neighbors. After graduating from Claverack College at Hudson, New York, Sanger took a teaching position in […]
Rose Schneiderman
Rose Schneiderman


Rose Schneiderman was a Jewish suffragist, labor rights activist and orator. Her diminutive stature—she was only 4’9”—flaming red hair, powerful speaking skills and penchant for socialism earned her the nickname “The Red Rose of Anarchy.” Schneiderman was born on April 16, 1882, to working-class parents in Poland. The family immigrated to New York City in 1890 and three years later, Schneiderman’s father died leaving behind three children and a pregnant wife. In 1895, at the age of 13, she had to drop out of school and start working as a […]
Anna Howard Shaw
Anna Howard Shaw


Anna Howard Shaw was an American suffragist who became the first woman minister of the Methodist Protestant Church. Shaw was born February 14, 1847, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, England. In 1851, Shaw's family immigrated to the United States. To help support her family, at age 15, Shaw worked as a teacher at a frontier school. After the Civil War, Shaw was able to attend high school and then college. She entered Albion College in 1873, but left in 1876 to attend Boston Theological Seminary. She graduated in 1878 as the only […]
May Slosson Gorslin Preston
May Gorslin Preston Slosson


May Gorslin Preston Slosson was a suffragist, educator and prison chaplain. Slosson was born in 1858 in Ilion, New York. She was the first woman to obtain a doctoral degree in philosophy in America and the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from Cornell University. Slosson lived in Wyoming for most of her adult life, teaching at the University of Wyoming. She also organized lectures for prisoners at the Wyoming State Penitentiary and eventually was appointed the chaplain, the first female prison chaplain in the United States. She moved with […]
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, 1987. After graduating from high school, she worked as a teacher, telephone operator, office manager for a woolen […]
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 […]