Category: Historical (born before 1900) / page 9

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 […]
Rowena Edson Stevens
Rowena Edson Stevens


Rowena Edson Stevens was born on April 25, 1852, near Columbus, Wisconsin. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in 1873, a member of Iowa's State first graduating class. She taught school in Iowa and Nebraska from 1873 to 1876, then married John Stevens, a 1872 graduate of Iowa State. The Stevens family lived in Ames from 1876 to 1893, then moved to Boone, Iowa. Stevens was a strong supporter of women's suffrage. She served as president of the Political Equality Club in Ames […]
Maria W. Stewart
Maria W. Stewart


Maria W. Stewart was a African American teacher, lecturer and activist. She was one of the first American women of any race to speak to a "mixed" audience of men and women and the first African American woman to publish a political manifesto. Stewart was born in 1803 in Hartford, Connecticut, to free African American parents. Orphaned by age 5, she served as an indentured servant to a minister until age 15, receiving no formal education. Between ages 15-20, Stewart supported herself as a servant, eventually moving to Boston. She […]
Lucy Stone
Lucy Stone


Lucy Stone, abolitionist and women's rights activist, was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1818. At the age of 16, after completing local schools, she taught and saved money for advanced study. She attended nearby Mount Holyoke Seminary for one term in 1839, but returned home to attend to the illness of a sister. Stone waited until 1843 to enroll at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College); upon her graduation in 1847, she became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a bachelor's degree. Stone gave her first […]
Bertha von Suttner
Bertha von Suttner


Bertha von Suttner, writer and peace activist, was the sixth person and the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1905. Suttner was born June 9, 1843, in Prague, Austria, to a noble family. Her father died before her birth, and she was raised by her mother, whose financial mismanagement necessitated that Suttner, at age 30, take a position as teacher-companion to the Suttner daughters. There, she fell in love with her charges' brother, Arthur, who was seven years her junior. She left employment with the family and […]
Mary Burnett Talbert
Mary Burnett Talbert


Mary Burnett Talbert was an African American civil rights and anti-lynching activist and suffragist. Talbert was born on September 17, 1866, in Oberlin, Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1886, the only African American woman in her graduating class. After college, she was a teacher at Bethel University in Little Rock, Arkansas, then became assistant principal of Union High School in Little Rock, the highest position held by an African American woman in the state. In 1891 she moved to Buffalo, New York, after […]
Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell


Mary Church Terrell was a writer, educator and activist for civil rights and women's suffrage. Terrell was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee. Her parents, both former slaves, were small business owners, and her father was the South's first African American millionaire. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 with a Bachelor of Arts in classical languages and earned a master's degree in education from Oberlin in 1888. After earning her bachelor's degree, Terrell taught at Wilberforce College (Ohio) and then at the M Street Colored High School […]
Susette Tibbles
Susette La Flesche Tibbles


Susette La Flesche Tibbles Bio Susette La Flesche Tibbles, also known as Bright Eyes, was a Native American suffragist and activist. Her sister, Susan Le Flesche Picotte was the first Native American woman physician. She was born in Bellevue, Nebraska in 1854 to Joseph La Flesche, the last recognized chief of the Omaha people. She attended the Presbyterian Mission Boarding Day School from 1862 to 1869. The brutality of forced assimilation at many of these boarding schools has been well documented. Native children were often forced to dress in Western […]
Grace Trout
Grace Wilbur Trout


A Maquoketa-born woman led the way to women’s suffrage in the state of Illinois and later across the United States. Her name is Grace Wilbur Trout and she was born in 1864 in Maquoketa. She became known as “The Woman Who Never Fails.” That may be because Grace Trout never gave up on her fight to gain the vote for women. On June 11, 1913, after going so far as to block the way of any legislators who might be tempted to leave the capitol before a vote was taken, […]
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth


Sojourner Truth was an African American evangelist and reformer who applied her religious fervor to the abolitionist and women's rights movements. Named Isabella by her parents, Truth was born circa 1797, in Ulster County, New York. The daughter of slaves, she spent her childhood as an abused chattel of several masters. Between 1810 and 1827, she bore at least five children to a fellow slave named Thomas. Just before New York state abolished slavery in 1827, she found refuge with Isaac Van Wagener, who set her free. With the help […]