Frances Perkins
American workers-rights advocate, first women in the US Cabinet, fourth US Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position.
Category Archives: Activism > Social Reform
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Rose Schneiderman
Rose Schneiderman’s fierce advocacy for women and workers earned her a reputation as “a tiny, red-haired bundle of social dynamite.” She was a leading voice in the trade union movement for over fifty years, organizing on the shop floor, the street corner, and in the halls of Congress and the White House.
Zerelda Sanders Wallace
First Lady of Indiana from 1837 to 1840, and a temperance activist, women’s suffrage leader, and inspirational speaker in the 1870s and 1880s.
Crystal Eastman
Crystal Eastman was one of the most visible Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century United States.
Leonora O’Reilly
A dynamic speaker and energetic union organizer, Leonora O’Reilly also made a significant contribution to the passage of women’s suffrage legislation at the state and federal levels in the US.
Jessie Ackermann
Jessie Ackermann was an American advocate of temperance and women’s rights, who as an international missionary for the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) spent a number of years in Australia as an organiser and social reformer. She wrote the first book-length study of Australian women.
Dr Alice Hamilton
Alice Hamilton promoted “industrial medicine” and laws to protect employees from dangerous substances in the workplace.
Elizabeth Taylor
As one of the first women justices of the peace in Christchurch she was later made an associate magistrate to the Children’s Court. Within the Christchurch branch of the National Council of Women, Elizabeth Taylor promoted issues such as a motherhood endowment, women police, the right of married women to retain their own nationality, and women in politics.
Mabel Wilson
New Zealand domestic worker and community leader
Maria Rye
Social reformer and a promoter of emigration from England, especially of young women living in Liverpool workhouses, to the colonies of the British Empire, especially Canada.