The first woman to run for president and the first female stock broker on Wall Street, Victoria Woodhull achieved remarkable success in finance, journalism, and politics. A spiritualist, suffragist, and free love advocate, Woodhull was an iconoclast who fought for her beliefs no matter how controversial they were at the time.
Bahamian suffragist Mary “May” Ingraham was the founding president of the Bahamas Women’s Suffrage Movement, as well as a businesswoman who owned properties and ran a store.
Anna Stout’s philosophy was that women should have equal rights with men and be free to develop their intellectual ability to its highest capacity.
Although she had joined the New Zealand Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1885, it was not until the 1890s that she began to play a tentative, independent public role. In April 1892 she was elected president of the Women’s Franchise League in Dunedin; the active leadership was provided by Marion Hatton. Early in 1895 Eva McLaren, corresponding secretary of the International Council of Women, approached Stout to preside over a New Zealand branch.
Physician, reformer and activist Cecilia Grierson was the first woman to receive a medical degree in Argentina.
Ekaterine Gabashvili was a Georgian writer, educationist and feminist who fought for social reform and women’s emancipation.
Mercedes Laura Aguiar was a writer, teacher and feminist from the Dominican Republic. As a journalist and poet, she wrote works that promoted gender equality and Dominican sovereignty, in opposition to the US occupation. She fought for women’s right to vote, women’s right to education, and employment protections for women and children.
A leading suffragist and abolitionist, Lucy Stone dedicated her life to battling inequality on all fronts. She was the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree and she defied gender norms when she famously wrote marriage vows to reflect her egalitarian beliefs and refused to take her husband’s last name.
Lucretia Coffin Mott was an early feminist activist and strong advocate for ending slavery. A powerful orator, she dedicated her life to speaking out against racial and gender injustice.
Champion of temperance, abolition, the rights of labor, and equal pay for equal work, Susan Brownell Anthony became one of the most visible leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she traveled around the country delivering speeches in favor of women’s suffrage.
A Quaker abolitionist and teacher, Prudence Crandall bravely defied prevailing patterns of racial discrimination when she opened one of the first schools for African American girls in Connecticut in 1833. Though supported by leading anti-slavery activists—among them William Lloyd Garrison—Crandall, a white woman, faced legal harassment and social ridicule for her efforts to educate free blacks in the North.