Women's Rights Collection, 1789-2000 (bulk: 1864-1983)

Grimké, Angelina Emily, 1805-1879

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w64g2hxz (person)

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (born February 20, 1805, Charleston, South Carolina – died October 26, 1879, Hyde Park, Massachusetts), American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. She and her sister, Sarah Moore Grimké, were considered the only notable examples of white Southern women abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina...

Stone, Lucy, 1818-1893

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6wr0tw2 (person)

Lucy Stone (b. Aug. 13, 1818, West Brookfield, MA–d. Oct. 18, 1893, Boston, MA) was born to parents Hannah Matthews and Francis Stone. At age 16, Stone began teaching in district schools always earning far less money than men. In 1847, she became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree from Oberlin College. After college, Stone began her career with the Garrisonian Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and began giving public speeches on women's rights. In the fall of 1847, with...

Foster, Abby Kelley, 1811-1887

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w67t8c4n (person)

Abby Kelley Foster (January 15, 1811 – January 14, 1887) was an American abolitionist and radical social reformer active from the 1830s to 1870s. She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals. She married fellow abolitionist and lecturer Stephen Symonds Foster, and they both worked for equal rights for women and for Africans enslaved in the Americas. Foster wa...

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-1935

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6524nmh (person)

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860-1935) was the leading public intellectual of the women’s movement in the early 20th century. Born into the prestigious Beecher family, she struggled through a lonely childhood and disastrous marriage, which caused a nervous breakdown. Her mental health returned once she separated from her husband; she later gave him custody of their young daughter, and he had a happy second marriage to one of her close friends. She moved to California, and threw herself int...

Grimké, Sarah Moore, 1792-1873

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6zd8s40 (person)

Even though Sarah Moore Grimké was shy, she often spoke in front of large crowds with her sister Angelina. The two sisters became the first women to speak in front of a state legislature as representatives of the American Anti-Slavery Society. They also became active writers and speakers for women’s rights. Their ideas were so different from most of the ideas in the community that people burned their writings and angry mobs protested their speeches. However, Grimké and her sister would not let t...

Sophia Smith collection

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w65n08xb (corporateBody)

Rose, Ernestine L. (Ernestine Louise), 1810-1892

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6bk2190 (person)

Ernestine Rose was born Jan. 13, 1810 in Piotrków Trybunalski, Congress Poland. Her father was a wealthy rabbi although Rose remained a staunch atheist throughout her life. She left Poland at the age of 17 and eventually relocated to England. There she met Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, a socialist, and the two were good friends. She married William Ella Rose, another socialist and the two emigrated to the United States in 1836 and settled in NYC. Rose became a speaker for abolition of slaver...

Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1862-1931

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6dc8qwq (person)

Ida B. Wells (b. July 16, 1862, Holly Springs, MS - d. March 25, 1931, Chicago, IL) was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to her slave parents. Following the death of both her parents of yellow fever in 1878, Ida, at age 16, began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Mississippi. Some time between 1882 and 1883 Wells moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to teach in city schools. She was dismissed, in 1891, for h...

Blackwell, Henry Browne, 1825-1909

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6571dkr (person)

Hamilton, Gail, 1833-1896

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6m32xf6 (person)

Author; b. Mary Abigail Dodge. From the description of Correspondence, 1849-1893. (Lewis & Clark Library). WorldCat record id: 31327028 Pen name of American author Mary Abigail Dodge. From the description of Papers of Gail Hamilton [manuscript] 1862-1895. (University of Virginia). WorldCat record id: 647812158 Gail Hamilton was born Mary Abigail Dodge on March 31, 1833, in Hamilton, Massachusetts to Hannah Stanwood and James Brown Dodge. She graduate...

Kenyon, Dorothy, 1888-1972

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w60s0rrq (person)

Lawyer; Judge; activist. Municipal Court Justice, New York City, 1930's; president of the Consumers' League of New York; appointed to a League of Nations Commission to Study the Legal Status of Women, 1938; U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 1947-50. Charged by Senator Joseph McCarthy with membership in communist organizations and was the first person to appear before Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee, 1950. Was on National Board of the American Civil Lib...

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1815-1902

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w69706n1 (person)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnstown, New York in 1815. She organized the first Women's Rights Convention at Senecca Falls, New York, in 1848 and for more than fifty years thereafter was a crusader for women's rights, especially women's suffrage. She died in New York City in 1902....

Paul, Alice, 1885-1977

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w68735kj (person)

Quaker, lawyer, and lifelong activist for women's rights, Alice Paul was educated at Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania, where her doctoral dissertation was on the legal status of women in Pennsylvania. She later earned law degrees from Washington College of Law and American University. Paul also studied economics and sociology at the universities of London and Birmingham and worked at a number of British social settlements (1907-1910). While in England she wa...

Mott, Lucretia, 1793-1880

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6wx86s1 (person)

Lucretia Mott (née Coffin) was born Jan. 3, 1793 in Nantucket, MA. She was a descendent of Peter Folger and Mary Morrell Folger and a cousin of Framer Benjamin Franklin. Mott became a teacher; her interest in women's rights began when she discovered that male teachers at the school were paid significantly more than female staff. A well known abolitionist, Mott considered slavery to be evil, a Quaker view. When she moved to Philadelphia, she became Quaker minister. Along with white and black wo...

Terrell, Mary Church, 1863-1954

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6222w4f (person)

Mary Church Terrell was born Sept. 23, 1863 in Memphis, TN. Her parents, Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers, were freed slaves. She majored in Classics at Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to accept African American and female students; she was one of the first African American women to attend the institution. Terrell graduated in 1884 with Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt. She earned her master's degree in Education from Oberlin in 1888. She began teaching at Wilberfo...

Bloomer, Amelia Jenks, 1818-1894

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6233htk (person)

Amelia Jenks Bloomer was an early suffragist, editor, and social activist. Bloomer was also a fashion advocate who worked to change women’s clothing styles. Bloomer was born in Homer, New York. With only a few years of formal education, she started working as a teacher, educating students in her community. In 1840, she married David Bloomer and moved to Seneca Falls, New York. Bloomer quickly became active in the Seneca Falls political and social community. She joined a church and volunteered...

Truth, Sojourner, 1799-1883

https://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6s57g1k (person)

Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree, c. 1797, Swartekill, New York-died November 26, 1883), African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist best-known for her speech on racial inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", delivered extemporaneously in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention. Truth was born into slavery but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. She devoted her life to the abolitionist cause and helped to recruit black troops for the Union Army. Although Truth ...