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.
Category Archives: Activism > Social Reform
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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.
Patricia Bartlett
Patricia Bartlett became a household name in 1970s New Zealand when she stood against the tide of social change which promoted more relaxed attitudes to sexuality.
Florence Keller
A few years before her retirement in her mid 90s, Florence Keller was acclaimed the oldest practising surgeon in the world.