A skilled political strategist, Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman Catt was a suffragist and peace activist who helped secure for American women the right to vote. She directed the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and founded the League of Women Voters (1920) to bring women into the political mainstream.
Ana Roqué de Duprey, a prolific educator, writer, and scientist, founded the first woman’s suffrage organization in Puerto Rico in 1917. Known as “Flor del Valle” (“Flower of the Valley”) for her work in botany, she strove to promote educational opportunities and political rights for women in Puerto Rico.
A former slave, Sojourner Truth became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Her Civil War work earned her an invitation to meet President Abraham Lincoln in 1864.
Known as the “Godmother of Title IX,” Bernice Sandler fought for women’s rights in education. After being denied equal access to teaching jobs at her university, Sandler took matters into her own hands. In addition to starting a social revolution for women’s rights, she became the first woman ever appointed to a Congressional committee to work specifically on women’s issues.
Felisa Rincón de Gautier, affectionately known to the public as Doña Fela, became the first female mayor of a capital city in the Americas when she was appointed mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1946. She went on to win reelection four times, serving in office until 1969. Doña Fela devoted herself to public welfare, working to improve housing, public health, and employment for the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Pauli Murray was breaking barriers from a young age. Held back by what Murray dubbed “Jane Crow,” s/he* was a staunch advocate for the rights of women and people of color and fought tirelessly for civil rights. As a poet, writer, activist, organizer, legal theorist, and priest, Murray was directly involved in, and helped articulate, the intellectual foundations of two of the most important social justice movements of the twentieth century.
Maria de Lopez rallied the crowd gathered at Los Angeles Plaza on October 3, 1911 by giving a speech in favor of woman’s suffrage entirely in Spanish, an unprecedented event for the time. An educator, translator, and clubwoman, Lopez helped win the vote for Californian women with her oratory and the writings she translated into Spanish. In addition to her suffrage work, Lopez fought for decades to preserve Spanish- and Mexican-American cultural heritage.
Poet and author Audre Lorde used her writing to shine light on her experience of the world as a Black lesbian woman and later, as a mother and person suffering from cancer. A prominent member of the women’s and LGBTQ rights movements, her writings called attention to the multifaceted nature of identity and the ways in which people from different walks of life could grow stronger together.
Adelina Otero-Warren, the first Hispanic woman to run for U.S. Congress and the first female superintendent of public schools in Santa Fe, was a leader in New Mexico’s woman’s suffrage movement.
In 1959 when Hawaii became a U.S. State, Patsy Mink knew she wanted to run for a position in government. Little did she know, she would become the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress. In addition to writing bills like Title IX, the Early Childhood Education Act, and the Women’s Educational Equity Act, Mink was the first Asian-American to run for U.S. President.