Activism Archives - Page 5 of 161

Betty Connolly

Betty Connolly was a working class suffragist from Newton Highlands, Massachusetts who was affiliated with the National Woman’s Party.

Edith Ainge

Treasurer and National Council member for the National Woman’s Party

Marvel Cooke

Marvel Cooke was a pioneering journalist and political activist who spent her groundbreaking career in a world where she was often the only female African American.

Fanny Fligelman Brin

Fanny Fligelman Brin devoted her life to the causes of world peace, democracy, social justice, and Jewish welfare.

For more than seventy years, the Minnesota-based writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur was a voice for oppressed peoples worldwide. Beginning in the 1920s, she championed the struggles of workers against the capitalist economy, the efforts of women to find their voices and their power, the rights of American Indians to their lands and their cultures, and environmentalist causes.

Liang May Seen

Liang May Seen was the first woman of Chinese descent to live in Minnesota. She overcame an impoverished childhood in China and teenage years spent in a San Francisco brothel to become a respected leader in the Chinese immigrant community in Minneapolis.

Milagros Benet de Newton

Milagros Benet de Newton was a conservative women’s suffrage leader in Puerto Rico who supported voting rights for educated women.

Sofia Reyes de Veyra

While advocating for Philippine independence and living in D.C., Sofia de Veyra and other Filipinas joined local women’s organizations that supported the American suffrage movement. Upon returning to the Philippines, these pioneering women formed women’s clubs and eventually won the right to vote on April 30, 1937.

Hannah Jensen Kempfer

Hannah Jensen Kempfer was the first woman from rural Minnesota elected to the state legislature, serving nine terms in the Minnesota legislature between 1922 and 1942.

Hilda Simms

Civil rights activist Hilda Simms became a national celebrity for her leading role in the first all-Black performance of the Broadway show Anna Lucasta. Frustrated by her struggling career and the lack of roles for Black actors, Simms worked as the creative director for the New York State Human Rights Commission to address racial discrimination in the entertainment industry.