Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké were born into a wealthy family who enslaved people in South Carolina, but they became the only prominent white Southern women supporting abolition. Horrified by the brutality they witnessed, they rejected their upbringing, moved north to Philadelphia, and became Quakers. In 1835, Angelina wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, declaring that the cause was “worth dying for” (70). A year later, her pamphlet “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” was publicly burned in Charleston, and she was threatened with prison.

Their public advocacy was considered scandalous. When the sisters embarked on a public speaking tour, they faced severe criticism for the “unnatural” act of women speaking on political matters. In response, Sarah published “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes,” demanding equality with even firmer rhetoric than before. In February 1838, Angelina became the first woman to speak before a US legislative body, addressing the Massachusetts state legislature. Days after her wedding to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld—an event with both a white and a Black minister, a mixed-race group of guests, and progressive vows—she spoke at Pennsylvania Hall while a mob threw rocks; the building was burned down the next day. 

The sisters later sponsored the education of two of their nephews, who were the sons of their brother, Henry, and an enslaved woman. The sisters had maintained contact with their brother, a cruel enslaver, complicating their historical legacy; however, the two nephews they sponsored developed successful careers, with one becoming a national vice president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1870, Sarah and Angelina attempted to vote in a local election, but their ballots were not counted.

Charlotte Forten was a writer, teacher, and abolitionist whose diaries provide a rare and intimate account of the life of a free Black woman in the antebellum North. Born into a wealthy and influential free Black family in Philadelphia, she was the granddaughter of James Forten, a privateer who fought in the Revolution and a prominent abolitionist. Raised by her grandmother and aunts, who were founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Forten was instilled with a deep commitment to activism. 

Despite her privileged background, she faced constant racism, an experience that fueled her writing and her deep disillusionment with America’s hypocritical celebration of freedom. She had to travel to Salem, Massachusetts, to receive an education as a teenager and was the only Black student in her school. Later, she published poetry criticizing the hypocrisy of supposed American values and the country’s deeply entrenched structural racism.

During the Civil War, Forten seized the opportunity to act on her principles. In 1862, she traveled to South Carolina’s Sea Islands as part of the Port Royal Experiment, becoming the first Northern Black teacher to educate formerly enslaved people. She documented this transformative experience in a two-part series for The Atlantic Monthly in 1864, making her the first Black woman to be published in the prestigious magazine. After the war, she married Reverend Francis J. Grimké, the nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and co-founder of the NAACP, while she founded the National Association of Colored Women. Her lifelong work left an invaluable written record of the fight for racial justice from a perspective that was long excluded from history.

The organized women’s rights movement in the US began in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. The movement’s key organizers included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an activist, and Lucretia Mott, a social reformer and Quaker. They met eight years earlier at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were forced to sit behind a curtain and were forbidden from speaking. Their shared indignation sparked a partnership that culminated in the first women’s rights convention. Along with a small group of other Quaker women, they planned the event in just a few days at the home of Jane Hunt.

At the convention, Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments, a document she had drafted to mirror the Declaration of Independence. By replacing “all men are created equal” with “all men and women are created equal” and listing grievances against patriarchal tyranny (85), the document exposed the hypocrisy of American democracy. The most controversial of its demands was for women’s suffrage, a resolution that passed thanks to the important support of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass published a copy of the Declaration in his newspaper, The North Star, despite outrage and ridicule from the public and other outlets. 

Nonetheless, the convention was attended by over 300 people, and 100 of them—68 women and 32 men—signed the Declaration. The text acknowledges how no Black women were invited to the convention, contrasting it with the advocacy of figures like Sojourner Truth, whose speeches challenged the narrow definitions of womanhood within the movement. It still took 72 years for the 19th Amendment, which granted only white women the right to vote, to be approved.

Sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell broke through the gender barrier in the medical profession at a time when women were considered unfit for the field. Raised by a Quaker abolitionist family, their father educated his children equally. Elizabeth initially had a distaste for medicine but changed her mind when she noted severe gaps in women’s medical care. In 1847, she was accepted to Geneva Medical College in New York, but only because the male students voted her in as a joke, never believing she would attend. Lasting social ostracism and fighting for access to all parts of the curriculum, she graduated at the top of her class in 1849, becoming the first woman in America to earn a medical degree.

Her sister, Emily, was determined to follow in her footsteps but faced even greater resistance. After being rejected by 11 schools, she eventually graduated and became the third woman in the US to earn a medical degree, after her sister and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. Facing public distrust and exclusion from established hospitals, the sisters decided to create their own institution. In 1857, they founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital in America staffed by women. The hospital served poor communities and provided important clinical training for female physicians. Emily managed the infirmary for 40 years, overseeing its growth into a major institution. 

In 1868, they furthered their mission by opening the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, creating a pipeline for future generations of female doctors. The women held complicated opinions, by contemporary feminist standards, as Elizabeth only supported suffrage for educated women; however, her and her sister still made significant progress for women in predominantly male fields.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was a surgeon, spy, and women’s rights advocate who became the first female US Army surgeon and remains the only woman to have received the Medal of Honor. After graduating from medical school in 1855, she volunteered for the Union Army during the Civil War but was denied a commission because of her gender. Undeterred, she served as an unpaid surgeon on major battlefields, eventually earning a paid position as an acting assistant surgeon. She also worked as a spy, gathering intelligence that aided General William Sherman’s march on Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1864, while riding alone behind enemy lines searching for wounded Union soldiers, Walker was captured by Confederate forces and spent four months as a prisoner of war, an ordeal from which her health never fully recovered. She was kept in Castle Thunder prison, a brutal establishment that perpetuated regular violence against women. Following her release, the government wanted to honor her without encouraging other women to similarly pursue positions in the military, a goal of Walker’s. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson awarded her the Medal of Honor for her valiant service while acknowledging that she couldn’t be given a customary military rank since she was a civilian. At the time of the text’s publication, she is the only woman to have ever received the medal.

Decades later, in 1917, the Army changed the eligibility criteria for the medal and rescinded hers, but Walker refused to return it, wearing it daily until her death. President Jimmy Carter restored the medal for Walker posthumously in 1977. Walker was also a staunch advocate for “dress reform” and was arrested in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1870 for wearing trousers in public, a radical act that she saw as a declaration of personal freedom.

Sisters Susan and Susette La Flesche, members of the Omaha Tribe, became advocates for Indigenous rights, challenging systemic injustice through medicine and law. Susan was inspired to become a doctor after witnessing a sick Indigenous woman die when a white doctor refused to provide care. She graduated as valedictorian from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1889, becoming the first Indigenous woman in the US to earn a medical degree. After returning to the Omaha Reservation, she served as the sole physician for over 1,000 people, using her position to advocate for public health and connect her community’s suffering to destructive federal policies. She ultimately raised private funds to build the first hospital on any reservation.

Her older sister, Susette, pursued advocacy through a different path. In 1879, she served as a translator in the landmark civil-rights case Standing Bear v. Crook. Her translation of Chief Standing Bear’s courtroom speech was key in the judge’s historic ruling granting personhood and greater rights to Indigenous people. The victory launched Susette onto a national speaking tour, where she advocated for Indigenous American citizenship and sovereignty, challenging the nation’s hypocrisy. Together, the sisters demonstrated how Indigenous peoples could use the institutions of the dominant culture to fight for their survival and rights.

Anna Dickinson was a celebrated orator who, at the height of the Civil War, became the first woman to give a political address to Congress. Raised as a Quaker abolitionist, she sent an outraged letter to The Liberator as a teenager in 1856, and she later discovered her gift for public speaking at a Quaker meeting in 1860. Her passionate and eloquent speeches caught the attention of Republican Party leaders, who hired her to campaign for the Union cause at a time when women couldn’t vote.

In January 1864, at age 21, she spoke before a packed House chamber that included President Abraham Lincoln. In a daring speech, she criticized Lincoln’s lenient plans for Reconstruction but ultimately endorsed his re-election. He resisted her more “radical” propositions about how to respond to the South, ideas that she carried through later speeches wherein she campaigned to give Black people more rights. She believed that formerly enslaved people should be given seized rebel land and the right to vote.

The event with Lincoln solidified her national celebrity status, and she became one of the most popular and highly paid speakers on the lecture circuit, earning nearly as much as the president. She used her platform to advocate for abolition, a harsh punishment for the Confederacy, and women’s suffrage. Dickinson proved that a woman’s voice could influence national politics, blazing a trail for generations of women who would follow her onto the public stage. Her later life was marked by personal struggles, but her early career was proof of her revolutionary impact.

Belva Lockwood was a pioneering lawyer and political candidate who broke barriers in both the legal profession and national politics. Widowed at a young age, she was motivated to fight for equality after discovering that she earned half the salary of her male colleagues for the same teaching job. After completing her legal studies, she had to appeal directly to President Ulysses S. Grant to receive her law-school diploma, which the school had withheld despite her having completed all the requirements.

In 1876, the US Supreme Court denied her admission to its bar. In response, Lockwood drafted and personally lobbied Congress to pass a bill allowing female attorneys to practice before the nation’s highest court. The law passed, and in 1879, she became the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court Bar. The following year, she became the first woman to argue a case before the court. Not content with her legal achievements, she ran for president in 1884 and 1888 on the National Equal Rights Party ticket. Her campaigns highlighted the absurdity of a system in which a woman could be a candidate for the nation’s highest office but could not cast a vote. She continued working as a lawyer into her eighties, at one point securing a landmark settlement for the Cherokee Nation, but she died three years before the 19th Amendment was passed.