Ellen Spencer Mussey

Born this day in 1850: Ellen Spencer Mussey (1850–1936), lawyer, educator, women’s rights activist

Mussey was born Ellen Spencer in Geneva, Ohio. Her father operated a penmanship school and promoted his method of handwriting (Spencerian penmanship). At a very young age, Mussey helped her father teach classes. Her father died while she was still a teenager, and Mussey lived with several different siblings and attended various seminaries for the next several years.

In 1869 Mussey moved to Washington, D.C. and managed the women’s department of her brother Henry’s business school (Spencerian Business College). The school trained young women for government work and was well-known in Washington.

In 1871 she married Reuben Mussey, a lawyer, and eventually began assisting him in his practice. After her husband’s death in 1892, Mussey wished to formally practice law in order to support herself and her family. No law schools in the area would accept her as a student because—really, do I have to tell you? She took the bar exam anyway the following year and qualified to practice law. She was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1876 and to practice before the U.S. Court of Claims the following year. Her practice included probate law, general commercial law, and international law. She also served as counsel to the American Red Cross and to the Norwegian and Swedish legations for 25 years.

Discovering young women who wished to study law (and who, like her, were denied admission to law schools on the grounds that they had lady parts), Mussey, along with lawyer Emma M. Gillett, established a law school—the Washington College of Law (1898)—that accepted both women and men as students.

Mussey was also active in the fight for women’s rights, including playing a prominent role in securing married women’s property rights, and drafted the Cable Act of 1922, which granted independent citizenship to married women.

Mussey’s other contributions included playing a leading role in establishing public kindergarten and the juvenile court system in the District of Columbia. She also established a school for developmentally disabled children.

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Sarah Elizabeth Doyle

“The women’s sphere is one of infinite and indeterminate radius.” —Sarah Elizabeth Doyle

Born this day in 1830: Sarah Elizabeth Doyle (1830–1922), suffragist and social reformer who co-founded the Rhode Island School of Design and engineered women’s access to Brown University

Doyle was a native of Providence, Rhode Island. After high school she was a popular and by all accounts inspirational teacher. She also served as a principal for many years. Doyle believed deeply in the need to promote women’s advancement. She was a member of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association and lobbied for state suffrage when Rhode Island was drafting a new constitution. She saw not only suffrage but also the organization of women as key to their advancement. She helped found the Rhode Island Women’s Club in 1876 and served as its president until 1884. She also helped found the Rhode Island State Federation of Women’s clubs. She contributed greatly to promoting women’s access to higher education. In 1887 she was instrumental in founding the co-educational Rhode Island School of Design and through her efforts Brown University opened its doors to women in the 1891.

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Lavinia Lloyd Dock

Born this day in 1858: Lavinia Lloyd Dock (1858–1956), public health nurse, pioneer in the standardization of nursing practice, early advocate of birth control, suffragist, and social reformer

Isabella Beecher Hooker

“Women are surely ‘people,’ I said.” — Isabella Beecher Hooker (in reference to the phrase “We, The People” in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution)

Born this day in 1822: Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822–1907), suffragist and lobbyist on behalf of women’s rights

Isabella Beecher Hooker was born Isabella Beecher to the Rev. Lyman Beecher family in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1841 she married lawyer John Hooker. The couple had four children.

The Hookers were the center of Hartford’s literary and social circle. It was under the influence of this elite group that Hooker became convinced of the feminist cause. She worked with leading suffragists of the day to promote women’s rights. She cofounded the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868 and the following year founded the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association (which she led for 36 years), planned and sponsored woman's rights conventions, and supported a married women's property bill that was drafted by her husband. She also lobbied extensively in Washington D.C. for a constitutional suffrage amendment.

“For years and years women have been petitioning Congress and the State Legislatures to take down the political bars which men have put up, contrary to the national constitution and the whole spirit of our government, and allow them to become a active co-workers in promoting the general welfare; but the reply has been "leave to withdraw," or its equivalent; and this simply because these women petitioners had no power to cut off the heads of these Congressmen and Assemblymen; (their political heads, I mean…).” —Isabella Beecher Hooker, “The Constitutional rights of the women of the United States,” an address before the International Council of Women, Washington, D. C., March 30, 1888

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Angelina Grimké

“The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.” —Angelina Grimké

Born this day in 1805: Angelina Grimké (1805–1879), abolitionist and women’s rights advocate

Angelina Grimké and her sister, Sarah Grimké, were born into a prominent slave-holding family in South Carolina. As young women, both left the south to speak out against slavery. Their antislavery activism aroused harsh criticism. Much of that criticism was leveled at them because they were women daring to speak in public—and to mixed audiences.

“We have given great offense on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism. I believe it is woman’s right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is governed.”

Soon they were crusading for women’s rights as well. In 1838 Angelina spoke before the Massachusetts state legislature, making an appeal for both abolition and for women’s rights. She was the first woman to address a U.S. legislature.

Angelina most famously authored the pamphlet “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.” In this pamphlet she appealed to those who claimed the Bible justified slavery and used the Bible to argue convincingly that it did not. She also co-authored, with her husband, Theodore Weld, and Sarah, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. The work was widely considered the most accurate description of slavery and was used as a resource by Harriet Beecher Stowe when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 1868 Grimké learned that her brother Henry had fathered two children of an enslaved woman. Both sisters acknowledged their nephews and sponsored their education. 

After the Civil War, Grimké concentrated on the women’s movement. She, as well as her husband and her sister, played a leading role in the Massachusetts Women’s Suffrage Association. In 1870, she joined her sister and more than 40 other women in an illegal protest vote.

Angelina Grimké was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

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Marguerite Milton Wells

“[T]here must be a nucleus of people in each community who would carry a continuing responsibility for government and would give an intelligent and disinterested political leadership on issues as they arose.” 

— Marguerite Milton Wells 

Born this day in 1872: Marguerite Milton Wells (1872–1959), organizing force behind the League of Women Voters

Wells grew up in Dakota Territory, and became fascinated with democracy as she watched the development of statehood firsthand. She received a B.L. from Smith College in 1895. After college she traveled, cared for various family members, and was heavily involved in volunteer work, serving on many civic and charitable boards.

In 1917 she became active in the suffrage movement, to the exclusion of all other interests, and joined the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association. After the passage of the 19^th Amendment, the National Woman Suffrage Association was transformed into the League of Women Voters. Wells took up the league’s mission with gusto and directed its course over the next 25 years. She was president of the Minnesota League of Women voters for ten years while also sitting on the board of the national league. She then went on to become president of the national league from 1934 to 1944. Wells guided the league in its mission to train women to participate in democracy with the knowledge and skills necessary to serve the public interest.

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Maud Wood Park

 Born this day in 1871: Maud Wood Park (1871–1955), feminist and social reformer whose lobbying efforts were instrumental in securing passage of the 19th Amendment

Park was born Maud May Wood in Boston, Massachusetts. She was educated at Radcliffe College where she was in a minority of two as a supporter of suffrage (her sister suffragist was Inez Haynes Gillmore). She joined the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, becoming its chair in 1900. That same year she served as a delegate to the meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1901 established the College Equal Suffrage League to help draw young, educated women into the cause. After extensive lecturing and touring (a tactic she used throughout her career), Park had inspired the generation of chapters in 30 states. These banded together to form the College Equal Suffrage Association. Also in 1901 Park became executive secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, an organization dedicated to suffrage and reform efforts of particular interest to women.

In 1916 Park became the head of the congressional committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In this role she organized an army of lobbyists to help push the suffrage amendment through Congress. Her lobbyists kept close tabs on members’ positions on suffrage and had to keep them interested in the cause—Congress had vowed to legislate on nothing not related to world war.

After passage of the 19^th Amendment, Park became the first president of the League of Women Voters, formed in 1920. In 1924 she organized the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, lobbying for the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921. This act authorized federal aid to states for maternity, child health, and welfare programs. It was the first social welfare program funded at the federal level. The committee also secured the passage of the Cable Act of 1922, which granted independent citizenship to married women.

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Harriot Stanton Blatch

Unpaid work never commands respect; it is the paid worker who has brought to the public mind conviction of woman’s worth. The spinning and weaving done by our great-grandmothers in their own homes was not reckoned as national wealth until the work was carried to the factory and organized there…

—Harriot Stanton Blatch, 1898

Born this day in 1856: Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–1940), suffragist and women’s rights activist

Blatch was born Harriot Stanton, daughter of founding feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and abolitionist Henry B. Stanton. She was educated at Vassar College, earning a bachelor’s in 1878 and later earning a master’s degree as well (1894). In 1882 she married Englishman William H. Blatch and by doing so lost her American citizenship (that was the law up until 1922).

The couple lived in England and had two children, one of whom died at age four. Blatch became involved in the suffrage movement in England and worked with Emmeline Pankhurst.

In 1902 Blatch and her family moved to the U.S. She continued working for women’s rights. She was especially a supporter of working women, and saw women’s economic independence and the vote as natural companion causes. She brought working women into the suffrage movement, creating the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (1907). Unlike her mother, Blatch, perhaps because of the 20 years she spent involved in the more militant Engish suffrage movement, favored more in-your-face tactics. She allied her group with ALICE PAUL’s Congressional Union, which later became the National Women’s Party. She organized rallies, parades, and days-long marches that proved to be a much-needed shot in the arm for the movement. Not only did she bring numbers into the movement (in the form of working and professional women), but also attracted attention from the press and the public.

During World War I she was head of the U.S. Food Administration’s Speaker’s Bureau and directed the Women’s Land Army, which organized and train women to work of farms that men had left to go to war. After the war, however, she promoted pacifism and like many suffragists supported the League of Nations.

After the passage of the 19^th Amendment, she continued with various reform causes, including the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment.

She wrote several books, including a memoir; contributed to the History of Woman Suffrage, written by her mother and Susan B. Anthony; and edited her mother’s diaries and letters.  

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Alva Belmont

 “Pray to God. She will help you.” —Alva Belmont

Born this day in 1853: Alva Belmont (1853–1933), socialite turned suffragist and social reformer who used her vast fortune to support the vote for women and other causes

Alva Belmont was born Alva Erskine Smith in Mobile, Alabama. In the 1870s she moved to New York City and married William Kissam Vanderbilt (grandson of Cornelius) and proceeded to elbow, if not bulldoze, her way into New York society (not even the Vanderbilts were good enough for the Astors, you see).  She designed a lavish home on Fifth Avenue and an even more ostentatious mansion (a cottage, she called it) in Newport, R.I. After spending more than $12 million dollars climbing to the top of the social ladder she was knocked back down a few rungs when she divorced her philandering husband in 1895. The following year she married wealthy banker Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont.

Belmont’s husband died in 1908, and seemingly overnight Belmont became a suffragist and social reformer. With the same zeal she demonstrated trying to penetrate New York society, Belmont hurled herself into the women’s movement. And she opened her wallet just as readily. Belmont threw her lot in with the more militant wing of the movement. She worked closely with ALICE PAUL and held offices in the Congressional Union and the National Woman’s Party. She also founded and funded the Political Equality League. She paid for the headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and bought a mansion to house the National Woman’s Party, opened up her Newport “cottage” for feminist meetings, funded press bureaus, conferences, and even a socialist magazine (Max Eastman’s The Masses). She supported the Women’s Trade Union League, housing for poor women, hospitals, churches, and more. She led a huge suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue in 1912 and even co-wrote a suffrage-themed opera.

After passage of the 19^th Amendment Belmont took up her old hobby, architecture. She made a name for herself in this arena, too, and was one of the first women elected to the American Institute of Architects. 

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Abby Foster

“All the great family of mankind are bound up in one bundle. When we aim a blow at our neighbor’s rights our own are by the same blow destroyed. Can we look upon the wrongs of millions—can we see their flow of tears and grief and blood, and not feel our hearts drawn out in sympathy?” 

—Abby Foster

Born this day in 1810: Abigail Kelley Foster (1810–1887), radical abolitionist and women’s rights leader who shook up the status quo

Foster was born Abigail Kelley in Pelham, Massachusetts. She was raised a Quaker and educated in Quaker schools. She also began teaching in a Quaker school, but gave up her teaching career in 1839 to lecture full-time for the abolitionist cause. Foster was a dynamic speaker and radical in her views, which included criticism of the church, the government, and even the Constitution. Her extreme views—and especially the fact that she would address mixed audiences—often incited violence. Nevertheless, she kept up an exhaustive speaking schedule, eventually including other causes into her talks, such temperance, suffrage, dress reform, and financial independence for women.

In 1845 she married a fellow abolitionist, Stephen Symonds Foster. A marriage of equals, they took turns lecturing and tending to their farm and their children. Sometimes they lectured together. On several occasions they refused to pay taxes on the farm as protest against Foster’s lack of vote. Whenever the farm was seized and auctioned off, it would be purchased by supporters and returned to them.

Foster’s prominent position in the abolition movement led to some schisms, some involving the role of women in the movement and others involving her criticism of the church’s attitude toward slavery. Like many woman abolitionists, the hostility she met when trying to advocate for rights for African Americans led her to become increasingly involved in the women’s movement. She was a role model for future feminist leaders, including Lucy Stone, who said of her:

Mrs. Foster, for more than thirty years, stood in the thick of the fight for the slaves, and, at the same time, she hewed out the path over which women are now walking toward their equal political rights.

 —Lucy Stone 

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Charlotte Ray

Born this day in 1850: Charlotte Ray (1850–1911), teacher, first African American woman to hold a law degree, and first woman of any color to be admitted to the bar in Washington, D.C.

Charlotte Ray was a native of New York City and daughter of a pastor who was a prominent member of the African American community and a conductor on the underground railroad. She attended the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth, in Washington, D.C., and in 1869 became a teacher at Howard University in the schools the normal and preparatory department. She also studied law while at Howard, receiving her law degree in 1872. She was the first African American woman in the United States to receive a law degree. She was admitted to the D.C. bar—the law had just been changed, deleting being male as a requirement—becoming the first woman admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia.

Ray set up a law practice, specializing in commercial law, but could not get enough clients to keep her practice open. Accounts describe her as a more than able lawyer, but that racial prejudice kept clients away. By 1879 she resumed her teaching career in her home state of New York, teaching in the Brooklyn public schools.

Not very much is known about the rest of her life. She was active in the women’s movement—records show that she was a delegate to the National Woman Suffrage Association’s annual meeting in New York City in 1876. She married in the late 1880s. In 1895 she joined the newly founded National Association of Colored Women.  Ray died of acute bronchitis in 1911.

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Caroline Severance

Born this day in 1820: Caroline Seymour Severance (1820–1914), social reformer, suffragist, women’s club pioneer

Caroline Severance was born Caroline Seymour in Canandaigua, New York. She was educated at various female seminaries and taught briefly at a boarding school for girls. In 1840 she married Theodoric Cordenio Severance. The couple moved to Cleveland and had five children.

The influence of her reform-minded husband and his family kick-started Severance on a career of reform work lasting  seven decades. Severance was at the center of many reforms, including abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, dietary reform, and religious liberalism. Literary figures were also welcomed in the Severance home. Severance was active in women’s rights conventions and was president of the first convention of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association (1853).

She was deeply impressed by the traveling lecturers from New England, so when her husband was offered a job in Boston, the family jumped at the chance to relocate. Severance surrounded herself with the city’s leading literary figures and reformists. She became a lecturer on behalf of the mounting abolition movement and was a close friend of William Lloyd Garrison.

Severance was involved in a wide range of reform activities. In 1862 she joined the board of directors of the New England Hospital for Women  and Children. In 1867 she cofounded the American Equal Rights Association with Susan B. Anthony, and the following year she helped found the Free Religious Association. She also founded that year what one of the earliest women’s club in the nation, the New England Women’s Club. In 1869 she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1875 Severance and her husband moved to California, where she continued her tireless reform efforts. She organized women’s clubs and presided over the Los Angeles County Woman Suffrage League for several years, giving it a much-needed shot in the arm. She was a driving force in California’s kindergarten movement and the establishment of juvenile courts. She promoted Christian socialism, Progressivism, and anti-imperialism. She was also a pacifist. In 1911, after California passage state suffrage for women, Severance, at age 91, became the first woman in California to register to vote.

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Alice Paul

 “There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.” —Alice Paul

Alice Paul raising a glass to suffrage in 1920.

Born this day in 1885: Alice Paul (1885–1977), militant suffragist and fierce proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment

What Carrie Chapman Catt did for the moderate wing of the women’s movement, Alice Paul did for its militant wing. Paul learned militant tactics from British suffragists like Emmeline Pankhurst while overseas from 1907 to 1910. These tactics included the civil disobedience that resulted in three arrests during that time.  Paul took this training back home with her in 1910. She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), but grew impatient with what she saw as their timid approach. When she became chair of its languishing Congressional Committee in 1912, she began organizing activities that would draw much-needed public attention to the cause. The first such activity was a large-scale suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, that upstaged president-elect Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in Washington D.C. the day before his inauguration. The spectacle included 26 floats, ten bands, five squadrons of cavalry, six chariots, and around 8,000 women marchers. Half a million people attended the parade. The crowd eventually got out of hand, and groups of angry men attacked the women while the police stood by with their arms folded.

Front page of the suffrage paper Woman's Journal covering the March 3, 1913 march.

Before long Paul and NAWSA parted ways. She joined up with the Women’s Party, taking the Congressional Committee with her, and it eventually evolved into the National Women’s Party. Paul continued agitating with marches, pickets, and acts of civil disobedience—including be one of a group of women who regularly chained themselves to iron fencing outside the White House. One major accomplishment of the National Women’s Party was to keep focus on suffrage even though World War was raging. In fact, Paul criticized the U.S. for “keeping the world safe for democracy” abroad while it wasn’t exactly promoting it at home. Wilson in particular came under fierce attack until he converted to the cause.

Paul threw herself body and soul into her activism. She was arrested several times, as she was overseas, and singled out for excessively long sentences and endured abuse while in prison. In October of 1917 she was arrested for picketing and kept in solitary confinement (she was not even allowed letters). Demanding to be treated like a political prisoner, she went on a hunger strike (not her first)  for three weeks and was brutally force-fed through her nose. Public outcry led to her early release.

After passage of the 19^th Amendment, she introduced the Equal Rights Amendment (1923), which she dubbed the Lucretia Mott Amendment. The original wording of the amendment was

Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.

It was later updated to read

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

After failure of the ERA to pass in 1923, Paul also turned her attention to equal rights on the international level. She supported the League of Nations and attempted to get an equal rights treaty adopted. In 1938 she created the World Woman’s Party and served as its first president. With the arrival of World War II, the party never really got off ground, but Pau was successful in getting the preamble of the United Nations Charter to include sex equality.

The remainder of her long life Paul dedicated to the passage of the ERA. She armed herself with several law degrees (in addition to the pile of various undergraduate and graduate degrees she already had) so that she could argue for its passage with strong legal arguments.  The ERA was introduced to Congress annually for 50—count ’em, 50!—years before it was finally passed in 1972. The amendment failed to garner the required number of votes for ratification before the 1982 deadline.* Paul was also responsible for the inclusion of sex in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.”

—Alice Paul

Alice Paul was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1979.

Read more about the Equal Rights Amendment, including ongoing efforts at ratification, here.

*The ERA required ratification by 38 states, but was ratified by only 35. Blame Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.

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