Edith New was an English suffragette. She was one of the first to smash windows in an attempt to bring attention to women’s suffrage. New had been an assistant mistress at Queenstown Infant School from 1899-1901 before leaving Swindon to teach in deprived areas of Deptford and Lewisham. After hearing Emmeline Pankhurst speak at a …
Annie Kenney was an English working class suffragette who became a leading figure in the Women’s Social and Political Union. Kenney started work at the age of 10 in a local cotton mill in Yorkshire. She was a cotton frame tenter and her duties were to crawl on her hands and knees under the machine …
Angela Davis is an American academic, Civil Rights Activist, scholar and Women’s Rights Activist who advocates for the oppressed. Davis’ political activism began when she was a child in Birmingham, Alabama. She lived in the “Dynamite Hill” neighbourhood, which was marked by racial conflict and experienced racial prejudice and discrimination. As a teenager she organised …
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement. Cady Stanton was introduced to the abolitionist, temperance, and women’s rights movements through her cousin, the reformer Gerrit Smith. In 1840 she married the reformer Henry B. Stanton, she insisted that ‘obey’ be dropped from the …
Susan B. Anthony was a suffragist, abolitionist, author and speaker She was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony grew up in a Quaker family, where she developed a strong commitment to social equality. Her father taught all of his children to be independent, teaching them about business and giving them responsibilities …
Gloria Steinem is is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organiser who became nationally recognised as a leader and spokeswoman for the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 70s. Steinem was given her first serious assignment as a freelance writer by Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker. Her first draft on the …
Amelia Earhart was a writer and an American aviation pioneer, she was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart had no interest in flying until a short 10 minute trip on a plane at a Long Beach air show in 1920. As soon as Earhart was two or three hundred …
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani Children’s Activist and Women’s Rights Activist. She is the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. Yousafzai became an advocate for the education of girls as a child after the Taliban took control and tried to ban girls from education, going so far as to attack girls’ schools in Swat. She began speaking …
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, GBE was an English feminist and suffragist. She is the founder of the Fawcett Society who carry on her fight for equal rights for women. Fawcett’s interest in politics began at an early age encouraged by her enterprising family. In 1865 Fawcett’s sister Louise took her to a speech on Women’s …
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher and advocate of Women’s rights. Wollstonecraft was brought up by an abusive father whom she left at age 17 when her mother died. She set up a school in Newington Green with her sister, who had fled an abusive marriage. She used this experience to write the pamphlet …