In 1872, Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman to run for president when she ran on the Equal Rights ticket with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Douglass refused to campaign, however, as Woodhull was a highly controversial character. After making $700,000 in the brokerage business (having been set up with money from admirer Cornelius Vanderbilt), Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin started Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, a periodical which advocated, among other things, women's suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, free love, vegetarianism, birth control, and licensed prostitution. Other feminists kept their distance from Woodhull, who was called "Mrs. Satan" by polite society. Woodhull spent election day in jail for having accused the Reverend Henry Beecher of adultery with a parishioner. She later moved to England and married a banker. In England, Woodhull published a monthly paper which dealt with palmistry, astrology, and high finance.

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Phillis Wheatley
born c. 1753, died 1784

Little is known of the early life of the exemplary poet Phillis Wheatley. Bought by Boston tailor John Wheatley in 1761 directly off a slave ship, her age was placed at seven because she was losing her first teeth. Her relatively kind owners allowed her free run of the house and library, and she very quickly learned English. Despite her status as a slave, Wheatley amazingly started to write poetry at the age of thirteen. Her highly classical poetry shows the influence of Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray. She was praised as a prodigy during her life, attracting the attention of prominent people like the Countess of Huntington in London, General George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock. The praise, however, did not keep her from dying penniless or keep her life from becoming all but lost to history. It was not until 1834 that Margaretta Odell, by publishing a memoir in a new edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, established Wheatley as the first African-American woman poet.

"On Being Brought From Africa To America"
Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my beknighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their color is a diabolic dye."
Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

----Phillis Wheatley

Harriet Tubman
born 1820, died March 10, 1913

Harriet Tubman started her life as a slave named Araminta Greene. She later adopted her mother's first name. Her early life was spent doing back breaking labor on a plantation in Maryland where she was often beaten. She suffered her whole life from a skull fracture she received at age thirteen when an overseer struck her with a two-pound weight. After she escaped from slavery, she did not forget those left behind. She became part of the Underground Railroad, and successfully made about nineteen trips to free slaves. It is estimated that she helped more than 300 people escape to Canada. She was called "Moses" for having led so many of her people to freedom. It was her shrewd intelligence and ingenuity which made her so successful. She planned meticulously, never took the same route twice, and maintained strict discipline among her followers. The Maryland plantation owners considered her such a threat that at one point rewards for her capture totaled approximately $40,000. During the Civil War, she worked as a Union spy and scout. After the war, Tubman opened her home as the Harriet Tubman Home for Indigent Aged Negroes.

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Belva Lockwood
born October 24, 1830, died May 19, 1917

Although Belva Lockwood was admitted to and attended classes at National University Law School (later George Washington University), they refused to grant her a diploma. She promptly wrote a letter to President Ulysses S. Grant, ex-officio president of the school. Within twenty-six days, her diploma was granted. She was admitted to the bar, but the courts refused to hear a woman attorney. Her personal efforts at lobbying Congress led to passage of a bill that, in 1879, enabled her to become the first woman lawyer admitted to the Supreme Court's bar. Lockwood also founded the first suffrage group in the District of Columbia and lobbied Congress for passage of feminist legislation. She ran for president in 1884 on the Equal Rights ticket, but garnered only 4,000 votes. As a lawyer, Lockwood won many historic cases, including one that allowed a black attorney to practice before the Supreme Court, and one in which she won $5 million for the Eastern Cherokee Indian tribe.

Marie Curie
born 1867, died 1934

Perhaps the most famous of all women scientists, Marie Curie (born Manya Sklodowska) is notable for her many firsts. In 1903, she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. The award, jointly awarded to Curie, her husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, was for the discovery of radioactivity. She was also the first woman teacher at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1906). In 1911, Curie won a second Nobel Prize (this time in chemistry) for her discovery and isolation of pure radium. She was the first person ever to receive two Nobel Prizes. Her oldest daughter Irene Joliot-Curie also won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1935). In 1934, Curie died of leukemia, caused by her work with radium.

Elizabeth Blackwell
born February 3, 1821, died May 31, 1910

Elizabeth Blackwell, America's first woman doctor, was admitted to New York's Geneva College as a joke in 1847. She overcame taunts and prejudice while at medical school to earn her degree in 1849, graduating at the top of her class. After American hospitals refused to hire her, she opened a clinic in New York City where she was joined by her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell and Dr. Marie E. Zakrzewska. In 1868, Blackwell opened the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, a high quality institution which remained open until 1899, when women were first admitted to Cornell University Medical School.

Mary McLeod Bethune
born July 10, 1875, died May 18, 1955

As a child, Mary Mcleod Bethune walked ten miles a day to attend school. This experience certainly shaped her life as a pioneering educator for African-Americans. After being rejected for missionary service, Bethune entered the teaching profession. In 1904, she opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. In 1923, with a faculty and staff of 25 and a student body of 300, the school merged with Cookman Institute and became co-educational. The school was renamed the Bethune-Cookman Institute in 1929, and awarded its first four-year degrees in 1943. President Franklin Roosevelt placed her in charge of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration in 1936 making her the first Black woman to be a presidential adviser. In 1935, Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women, which united many major national Black women's associations.

Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony was born February 15,1820 in Adams Massachusetts to Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Susan was the second born of eight children in a strict Quaker family. Her father, Daniel Anthony, was a stern man, a Quaker Abolitionist and a cotton manufacturer. He believed in guiding his children, not directing them. He did not allow them to experience the childish amusements of toys,games,and music,which were seen as distractions from the inner light. Instead he enforced self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one's own self-worth. Susan was a precocious child and she learned to read and write at the age of three. In 1826, the Anthony's moved from Massachusetts to Battensville,N.Y. where Susan attended a district school. When the teacher refused to teach Susan long division, Susan was taken out of school and taught in a "home school" set up by her father. The school was run by a woman teacher, Mary Perkins. Perkins offered a new image of womanhood to Susan and her sisters. She was independent and educated and held a position that had traditionally been reserved to young men. Ultimately, Susan was sent to boarding school near Philadelphia. Susan taught at a female academy, Eunice Kenyon's Quaker boarding school, in upstate New York from 1846-49. After, she settled in her family home in Rochester, New York. It was here that she began her first public crusade on behalf of temperance. Susan's first involvement in the world of reform was in the temperance movement. This was one of the first expressions of original feminism in the United States and it dealt with the abuses of women and children who suffered from alcoholic husbands. In 1849, Susan gave her first public speech for the Daughters of Temperance and then helped found the Woman's State Temperance Society of New York, one of the first organizations of its time. In 1851 she went to Syracuse to attend a series of antislavery meetings. During this time Susan met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, became fast friends and joined Stanton and Amelia Bloomer in campaigns for women's rights. In 1854, she devoted herself to the antislavery movement serving from 1856 to the outbreak of the civil war,1861. Here, she served as an agent for the American Anti-slavery Society. After, she collaborated with Stanton and published the New York liberal weekly, "The Revolution" (1868-70) which called for equal pay for women. In 1872, Susan demanded that women be given the same civil and political rights that had been extended to black males under the 14th and 15th amendments. Thus, she led a group of women to the polls in Rochester to test the right of women to vote. She was arrested two weeks later and while awaiting trial, engaged in highly publicized lecture tours and in March 1873, she tried to vote again in city elections. After being tried and convicted of violating the voting laws, Susan succeeded in her refusal to pay the fine. From then on she campaigned endlessly for a federal woman suffrage amendment through the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869-90) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890-1906) and by lecturing throughout the country. Anthony, along with Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage published the History of Woman Suffrage 4 vol (1881-1902) In 1888 she organized the International Council of Women and in 1904 the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Although Anthony did not live to see the consummation of her efforts to win the right to vote for women, the establishment of the 19th amendment is deeply owed to her efforts.
This biography was put together by Jody Litt.

Music is Reflections
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