Foundational Women on the Women’s Suffrage Plaza Tower and Benches

Ardent suffragist and determined social reformer, Anthony championed universal suffrage, abolitionism, equal pay for equal work, temperance, and additional rights for women. She was the New York State agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society and founded the New York Women’s State Temperance Society in 1852 with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The pair formed The American Equal Rights Association in 1866, seeking the right to vote for African Americans as well as women. They published a weekly newspaper, The Revolution, with articles promoting suffrage, women’s divorce rights, and rights to hold land. In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, protesting the lack of mention of women in the 15th Amendment. When arrested and convicted for voting in Rochester, NY in the November 1872 presidential election, Anthony stridently refused to pay the $100 fine. Author of the 1878 unsuccessful attempt to pass women’s voting rights in Congress, the 19th Amendment – the same language, passed in 1920, long after her death, is known as the “Anthony Amendment.” Her lecture circuit in the 1870s included speeches in Rochelle, Durand (where relatives lived), Rockford, and Chicago. In late 1888 more than 500 greeted Anthony at the Rockford mansion owned by manufacturer Ralph E. Emerson at the invitation of his wife, Adeline Talcott Emerson, and the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association.

This internationally known teacher, author, and Fulbright lecturer was the second woman to receive a Ph.D. in speech pathology, from the University of Wisconsin in 1937.  She authored many professional writings and taught at Rockford College for 36 years. Her Fulbright lectures took her to Norway and Denmark, and she trained Turkey’s first specialists in language and speech disorders. She received Rockford Rotary Club’s Service Above Self Award. A mentor to many, she co-founded the Rockford Network to support women and was a founding member of Rockford’s Interracial Commission. She is honored by the YWCA Mildred Berry Award for Education.

This educator – who founded Bethune-Cookman College and became our government’s highest-ranking African American woman – grew up picking cotton on South Carolina land her former slave mother worked hard to buy. Bethune taught there and married after Scotia Seminary graduation and attending Moody’s Institute for Missions.  In 1904, this now single mother founded “on $1.50 and faith” the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, merging later to form Bethune-Cookman. Championing racial and gender equality, she led voter registration drives, was the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women, and from 1940 until death was vice president of the NAACP. FDR named her to direct Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, and she served the U.S. and U.N. in other ways as well. She was a writer for the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier. In Rockford around 1968, the Neighborhood Opportunity Extension Center formed a Mary McLeod Bethune Club for teens, promoting African American history and culture.

In 1975, Sisters Dorothy Bock and Elaine Hirschenberger — members of the international order of School Sisters of St. Francis — co-founded Womanspace of Rockford, seeking to empower and transform the world, one woman at a time. Bock, a professional sculptor, and painter whose work is in many private collections taught art and writing to all ages and served as a mentor to many women and men. A lifelong poet and well-recognized speaker, her published work appeared for over five decades in several magazines and books. She was Rockford’s first “Feminist of the Year” and received many accolades over her lifetime including a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rockford Area Arts Council.

Raised in Washington, D.C. by her formerly enslaved mother, this M Street High School honors graduate became an educator, school founder, writer, and church worker. She promoted suffrage as an officer in the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Church. Locally, Providence Baptist Church has had a Nannie Helen Burroughs mission group. In 1909 Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls, with a vigorous academic and vocational education to African American women worldwide.  Funding was raised in the African American community, with the Baptist Convention providing the D.C. land. Mary McLeod Bethune spoke at the 1928 dedication of its larger Trades Hall, which was renamed Nannie Helen Burroughs School and became a National Historic Landmark.

A political strategist and key volunteer recruiter, Wisconsin-born Catt succeeded Susan B. Anthony was the leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1900. Her background in self-determination, earning her own way through Iowa State College when her father refused to support a woman’s education, was useful in overcoming obstacles to her advancement to a high school principalship and later superintendent of schools for Mason City, Iowa. She embraced journalism and the newspaper business after marrying Leo Chapman; using those skills in San Francisco after his untimely death. Returning to Iowa, she married George Catt and became active in the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, which brought her to the attention of Anthony. Leaving the NAWSA in 1904 when her second husband was ill, she returned to NAWSA leadership in 1915 and is credited with the “Winning Plan” that helped finally pass the 19th Amendment. The peace advocate was key in the merging of the National Council of Women Voters with the NAWSA to found the League of Women Voters in Chicago in 1920, even before the Amendment was ratified. Catt’s later life was dedicated to helping women around the world secure the right to vote.

In 1937 this Kentucky native was tapped to serve as Rockford College’s President. Her forward-thinking modernization of the midwestern college featured faculty tenure and an “Earn-Learn” program, and she – like Jane Addams – advocated a liberal arts education for women as world citizens. As World War II closed in, Cheek called for students to aid refugees and needy students, have “tolerance and respect for racial groups, political ideas, and religious beliefs other than our own,” and to “cultivate democracy,” as described in We Are a College at War (Mary Weaks-Baxter, et al, c2010). After her BA from Mount Holyoke College, MA in modern history from Columbia University, and doctoral studies abroad in Geneva; she held positions at Kentucky College for Women and Mount Holyoke before Rockford. She received honorary doctoral degrees (LLD and LHD) from many colleges, including Mount Holyoke, Beloit College, Rockford College, and Kobe College in Japan – where she taught history following 1954 retirement. Cheek also served on the boards of several colleges. Rockford College awarded her its Jane Addams Medal in 1987.

In 1972, Chisholm became the first woman and African American to seek the U. S. Presidential nomination from a major political party. She was also the second African American elected to the New York state legislature, and in 1968 her seven terms as the first African American woman in Congress began. The title of her autobiography, Unbound, and Unbought, was her motto. Born in Brooklyn to immigrants, she attended primary grades in Barbados and graduated from Brooklyn College cum laude, attracting notice as debating and public speaking star. After nursery school teaching, with an early childhood education master’s from Columbia University, she became in 1960 a New York City Division of Day Care consultant.  She joined the League of Women Voters, NAACP, Urban League, and local Democratic Party club. In Congress, “Fighting Shirley” advocated for racial and gender equality (including ERA), for the poor, and to end the Vietnam War. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and the National Political Congress of Black Women. Sadly, her historic ‘72 campaign met with racial and gender discrimination.

Bader Ginsburg was the second woman seated on the U.S. Supreme Court, nominated by President Clinton in 1993.  She was well known for extensive legal work fighting gender discrimination, which began while she was teaching at Rutgers School of Law (1963-72), starting with the case of a man seeking a tax deduction for caring for his elderly mother. Little did she know that once she was in her 80s and ill, she would become a legal and feminist icon, the Notorious RBG!  Born in Brooklyn and excelling as a student and baton twirler, she continued twirling legal and domestic batons throughout life. After a B.A., marriage, and Columbia Law School graduation at the top of her class, she got a District Court Judge clerkship – hard to obtain as a woman and mother. She learned Swedish, co-authoring a book with a Swedish civil procedure scholar. In 1971 she founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and wrote her first Supreme Court brief, Reed v. Reed. In 1980 President Carter named her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  She strongly advocated for the ERA. As the court veered right, Ginsburg’s dissenting role – which she relished – grew markedly.

Goode was born in Chicago and became an educator, civil rights and voting rights activist, community leader, and musician. In 1962 she and her husband moved to Rockford and saw a need to address problems encountered by African Americans. They organized election day transportation and childcare, knocking on doors to explain the importance of voting. Goode became active in the NAACP, TAUS, and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and encouraged friends and neighbors to run for office. Her passion for education had begun as a teen, teaching reading to a cousin with a learning disability.  She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education and counseling, also studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music so she could “bang out” Chopin and B.B. King on her piano.  While raising her family, she began her 30 years with the Rockford School District as a teacher at Washington Junior High School, followed by high school counseling at East, Auburn, and Jefferson. In 1982 she received a doctoral degree in continuing adult education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also served as executive director of Rockford’s Booker Washington Community Center, urging students to obtain education first, and then act. “Remain calm; organize, act and vote!” was her charge. To honor her, family and friends established a scholarship in her name at the Community Foundation of Northern Illinois.

Goode is honored on one side of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial tower sculpture for her commitment to civil rights and voting rights, and her belief in the power of education and the power of the vote.

This longtime social worker in Rockford was also the first African American in Rockford to hold elective office, being elected to the School Board. In 1990, Harris retired from social work and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Association of Social Workers. In 1951, her work in Rockford had begun at the Illinois Department of Child Welfare, then at Family Consultation Service, and 1964 to the 1990s at Janet Wattles Mental Health Center as a psychiatric social worker and manager.  She served on several community boards.  On the School Board, she worked to establish a teacher development center. In 1995, after retirement, Harris was lured back to supervise the new Harris-Kennedy Group Home.

Early U.S. feminists, including suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were influenced by the women’s equality they witnessed among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy of six Native American nations). Traditionally, the women of the Haudenosaunee have stood in a position of power. Long before the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S., Haudenosaunee women enjoyed a life of equality and power in their communities. The Haudenosaunee is a matriarchal society in which a child’s clan is passed down through the mother. When a woman married, it was the man who moved into the woman’s lodging with her family.

Elected an Illinois State Senator in 1974 for Rockford’s 34th District. She was in the “Crazy Eight” independent Democratic caucus, challenging the Chicago machine. She recruited many to run for office, with a persuasiveness perhaps from drama study at Rockford College (BA) and the University of North Carolina (MA). Devoted to education, she served on the Rockford College board, Rock Valley College’s founding board, and the State Board of Higher Education. As a League of Women Voters lifelong member, she traveled to China in 1976. Her dictum was “Do the good that lies before you.”

Karen was co-founder and executive director of Charlotte’s Web from its start in 1972 until 2009 when the torch was passed to daughter Lani.  Folk, blues, and bluegrass musicians – including Steve Goodman and Doc Watson – performed there in the former synagogue on First Street.  They often stayed at the Howards’ farm, where Karen connected with nature and had set up an art gallery. She was a visionary who “created the desire of the community to have” this music, as her husband Bill noted.  She was a founding member of other organizations and advocated for social justice and for art. The Crossroads Blues Society honored her by establishing the Karen Howard Memorial Music Scholarship.

Kamenshek, who also went by Kammie, was a star baseball player from 1943-53 for the Rockford Peaches, a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  She was a seven-time All-Star and was chosen by Sports Illustrated as one of the top 100 female athletes of the century.  A great hitter, she was also considered by some the league’s best first baseman. The “Dottie Hinson” lead character in “A League of Their Own” was based on Kamenshek and other players. Her degree was in physical therapy, which she practiced in California. In 1982, after a recent AAGPBL reunion, Kamenshek and player Dottie Key were guests on ABC’s Good Morning America.

Lathrop’s devotion to underprivileged children led to national and international acclaim. After meeting Jane Addams at Rockford Female Seminary and subsequently graduating from Vassar in 1880, this devotion took her to Hull House, and then to Chicago’s slums as a volunteer “county visitor.” Three Illinois governors put her on the Illinois State Board of Charities, requiring an annual visit to all county poorhouses and jails; and three U.S. Presidents (1912 on) appointed her to head the Labor Dept.’s new Children’s Bureau. That pioneering work, as well as her service on the League of Nations Child Welfare Commission, drew acclaim. Lathrop also helped establish the League of Women Voters of Illinois and Winnebago County.

This Chinese-American activist for women’s rights and suffrage was unconventional and smart-beyond-her-years from the start, and became the first Chinese woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics.  Lee was born in China, and the family moved to New York City in 1905 after she won a scholarship at age nine. She became quickly involved in women’s rights, as a teenage activist in a women’s group on horseback leading a suffrage parade in 1912 that drew 10,000 people and was covered by the New York Tribune.  In 1917, as part of the Women’s Political Equality League, she led Chinese and Chinese-American women in a Fifth Avenue suffrage parade. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens and voting, not repealed until 1943. Thus, the 19th amendment did not help Chinese women like Lee. While at Barnard College, this history and philosophy major also wrote feminist essays for The Chinese Students’ Monthly and continued advocating for suffrage. Later in life, she opened the Chinese Christian Center in New York City, offering a health clinic, kindergarten, vocational training, and English classes to the Chinese community.

Martha was born in Mexico and moved with her family to Rockford at age six. Her public activism focused on feminism, justice, and Mexican American advocacy.  In addition to being a YWCA youth director and interpreter in county court, she was involved with South West Ideas for Today & Tomorrow, the Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and the Barbour School bilingual program. After working as Neighborhood Development Specialist for the Rockford Community Development Department, she became in 1991 the first Hispanic 16th Congressional District aide, serving as economic development director in U.S. Representative John Cox’s Rockford office. She also served as a Rockford Township Trustee and helped with Hispanic Heritage Month community events.

As a women’s suffrage activist wanting to bring more women into the Republican Party, McCormick lobbied for the Illinois Equal Suffrage Act in 1913 and succeeded Alice Paul to chair the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1940 she became the first woman to manage a presidential campaign – Thomas Dewey’s against FDR. The daughter and wife of U.S. Senators, in 1903 she had married first husband Medill McCormick, who was also the publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Both were in the settlement house movement, and she became active in pure foods, opening a dairy farm near Byron, Illinois. From 1929-31 she was a U.S. Representative at large from Illinois. She donated land to the local Girl Scouts, which became Camp Medill McCormick in Stillman Valley. After moving to New Mexico with her second husband, fellow Congressional Representative Albert Simms, she published Rockford’s Morning Star and Register-Republic from 1933 until her death.

McCulloch, a pioneer worker for women’s suffrage in Illinois and nationwide, was the second woman to practice law in Rockford and the first woman Justice of the Peace in the U.S.  After growing up in New Milford, she received a Rockford Female Seminary B.A. in 1882, and in 1886 passed the Illinois bar following graduation from Chicago’s Union College of Law. Her four-year Rockford practice focused on women facing problems due to a lack of legal status. Later, she was a Rockford College trustee and founded the College’s McCulloch Social Service Fellowship at Chicago Commons. She continued women’s advocacy through her Chicago law partnership with husband Frank McCulloch and their home in Evanston, a city that also honors her.  She practiced before the U.S. Supreme Court and wrote extensively on suffrage and women’s and children’s rights, including plays.  She chaired the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association and was legal counsel for the National American Woman Suffrage Association – which in 1929 honored McCulloch, Jane Addams, and Kate F. O’Connor. After Illinois women received the right to vote for Presidential electors and statutory offices in 1913, McCulloch said, “I have fought for women’s suffrage for more than 16 years, and it is with genuine pleasure that I receive this most welcome news. We are carrying the suffrage standard into the east.”

McCulloch is honored with a tile on one of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Plaza benches.

Neubauer co-founded Women’s March Rockford and worked hard for the revitalization of downtown Rockford. This Rockford native had a motto of “Love in Action,” sharing her talents through volunteering and community activism. She worked as an architect after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, with one project helping design the SwedishAmerican Regional Cancer Center on Bell School Road to provide a sense of calm and hope – not knowing she would be a patient there years later.  She and her husband Eric opened Ground Floor Skateboards, an independent skate shop in downtown Rockford. She also served on the boards of Trinity Daycare, Jeremiah Development, Shelter Care Ministries, River District, the City of Rockford Zoning Board of Appeals, and other organizations.

This nationally recognized suffragist from Rockford was energetic throughout life in promoting women’s suffrage, including speaking, lobbying, and marching in parades. Somehow, she also found time for government work, church, business, and sports. Within 10 years of graduating from Rockford’s East Side High School, she became Deputy County Clerk and a notary public, was elected secretary of the Young Ladies Sodality of St. James Church, started an equestrienne society, and in 1888 tied a yellow ribbon representing equal suffrage to the flag rope of our new Courthouse, saying “There is certainly no good reason why a woman should not vote if she wants to.” [Rockford Daily Gazette, January 26].  She was active with Rockford Woman’s Club suffrage efforts, representing the club in Springfield and elsewhere. Her continued advocacy included reminders of how difficult it had been to secure suffrage, urging women to “be independent in thought and action.” [Daily Register-Gazette, 12/13/1927] She worked for equal pay for teachers in Rockford. O’Connor also sold real estate and insurance in Rockford and Chicago. In 1933, Governor Horner appointed her supervisor of the new minimum wage law for women and children. Later, she was promoted to superintendent of women and children’s employment in the state labor department. O’Connor began working for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1942, in the regional wage and hour division.

O’Connor is honored on one side of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial tower sculpture for her tireless speaking and advocating to achieve women’s suffrage, as well as her work for equal pay and women’s and children’s rights.

When Parks famously refused to leave her seat and go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, that was not a sudden decision by a normally quiet person. She was an established leader in Alabama’s Civil Rights Movement, a lifelong activist and freedom fighter challenging white supremacy. After becoming branch secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, she spent years pushing for voter registration, seeking justice for African Americans, and pressing for desegregation of schools and public spaces. Her refusal to yield her seat to a white woman set in motion the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest social movements in history.  She and her family faced death threats for years, but she continued her activism after moving with her husband to Detroit. In 1996, President Clinton awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

On the eve of the 1913 inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized the first major political march in Washington D.C., themed “Ideals and Virtues of American Womanhood.” Paul became the head of the Washington chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) after studying sociology and social work in the U.S. and England and receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She preferred lobbying at the federal level, so left the NAWSA, and with others founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916. Attempting to bring pressure on legislators and President Wilson to grant women the vote, the “Silent Sentinels” began picketing at the White House in 1917, which lasted 18 months. As the U.S. became involved in World War I the women were criticized and physically attacked, and then arrested. Paul and other suffragists went on hunger strikes and were tortured with force-feeding tactics and attempts to place them in an insane asylum. After the 19th Amendment was adopted, Paul authored the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1923. It was introduced in every session of Congress until passage in 1972 but has never been fully ratified.

In 1910, Raiche made the first accredited solo flight (before Amelia Earhart) by a woman in the U.S., honored by the Aeronautical Society of NY, and later in Chicago, she organized the first pilot-instruction class for women.  Also an M.D., she was one of the first woman specialists in obstetrics and gynecology in the U.S.  Raiche (also known as Bessie or Faith) was born in Wisconsin, likely Jefferson County, then grew up in Rockford, graduating from Rockford High School. Her interests included languages, ice skating, music, riding horses, and shooting, and she studied painting in Paris. She worked her way through Tufts Medical School and then was an M.D. at Staten Island Children’s Hospital.  She and her husband built airplanes in Mineola, NY, wherein in 1908 Bessica (wearing breeches) flew their first plane – made of bamboo & silk, with their grand piano as carpenter’s horse, and removing the front of their summer house to get it out. She returned to medicine in 1912 to California. She was elected president of the Orange County Medical Association., worked with public health and welfare and tuberculosis, and was a strong advocate for birth control. She is a part of Rockford’s rich aviation history!

As the principal author of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton became the chief philosopher of the women’s suffrage movement. During her childhood in central New York state, Elizabeth Cady was exposed to abolitionist ideals and met her future husband Henry Brewster Stanton and married in 1840. While honeymooning, she met Lucretia Mott at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London where they became friends and later organized the Seneca Falls Convention where the right of American women to vote was first called for publicly and formally in 1848, at the first American women’s rights convention. By the 1850s, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony and developed a partnership and organizations that drove the effort for women’s suffrage forward into the 20th century. Stanton was what she called a “voluntary mother” of seven children which kept her at home writing in support of suffrage while Anthony traveled around the country giving Stanton’s lectures on the subject. In addition to suffrage, Stanton championed abolition, married women’s property ownership, marriage and divorce reform, among other issues. She authored a three-volume History of Woman Suffrage (1885) as well as the controversial Woman’s Bible (1895) which questioned the gendered treatment of women in the Bible. She founded several suffrage organizations, including the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890) which resulted from a merger designed to unify the suffrage movement in one national organization to bring about the final victory. Stanton was a sometimes controversial figure in the movement but is nonetheless the mother of women’s suffrage in the United States.

Stanton is honored with a tile on one of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Plaza benches.

This founder and first president of Rockford’s Mendelssohn Club (now Mendelssohn Performing Arts Center) loved music and piano from childhood on, graduating from Rockford Female Seminary’s music department. The Mendelssohn Club – the oldest continuously operating music organization in the U.S. – emerged in 1884 from a gathering of women performers at the Starrs’ home. The Club presented at the Chicago World’s Fair, including a paper by Starr, who became the first vice president of the National Federation of Music Clubs. During the first world war, she served on the War Camp Community Service Committee.  She and others with Mendelssohn Club organized concerts for Camp Grant, and on Sundays, the Starrs held suppers for Camp soldiers at their home.

Sturgis, the first African American full-time educator in Winnebago County, began her 12-year tenure at Lincoln Park Elementary School in 1953 after moving to Rockford from Virginia. She was also the owner and publisher of the Mid-West Observer minority weekly newspaper in Rockford, and Governor Daniel Walker named her to the Illinois Pardon and Parole Board in the mid-1970s, as detailed in her book, Let The Record Show: Memories of a Parole Board Member.  After teaching at Lincoln Park, she was a counselor at Auburn High School.  Sturgis was a member of many community boards and an outspoken advocate for civil rights, reason, and non-violence.  She was also a counseling supervisor for the Illinois Employment Service and a program manager for the Bureau of Employment Security.

Terrell was an African American civil rights and suffrage activist and one of the first African American women to earn a college degree – bachelor’s and master’s from Oberlin College. In 1896 she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women with her motto, “lifting as we climb,” serving as its first president, and she was one of the 60 signers of the 1909 “Call” to found the NAACP. She was born to formerly enslaved parents who became affluent in business. Terrell taught at Wilberforce College and then at Washington D.C.’s M Street Colored High School, which Nannie Burroughs later attended. She became involved in women’s rights and suffrage, going on a lecture tour, and after 1892 lynchings in Memphis, joined with Ida B. Wells in anti-lynching campaigns. She helped desegregate D.C. restaurants, and in the 1940s published her autobiography, and became the first African American member of the American Association of University Women.

Truth, born enslaved in New York as Isabella Bornfree, became a compelling orator and preacher, going on a lecture tour around the country to advocate for abolition, temperance, women’s rights, and suffrage. In the 1850s she dictated her autobiography, as she was illiterate, and in 1864 President Lincoln invited her to the White House. In 1872 she tried to vote, the same year as Susan B. Anthony.  She chose her name since she “preached the truth,” and her lecture tour included speaking in Rockford at Court Street Methodist Church in 1859. After years of enslavement, during which she was bought and sold four times and suffered violent punishments, she became free in 1827. In the 1850s she settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where three of her daughters lived. During the war, she organized supplies for African American troops, and after the war, she helped the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Tubman, born enslaved in Maryland, escaped with two of her brothers through the already-established Underground Railroad, then returning several times to help many others escape, none ever caught. She was “the Moses of her people.” She was also the first African American woman to serve in the military, as she was a nurse, Union spy, scout, and guerrilla operative in the Civil War. She advocated for women’s suffrage after the war. Tubman’s birth name was Araminta. When she tried at age 12 to protect an enslaved man from a beating, the master slammed her head, causing lifelong medical issues. She had a short-lived marriage – although not allowed – to John Tubman, taking her mother’s first name. The knowledge she gained of towns and transportation routes, through traveling the Underground Railroad, made her a skilled Union spy and scout in the Civil War.  After the war, she also helped freedmen, cared for her aging parents, worked with a writer on an autobiography, re-married and adopted, and established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged.

Voss, an engineer, and NASA astronaut flew in space five times, jointly holding the record for American women. On the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, she and the crew mapped over 47 million miles of the  Earth’s land surface. Born in Indiana, she attended elementary school through 6th grade in Rockford, which she considered her hometown. She received a bachelor of science from Purdue in 1975 while working at Johnson Space Center, and a master of science in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in aeronautics/astronautics from MIT, completed in 1987. The astronaut corps accepted her in 1990, and she logged over 49 days in space, participating in the first Shuttle rendezvous with the Mir space station on STS-63.  From 2004-07 “she was Science Director for NASA’s Kepler Space Observatory, an Earth-orbiting satellite designed to find Earth-like extrasolar planets in nearby solar systems.” [Discovery Center.]

Otero-Warren was the major bilingual activist for the 19th amendment in New Mexico, the first female superintendent of Santa Fe County public schools (1918-1929), and the first Hispanic woman to run for U.S. Congress (unsuccessfully, Republican, 1921). Born on her prominent family’s hacienda near Los Lunas, she studied at Maryville College of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis. She returned at age 13 and later to care for many siblings, as told in her book Old Spain in Our Southwest. She insisted suffrage materials be bilingual, and Alice Paul chose her in 1917 to head the New Mexico chapter of the Congressional Union, which would become the National Woman’s Party. As the county’s school superintendent, and Inspector of Indian Schools, Otero-Warren worked for better conditions in rural Hispano and Native American schools. She was also critical of the boarding schools for Native Americans. Statewide, she chaired the Board of Health and later directed an adult literacy program for the Works Progress Administration.

Wells-Barnett was born enslaved in Mississippi and became a pioneering newspaper owner, equal rights activist, anti-lynching crusader, and suffragist. She received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for her extensive reporting on lynching. She lectured throughout the U.S. and England, including a presentation in Rockford on “Lynch Law and the Constitution” [Morning Star, 7/8/1896], and her crusade laid the groundwork for anti-lynching efforts of the NAACP.  She sued the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad in 1884 for violating equal accommodation statutes, and in 1893 she and other African American activists boycotted the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Wells co-founded the National Association of Colored Women and founded Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club. She marched with Illinois in the 1913 Suffrage Parade, defying the last-minute segregation of African American marchers to the tail-end of the parade.

Zitkala-Sa, born on South Dakota’s Yankton Indian Reservation, was co-founder in 1926 and president of the National Council of American Indians, which worked to gain suffrage for all Native Americans. She also started the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. A musician and writer, Zitkala-Sa published widely on the Native American experience and was a songwriter and lyricist for the first Native American opera. At age eight she was sent to a Quaker missionary residential school and re-named Gertrude Simmons. While loving her studies and playing the violin, she grieved losing her heritage. In college, she started collecting and translating stories from Native tribes.  Following violin study at the New England Conservatory of Music, she taught music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and wrote Lakota stories, as well as articles critical of such boarding schools. After the Sun Dance Opera, she moved with her husband to Washington, D.C., and edited the journal of the Society of American Indians, lecturing widely on why indigenous people should be American citizens.