Important in the nineteenth century woman suffrage movement, the outlines of Anthony's life are widely available on the internet and will not be repeated here. At times it seems as if Anthony is the token woman allowed to enter the hallowed halls of men's history and we forget the hundreds, nea, thousands, and tens of thousands, of women who worked alongside of Anthony in the quest for the ballot. And we forget the other great female reformers of the nineteenth century, women who opened the doors of colleges and universities to women; women who fought for the first married women's property rights acts; women who founded schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and medical schools for women; women who broke down barriers to women's entry into numerous professions including medicine, ministry and the law; women who were active in the abolitionist, temperance and social welfare organizations - women whose pioneering work created a climate in which Anthony's woman suffrage movement could be successful.

      We forget, too, the strong influence of European women's and human rights movements, and the thousands and tens of thousands of women involved in those movements, upon the American women's movement.

      A list of only a few of the leaders of those movements can give us some small inkling of the large number of women active in the nineteenth century American reform movements, many of whom would be counted among the great men of American history if they had been born with a different set of sex organs.

Historical notes:

      The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed in 1890 by the merger of the liberal National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

Judith Sargent Murray (1751 - 1820): early feminist theorist whose work in part inspired Mary Wollstonecraft to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Unitarian minister, writer and editor (1, p. 237)

Frances Wright (1785-1852); wealthy Scottish immigrant to American, writer lecturer, abolitionist, early champion of equal educational opportunities for women, Married Women's Property Rights legislation and birth control, and outspoken opponent of authoritarian religions (1, p. 390)

Emma Willard (1787-1870): educator. In 1821, Willard opened the Troy (NY) Female Seminary, the first high school for women in the US which offered girls the same education as boys, preparing them both to be teachers and for a college education. A generation later, women who were both trained in her school and the schools created by her students and denied access to colleges, would clamor for access to college education for their daughters. (1, p. 375-376)

Maria W. Miller Stewart (1803-1879): early (c. 1830) African-American abolitionist speaker and writer, teacher in black public schools, nurse during the Civil War (1, p. 324)

Prudence Crandall (1803-1890): Opened a girls school which was eventually swallowed in controversy - she allowed a black girl who had already completed her primary education in the public school to enter her school in order to train to be a teacher of children of her own race. Refusing to be cowed into submission, Crandall solicited the help of William Lloyd Garrison who recruited additional "colored" female students from wealthy families of color throughout the northeast. In 1833 she reopened the doors of her school as a school expressly intended as a teacher-training institute for young black women. Enraged, local residents tried to force the school to close, first by social ostracism, then by refusing to sell food and other commodities to the school. Unsuccessful, they forced the Connecticut legislature to pass a law forbidding the teaching of "any colored person . . .not an inhabitant. . . in this state" without permission of the town council. Arrested for violating the law, this quiet Quaker woman was convicted by the second jury to judge her case. The school's well was poisoned and mobs damaged the school and threatened harm to Crandall, her sister, and her students. She married and shortly thereafter closed her school and with her husband moved to Illinois where she continued her work as an educator, an abolitionist, a civil rights activist, and a woman's rights activist. (1, p. 93)

Abigail Kelly Foster (1810-1887): coming to prominence in the abolitionist movement about the same time as the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, were retiring from public life, Abby Kelly left her teaching position in 1839 to earn her living on the lecture circuit speaking out for the abolition of slavery. Her persistence in remaining in the public arena active in the abolitionist cause for the next twenty years, in spite of the condemnation she endured not only from slavery supporters, but from abolitionists who believed that women should not speak in public, made the sight of women speaking in public much less controversial, opening the doors of opportunity for other women. (1, p. 136)

Mary Grew, Ester Moore, Sarah Pugh (1800-1884): leaders of the enormously influential Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (1833-1870)

Ernestine Louise Rose (Sisimondi Potowski, 1810-1892): a Polish immigrant to America, her beauty, clarity of speech, and rhetorical abilities, earned her the title "Queen of the Platform." In an era when women were to be seen and not heard, she spoke in public on behalf of many causes. The first cause she embraced on coming to America was the Married Women's Property Rights Act. In 1836 according to Rose, "I sent the first petition to the New York Legislature to give a married woman the right to hold real estate in her own name. . . After a good deal of trouble, I obtained five signatures." Persevering, each year the number of doors slammed in her face decreased, the number of women claiming that they had all the rights they needed declined, and the number of signatures on her petitions grew. Joining forces with Paulina Wright Davis who was independently canvassing western New York for the cause, their influence grew again. Other women, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, joined the cause. Eventually, the law was passed in 1848, signaling the beginning of the end of women's legal disability. For in giving married women the right to own property, the right to sue and right to be sued, the law recognized that women were legal entities in their own right, distinct from their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. Rose would continue to work on various issues to women throughout her life. (2, pp. 54-60)

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850): Considered by some of her contemporaries to be the greatest intellect America had produced until her time, Fuller was reading Latin classics at an age when many children were still learning their alphabet. Fluent in several languages and knowledgeable about much of the world's literature, institutions of higher learning were closed to women at her time. Nonetheless, her powerful intellect could not be contained and she found a creative solution to her problem: she earned her living by holding "conversations" in her home, essentially a public lecture series which wealthy Bostonian men and women paid to attend. Invited by Emerson, Thoreau, and others of the era's philosophical giants, Fuller edited the Dial, a quarterly publication of Transcendentalist philosophy which is generally recognized as America's first literary journal. Moving to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, Fuller became America's first professional book review editor, choosing America's domestic writers who viewed life from an American perspective over foreign imports or imitations of European works . Turning her attention to the problems of women, Fuller wrote her feminist classic, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845), helping to bring about the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Tragically, she perished at sea while returning from a trip to Europe.(1, p. 141)

Mary Gove Nichols (-): lecturer on female anatomy and physiology. By teaching women about their bodies, Nichols helped to dispel women's disregard of their own health and to disabuse them of old-wives' tales passed down through the generations.

Mary Ann Shad Cary (1823-1893): A refugee to Canada after the American Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 endangering the lives of free blacks anywhere in the United States, Cary taught literacy to arrivals on the Underground Railroad, published books encouraging blacks to move to the western parts of the United States and Canada (abandoning both older American cities where racism was entrenched and the call to colonize Africa), and edited a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, aimed at blacks in Canadian provinces. Returning to America after the Civil War, Cary was active in the suffrage movement, claiming the right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment before Anthony, Olympia Brown, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and other women. (1, p. 70)

Amelia Jenkins Bloomer (1818-1894): temperance reformer. The nineteenth century temperance movement was in many ways the nineteenth century "woman against violence against women" movement. Women opposing drunken men their spending the family's income on liquor and beating their wives and children in a drunken rage fought back by trying to outlaw liquor. Editor of the temperance newspaper, The Lily, Bloomer's name is today most often associated with the bloomer dress, a type of attire which freed a woman's hands so that she could do things like walk up and down stairs at night while carrying a candle in one hand and a baby in the other. (1, p. 42-43)

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883): ex-slave, social reformer who stirred audiences with her speeches on behalf of the cause of abolition before the Civil War, the freedman after the Civil War, and women of all colors throughout her life.

Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby (1846-1916): Completing the men's course instead of the women's course at the University of Wisconsin, President Paul A. Chadbourne, an opponent of co-education, threatened to withhold her degree, but relented. She graduated valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa, and continued her studies in French, Greek, and chemistry, while teaching Latin and history. Married, she turned her attention to domestic duties before becoming involved in civic activism. She established the public library in Beatrice, Neb in 1873 and instituted a public course of lectures, through which she met leading suffrage figures. Converted to the cause, Colby organized the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Organization and began publishing the weekly Woman's Tribune, which soon came to be regarded as the official organ of the NWSA. In her columns, she dealt with a variety of topics, including religion, social issues, the labor movement, and male domination in marriage. Her paper survived until 1909 and Colby remained a suffragist and woman's rights activist until her death. (4, vol 1, pp. 355-357)

Abigail Scott Duniway (1834-1915): Oregon Territory pioneer, editor of the New Northwest, founder of the Oregon Equal Rights Society, leader in the Oregon and National woman suffrage associations. Her serialized novels, such as Edna and John, a Romance of Idaho Flat, [Washington State University Press, 2000, originally serialized in the New Northwest 1876-1877] were instrumental in convincing many in the Northwest (Oregon, Washington, and Idaho) to support both woman suffrage and woman rights in general.

Myra Colby Bradwell (1831-1894): America's first "Lady Lawyer." In the case Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), which should be as infamous as the earlier Dred Scott decision, Bradwell asked the Supreme Court to void an Illinois law which prohibited women from practicing law. The Supreme Court ruled that women were not considered persons under the Constitution, and, hence, could be barred from practicing law. (1, p. 50-51)

Oympia Brown (1835-1926): Universalist minister, one of the first women to be ordained to the ministry of a major Christian denomination, Brown went on to work as a minister for the next 21 years. Retiring from the ministry, she became a successful business woman and a leader in the Wisconsin state suffrage association and the NWSA, criss-crossing the country and using the speaking she had honed over 20 years as a preacher to preach the message of woman suffrage. A renegade from the NAWSA, Brown joined Alice Paul's Congressional Union and, later, her Woman's Party. (1, p. 54-55)

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931): a graduate of Rust College ( a school for ex-slaves) and Fisk University, Wells established her reputation as a reformer through the "colored press," writing on behalf of the Negro, campaigning against lynching, supporting woman suffrage, and working to make the vote for black men a reality, not just a clause on a piece of paper.

Lillie Devereaux Blake (1833-1913): author, woman's rights activist, and suffragist, President of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association (1879-1890) and the New York City Woman Suffrage League (1886-1890), Blake secured state laws which provided for women doctors in mental institutions (1881), matrons in police stations (1892), and seats for saleswomen. A regular speaker of the NWSA, and later the NAWSA, Blake's relationship with Anthony cooled after 1895 in part because Blake refused to narrow her political agenda to the suffrage issue alone and Anthony was convinced that adding any issue to the cause of suffrage divided and weakened the suffrage cause. (4, vol 1, pp. 167-168)

Mary Lyons (1797-1849): founder of Mount Holyoke in 1837, the first college in the United States specifically created to provide women the same education as a college educated man, preparing women for the job market.

      There are dozens of other American women and equally long lists of European women and women of non-Western cultures that I wanted to add to this list . But today's entry is already long enough for you to read and my butt is tired of sitting in this chair while I write.

      No list of the most influential women of the millennium would be complete without mentioning Susan B. Anthony. So, Anthony as a representative of the many women who worked in the nineteenth century American reform movements, is included on Sunny's list of the most influential women of the millennium.

Reference

      (1) Doris Weatherford, American Women's History, An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events, [New York: Prentise Hall,1994]

      (2) Yuri Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose, [Biblio Press; New York, 1990]

      (3) Abigail Scott Duniway and Deborah Shein, (editor), Edna and John, a Romance of Idaho Flat, [Washington State University Press, 2000], originally serialized in the New Northwest 1876-1877

      (4) Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Boyer, Notable American Women, A Biographical Dictionary, [Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University press, 1971]

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