Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Elizabeth Fry, sometimes referred to as Betsy Fry, was an English prison reformer, social reformer, philanthropist and Quaker. Fry was a major driving force behind new legislation to improve the treatment of prisoners, especially female inmates, and as such has been called the "Angel of Prisons". She was instrumental in the 1823 Gaols Act which mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual exploitation. Fry kept extensive diaries in which the need to protect female prisoners from rape and sexual exploitation is explicit.
Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was an American orator and lecturer. An advocate for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights, Dickinson was the first woman to give a political address before the United States Congress. A gifted speaker at a very young age, she aided the Republican Party in the hard-fought 1863 elections and significantly influenced the distribution of political power in the Union just prior to the Civil War. Dickinson was the first white woman on record to summit Colorado's Gray's Peak, Lincoln Peak, and Elbert Peak, and she was the second to summit Pike's Peak.
Lydia Maria Child, was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism.
Mary Livermore was an American journalist, abolitionist, and advocate of women's rights. Her printed volumes included: Thirty Years Too Late, first published in 1847 as a prize temperance tale, and republished in 1878; Pen Pictures; or, Sketches from Domestic Life; What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? Superfluous Women, and Other Lectures; and My Story of the War. A Woman's Narrative of Four Years' Personal Experience as Nurse in the Union Army, and in Relief Work at Home, in Hospitals, Camps and at the Front during the War of the Rebellion. For Women of the Day, she wrote the sketch of the sculptress, Miss Anne Whitney; and for the Centennial Celebration of the First Settlement of the Northwestern States, at Marietta, Ohio, July 15, 1788, she delivered the historical address.
William Allen was an English scientist and philanthropist who opposed slavery and engaged in schemes of social and penal improvement in early 19th-century England.
George Luther Stearns was an American industrialist and merchant in Medford, Massachusetts, as well as an abolitionist and a noted recruiter of black soldiers for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
Abigail Hopper Gibbons, née Abigail Hopper was an American abolitionist, schoolteacher, and social welfare activist. She assisted in founding and led several nationally known societies for social reform during and following the Civil War.
Abby Kelley Foster was an American abolitionist and radical social reformer active from the 1830s to 1870s. She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals. She married fellow abolitionist and lecturer Stephen Symonds Foster, and they both worked for equal rights for women and for Africans enslaved in the Americas.
Laura Smith Haviland was an American abolitionist, suffragette, and social reformer. She was a Quaker and an important figure in the history of the Underground Railroad.
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848 she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which Mott co-wrote the Declaration of Sentiments.
Lindley Murray Moore was an abolitionist, and educator.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Mary F. Thomas (1816–1888) was a pioneer American woman physician, abolitionist, and temperance and women's rights leader who advocated for women, as well as those in need. Born into a Quaker family, she grew up in Ohio and spent most of her life in Indiana. Thomas was an active member of the women's suffrage movement and a founding member of the Woman's Rights Association of Indiana, serving as a vice president and president of the Indiana organization. In 1859 she became the first woman to present a petition before the Indiana General Assembly, calling for passage of laws to provide property rights for married women and a women's suffrage amendment to the Indiana Constitution. At the national level she served a one-year term as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. In the mid-1850s she was a coeditor of Mary Birdsall's national woman's rights magazine, The Lily, and later an associate editor of the Mayflower with Lizzie Bunnel and a contributor to Woman's Journal.
Anna Richardson was an English Quaker slavery abolitionist and peace campaigner, and a writer and editor of anti-slavery texts and journals, based in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Frances W. Titus (1816-1894) was an American abolitionist and suffragist who is best known for being the confidante, secretary, tour director, financial manager, and editor of Sojourner Truth's biography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth. She led important reform movements as the founder of a school for freed slave men and also played a major role in local and state suffrage movements.
Amanda M. Way was a pioneer in the temperance and women's equal rights movements, an American Civil War nurse, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1870s, and a Society of Friends (Quaker) minister by the mid-1880s. Way, a founding member of the Indiana Woman's Rights Association, called for the state's first women's rights convention in 1851 and served as vice president of the proceedings. Way remained active in the Association, including service as its president in 1855, and helped reactivate it in 1869, renamed as the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dubbed her the "mother of 'The Woman Suffrage Association' in Indiana" for her early leadership and efforts in initiating the first women's rights convention in the state.
Matilda Sturge was a British Quaker minister, poet and essayist from Bristol. She wrote about the lives of four Quaker women who had achieved because they were allowed the freedom to do so. Sturge is considered to have taken an underrated role in the renaissance in the Quaker movement.
Lydia Rous was a British headmistress. She led The Mount School, a girls' boarding school for Quakers in York.
Catherine Swan Brown Spear was an American reformer, educator, and abolitionist.
