1. Eleanor Roosevelt
FDR’s “eyes, ears, and legs,” she traveled the country during the Depression, returning with information about how her husband’s New Deal programs were working. Later a delegate to the U.N., she was key to establishing its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
2. Harriet Tubman
Born enslaved, Tubman was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a spymaster, and the first known woman in U.S. history to plan and lead a military raid. In later years, she was a committed suffragist.
3. Susan B. Anthony
An abolitionist and suffragist, Anthony advocated tirelessly to ensure that all Americans could exercise all of their rights. She was arrested in 1872 for the crime of voting while female. “Failure is impossible,” she once said of the suffragist movement.
4. Jane Addams
The first American woman to earn the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), Addams was a progressive dynamo whose causes and accomplishments included the establishment of Chicago’s Hull House—the first U.S. settlement house—and helping to found the NAACP.
5. Frances Perkins
The first female Cabinet secretary, Perkins was one of FDR’s longest-serving aides. As labor secretary, she pushed for landmark reforms such as the minimum wage, a maximum workweek, and child labor limits. She also helped draft the Social Security Act.
6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Co-founder of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, Stanton penned its Declaration of Sentiments, making the then-extraordinary demand for equal rights. She “provided intellectual leadership to the first wave of the women’s rights movement,” Fordham Law’s Julie Suk noted.
7. Ida B. Wells-Barnett
“The Princess of the Press,” Wells-Barnett was born into slavery but went on to become a crusading journalist and suffragist. She focused especially on the scourge of lynching, writing A Red Record, a history and statistical record of such attacks.
8. Betty Friedan
“In the post–World War II period, when women had gone back to the home and were having large numbers of children, Friedan sparked a feminist movement with her critical, bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique,” said Amy Fried of the University of Maine (emerita).
9. Margaret Sanger
The mother of birth control—she coined the term in 1914—Sanger was a driving force in contraceptive legalization and its technological advances. Her decades-long quest for a “magic pill” to prevent pregnancy culminated in the first oral contraceptive.
T-10. Ella Baker
“Perhaps the most critical Civil Rights planner of the 20th century,” Calvin University’s Kristin Kobes Du Mez wrote. She was a key behind-the-scenes organizer at the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
T-10. Rachel Carson
Published in 1962, Carson’s Silent Spring helped launch the modern environmental movement. “Carson’s influence was reflected in the proclamation of the first ‘Earth Day’ in 1970, a few years after her death,” human rights activist Aryeh Neier said.
T-10. Hillary Clinton
She may not have shattered the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” but she built an extraordinary career as an advocate and exemplar for women in the United States and around the world, as a lawyer, first lady, senator, and secretary of state.
T-10. Phyllis Schlafly
The slayer of the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly mobilized “the housewife image to fulfill her deep political ambitions—a model for everyone from Ann Coulter in the 1990s to the tradwives of today,” wrote Vanderbilt University’s Nicole Hemmer.
T-10. Gloria Steinem
A groundbreaking journalist, Steinem co-founded the seminal second-wave feminist magazine Ms. in 1971. A lifelong spokeswoman for women’s rights, Steinem founded a number of activist organizations and even originated Take Our Daughters to Work Day.
