Louise Bryant chafed under the confines of middle-class respectability in Portland, Oregon in the first years of the twentieth century. A college graduate, she worked as the society editor for a local magazine and married a dentist. She detested housework and fell out of love with her husband. Poet Sara Bard Field encouraged Bryant to consider the contributions she could make to society, nudging her to get involved in the suffrage movement, one of the biggest political causes of the era.

In 1914, Louise Bryant met journalist Jack Reed. Captivated by his politics and his personality, she moved to New York to be with him. She settled in Greenwich Village and began writing for The Masses. In 1917, Bryant went to France as a foreign correspondent to report on the Great War.

When she finished her work on the western front, she and Jack Reed headed off to Russia to report on the revolution there. Bryant published Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. The following year she was on the picket line with Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, urging Congress to pass the women’s suffrage amendment. She was arrested and spent three days in jail.

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In 1863, Olympia Brown became the first woman in the United States to graduate from a theological school and become an ordained minister. Three years earlier, she had graduated from Antioch College in Ohio, where she began preaching. When Brown applied to a Unitarian theology school in Pennsylvania, she was told the trustees “thought it would be too great an experiment” to enroll a woman. The Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University opened its doors to her, though, and after she graduated she was offered a full-time minister’s position in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts in 1864.

Olympia Brown became active in the women’s rights movement after meeting Susan B. Anthony in Massachusetts. In 1867, Brown was recruited by Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell to be part of the great Kansas campaign to secure women’s voting rights in that state.

Brown took a leave of absence from her church and spent four months traveling through Kansas giving some 300 speeches, often times before hostile crowds. The Kansas campaign failed, but Brown never gave up her support for the suffrage cause.

When she married John Henry Willis in 1873, Olympia Brown, like Lucy Stone, kept her maiden name. She resigned her ministry in 1874, after the birth of her first child, but after a couple of years was anxious to get back to work. She accepted a position with a Universalist church in Racine, Wisconsin.

Olympia Brown stayed with that church for about nine years until she decided to work full time as a women’s suffrage organizer for both the Wisconsin Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association. During the 1910s, Brown joined Alice Paul’s Woman’s Party and stood with the pickets at the White House.

When at long last her decades of hard work paid off, Olympia Brown cast her first presidential ballot in 1920. She was 85 years old.

Born in Delaware in 1807 to a Quaker family, Elizabeth Chandler was orphaned at an early age and raised by relatives in Philadelphia. She was educated at a Quaker school there, and developed a talent for writing, which she put to use promoting the abolitionist cause.

In 1825, Elizabeth Chandler wrote a prize-winning poem called “The Slave Ship,” which caught the eye of Benjamin Lundy, publisher of the abolitionist periodical, Genius of Universal Emancipation. By 1826 she was regularly contributing poems and essays to the Genius, and Lundy then hired her to edit its Ladies’ Repository section in which Chandler regularly promoted the immediate emancipation of slaves. She did not live long enough to see the end of slavery in the United States. Elizabeth Chandler died of a fever in 1834.