REFORMERS/ ANTEBELLUM Movement

Women’s Rights

1. Amelia Bloomer – American women's rights and temperance advocate. Even though she did not create the women's clothing reform style known as bloomers, her name became associated with it because of her early and strong advocacy and her willingness to wear them.

2. Angelina and Sarah Grimke - 19th-century Southern American Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women's rights. Angelina Grimké married abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in May 1838.

3. Elizabeth Cady Stanton - American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement.  Pushed for suffrage at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and led the movement for many years.

4. Lucretia Mott - American Quaker, abolitionist, a women's rights activist, and a social reformer. She, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

5. Lucy Stone - Prominent American orator, abolitionist, and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women. Lucy Stone's refusal to take her husband's name, as an assertion of her own rights, was controversial then, and is largely what she is remembered for today. Women who continue to use their birth name after marriage are still occasionally known as "Lucy Stoners" in the United States.

6. Sojourner Truth - African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. Sojourner Truth was named Isabella ("Bell") Baumfree when she was born. She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?" was delivered in 1851.

7. Susan B. Anthony - American social reformer 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. In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and convicted in a widely publicized trial. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Popularly known as the Anthony Amendment, it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920

Abolition

8. William Lloyd Garrison - prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States rejecting the more moderate beginnings of the abolitionist movement. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the woman suffrage movement.

9. David Walker - militant African-American abolitionist and anti-slavery activist. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against oppression and injustice.

10. Elijah Lovejoy - American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor and abolitionist. He was murdered by pro-slavery mob during their attack on his warehouse to destroy his press and abolitionist materials.

11. Frederick Douglass - African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, known for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He published The North Star newspaper and eventually helped to get black troops organized during the Civil War.

12. Theodore Dwight Weld - One of the leading architects of the American abolitionist movement during its formative years, from 1830 through 1844. Weld played a role as writer, editor, speaker, and organizer. He is best known for his co-authorship of the authoritative compendium, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published in 1839. Harriet Beecher Stowe partly based Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Weld's text and it is regarded as second only to that work in its influence on the antislavery movement.  He married Angelina Grimke.

13. John Brown - white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. During the 1856 conflict in Kansas, Brown took part in the so-called Pottawatomie Massacre, killing five slavery supporters.  In 1859, Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry that ended with his capture. Brown's trial resulted in his conviction and a sentence of death by hanging.

14. Harriet Beecher Stowe – American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South.

15. Harriet Tubman - an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made about thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved family and friends,[1] using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.