Fearless & Fascinating Femmes of the First Wave Quiz

Answer: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) married in 1840, she omitted "obey" from her vows. She and her new husband, Henry, were appalled when they travelled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and Elizabeth Stanton was not allowed to sit on the floor with delegates, or even to speak.

In response, Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, patterned after Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, in which she demanded that women have the right to own property, to earn wages, to receive higher education, and to retain custody of their children after divorce (in 1848, only fathers had that right). Stanton lectured across the country in the 1860s, co-authored "A History of Woman Suffrage" (1881-85) and "The Woman's Bible" (1895), and co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Susan B. Anthony in 1869.

Answer: Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownwell Anthony (1820-1906) missed the Seneca Falls Convention as she was teaching in the nearby Mohawk Valley, NY, but she and her parents had signed a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments at a Unitarian church in Rochester, NY. (The Quaker-born Anthony had little use for orthodox Christianity though she was not an atheist).

Rochester was also where Anthony and 14 fellow feminists cast ballots with the help of sympathetic election officials, who had registered them illegally. She was arrested, but the judge paid her bail for her. She argued that she had a constitutional right to vote, but she lost her case in court. So the National Woman Suffrage Association focussed on amending the Constitution, which turned out to be a more successful strategy.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass were Anthony's lifelong friends.

Answer: Victoria Woodhull

The unconventional, outspoken Victoria Clafin Woodhull (1838-1927) was a known advocate for free love, legalized prostitution, and dress reform. After she spoke before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives for women's rights, the National Woman Suffrage Association invited her to join in 1871 despite their misgivings about some of her positions. Woodhull soon broke from NWSA, however, and formed the National Radical Reformers. By 1872, the Equal Rights Party had nominated her for the Presidency.

She lost, and was arrested some years later for passing "obscene" material through the mail, but she was acquitted. Woodhull and her sisters emigrated to England, where their philanthropy gained them a measure of acceptance in high society.

Answer: Lucretia Mott

In the USA, the Women's Movement grew directly out of the Anti-Slavery Movement. In fact, a great motivation was the way women were treated by their fellow abolitionists! Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880) worked very closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, both as an abolitionist and a suffragist. Alas, her early death has overshadowed her contributions in popular imagination.

Five delegates of the Liberty Party, an abolitionist Third Party which was the predecessor to the Free Soil Party, actually voted for Mott as candidate for Vice President, in 1848, twenty-four years before Victoria Woodhull's presidential nomination by the Equal Rights Party in 1872. Mott came in fourth in delegate voting.

Answer: Eugenie Potonie-Pierre

Socialist and woman of letters Eugenie Potonie-Pierre (1844-1898) practically founded French feminism. She was also secretary of the International Congress for Women's Rights, and a leader of the Union des Femmes. She and Ellen Robinson co-founded the International Peace Union.

It appears, however, that not Potonie-Pierre but a French philosopher named Charles Fourier coined the word 'féminisme' ("feminism"), although he meant something slightly different in the context of his imagined utopian society. So the use of the term to apply to the Women's Movement could well have originated with Potonie-Pierre and her fellow 'féministes'.

Answer: Frances Willard

The First Wave of the women's movement was often bound up in the temperance movement, as abolitionism had been before Reconstruction. "Temperance" means self-restraint and usually refers to refraining from drink and other vices.

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839-1898) was not the first president of the WCTU, but she was its most famous as she added political means to the Union's traditional moral persuasion. Willard endorsed woman suffrage as a way to realize their aims for social reform and civil rights, which included an end to trafficking in women, the raising of the age of consent, which in some states was age 7(!), the enforcement of statutory rape laws, and custody of children to their mothers after divorce. The WCTU remains an active international organization in the 21st century.

In 1882 Willard organized the Prohibition Party, which got the 18th amendment passed (31 years after her death) and which remains the oldest existing Third Party in the USA. The PP became the first political party to accept women as full members and grant them full delegate rights, including speaking on the floor and voting on the party's platform.

Willard was also an advocate of dress reform, particularly the abandonment of whalebone corsets that restricted breathing and led to fainting and organ damage.

Answer: Kate Sheppard

Katherine Wilson "Kate" Sheppard (1847-1934) was born in England but immigrated with her mother to New Zealand in 1869. She established the WCTU in New Zealand and like Frances Willard of America's WCTU, she saw women's enfranchisement as a way to promote her temperance-based social reforms, which were supported more by women than by men.

Sheppard was instrumental in making NZ the first country to enfranchise women, and helped produce the first women's suffrage bill in 1887. Women won the vote in 1893, in time for the general election that year. Sheppard moved back to England after her husband retired, but on her way she promoted women's suffrage in Canada and the USA, and continued to do so in Britain. In 1904 she returned to NZ where she remained the rest of her life and revived the National Council of Women.

Answer: Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst (1858-1928), with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, took women's activism to a whole new level in the early 20th century. The Mancunian Pankhursts and their fellow suffragettes were strongly influenced by the success of protests in Russia, and they adapted hunger strikes and other audacious and confrontational methods to their struggle for the vote.

Once World War I broke out, Pankhurst put suffragism on hold to support the war effort, and became part of the white feather movement, which would publicly embarrass young men who hadn't enlisted in the military by giving them a white feather, a symbol of surrender and by extension cowardice. Pankhurst emigrated to Canada, and did not live to see Britain enfranchise women on the same basis as men in 1928.

Answer: Millicent Fawcett

Not only the vote but also access to higher education was the concern for Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929). The moderate Fawcett distanced herself from her more militant sisters in the struggle, Emmeline Pankhurst and her Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and preferred to develop goodwill rather than enmity with Parliament. In fact, she became a feminist after hearing John Stuart Mill, philosopher and radical MP, speak for women's suffrage, and she later married an MP. She co-founded Newnham College [for women] at the University of Cambridge in 1871. She presided over the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (the NUWSS) for over twenty years.

Fawcett also campaigned to raise the age of consent, to criminalize incest, to eliminate trafficking in women, to outlaw child-marriage in India, and to end the imprisonment of prostitutes found to have STDs. During World War I, she continued to advocate for women's enfranchisement, and pointed out their contributions during the war. Fawcett wrote several books, including "Political Economy for Beginners" (1870) and a biography of Queen Victoria (1895).

Answer: Anna Pavlovna Filosofova

Anna Pavlovna Filosofova (1837-1912) was a philanthropist who essentially co-founded the First Wave of the feminist movement in Russia. She worked in educational reform and charity for the poor before turning specifically to organizing women and to working toward promoting education for women. Anna opened the first women's university in Russia in 1876.

She served in 1899 as chairwoman of the International Council of Women (a body which Susan B. Anthony helped form and which remains in the 21st century a recognized NGO that consults with WHO, UNESCO, and other UN agencies). Filosofova was part of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party.

More than 100 women's organizations celebrated the 50th anniversary of Filosofova's participation in public life in 1911, in a national jubilee.