Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810-July 19, 1850) “possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.” So wrote Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in their 1881 History of Woman Suffrage. Author, editor, and teacher, Fuller contributed significantly to the American Renaissance in literature and to mid-nineteenth century reform movements.…
Olympia Brown (January 5, 1835-October 23, 1926) dedicated her life to opening doors for women. Among only a handful of women to graduate from college, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Antioch in 1860 and three years later became the first woman graduate of a regularly established theological school: St.…
Maria Weston Chapman (July 25, 1806-July 12, 1885) was described by Lydia Maria Child as “One of the most remarkable women of the age.” Chapman and three of her five younger sisters played vital roles in the antislavery movement. Even the smaller Weston girls were pressed into service for the cause that dominated the lives of this family.…
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Abigail Adams (November 11, 1744-October 28, 1818) advocated and modeled an expanded role for women in public affairs during the formative days of the United States. Married to John Adams, she was an invaluable partner to him as he developed his political career, culminating in the presidency of the United States.
Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802-Oct. 20, 1880) was a novelist, editor, journalist and scholar who produced a body of work remarkable for its brilliance, originality and variety, much of it inspired by a strong sense of justice and love of freedom.…
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Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (December 19, 1820-May 23, 1905) was a key organizer for the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Afterwards, she became a leader of the woman suffrage and temperance movements, and a popular lecturer on social reform.…
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Lydia Ann Moulton Jenkins (1824 or 1825-May 7, 1874) was a leader in the women’s rights movement, a Universalist minister, and later a homeopathic physician. It has been claimed that she was the first woman to be granted ministerial fellowship in the United States, and perhaps the first to be ordained with full denominational authority.…
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Samuel Ripley (March 11, 1783-November 24, 1847) and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (July 31, 1793-July 26, 1867) played significant roles in the Unitarian movement, especially through their close connection with the Emerson family. Although the Ripleys were intimates of Ralph Waldo Emerson and friends of Boston area Unitarian ministers and transcendentalists, notice of them has been largely confined to mention in works of their better known associates.…
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Harriet Martineau (June 12, 1802-June 27, 1876), a pioneering British journalist and writer, grew up Unitarian and was for a time a Unitarian apologist. A free trade advocate, she provided influential support for economic reform in Britain. The observational methodology she developed traveling in America was a forerunner of modern sociology.
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Frances Wayland Wood (February 13, 1903-August 22, 1975) was a lay professional who dedicated her life to liberal religious education. She helped to renovate Unitarian Sunday School materials in the mid-twentieth century and worked as consultant to Unitarian churches across North America.
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Abigail Adams Eliot (October 9, 1892-October 29, 1992) was a pioneer of the nursery school movement. She is best known for her work with young children and in teaching other people to work with young children.
As her name suggests, she was a member of two of the most illustrious Unitarian families of New England: the Adamses and the Eliots.
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Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759-September 10, 1797), a revolutionary advocate of equal rights for women, was an inspiration for both the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century women’s movements. Wollstonecraft was not merely a woman’s rights advocate. She asserted the innate rights of all people, whom she thought victims of a society that assigned people their roles, comforts, and satisfactions according to the false distinctions of class, age, and gender.…
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