The Complete List of Historical Women - Last Name Begins with "A"

Historic Women - A

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Annie Heloise Abel (1873-1947) - Renowned historian and professor, Abel was born at Fernhurst, Sussex, England on February 18, 1873. She immigrated to the United States in 1885 and her family settled at Salina, Kansas. She obtained her master's degree in history in 1900 from the University of Kansas before studying at Cornell University and later receiving a doctorate degree from Yale. She then became a history professor at various colleges and began to author a number of works on Native Americans, particularly in relation to their participation and experiences during the American Civil War period and slave-holding Indians. She also studied British policy towards natives throughout the British Empire, not just in the new world. In 1921, she married an Australian named George Cockburn Henderson and briefly became Annie Heloise Abel Henderson. However, the marriage was brief and she returned to the United States, settling in Aberdeen, Washington. Abel continued to write and during her day became an acknowledged expert on her studies of Native Americans. She died of cancer on March 14, 1947 and was buried at Montesano, Washington.

Jane Addams (1860-1935) A pacifist, suffragist, an advocate of social reform and, in 1931, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She turned her prize winnings over to the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom, of which she was president.

Hannah Adams (1755-1831) Historian and the first professional woman writer in the United States, publishing A Summary History of New England in 1799.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) - A servant, seamstress, teacher and Civil War Nurse, Alcott's fame came as an author. Born on November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Louisa was one of four daughters. She moved with her family to Boston when she was just two years old. As a young girl, the family moved again to Concord, Massachusetts. Growing up in a Transcendentalist household, the environment was both intellectual and non-conventional, fostering her love of writing. Receiving her education primarily from her father, Bronson Alcott, it was furthered by her father's friends, people such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller.

Louisa May Alcott is widely known as the writer of Little Women, a self reflective children's book published in 1868. The success of this book led to other books based on Alcott's life such as Little Men and Jo's Boys, the money from which helped to support her sisters and parents.

As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. She volunteered to be a nurse in an army hospital in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, where she contracted typhoid fever. Later she would become an advocate of women's suffrage, and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

As she grew older, her health worsened, but she continued to write up until the end. She finally died of mercury poisoning which she contracted when she received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 56, and was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord.

Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) - Susan Brownell Anthony was born near Adams, Massachusetts on February 15, 1820 to a liberal Quaker abolitionist family. Receiving a good education, she herself would begin to teach by the time she was just 16. She soon began to dedicate her life to the women's suffrage movement, paving the way for the for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 which gave women the right to vote. Though she never lapsed in her commitment to women's rights, she focused her energies as the Civil War approached to abolition and was the principal New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. After the war, however, she returned to her suffrage movement activities and for 45 years she traveled throughout the United States by stage coach, wagon, carriage, and trains making 75-100 speeches a year. Though she was key to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, she would not live to see implemented, as she died 14 years prior of pneumonia and heart failure on march 13, 1906.

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Susan B. Anthony

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