Born into slavery under the name “Bett,” Elizabeth Freeman worked from a young age in the house of Colonel John Ashley, a prominent figure in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Ashley participated in drafting the 1773 Sheffield Declaration, a precursor to the Declaration of Independence, which stated that “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free and independent of each other.”

When Massachusetts passed its state constitution in 1780, Freeman—who was then known as “Mum Bett” or “Mumbet”—attended a public reading of the constitution, which said that “All men are born free and equal.” With this in mind, she asked lawyer Theodore Sedgwick, who had been involved with some of the Sheffield Declaration meetings, to help her sue for her freedom under the state constitution.

In the landmark 1781 case Brom and Bett v. Ashley, Freeman and another enslaved man in the Ashley house successfully won their freedom. This was the first of three cases in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that made slavery illegal in the state. With this victory, Mum Bett changed her name to “Elizabeth Freeman” and gave the same last name to her daughter.

Like Freeman, Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in the North. In 1826, with her daughter Sophia, she fled the New York residence of her enslaver John Dumont, but had to leave her other small children behind. Truth’s 5-year-old son Peter was later illegally sold to someone in Alabama, and in 1828 she successfully sued for Peter’s freedom and his return to New York.

In the 1840s, Truth began touring the country giving speeches against slavery. She delivered her most famous speech in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Though many now know the address as “Ain’t I a Woman,” contemporaneous accounts of it do not contain this phrase. (The name comes from an altered version of the speech that white abolitionist Frances Gage printed 12 years later.) 

Truth lived to see the abolition of slavery and the passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote (a short-lived victory in the South). After this, she continued to campaign for the rights of Black Americans and for women’s suffrage. In 1872, she attempted to vote in the presidential election in Battle Creek, Michigan, but was turned away.

The first known woman to give an abolitionist speech in public is Maria W. Stewart, who delivered this speech in 1832 in Boston. Significantly, she spoke before an audience of Black and white men and women at a time when women addressing mixed-gender audiences “was not regarded as being, quote, ‘respectable,’” Sinha says.

Stewart, born free in Connecticut, frequently spoke and wrote about abolition, the importance of education and the need for Black women to fight for their rights. Just before her death, Stewart published her collected speeches and writings in Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart.

“How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” she wrote in a section titled “Prayer.” “Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted. Sue for your rights and privileges… You can but die, if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not.”

Born into slavery in Maryland, Harriet Tubman escaped in 1849, a year before the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made it legal for enslavers or their hired agents to hunt down and recapture escapees in free states. A woman of extraordinary bravery, she returned to Maryland several times to free enslaved people. As one of the most widely known formerly enslaved people to help others escape through the Underground Railroad, Tubman undertook extremely dangerous missions—risking her freedom as well as her life.

Formerly enslaved abolitionists like Tubman and Frederick Douglass “were significant because they introduced radical tactics into the movement, including more activist tactics of rescuing fugitive slaves who may have been arrested and…sent back to the South,” Sinha says. “Tubman herself takes part in one of these actions on the very eve of the Civil War in Troy, New York.”

During the war, Tubman served as a spy for the Union Army and also became the first woman to lead a U.S. military expedition. That expedition was the 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid, which freed hundreds of enslaved people in South Carolina. After the war, Tubman continued fighting for the rights of Black people and for women’s suffrage.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, born free in the slave state of Delaware to abolitionist parents, worked with her family to help enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad. After the U.S. passed the Fugitive Slave Act, Cary moved to Ontario, Canada—where slavery was illegal—to join other Black Americans who had formed a community there.

In 1853, Cary launched The Provincial Freeman, Canada’s first abolitionist newspaper. The first Black woman editor of a newspaper in North America, she was also one of the first Black women to earn a law degree, which she completed at Howard University in Washington, D.C. after the Civil War. In 1874, Cary signed a petition to the House Judiciary Committee demanding women’s suffrage in D.C., one of 600 people to do so.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the abolition movement’s most powerful writers and orators. The poet, novelist and speaker—who was born free in Baltimore—became an active abolitionist in the 1850s after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. She continued her activism after the Civil War, giving one of her most famous speeches at the 1866 National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City.

In her speech, Harper detailed the legal battles she had endured as a widow and a single mother. “Justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law,” she said. “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”