Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was born in to a family of ardent abolitionists, in a home that was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and to a father who died when she was two years old from a heart attack after giving a speech against slavery.

Anna took on his passion for social causes at a young age. She published a piece about an abolitionist school teacher in Kentucky who was being abused when she was just 14 years old. And then she began work in her mid teens as a teacher to help support her mother who was raising five children on her own.

But public speaking is where she began to make a big impact. Encouraged by local abolitionists and suffrage leaders, Anna started giving public speeches. Her style of speech included sarcasm and ridicule, as with ease she could put down hecklers. And though she often suffered from throat issues, she persisted to speak.

In 1863 when she was 21 years old, she became the first woman to give a political address to the U.S. Congress.

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Sources: Brady's National Photographic Portrait Galleries, photographer. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, orator, abolitionist, advocate for women's rights, and the first woman to speak before Congress / From photographic negative in Brady's National Portrait Gallery. [New york: published by e. & h.t. anthony, 501 broadway, between 1855 and 1865] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2017660629/>.