“I have come forward and made myself a hissing and a reproach among the people,” Maria Stewart claimed as she addressed the large crowd at Boston’s Franklin Hall on Sept. 21, 1832. The first American woman to speak publicly in front of a racially, gendered, and economically mixed audience, Stewart faced hecklers and naysayers, but this did not stop her. A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, she was an activist, an abolitionist, and a women’s rights advocate. Stewart paved the way for activists including Susie King Taylor, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mattie Crawford, -->

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