(1759-1797) She was a British author and philosopher who is best known for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). In that text, she argued that women are inherently equal to men, but appear inferior because they do not have the same access to education. Two years before, she had responded to Edmund Burke's conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France with her own A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, is famous as the author of Frankenstein.

(1793-1880) She was a Quaker who agitated for both abolitionism and women's rights. When she attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the male delegates excluded her and the other female delegates from the convention and made them sit in a segregated area. She then turned her attention to women's rights. She was older than many of the other prominent delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she mentored. She briefly served as the first president of the American Equal Rights Association. She was also one of the Quakers who founded Swarthmore College.

(1797-1883) She was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree in Dutch-speaking New York. She gave herself her name in 1843 when she converted to Methodism and informed her friends that the spirit had called her. She was already well known as an abolitionist speaker when she attended the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention and declared that she had "as much muscle as any man" in her most famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?"

The husband was a utilitarian philosopher who comes up in quiz bowl most often in conjunction with his works On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1863). He makes this list, however, because he wrote one of the most influential philosophical defenses of women's rights in The Subjection of Women (1869). He claimed that his wife co-authored this text with him, a claim which is debated by historians. The husband and wife did write several essays together, including a tract advocating women's suffrage titled The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), and he recognized his wife as a major contributor to all his greatest works.

(1815-1902) She is most famous for writing the "Declaration of Sentiments" that she presented at the first women's rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. She based the text of her declaration on the Declaration of Independence; it included the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." She was a close collaborator for many years with Susan B. Anthony.

(1820-1906) She was one of the most outspoken and most famous proponents of women's suffrage in the United States. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she co-founded the first women's temperance society in the 1850s after they were excluded from an all-male temperance society. Together, in 1868, the two women founded a journal called The Revolution, which was dedicated to promoting women's rights. The following year, she and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1872, Anthony gained fame when she was arrested for voting in the presidential election. She defended herself by quoting the Fourteenth Amendment, but she was convicted.

(1858-1928) She was the most prominent advocate for women's voting rights in the United Kingdom. As one of the founders of the Women's Social and Political Union, she called for direct action and frequent protests to force male politicians to grant votes to women. Her protests frequently got her arrested, and while in jail she and other suffragettes often went on hunger strikes. Initially, prison officials brutally force-fed the hunger-striking suffragettes. In 1913, Parliament passed the Cat and Mouse Act, which provided for hunger strikers to be released from jail and re-arrested after they regained their health. As a result of the advocacy of this woman and others, Parliament began to grant voting rights to women in 1918.

(1879-1966) She was an early advocate of birth control and reproductive rights who founded the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into Planned Parenthood. As a young nurse living in New York City, she wrote columns about sexual education for the New York Call titled "What Every Mother Should Know" and "What Every Girl Should Know." She gave up nursing after one of her patients died of a self-induced abortion, and instead dedicated herself to educating women about contraception. In 1914, she began writing a newsletter called The Woman Rebel, in part to challenge the Comstock law, which prohibited the sending of "obscene" texts by mail, since she considered education about contraception to be an issue of free speech.

(1882-1941) She was an author who comes up in quiz bowl most often because of her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She makes this list, however, because of her essay A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she argued that a woman must have money and space in order to write and express herself. In the essay, she famously created the character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's imagined sister, who could not achieve the status of her brother because she did not have the same access to education. She also addressed these themes in Three Guineas (1938).

(1908-1986) She was a French writer and philosopher perhaps best known for her feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949). In that work, she argued that "womanhood" is defined by its differences from masculinity, which is perceived as normal. The Second Sex contains the famous line, "One is not born a woman, but becomes one." The book is divided into two parts, titled "Facts and Myths" and "Lived Experience." One fact about her often mentioned in quiz bowl questions is that she was a lover of Jean-Paul Sartre. She is often considered one of the pioneers of "second-wave" feminism, which emphasizes sexuality, the workplace, and other forms of inequality over the first-wave focus on voting and property rights.

(1921-2006) She was a writer and activist best known as the author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and as the most prominent co-founder of the National Organization for Women. In 1957, Smith conducted a survey of graduates of her alma mater, Smith College, and found that many of them were unhappy with their lives. She labeled this general unhappiness "the problem with no name." She then began writing The Feminine Mystique, in which she argued that being a housewife is unfulfilling and advocated for women to seek education and work outside the home.

(b. 1934) She is a journalist who founded and edited Ms. magazine. For an article in Show magazine in 1963, she went undercover as a Playboy bunny. Having had an abortion herself, she became a prominent advocate of abortion rights. She worked as a writer for New York magazine when she founded Ms., a feminist magazine devoted to women's issues. The magazine also popularized the use of the title "Ms." to address women regardless of marital status. She also wrote the book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), and the phrase "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" is often attributed to her.