After college, Allen was a music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for a brief time. When a nerve injury in her arm forced her to give up her dream of becoming a concert pianist, she decided to study law. Allen applied to law school at Western Reserve College, but was refused because she was a woman. Instead, she attended the Chicago University Law School and then entered the New York University Law School. After finishing her studies, she received the first law degree ever granted a woman.

Allen became a lawyer in 1914. That was at the height of the suffragette movement. Suffrage is a word meaning the right to vote. At that time, women in the United States were not allowed to vote. The suffragette movement was an attempt by women to get the right to vote. In this environment, Allen became interested in women's rights and the law.

Allen earned the reputation as an outstanding attorney that had a firm grasp of the issues most important to women. Her success as an attorney made Allen a natural candidate for public leadership positions. She became the first woman assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. Later, she became a judge on the Court of Common Pleas. In 1922, Allen was elected as the first woman to serve on the Ohio Supreme Court. Twelve years later, President Roosevelt appointed Allen as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals. She held that position for 25 years.

Alice persisted, however, and published her first poems in a Cincinnati newspaper when she was 18. Soon she and Phoebe were at work on a book of poems. Named the Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, the book was printed in 1849. The book was so successful that John Greenleaf Whittier, one of America’s leading poets, wrote them a letter praising their works. The famous writer, Edgar Allen Poe, stated that Alice’s poem "Pictures of Memory" was "one of the most musically perfect lyrics of our language." This early success convinced Alice to move to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. Phoebe soon followed her older sister and the two became regular writers for national magazines.

Both sisters wrote columns for New York newspapers and published more books. They became important people in New York. Leading artists and writers often gathered in their home to discuss their works and ideas. They also started a club for women called the Sorority of Sisters (Sorosis) in 1869. The purpose of the club was to get more rights for women. Had they lived during the late 20th century, they would have been frequent guests on television talk shows.

Claflin married Dr. James Woodhull in 1853, but divorced him eleven years later. After the marriage, Claflin and her sister, Tennessee, settled in New York City. With the help of Cornelius Vanderbilt, they made a small fortune buying and selling stock. In 1870, the sisters began publishing a newspaper called The Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. They often wrote about women's rights, complained of double standards and carried sensational stories about the rich and famous of the day. One such story that accused Henry Ward Beecher, a leading minister, of misbehavior, landed the sisters in legal trouble.

In 1872, the Equal Rights Party nominated Claflin to be its candidate for President of the United States. A woman running for President was unheard of at a time when women not only could not vote, but also were not welcomed in the discussion of politics. Claflin accepted the nomination and became the first woman to run for President. She received far fewer votes than U. S. Grant, another Ohioan, who won the election.

During her life, Gage became a leader in the three great reform movements that reshaped American life in the years before the Civil War: the temperance (anti-alcohol) movement, the women's rights campaign and the anti-slavery crusade. Like many women in Ohio prior to the Civil War, Gage was committed to making life better for the disadvantaged. These women saw an American dream that promised equality for all. They fought hard, often against great odds, to make their dream a reality.

Gage first gained national attention as chairwoman of a convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. That convention was called to encourage the people who were re-writing Ohio’s constitution to include more rights for women in the new law. Gage shocked many white members of the convention by allowing Sojourner Truth, an African-American, to speak to the group. Truth’s famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech caused many people to recognize that women’s rights applied to all women, white or black. It also did much to bring the women’s rights crusade and the abolitionist movement closer together. Soon after this convention, Gage became a widely recognized anti-slavery spokeswoman. Her writing and speaking for this cause were so forceful that she received threats against her life.

During the Civil War, Gage followed the Northern armies south, serving first as an agent of the Sanitary Commission that looked after wounded soldiers. Later, she was superintendent of a Paris Island, South Carolina camp for freed slaves. After the war, she took up the crusade against alcohol, again as a lecturer and writer. Using the pen name "Aunt Fanny," Gage also wrote stories and poems for children.

Butler fell in love with Oakley and they married several years later. The couple joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and toured as performers between 1885 and 1902. Buffalo Bill's show was a famous traveling show. It included performances and re-creations of western scenes and displays of frontier skills. Oakley was the marksman. The show also featured Sitting Bull, the famous Indian Chief, and a number of other celebrated Westerners. While with the show, Oakley entertained audiences, including Queen Victoria, around the world. She was able to hit the thin edge of a playing card, shoot a dime tossed into the air and shoot a cigarette out of her husband's mouth.

Schille wanted to become an artist. Sensing that she needed to further develop her talents, she moved to New York for study. That was an uncommon step for a young single woman in those days. Schille studied at the New York Art School beginning in 1897. Afterward, she traveled to Europe, eventually settling in Paris. There she won several art awards and mounted the first of many displays of her work.

By 1920, many critics viewed Alice Schille as one of the best American women painters. She had won a gold medal at the Panama Pacific Exposition for her art. She had also displayed her work at the world-famous French Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

After arriving in Cincinnati, Harriet came to know slavery first hand from visits to Kentucky. On these visits and through stories told by her father's friends, she heard of slaves being mistreated and of their efforts to escape. Ohio, a state that had outlawed slavery in 1803, bordered Kentucky and western Virginia, two states in which slavery was legal. In the years before the Civil War, slaves running from their masters in those states set a course for Ohio and freedom. Once in Ohio, they found people who would hide them and help them get to Canada. In Canada, slaves were beyond the reach of their masters. All across Ohio, but particularly in Cincinnati, church sermons and newspapers repeated the accounts of fleeing slaves being chased by their masters. Stowe read and listened to those stories.

By 1850, Stowe and her husband were living in Maine. In 1852, she wrote a book that drew upon her experiences in Kentucky and the stories she had heard and read in Ohio. Entitled Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book told the story of a fictional character escaping from a cruel slave owner. The vivid story came at a time when the country was turning against slavery. In the first year, it sold over 300,000 copies and eventually was published worldwide. The book was also made into a play that was performed throughout the North.

Uncle Tom's Cabin aroused abolitionist feelings in the years before the Civil War because Stowe skillfully described the horrors of slavery. In fact, the book was so influential that President Lincoln is reported to have said upon meeting Stowe during the Civil War "So you're the little woman who started the big war."

In 1889, Wald decided to study nursing at New York City Hospital. After graduating from nursing school, she entered the Women’s Medical College, studying to become a doctor. While in medical school, Wald volunteered to help poor people who lived on New York City's Lower East Side. She was so concerned with their problems that she dropped out of medical school in 1906 to help even more. Wald moved to a house on Henry Street so that she could live among the people that she was trying to help. There, she and her partner, Mary Brewster, set up the Henry Street Settlement House to provide care and health education for the poor. The Henry Street Settlement House later became the Visiting Nurse Society (VNS) of New York. The VNS brought medical care to people who could not visit doctors and hospitals.

In addtion to being a good nurse, Wald was a skilled leader. She convinced others to join her effort. She started with 10 nurses and by 1916 she had 250 nurses giving care to 1,300 patients a day. All of the money for salaries and medicine came from donations. The VNS became a model that was copied in cities around the globe. Wald was called upon to provide advice to others.

Wald’s contributions went beyond the VNS. She convinced the New York Board of Education to hire a nurse. Eventually, all of the schools in New York, as well as in other cities, had nurses in them. Wald also convinced President Teddy Roosevelt to create the Federal Children's Bureau to protect children from abuse and neglect. As the suffrage movement pressed for women's right to vote, Wald took up the cause. She fought for reform in divorce laws. Wald joined Margaret Sanger in a crusade to educate women about birth control. She led several peace marches to try to keep the U.S. out of World War I. Yet, when war came, she volunteered to work for the Red Cross. Wald encouraged businesses to create safer working conditions and to keep nurses or doctors on work sites. She also improved the quality of nursing education by convincing Columbia University to appoint the first professor of nursing at a U.S. college.