20 Women From History Who Took Down Powerful Institutions

In September 1887, Elizabeth Cochrane, a reporter working under the pseudonym Nellie Bly for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, faked insanity to be sent to New York City’s municipal Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Within the ten days the paper arranged to have her stay, the 23-year-old observed forced cold baths, spoiled food, and beatings. The newspaper arranged for her to be released as planned, and her exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, led to a jump in funding for the asylum of $850,000.

From 1902 to 1904, Ida Tarbell, an investigative reporter for McClure’s Magazine, gathered material from court records, government filings, and public company documents on Standard Oil, which John D. Rockefeller had built up by driving independent refiners like Tarbell’s father out of business. She demonstrated that the company operated a secret railroad rebate program and a predatory local pricing strategy to crush competitors. The evidence she presented was used as part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1911 to break up the monopoly.

Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist who co-owned the Memphis Free Speech, started looking into lynchings throughout the South when three of her friends, who owned a grocery store in Memphis, were lynched in March 1892. Since she deliberately constructed her argument using information from white-owned mainstream newspapers, her conclusions could not be dismissed as mere rumor. In her two books, Southern Horrors and A Red Record, she showed that lynching was a means to rid the South of economically successful Blacks and not, as was widely believed, to punish rapists.

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, the Irish-born labor organizer for the United Mine Workers, joined a strike by workers in Pennsylvania’s textile industry, which employed thousands of children. In 1903, Jones organized the child workers’ 100-mile march to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay estate. With many of the kids missing fingers from working the machinery, Roosevelt’s staff still refused to let her past the front gate. There was no meeting. But the march did make the dangers of child labor impossible to overlook, helping spur Pennsylvania to raise the minimum working age to 14.

When Elizabeth Packard, a resident of Illinois, was sent to a state insane asylum in June of 1860 by her husband, Theophilus, a minister, it was because she had disagreed with him about religion. At that time, Illinois law allowed husbands to send their wives to an insane asylum without providing any evidence of insanity. After spending three years inside one, recording the conditions for later publication, she was released but kept confined to her home until her friends were able to arrange a hearing. In January 1864, a jury took seven minutes to declare her sane.

As the assistant attorney general in charge of enforcing prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrandt discovered that corruption within the federal Bureau of Prohibition allowed local police to protect prominent bootleggers from liquor charges by accepting bribes. In response, she successfully sued to have bootlegging profits treated as income subject to taxation. She won this strategy before the Supreme Court in 1927, paving the way for the prosecution of Al Capone for income tax evasion in 1931, two years after she resigned from her position.

During the Second Anglo-Boer War, the British under Lord Kitchener adopted a scorched earth policy and concentrated Boer women and children into camps. The English welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse visited several of these camps in South Africa for several months. There they lived in severe overcrowding, inadequate nutrition, and disease, especially measles and dysentery. Hobhouse concluded that some 28,000 Boer civilians had died in these camps, mostly children. Her report was instrumental in the appointment of a government commission, whose findings supported Hobhouse’s conclusions, and the death rate from the camps decreased rapidly thereafter.

In 1841, Dorothea Dix, a teacher from the United States, discovered that mentally ill women were kept in an unheated basement cell with prisoners at a jail in Massachusetts. For the following two years, Dix toured jails and poorhouses throughout the state, documenting people held in iron cages and shackles, as well as being beaten. She presented her report to the Massachusetts legislature in 1843. Legislators used her findings to increase the size of the state’s mental hospital, and Dix’s efforts also resulted in the founding or expansion of over 30 public mental hospitals around the country.

In 1813, English Quaker philanthropist Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate Prison in London and found hundreds of women and children living in cramped, unheated cells, where they were extorted for food and straw by the guards. In 1818, she gave testimony to a British parliamentary committee, the first time a non-royal woman had done so. Five years later, lawmakers passed a law mandating sex-segregated guarding, paid staff, and sanitation standards at prisons around the country.

In 1950, Marvel Cooke went undercover to report on the conditions of domestic workers in New York. The first Black woman hired full-time by a mainstream white-owned daily paper, Cooke posed as a day laborer on Bronx street corners nicknamed the “Bronx Slave Market,” where poor Black women gathered to await offers of employment from white housewives. Her four-part series revealed employers tampering with clocks, paying less than a living wage, and subjecting their help to verbal insults and humiliation. Cooke called for the regulation of domestic work and for its unionization.

In the early 1910s, Jovita Idár, a Mexican-American woman who wrote for the Laredo newspaper El Progreso, covered the extrajudicial murder of Mexican Americans at the hands of the Texas Rangers, as well as land seizures and segregated schools. When the paper published criticism of the U.S. military’s intervention in Mexico in 1914, armed Rangers appeared at its doors to force it to close. Idár stood at the entrance and persuaded them to leave. They came back the following day while the office was vacant and smashed the press.

Harriet Jacobs was an enslaved woman in Edenton, N.C., who hid for seven years in an attic crawlspace to escape enslavement at the hands of a man named Dr. James Norcom before running away north. She published an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in 1861 under the pseudonym “Linda Brent,” which was later confirmed as fact by historian Jean Fagan Yellin. In the book, she describes how Southern laws protected enslavers with complete legal authority over enslaved women, denying them legal protection from rape and physical abuse.

In 1869, English social reformer Josephine Butler began a campaign to abolish Britain’s Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed military and plainclothes police in garrison towns to arrest any woman whom they suspected of prostitution and force her to submit to an internal medical examination. Butler traveled around the country, distributing pamphlets and speaking at public meetings about how the acts constituted a legal double standard that allowed police to harass working-class women. In 1883, Parliament suspended the acts, and then fully repealed them three years later.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an African American abolitionist who fled to Canada following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. In 1853, she launched The Provincial Freeman, making her the first Black woman newspaper editor in North America. Her newspaper called out “relief” societies, such as the one led by the abolitionist Henry Bibb, that solicited donations to help Black refugees only to charge them exorbitant prices for land and segregate their settlements so they could keep the difference.

Caroline Bartlett Crane, sometimes called America’s Municipal Housekeeper, walked into several slaughterhouses in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1902 and discovered filth and diseased livestock headed for market. Crane went on to inspect meatpacking plants across the country, digging through piles of government paperwork to find that federal meat inspectors were approving meat cuts infected with tuberculosis and cholera. In 1912, Crane showed lawmakers the actual diseased meats, which prompted a sweeping change in federal meat inspection laws, separate from what Upton Sinclair had depicted in his fictional novel “The Jungle.”

In 1893, Florence Kelley, a reformer who lived in Chicago’s Hull House settlement, was appointed Illinois’ first Chief Factory Inspector. After painstakingly searching through tenement garment factories block by block, she discovered that children as young as 5 were working 14-hour shifts next to uncontained infectious diseases such as smallpox. Her findings led to the passage of the Illinois Factory Inspection Act later that year, allowing the state to inspect businesses and restrict both child labor and the working hours of women.

In 1890, Kansas lawyer and Populist luminary Mary Elizabeth Lease gave more than 160 speeches in which she explained how Eastern banks were foreclosing on family farms and how railroad cartels were squeezing their farmers with crippling freight rates. She also argued that both major parties were in cahoots with Wall Street’s financial trusts. Lease would be credited for helping the Populists achieve electoral success two years later. “Raise less corn and more hell,” she was quoted as saying, but later claimed that a reporter had invented those words, although she added that the message was correct.

Kate Richards O’Hare, an American Socialist orator, was convicted on a charge of violating the 1917 Espionage Act for making an anti-war speech. She spent 14 months in the Missouri State Penitentiary with inmate Emma Goldman. O’Hare did not merely sit quietly and do her time. She wrote about spoiled food, brutal whippings, disease that went untreated, and contractors making money off forced inmate labor. Her book In Prison, published in 1923, focused heavily on the issue of penal administration. This, in turn, led to a congressional inquiry regarding federal prison labor contracts.

In 1910, Dr. Alice Hamilton, an American physician and pioneer of industrial toxicology, headed the Illinois Occupational Disease Survey. She inspected factory work sites and interviewed workers in their own homes about lead poisoning, solvent poisoning, and “phossy jaw,” a disintegration of the jaw caused by phosphorus poisoning. Her data showed that management was covering up workers’ deaths from chemical exposure and then blaming the workers for their own poisoning. Her findings helped to bring about new state workers’ compensation laws and national safety standards.

Dr. Sara Josephine Baker directed New York’s first municipal child health bureau, established in 1908. Walking through tenements in Hell’s Kitchen and the Lower East Side, she found the source of more than 1,500 infant deaths per summer week: unpasteurized milk, poorly ventilated dwellings, and filthy streets. Her program of clean-milk delivery and a drop treatment that saved babies from blindness led to an infant death rate lower than any other large city in America or Europe. During her time as director, the city saved an estimated 90,000 infant lives.

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