Famous social reformers in history

How these ten reformers were chosen

A social reformer, here, is someone who set out to change an unjust law or custom and left a written record of the argument: a pamphlet, letter, speech, petition or autobiography. The ten come from France, the United States, Britain and India and span about 170 years, from Voltaire’s campaign of the 1760s to the 1930s.

Reformers were not saints, and several disagreed sharply with each other. Where they did, or where their views had limits we now see clearly, the entry says so. Other reformers who belong on any list include Jotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar, William Wilberforce, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Voltaire (1694 to 1778): the campaign for Jean Calas

In 1762 the Protestant merchant Jean Calas was tortured and executed in Toulouse, accused of killing his son to stop him becoming Catholic. Voltaire took up the case, wrote pamphlets and letters across Europe, and published the Treatise on Tolerance (1763).

Most lists miss: the campaign worked. In 1765 judges in Paris declared Calas innocent and his family was compensated. It is one of the first public campaigns to overturn an injustice by mobilising opinion. Voltaire’s tolerance had blind spots, though: he also wrote hostile stereotypes of Jews.

Abigail Adams (1744 to 1818): “Remember the Ladies”

Abigail Adams ran the family farm in Massachusetts during the Revolution and wrote over a thousand surviving letters. On 31 March 1776 she urged her husband John, then in Congress, to remember the ladies in the new code of laws and not to give husbands unlimited power.

Most lists miss: she also opposed slavery. In 1774 she wrote that it was iniquitous to fight for liberty while robbing others of it, and in 1797 she defended the right of James Prince, a free Black youth in her household, to attend an evening school when neighbours objected. See Remember the Ladies.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772 to 1833): against sati

Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a Bengali scholar, campaigned against sati, the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. In 1818 he published a dialogue arguing that the scriptures did not require it and that it was often coerced. Sati was banned in Bengal in December 1829. He also founded the Brahmo Sabha (1828), argued for a free press and for women’s property rights, and died in Bristol, England, in 1833.

Most lists miss: in 1823 he wrote to the Governor-General opposing a new Sanskrit college and asking instead for teaching in mathematics, chemistry and anatomy. Historians still debate his views on British rule; reading his own words is the fairest way in.

Sojourner Truth (about 1797 to 1883): rights for Black women

Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree into slavery in New York, spoke Dutch as her first language. Freed in 1827, she went to court to recover her son Peter, illegally sold to Alabama, and won. From 1843 she travelled as a preacher and speaker against slavery and for women’s rights.

Most lists miss: the famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” version, in a Southern dialect she did not speak, was published by Frances Dana Gage in 1863, twelve years later. The 1851 report above is closer to what she said.

Frederick Douglass (1818 to 1895): abolition in his own words

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 and became the leading Black abolitionist, author of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and editor of The North Star. He met Lincoln at the White House and pressed him on equal pay and treatment for Black soldiers.

Most lists miss: he was at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and spoke for the resolution demanding women’s right to vote when it was close to failing. Yet in 1869 he split with Susan B. Anthony over whether Black men’s votes should wait for women’s. Hear both sides in the Equal Rights debate of 1869, and his meeting with Lincoln in the White House debate of 1863.

Florence Nightingale (1820 to 1910): public health reform

Florence Nightingale used statistics after the Crimean War to force the British army and government to reform sanitation in barracks and hospitals, and founded professional nurse training in 1860.

Most lists miss: she spent decades campaigning on India, arguing in How People May Live and Not Die in India (1863) that clean water and drainage would cut deaths among soldiers and the Indian population alike. In Cassandra (1852) she also attacked the idleness forced on women of her class.

Susan B. Anthony (1820 to 1906): votes for women

Susan B. Anthony led the American campaign for women’s suffrage for over fifty years with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In November 1872 she voted in Rochester, New York, was arrested, and at her trial in 1873 was fined 100 dollars, which she refused to pay.

Most lists miss: the amendment that gave American women the vote in 1920, fourteen years after her death, was popularly called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Her 1869 stand against the Fifteenth Amendment included remarks about race that historians rightly criticise.

Savitribai Phule (1831 to 1897): schools for girls

Savitribai Phule, married as a child to Jotirao Phule, who taught her to read, opened a school for girls with him at Bhide Wada in Pune in January 1848 and became one of India’s first women teachers. They later opened schools for children of castes then barred from learning.

Most lists miss: in 1863 the Phules opened a home where widows and unmarried pregnant women could give birth safely, at a time when such women faced shame and their babies were at risk; they adopted one of the children, Yashwant. She died in 1897 after catching plague while caring for patients. A well-known tradition says she carried a spare sari because people threw mud at her on the way to school.

Harriet Tubman (about 1822 to 1913): leading people to freedom

Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1849 and went back about thirteen times to guide roughly seventy people, many of them family, to freedom. In the Civil War she was a Union scout and spy, and in June 1863 helped lead the Combahee River raid in South Carolina, which freed more than 700 enslaved people.

Most lists miss: the government was slow to pay her. She received a pension in 1899, at first as the widow of a soldier, Nelson Davis, and only later an increase recognising her own service. In her last years she spoke at women’s suffrage meetings.

Sarojini Naidu (1879 to 1949): women’s votes in India

Sarojini Naidu, the poet of The Golden Threshold, became a leading voice of the Indian National Congress and, in 1925, its first Indian woman president. She spoke across India for women’s education and against purdah and child marriage.

Most lists miss: in December 1917 she was part of a women’s delegation to Edwin Montagu, the British Secretary of State for India, asking for votes for Indian women. In May 1930, after the movement’s leader had been arrested, she led the non-violent salt protest at the Dharasana works.

Summary table: reformers, causes and dates

Project ideas using social reformers

• Same cause, two countries: compare Savitribai Phule’s schools with Abigail Adams’s arguments for women’s education. What did each want, and what stood in the way?
• Read the real speech: put Robinson’s 1851 report of Sojourner Truth beside Gage’s 1863 version and list every difference.
• Debate: stage the 1869 argument between Douglass and Anthony using their own words. The classroom debate guide gives a format.
• Interview practice: prepare questions for Frederick Douglass or Savitribai Phule and practise by voice on Yuga. The AI recreations are built from the reformers’ writings and the record, but they are not the real people and can be wrong, so quote primary sources, not the app.

More: Black History Month figures, Lincoln and Douglass and questions to ask Susan B. Anthony.