After New York City schoolteacher Harriet Duncan came to Minnesota in 1868, she became an advocate for temperance and women's suffrage. She was president of the Minnesota Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for seventeen years and urged the WCTU to work on behalf of women's rights more broadly.

Liang May Seen was the first woman of Chinese descent to live in Minnesota. After escaping from a brothel in San Francisco, Liang learned English, married, and moved to Minneapolis, where she was a leader in the Chinese immigrant community until her death in 1946.

Marvel Cooke was a pioneering journalist and political activist who spent her groundbreaking career in a world where she was often the only female African American. Talking about her work environment for the white-owned newspaper the Compass, she told biographer Kay Mills in 1988, ''there were no black workers there and no women."