Annie Heloise Abel (1873–1947)

Annie Heloise Abel was born in Sussex, England and at age 12, followed her family to emigrate to the USA. They settled in Salina, Kansas, where she graduated from high school in 1893 and began teaching in public schools. A couple of years later, she enrolled in the University of Kansas and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and earned an M.A. in history. After again teaching for a few years in order to make money for her graduate studies, Abel began a doctoral degree at Cornell University and completed it at Yale. Annie was among the first cohort of women to earn doctorates in history in the USA. She soon became well-known for her scholarship on Native American history.
Several of her books were published by the University of Nebraska Press.

In 1906, she took a position as an instructor at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, rising to full professor and head of the history department in six years. It was at Goucher that she became involved with the women's suffrage movement.

As president of the Maryland branch of the College Suffrage League, one of the groups associated with the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she encouraged student understanding and participation in the suffrage movement at area colleges. She vigorously debated opponents of the suffrage movement in public and held parlor talks on the topic.

In 1913, she organized the Goucher contingent of 100 students who marched in the National Woman’s Party parade in Washington, D.C., the first major suffrage spectacle organized by the NAWSA.
Annie left Goucher in 1916 and took a position at Smith College in Massachusetts. Subsequently, she accepted a fellowship in Australia in order to study indigenous groups there. She was briefly married to George Henderson, a professor of English at Adelaide University. When she returned to the USA, she taught at several colleges and universities before retiring to the family home in Aberdeen, Washington.