Anna J. Cooper

Born into slavery in North Carolina, Cooper became a Washington school principal and, at 66, earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne. A Voice from the South (1892) argued that Black women faced both a "woman question" and a "race problem", and that white suffragists and Black male leaders each ignored half of her situation. It anticipates the later idea of intersectionality by nearly a century, and makes a natural pairing with Kimberlé Crenshaw further down.