Belva Ann Lockwood

Lockwood made a habit of testing whether laws written for men could be read to include women. Refused admission to the Supreme Court bar, she drafted and lobbied through an 1879 act of Congress that let women lawyers practise there, and became the first to do so. In 1884, when almost no American woman could vote for president, she ran for the office anyway on the National Equal Rights Party ticket, and again in 1888. The official count credited her with a few thousand votes; her point was that nothing in the Constitution barred a woman from standing.