100 years ago Ohio ratified the 19th Amendment. Here are 6 women who made suffrage reality

You won't see these names and faces in most history books.

The woman's suffrage movement spanned decades, but much of that history is widely unknown.

On June 16, 1919, the Ohio General Assembly ratified the 19th Amendment – the fifth state to do so. The amendment reached the 36-state threshold on Aug. 18, 1920, with Tennessee's approval.

In advance of the 100th anniversary of the Ohio vote, The Enquirer set out to highlight a handful of Ohio women who were crucial to the suffrage movement.

RELATED:100 years later, Ohio's track record of electing female leaders remains abysmal

We found volumes. Yet details about their lives and work were not so easy to find.

There were the pioneer suffragists, who spoke in public about women's rights at a time when women didn't speak in public, period. There were suffragists that formed local women's organizations – the initial structure that made statewide campaigns possible.

We could go on.

Many of these women fought passionately for a cause they would never see realized. The women advocates on the tail end of the journey did see that change and many of them went on to remain involved in women's rights, some as politicians.

Here are six of those women.

Harriet Taylor Upton

Born: 1853

Died: 1945

Hometown: Warren

Harriet Taylor Upton's father was a Republican congressman. Upton was one of the first women elected to a local school board in 1898 after an 1894 law allowed women were to run for the office.

Upton was elected president of the Ohio Woman's Suffrage Association in 1899. Upton brought the headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to Warren, Ohio, in 1903. It would remain there until 1910.

Upton led the campaign to get women's suffrage into the Ohio Constitution at the 1912 constitutional convention. Only one congressional district passed the amendment and it failed in a popular vote with 57 percent voting against.

"I feel that if this campaign did nothing else and it did much else, it showed us what the real womanhood of the state of Ohio is and it also showed where women will stand and what they will do when they come into their inheritance," Upton said.

Upton was a Republican and was elected in 1920 as the first woman to become a vice chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Florence E. Allen 

Born: 1884

Died: 1966

Hometown: Cleveland

Allen, a graduate of Western Reserve University and New York University's law school, was a newspaper music critic, lawyer and suffragist in the early 20th century. 

Allen started her own law practice in Cleveland in 1914, at a time when women lawyers were rare.

Allen was active in the Women Suffrage Party. In 1911, Allen visited 66 of Ohio's 88 counties, speaking before farmers' groups and unions. She fundraised for the effort and helped collect petitions to put women's suffrage on the Ohio ballot.

In 1919, Allen, a Democrat, was appointed assistant prosecutor of Cuyahoga County. 

In 1922, the first election Ohio women could vote, Allen ran for the Ohio Supreme court. She was elected, becoming the first woman elected to any state supreme court. She set another precedent as the first woman judge to serve on a federal court when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934.

She served on the Sixth Circuit for 32 years.

Hallie Quinn Brown

Born: 1845

Died: 1949

Hometown: Wilberforce

Hallie Quinn Brown was born to freed slaves and moved to Wilberforce at a young age.

Brown graduated from Wilberforce University and took advanced courses in New York and Paris. She returned to Ohio to teach in Dayton public schools. She later taught at Central State University and Wilberforce and was dean of women at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Brown was a skilled public speaker who spoke about civil rights, temperance and women's suffrage. The three issues were intertwined. Many women's suffrage groups didn't welcome African-American women and some who worked on the cause in D.C. believed they could only win suffrage if they excluded African-American suffrage from the debate.

Brown helped found the National League of Colored Women in 1896, which joined others in 1896 to become the National Association of Colored Women. She was president of that organization from 1920 to 1924.

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem

Born: 1864

Died: 1940

Hometown: Toledo

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem grew up in Germany and moved to Toledo in 1887 at the age of 19 with her husband.

Steinem was the first woman elected to the Toledo school board, in 1904, and may have been the first Jewish woman to hold elected office in America.

She was active in the Toledo suffrage efforts and became president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association in 1908. As president she wrote to suffrage association chapters across the state, urging them to campaign for pro-suffrage delegates to the 1911 constitutional convention.

After the 1912 Ohio amendment failed, Steinem marched with thousands in the Women's Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C., the day before President-elect Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Steinem is the paternal grandmother of feminist Gloria Steinem.

Bettie Wilson

Born: 1850

Died: 1928

Hometown: Cincinnati

Bettie Wilson taught in the Cincinnati public schools for 40 years.

Wilson was elected in 1896 to the school board of Hartwell before it was annexed to Cincinnati – two years after women were allowed to serve on school boards.

She was an officer of the Hamilton County Suffrage Association from 1910 to 1920. 

Wilson was described as "a convincing speaker" who "never lost an opportunity to push the cause of suffrage" in the League of Women Voters of Ohio honor roll published in the 1930s. 

Sure enough, when she announced her retirement from Cincinnati public schools, she immediately followed with a call for her colleagues to join the suffrage movement, according to an April 1911 Cincinnati Enquirer article. 

She also unsuccessfully ran for the state House of Representatives twice.

Belle Sherwin

Born: 1869

Died: 1955

Hometown: Cleveland

Sherwin was a founder of the Consumers League of Ohio, which lobbied for fair wages and safe working conditions for women in the early 1900s. Sherwin's father, Henry Sherwin, was the founder of the Sherwin Williams Company.

During the 2012 campaign for the Ohio suffrage amendment, Sherwin was one of hundreds of suffragists who gave soap-box speeches while being heckled by anti-suffragists.

When the Cuyahoga County Woman's Suffrage party disbanded in April 1920, the Cleveland chapter of the League of Women Voters was formed. The league, which Sherwin helped lead, registered 41,416 women to vote by October 1920.

Sherwin was president of the National League of Women Voters from 1924 to 1934.

Sources: The Ohio History Connection, Ohio Supreme Court, "Women of Ohio" by Ruth Neely, "Buckeye Women" by Stephane Elise Booth, Cincinnati Enquirer archives, Library of Congress, "History of Woman Suffrage and League of Women Voters in Cuyahoga County 1911-1945" by Virginia Clark Abbott.

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