Some Women with
Unitarian and Universalist
Connections

Listed in order of their birth years. American unless otherwise indicated.

• Anne Bradstreet 1612-1672 Nonconformist
  (poet, writer; descendents include Unitarians William Ellery Channing, Wendell Phillips, Oliver Wendell Holmes)

• Anna Laetitia Aiken Barbauld 1743-1825 Unitarian (British)
  (activist, poet -more-)

• Judith Sargent Murray 1751-1820 Universalist
  (poet and author; wrote essay on feminism: 1790 "On the Equality of the Sexes" (Rossi, 1973))

• Mary Wollstonecraft 1759-1797 Unitarian; married Unitarian minister
  (author, wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" 1792, and Maria or the Wrongs of Woman; daughter was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author.)

• Mary Moody Emerson 1774-1863 Unitarian
  (writer; many of her unpublished writings foreshadow the ideas of her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• Maria Cook 1779-1835 Universalist
  (jailed after preaching Universalism)

• Lucy Barnes 1780-1809 Universalist
  (Universalist writer, poet)

• Eliza Lee Cabot Follen 1787-1860 Unitarian
  (children's author, abolitionist; she, with husband Charles Follen, Harvard German instructor, introduced the Christmas tree custom to America)

• Eliza Farrar 1791-1870 Quaker, Unitarian
  (children's author, abolitionist)

• Lucretia Mott 1793-1880 Quaker, Free Religious Association
  (reformer: abolition, feminism, peace, temperance, liberal religion; cousin of Phebe Hanaford)

• Frederika Bremer 1801-1865 Unitarian (Swedish)
  (novelist, feminist, pacifist)

• Harriet Martineau 1802-1876 British Unitarian
  (writer, social critic, journalist, feminist)

• Lydia Maria Francis Child 1802-1880 Unitarian
  (author, abolitionist, reformer; wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans and "Over the River and Through the Woods")

• Dorothea Lynde Dix 1802-1887 Unitarian
  (mental health reformer, prison reformer, poet)

• Elizabeth Palmer Peabody 1804-1894 Unitarian, Transcendentalist
  (teacher, author, reformer; sister to Mary Peabody Mann and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne; close associate of William Ellery Channing)

• Sarah Flower Adams 1805-1848 Unitarian (British)
  (hymn writer: Nearer My God to Thee)

• Mary Tyler Peabody Mann 1806-1887 Unitarian
  (educator; also married to Horace Mann and sister to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne)

• Maria Weston Chapman 1806-1885 Unitarian
  (abolitionist)

• Mary Carpenter 1807-1877 Unitarian (British)
  (abolitionist, teacher, juvenile justice reformer)

• Sophia Peabody Hawthorne 1809-1871 Unitarian
  (author and writer; also married to Nathaniel Hawthorne and sister to Elizabeth Parker Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann)

• Fanny Kemble 1809-1893 Unitarian (British)
  (poet, Shakespearean actress; author of "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39")

• Margaret Fuller 1810-1850 Unitarian, Transcendentalist

• Elizabeth Gaskell 1810-1865 Unitarian
  (writer, reformer, also wife of Unitarian minister William Gaskell)

• Ellen Sturgis Hooper 1812-1848 Transcendentalist Unitarian
  (poet, sister of Caroline Sturgis Tappan)

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902 Unitarian
  (suffragist, organizer, writer, co-author of The Woman's Bible, mother of Harriot Stanton Blatch)

• Lydia Moss Bradley 1816-1908 Unitarian and Universalist
  (educator, philanthropist, founded Bradley University)

• Charlotte Saunders Cushman 1816-1876 Unitarian
  (actor)

• Lucy Stone 1818-1893 Unitarian
  (feminist, suffragist, abolitionist; married Henry Brown Blackwell whose sisters were Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Blackwell and whose brother Samuel Blackwell married Antoinette Brown Blackwell. Mother of Alice Stone Blackwell.)

• Sallie Holley 1818-1893 Unitarian
  (abolitionist, educator)

• Maria Mitchell 1818-1889 Unitarian
  (astronomer (portrait))

• Caroline Sturgis Tappan 1819-1868 Transcendentalist Unitarian
  (poet, children's author, sister of Ellen Sturgis Hooper)

• Julia Ward Howe 1819-1910 Unitarian, Free Religious Association
  (writer, poet, abolitionist, social reformer; author of Battle Hymn of the Republic; promoter of Mother's Day for Peace; mother of Laura E. Richards and married to Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins School for the Blind, researcher)

• Lydia Pinkham 1819-1883 Universalist (eclectic)
  (patent medicine inventor, businesswoman, advertising writer, advice columnist)

• Florence Nightingale 1820-1910 British Unitarian
  (nurse; founded nursing as a modern profession; mathematician: invented the pie chart)

• Mary Ashton Rice Livermore 1820-1905
  (lecturer, suffragist, temperance advocate, helped organize Civil War Sanitary Commission)

• Susan Brownell Anthony 1820-1906 Unitarian and Quaker
  (reformer, suffragist)

• Alice Cary1820-1871 Universalist
  (author, poet, abolitionist, suffragist; sister of Phoebe Cary)

• Clara Barton 1821-1912 Universalist
  (Red Cross founder)

• Elizabeth Blackwell 1821-1910 Unitarian and Episcopalian
  (physician, sister of Emily Blackwell, of Samuel Blackwell, married to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and of Henry Blackwell, married to Lucy Stone)

• Caroline Wells Healey Dall 1822-1912 Unitarian
  (reformer, author)

• Frances Power Cobbe 1822-1904 Unitarian (British)
  (feminist, anti-vivisectionist)

• Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz 1822-1907 Unitarian
  (scientist, author, educator, first president of Radcliffe College; married to Louis Agassiz)

• Sarah Hammond Palfrey 1823-1914
  (writer; daughter of John Gorham Palfrey

• Phoebe Cary 1824-1871 Universalist
  (poet, abolitionist, suffragist; sister of Alice Cary)

• Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney 1824-1904 Universalist, Unitarian, Free Religious Association
  (civil rights activist, suffragist, editor)

• Antoinette Brown Blackwell 1825-1921 Congregational and Unitarian minister
  (minister, author, lecturer: first woman ordained as a Protestant minister in the US by a "recognized denomination"; later married Samuel Blackwell, brother of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and of Henry Blackwell, married to Lucy Stone)

• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 1825-1911 Unitarian
  (writer, poet, abolitionist, feminist, temperance advocate) [portrait]

• Emily Blackwell 1826-1910 Unitarian
  (physician, sister of Elizabeth Blackwell, of Samuel Blackwell, married to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and of Henry Blackwell, married to Lucy Stone)

• Matilda Joslyn Gage 1826-1898 Unitarian
  (suffragist, reformer; her daughter Maud married L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz.) (Gage retained her membership in the Baptist church; later became a Theosophist.)

• Maria Cummins 1827-1866 Unitarian
  (author)

• Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon 1827-1891Unitarian (British)
  (feminist)

• Phebe Ann Coffin Hanaford 1829-1921 Universalist
  (minister, author, poet, suffragist; cousin of Lucretia Mott)

• Abigail May Williams 1829-1888

• Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 Transcendentalist
  (poet; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Unitarian minister, was an important figure in her career.]

• Helen Hunt Jackson 1830-1885 Transcendentalist
  (author; proponent of Indian rights) (no church connection as an adult)

• Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888 Transcendentalist
  (author, poet; best known for Little Women)

• Jane Andrews 1833-1887 Unitarian
  (educator, children's author)

• Rebecca Sophia Clarke 1833 -1906 Unitarian
  (children's author)

• Annie Adams Field 1834-1915 Unitarian
  (author, literary hostess, charity worker; married to James Fields, editor of the Atlantic; after his death lived with Sarah Orne Jewitt, author)

• Olympia Brown 1835-1926 Universalist
  (minister, suffragist)

• Augusta Jane Chapin 1836-1905 Universalist
  (minister, activist; one of the chief organizers of the Parliament of the World's Religions, 1893, especially of participation of many women of a variety of faiths in this event.)

• Ada C. Bowles 1836-1928 Universalist
  (suffragist, abolitionist, temperance supporter, home economist)

• Fanny Baker Ames 1840-1931 Unitarian
  (charity organizer; suffragist, teacher; leader of the Unitarian Women's Auxiliary Conference)

• Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot 1843-1929 Unitarian
  (author, reformer; father-in-law was William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister and founder of Washington University, St. Louis; son was T.S. Eliot, poet)

• Eliza Tupper Wilkes 1844-1917

• Emma Eliza Bailey 1844-1920 Universalist
  (Universalist minister)

• Celia Parker Woolley 1848-1919 Unitarian, Free Religious Association
  (minister, social reformer)

• Anna Garlin Spencer 1851-1931 Free Religious Association
  (minister, writer, educator, NAACP founder, social reformer; also wife of Unitarian minister William B. Spencer) (associated with Unitarian, Universalist and Ethical Culture congregations, she did not consider herself a "member" of these but identified with the broader "free religion")

• Mary Augusta Safford 1851-1927 Unitarian
  (minister)

• Eleanor Elizabeth Gordon 1852-1942 Unitarian
  (minister)

• Maud Howe Elliott 1854-1948 Unitarian
  (author, social reformer; daughter of Julia Ward Howe)

• Maria Baldwin 1856-1922 Unitarian
  (educator, reformer, first African American woman principal)

• Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch 1856-1940 Unitarian
  (suffragist; daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton)

• Alice Stone Blackwell 1857-1950 Unitarian
  (suffragist, reformer; daughter of Lucy Stone & Henry Brown Blackwell)

• Fannie Farmer 1857-1915 Unitarian (and Universalist?)
  (cookbook author, teacher of cooking and dietetics; first to write recipes with exact measurements)

• Ida C. Hultin 1858-1938 Unitarian and Universalist
  (minister; spoke at 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions)

• Caroline Julia Bartlett Crane 1858-1935 Unitarian
  (minister, social reformer, sanitation reformer)

• Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman Catt 1859-1947 Unitarian connections
  (suffragist, pacifist, founder of League of Women Voters)

• Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman 1860-1935 Unitarian
  (feminist, author of Herland, The Yellow Wallpaper speaker)

• Jane Addams 1860-1935 Presbyterian
  (social reformer, settlement house founder; author, Twenty Years at Hull House) (attended All Souls' Unitarian Church in Chicago and the Ethical Culture Society in Chicago for many years; was briefly an Interim Lecturer at the Ethical Society; retained her membership in a Presbyterian congregation)

• Florence Buck 1860-1925 Unitarian
  (minister, religious educator, writer)

• Kate Cooper Austin1864-1902 Universalist, freethinker
  (feminist, anarchist, writer)

• Alice Ames Winter 1865-1944 Unitarian
  (Woman's Club leader, author; daugher of Fanny Baker Ames)

• Beatrix Potter 1866-1943 Unitarian (British)
  (artist, author; wrote Peter Rabbit series)

• Emily Greene Balch 1867-1920 Unitarian, Quaker
  (1946 Nobel Prize for Peace; economist, pacifist, a founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom)

• Katherine Philips Edson 1870-1933 Unitarian
  (suffragist, reformer, labor arbitrator)

• (Sara) Josephine Baker 1873-1945 Unitarian
  (health reformer, physician, public health administrator)

• Amy Lowell 1874-1925 Unitarian
  (poet)

• Edna Madison McDonald Bonser 1875-1949 Universalist
  (minister, religious educator; first woman minister in Illinois)

• Clara Cook Helvie 1876-1969
  (minister)

• Sophia Lyon Fahs 1876-1978 Unitarian Universalist
  (religious educator, minister)

• Ida Maud Cannon 1877-1960 Unitarian
  (social worker; known as founder of medical social work)

• Margaret Sanger 1883-1966
  (birth control advocate, social reformer)

• Marjorie M. Brown 1884-1987 Unitarian
  (author, Lady in Boomtown)

• Maja V. Capek 1888-1966 Unitarian (Czechoslovakian)
  (Unitarian minister; helped create the Flower Communion and introduce it to Unitarians in America and Europe)

• Margaret Barr 1897? - 1973 Unitarian (British)
  (educator, administrator, helped create Unitarian church movement in Khasi Hills, India; friend of Gandhi)

• May Sarton 1912-1995 Unitarian Universalist
  (poet, author)

• Sylvia Plath
  (poet)

• Malvina Reynolds
  (songwriter, folksinger)

• Frances Moore Lappe'
  (author, nutritionist, activist: wrote Diet for a Small Planet)

• Jewel Graham Unitarian Universalist
  (social welfare educator; President, World YWCA)

• Samantha Smith 1973? - 1985 Unitarian Universalist
  goodwill ambassador: wrote peace letter to Andropov and visited USSR

Some additional sources: