Jennie Collins

Jane "Jennie" Collins (1828–1887) was an American labor reformer, humanitarian, and suffragist. Orphaned as a child, she supported herself at 14 by working in the cotton mills, and later as a domestic and a seamstress. She was active in the abolitionist and labor movements, volunteered in military hospitals during the Civil War, and founded a charity for poor working women in Boston. In 1870, at the invitation of Susan B. Anthony, she addressed the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington. The following year, she became one of the first working-class women in the United States to publish a volume of her own writings: Nature's Aristocracy; Or, Battles and Wounds in Time of Peace. A Plea for the Oppressed.