Lucretia is a legendary figure in the history of the Roman Republic. According to the story, told mainly by the Roman historian Livy and the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (who lived in Rome at the time of the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus), her rape by the king's son and consequent suicide were the immediate cause of the revolution that overthrew the monarchy and established the Roman Republic.

The incident kindled the flames of dissatisfaction over the tyrannical methods of the last king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. As a result, the prominent families instituted a republic, drove the extensive Tarquin family from Rome, and successfully defended the republic against attempted Etruscan and Latin intervention. The rape has been a major theme in European art and literature.

The beginning of the Republic is marked by the first appearance of the two consuls elected on a yearly basis. The Romans recorded events by consular year, keeping an official list in various forms called the fasti, used by Roman historians. The list and its events are authentic as far as can be known although debatable problems with many parts of it do exist.

Lucretia Coffin Mott (January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and a social reformer.

Lucretia Coffin was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the second child of six by Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin. At the age of thirteen, she was sent to the Nine Partners Quaker Boarding School in what is now Millbrook, Dutchess County, New York, which was run by the Society of Friends. There she became a teacher after graduation. Her interest in women's rights began when she discovered that male teachers at the school were paid three times as much as the female staff. After her family moved to Philadelphia, she and James Mott, another teacher at Nine Partners, followed.

On April 10, 1811, Lucretia Coffin married James Mott at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia. They had six children. Their second child, Thomas Coffin, died at age two. Their surviving children all became active in the anti-slavery and other reform movements.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman's rights and woman's suffrage movements in the United States.

Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she was an active abolitionist together with her husband, Henry Brewster Stanton and cousin, Gerrit Smith. Unlike many of those involved in the woman's rights movement, Stanton addressed various issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights. Her concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce laws, the economic health of the family, and birth control. She was also an outspoken supporter of the 19th-century temperance movement.

After the American Civil War, Stanton's commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the woman's rights movement when she, together with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while women, black and white, were denied those same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that were finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, approximately twenty years after her break from the original women's suffrage movement.