Top 10 Facts You Didn’t Know about the 19 th Century Suffragette and Mountaineer Annie hung a “Votes for Women” banner on Mount Coropuna in Peru at the age of 61 years old. It had taken her five attempts over four years and she was the first person to do it. She later referred to the experience as a ‘horrible nightmare’. She never married and never had children. She did one of the few things open to women at the time: became a teacher, graduating from Rhode Island Normal School, (a teaching establishment) in 1872. Keen to continue, she wanted to apply to Brown University, like her brothers and father before her. She was refused admission because she was a woman. She moved to Michigan to teach languages and maths at Saginaw High School – during which she decided she wanted more. She wanted to go to university. Her father was appalled, telling her it was ‘perfect folly’ for her to consider doing so at the grand old age of 27 years old. Annie wasn’t having it and wrote to him telling him so. Impressed by her determination, her father acquiesced, and Annie enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1875 (it had only recently begun accepting female students), achieving a degree in Greek in three years, followed by a Masters in 1881.