When Wanda Sobieski was in high school, the entire section on women’s history in her textbook consisted of one sentence: In 1920, Congress gave women the right to vote.

“Which was not true! It came as a result of a 72-year battle,” Sobieski explains. “Years later, I was horrified to realize we had no idea what had made such an important change in the whole voting system in our country. The 19th Amendment is an enormously important story because it was the single biggest social-political change in the history of the country—and it was non-violent. We more than doubled the electorate. A century later, most of the story is already forgotten.”

There’s so much to this story that the cause of faithfully archiving, celebrating and honoring this monumental era in women’s history has become a lifetime crusading passion for Sobieski. The first female partner in the hundred-year history of the law firm Baker, Worthington, Crossley, Stansberry & Woolf (now Baker Donelson), she later founded Sobieski, Messer & Associates. She and her husband, UT College of Law Professor Emeritus John Sobieski (former Associate Dean and Acting Dean of the Law School) have three children and five grandchildren.

While building her legal career and raising a family, Sobieski founded the nonprofit Suffrage Coalition in 1995 to locate and preserve the history of the local suffrage movement. Their work keeps the stories of sacrifice and triumph alive through projects like The Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial, honoring three Tennessee suffrage leaders, and the Burn Memorial, honoring legislator Harry T. Burn and his mother, Febb Burn.