Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti

She trained as a teacher in Abeokuta and in England, returned to teach, and married the educationist and union leader Israel Ransome-Kuti. Her early organising began with a literacy and welfare club for market women, which grew into the Abeokuta Ladies' Club and then the Abeokuta Women's Union with a mass membership.

The union challenged the flat tax levied on market women, the arbitrary seizure of goods and the price controls of the late colonial period, using mass demonstrations, petitions and sustained pressure that led to the temporary abdication of the Alake of Egbaland in 1949 and to the removal of the tax. She founded the Nigerian Women's Union and the Federation of Nigerian Women's Societies, pressed for women's representation in the nationalist movement, travelled to international women's conferences and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. She was injured when soldiers attacked the Kalakuta compound of her son Fela Kuti in 1977 and died the following year.

The Abeokuta campaign is the standard example in Nigerian history of women's mass organisation forcing a change in colonial taxation, and the unions she founded shaped women's political organising for decades afterwards.