Leona Huntzinger was born on February 3, 1881, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was working in a lace mill factory in Philadelphia when she met Elizabeth Hopkinson. They became close friends and possibly lovers. Huntzinger moved in as a boarder in the Hopkinson home, where she essentially became a member of the family. They worked in the mills for more than fifteen years before becoming suffrage activists. In 1915, the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Organization temporarily hired Huntzinger as a suffrage organizer representing working women. 

In May 1916, the two women moved to Chicago, where they found temporary employment as housekeepers and lived in a boarding house with other domestic service workers. Huntzinger and Hopkinson made the decision to head back east when offered new job opportunities as suffrage speakers with the New York State Suffrage Association. They toured the state in a car, delivering suffrage speeches out of the back seat during the day and sleeping in the car at night.  

After their suffrage work, Huntzinger and Hopkinson purchased Three Springs Farm in Bacton, Pennsylvania. By 1930, they had adopted four young boys (aged 7 to 13), who lived and worked with them on the farm. Huntzinger passed away on August 13, 1937, at the age of 56. 

For more on Hopkinson, see Michelle Katherine Pettine Moravec and Hope Smalley, “Stunts and Sensationalism: The Pennsylvania Progressive-Era Campaign for Women’s Suffrage,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 87, no. 4 (Autumn 2020): 631–656; Wendy Rouse, Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2022). For an OutHistory exhibit that addresses Huntzinger, see The Queer History of Women's Suffrage: Scholarship and Censorship in 2025, by Wendy Rouse.