Hedy
Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress
and mathematician. She is often referred to as the most beautiful woman in
Europe, but she also had extraordinary mathematics skills. Along with composer
George Antheil, Lamarr invented an early technique for spread spectrum
communications and frequency hopping, which is pivotal for wireless
communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. She invented and
sold a communication technology to the US Navy that is still used by the entire
US military to this day as well as in WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and almost every
single modern communication device.
Marie
Curie
On December 10, 1903, Marie Curie became the first woman
(along with her husband,
Pierre) to receive the Nobel prize. The discoverer of radium and polonium
coined the term radioactivity to describe the elements' radiation of alpha,
bate and gamma rays. In 1911, five years after her husband's death, she became
the first person to win a second Nobel prize, for further work on radioactive
elements. Curie also invented the mobile X-ray unit. These "Little
Curies" were simply Renault cars outfitted with x-ray machines, driven
onto the battlefields of World War I. Although she had never driven a car
before the war, Curie even drove one herself. A champion of radiation's
curative potential, she died of side effects from her years of exposure to
radioactive elements.
Jane Addams
Jane Addams was a pioneer settlement
worker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher, sociologist,
author, and leader in woman suffrage and world peace. She said that if women
were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better
places to live, they needed the vote to be effective in doing so. Addams became
a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their
communities. She is increasingly recognized as a member of the American
pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1931 she became the first American woman to
be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Elizabeth
Blackwell:
First American woman awarded a medical degree
by a college. Attended Geneva College in New York after she was rejected by all
the major medical schools in the nation because of her sex. Elizabeth Blackwell
later founded a women’s medical college to train other women physicians. She
was a pioneer in promoting the education of women in medicine in the United
States.
Belva
Ann Lockwood
This amazing woman was as American
attorney, politician, educator, author and woman’s rights activist. She was one
of the first female lawyers in the United States, and in 1879 she successfully
petitioned congress to be allowed to practice before the Supreme Court, making
her the first woman attorney given this privilege. Lockwood ran for president
twice, and was the first woman to
appear on official ballots.
Amelia
Earhart:
Amelia Earhart was an American author and
aviation pioneer. As the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean,
she opened the skies to other women. In 1937 while attempting to become the
first person to fly around the world, Earhart’s plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.
Helen Keller
A childhood disease left her deaf, mute, and
blind. Helen Keller became an expert author and lecturer, educating nationally
on behalf of others with similar disabilities. She campaigned for women’s
suffrage and labor rights, and in 1971 she was inducted into the Alabama
Women’s Hall of Fame.
Lucille
Ball
Lucille Ball was an American comedienne,
model, film and television actress and Executive. One of the most popular and
influential stars in the United States during her lifetime, she had one of
Hollywood's longest careers, especially on television. Ball became the first
woman to run a major television studio, Desilu, which produced many successful
and popular television series.
Rachel
Carson
Rachel Carson was an American marine
biologist, writer and naturalist, who is famous for advancing the global
environmental movement through her writings. She is regarded as one of the most
influential people of the 20th century, and was posthumously awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter.
Emily
Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was an American poet. Born in
Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she
lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst
Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke
Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of
as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing
and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most
of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.
Grace
Hopper
If you are reading this, thank this woman. Her
name is Grace Hopper, and she is one of the most under appreciated computer
scientists ever. You think Gates and Jobs were cool? THIS WOMEN WORKED ON
COMPUTERS WHEN THEY TOOK UP ROOMS. She invented the first compiler, which is a
program that translates a computer language like Java or C++ into machine code,
called assembly, that can be read by a processor. Every single program you use,
every OS and server, was made possible by her first compiler.
Margaret
Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth
control activist, sex educator, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term birth
control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and
established Planned Parenthood. Sanger's efforts contributed to the landmark
U.S. Supreme Court case which legalized contraception in the United States.
Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of birth control and has
also been criticized for supporting eugenics, but remains an iconic figure in
the American reproductive rights movement.
Maya
Angelou
Born April 4, 1928, Dr. Maya Angelou is one of
the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global
renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist,
educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights
activist. Dr. Angelou has received over 30 honorary doctorate degrees, and
President Bill Clinton even requested that she compose and read a poem at his
inauguration in 1993.
Clara
Barton
The founder of the Red Cross found her calling
during the Civil War, when she worked with wounded soldiers as a volunteer. She
organized a search for missing soldiers after the war, then turned her
attention to Europe from 1869-1873, opening hospitals during the
Franco-Prussian War. When the American Red Cross society formed in 1881, she
was elected its president, filling that post until 1904. As a delegate to the
1884 International Peace Convention in Geneva, she secured worldwide
recognition of the Red Cross as a neutral provider of wartime and peacetime
disaster relief. Among the Red Cross relief efforts she supervised were those
during the Spanish-American War, after the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood
and during the Boer War in South Africa.
Mary
Leakey
This English archaeologist and scientific
illustrator enjoyed a lifetime of professional success. Walking near Lake
Victoria in 1948, Mary Douglas Leakey discovered the ancient skeleton of a
primitive ape. With cameras rolling in 1959, she uncovered the skull of
Australopithecus, a hominid 1.75 million years old, at Olduvai Gorge. Later,
she found jaws and teeth with human characteristics in creatures that were more
than 3.75 million years old. Finally, in 1976, a few miles south of Olduvai
Gorge, she located the fossilized footprints of human ancestors and asserted
that they had walked upright 3.6 million years ago.
Juliette
Gordon Low
Juliette Low was the Founder of the Girl
Scouts of America. Nicknamed Daisy" as a child, she was an accomplished
artist known for her sense of humor and love of pets. Juliette lost most of her
hearing due to accidents. Meeting Lord Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts)
in England, she became excited about his programs and told her sister,
"I've got something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all
the world, and we're going to start it tonight!" The Girl Scouts brought
girls of all backgrounds and abilities together, helping them develop
self-reliance and resourcefulness. The Girl Scouts also helped prepare young
women for possible future roles as professional women-in the arts, sciences and
business-and for active citizenship outside the home.
Judith
Arlene Resnik
Judith was an American engineer and a NASA
astronaut who died in the destruction of Space Shuttle Challenger during the
launch of mission STS-51-L.
Resnik was
the second American female astronaut, logging 145 hours in orbit. She was a
graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the
University of Maryland. The IEEE Judith
Resnik Award for space engineering is named in her honor.
Susan
B. Anthony:
The 19th century women’s movement’s most
powerful organizer. Together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony
fought for women’s right to vote. She was also very involved in the fight
against slavery and the
temperance campaign to limit the use of alcohol.
Dr. Sally Ride:
Sally Kristen Ride was an American
physicist and astronaut. Ride joined NASA in 1978, and, at the age of 32,
became the first American woman in space. She left NASA in 1987 to work at
Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control. She
served on the committees investigating the nation's two space shuttle disasters
(Challenger and Columbia), becoming the only person to serve on both panels.
She founded a company, Sally Ride Science, in 2001. She co-authored six
children's science books with her life partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy.
Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to be launched into space.
Amalie Emmy
Noether
Emily Noether was a German mathematician whose
innovations in higher algebra gained her recognition as the most creative
abstract algebraist of modern times. Noether was described by Albert Einstein,
among others, as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. She
also well-known for her groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics.
Ayn
Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist,
philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She wrote two best-selling novels,
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged; although she is most widely recognized as
the creator of the philosophical system she called Objectivism.
Beverly
Cleary
Beverly Cleary is an American author,
who worked as a librarian before writing children’s books. In 1981 she won the
National Book Award, and in 1984 she won the Newberry Medal. Cleary has sold
over 91 million copies of her books worldwide, and she is known as one of America’s most successful authors.
Eleanor
Roosevelt:
As a champion of human rights, she strove to
further women’s causes as well as the causes of black people, poor people, and
the unemployed.
Harriet
Tubman
Harriet
Tubman was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during
the Civil War. She escaped from slavery in the South, and led hundreds of
bondsmen to freedom in the North along the route of the Underground Railroad—an
elaborate secret network of safe houses organized for that purpose.
Florence
Nightingale
Florence Nightingale was a celebrated English
social worker and statistician, although she is best known as the founder of
modern nursing. She came to prominence while serving as a nurse during the
Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The
Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night. In 1860,
Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment
of her nursing school at St.
Thomas’ Hospital in London; it was the first secular nursing school in the world.
Susan
Faludi
No one has done more in the past two decades
to challenge lazy, irresponsible and misogynistic journalism and encourage us
to challenge the supposedly mainstream consensus about women's status in
society than Susan Faludi.
Social historian, political analyst, and fact
checker extraordinaire, her books are immaculately researched, sourced and
beautifully written. Backlash shredded anti-female panics over such statistical
fabrications as whether college educated women over 30 were more likely to die
in a terrorist attack than marry. She exposed the human cost of recent economic
policy to ordinary men in Stiffed, and the re-writing of 9/11 heroism in The
Terror Dream.Every time we challenge a nonsense statistic in the papers or on
the news, it was the inspirational Faludi who really paved the way.
Sonia
Sotomayor
When President Obama announced his nomination
of Sonia Sotomayor to the supreme court in 2009, he said she had "lived
out the American dream." Born in the Bronx, the daughter of Puerto Rican
immigrants, Sotomayor and her brother were brought up in the housing projects
by her mother after her father died when she was nine. Sotomayor's mother put
great value on her children's education, buying the only set of encyclopedias
in the neighborhood, and her daughter went first to Princeton, then to Yale Law
School, where her careful opinions are now taught. Apart from a period in
private practice in the 80s, Sotomayor has worked for years in public service,
as a trial judge and then at the court of appeals. Now one of three women on
the supreme court, and its first Hispanic justice, Sotomayor has brought her
real-world experience to her careful rule-of-law opinions. Sotomayor is the
Court's 111th justice, its first Hispanic justice, and its third female
justice.
Brenda Hale
Trailblazer and troublemaker Brenda Hale was
the first woman and the youngest judge to become a law lord, and is currently
the only female justice of the UK supreme court. Calling herself a
"softline" feminist, she has campaigned to increase the diversity of
the judiciary, worked to overhaul family law, and to protect victims of
domestic violence. Savaged by the right-wing press for trying to bring in a
no-fault divorce, in the 80's she wrote the first comprehensive survey of
women's rights at work, in the family and the state, and was instrumental in
introducing the Children's Act 1989 – the most important piece of legislation
in the UK protecting children.
As well as speaking out about the exclusive
way judges are picked, Hale, 66, is not above fighting small skirmishes: after
dinner in judge's lodges she, along with a female barrister, refused to
withdraw to another room while the men continued their port and conversation.
As one panelist marveled: "She's a real troublemaker. She's brilliant."
Cerrie
Burnell
Cerrie Burnell didn't receive the
friendliest welcome from some parents when she became the new presenter of the
BBC's children's channel, CBeebies, in January 2009. Some parents complained on
a BBC message board that the 30-year-old – who was born with no lower right arm
– frightened their children, others said that she should cover her arm with a
long sleeve. Burnell refused, and she tackled the comments head on in the
ensuing controversy. "If anything, it made me think it's even more
important to raise the profile of disability in a positive way," she said
in an interview with this paper. "Just get up, get out there and do
something that has nothing to do with disability and let people see you."
A single mother, she has also championed the experience of lone parenting, and
mothering in particular.
Eleanor
Ann Ormerod
In the nineteenth century, the new science of
biology gave rise to various sub-disciplines, including economic entomology.
The first woman to work as a professional entomologist, Eleanor Ormerod,
specialized in this field. By making observations on her father's English
estate, she became an authority on insect infestation, often testifying in
court as an expert, but unpaid, witness on contaminated food shipments. She
devised many methods for pest control, such as pruning, burning and
applications of chemicals, oils and kerosene.
Lynn
Margulis
Lynn Margulis was an American biologist and
University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. She is best known for her theory on the origin of
eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, which
is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed. She showed
that animals, plants, and fungi all originated from protists. She is also
associated with the Gaia hypothesis, based on an idea developed by the English
environmental scientist James Lovelock.
Ada
Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of
Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an
English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles
Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her
notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended
to be processed by a machine. Because of this, she is often considered the
world's first computer programmer.
Madonna
Born Madonna Louise Ciccone in
Rochester, Michigan, Madonna studied dance at the Univerity of Michigan. After
working briefly in Paris as a backup singer for a French disco star, she moved
to Manhattan, where he was a drummer for the Breakfast Club and lead singer for
Emmy, two new-wave groups. a demo tape cut with Emmy earned Madonna a contract
with Sire records, wich released her first album in 1983. Since that smash-hit
debut she's remained st the top, despite controversy and criticism. A
consummate entrepreneur and entertainer, Madonna just keeps coming back, in
different guise and with different musical styles.
Belle Boyd
A Confederate spy during the Civil War, Belle
Boyd worked as a courier for both General Beauregard and General Jackson. In
1862 she delivered information to Jackson that allowed him to retake a
Union-held city. She was captured in 1865 by the Union army and imprisoned.
Ellen
Key
With her book The Century of the Child
(1900), Swedish feminist and educator Ellen Key stirred controversy and
profoundly influenced education in many countries. She proposed that education
should serve the promise and problems of individual children rather than the
demands of society or religion. Key's liberal thinking also extended to women's rights,
pacifism and the relations between the
sexes.
Jackie
Joyner-Kersee
Jackie Joyner-Kersee is a retired American
athlete who starred in both track & field and basketball at the University
of California at Los Angeles. She eventually won three gold, one silver, and
two bronze Olympic medals, and is ranked among the all-time greatest athletes
in the women’s heptathlon and long jump. She was also voted The Greatest Female
Athlete of the 20 century by Sports Illustrated for Women magazine.
Rita
Levi-Montalcini
Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian
neurologist. She decided to attend medical school, overcoming the objections of
her father who believed that “a professional career would interfere with the
duties of a wife and mother.” Levi-Montalcini and her colleague Stanley Cohen
received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve
Growth Factor (NGF) in 1986. She had been the oldest living Nobel laureate and
the first to ever reach a 100th birthday.
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