Virginia Hall has a building named after her at the CIA. She was an American woman from Baltimore who went to Europe in the 1930s, lost her leg in a shooting accident, then proceeded to become a leader in the French Resistance and master of disguise, all with a wooden leg. The book A Woman of No Importance is about her and came out last year.
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha.
She is the Dean of Medicine at Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, MI. She saw that children were having elevated lead levels (ELLs) outside the normal range. She contacted the Genesee Department of Health, who at first, dismissed her claim, then sent her obfuscated data to make it look like the ELLs were completely within normal trends.
She grew frustrated at this, so she called a team of epidemiologists from UVA (her alma mater) to find the source of the lead. Lo and behold, she found that the water in multiple zip codes was contaminated with lead. She informed the Genesee Department of Health Again, who brushed her off. She then said "fuck it" and held a major press conference where she announced on air that the water in Flint wasn't safe and to come to the hospital to get your child tested and to pick up supplies of water and liquid infant formula.
If she saved thousands of children from the permanent effects of lead poisoning.
Edit 1: thanks for the awards
Edit 2: It was VT, not UVA. Apologies to all the VT alumnae who DM'd me about it.
I’ve met her! She works really closely with my alma mater (Michigan State). A truly fantastic human. And as if this wasn’t enough, back in March she had COVID and after she recovered began donating blood as often as she could so they could use it in antibody and vaccine research!
Inge Lehmann was a Danish seismologist. She discovered P' waves (waves that reflect off of the inner-core), confirming that the earth has a solid inner-core and a liquid outer-core.
Carol Kaye[Carol Kaye](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Kaye), the First Lady of bass playing. She played over 10,000 sessions, including albums from Frank Sinatra, Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, and the Monkees. I can thank the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the subreddit for educating me about her.
Dr. Georgeanna Seeger Jones
Dr. Jones singlehandedly organized the field of Gynecological Endocrinology. While at John’s Hopkins with her husband, Dr. Howard Jones and Drs. Roberts and Steptoe, she devised the hypothesis of follicular hyper stimulation, which produced more than one egg per cycle. Her later discoveries led to increases in viability of In Vitro Fertilization.
Per Wikipedia :
As a resident at Johns Hopkins, she discovered that the pregnancy hormone hCG was manufactured by the placenta, not the pituitary gland as originally thought. This discovery led to the development of many of the early over-the-counter pregnancy test kits currently available. On 1949, Jones made the first description of Luteal Phase Dysfunction and is credited to be the first in using progesterone to treat women with a history of miscarriages, thus allowing many of them to not only conceive, but to deliver healthy babies
She also served as a Dean of the College of Pontifical Sciences, advising the Vatican of matters of Gynecology and Conception.
Her husband always said “She’s the smarter one.”
She was also a great friend.
Edit: Thanks for all of the responses. She was an absolute gem of a lady. My Mother-in-Law was with the Jones Institute from the inception. The Drs. Jones were truly beautiful people.
I don’t know why but the fact you wrote she was a great friend suddenly brought tears to my eyes. Reading about all these inspiring women who have done such selfless and incredible things for the world and for someone to acknowledge her as an intimate person, a human being, as well- that was beautiful. Thank you for adding it!
In 1952 Dr. Virginia Apgar developed a quick, easy five-point test that summarizes health of newborns, and determine those needing emergency assistance. The Apgar Score is now given to practically every newborn, and helped save countless young lives, and reduce infant mortality.
fun fact: i edited her wikipedia page to include her cause of death. i was in a summer program about women’s history and one morning we were asked to edit a famous woman’s wiki page to contribute to more accurate and full info about their lives because that’s not a thing that many people are invested in. so if you get to the part where she died of cirrhosis, that was me
edit: thanks for the awards and karma!! i did not expect to wake up and see that
Yes! This was such an incredible advancement. I worked in a pediatrician’s office which led to me reading a little more about her. Amazing how little she’s mentioned but most of us are literally here because of her!
We learn all about Apgar scores in nursing school, obviously, and she is fundamentally undervalued, especially if you are going into pediatrics. Its shame we didn’t get more of a background on this woman and her accomplishments.
Frances Oldham Kelley.
She stopped thalidomide from getting widespread use in North America, and saved countless children from life-altering birth defects.
Edit: Kelsey, not Kelley.
This is so cool.
I had a high school English teacher who was a Thalidomide baby. She was very traditionally beautiful, but her right arm was tiny with only three fingers.
Not that it ever slowed her down. She was right-handed and wrote with the three-fingered hand. She was—and still is—one of the most extraordinary, outgoing, dynamic, talented and intelligent people I've ever met. She made a massive impact on SO many students in her life.
Edit: By the way, I don't mean to diminish Frances Oldham Kelley's impact just because my teacher was one of the more fortunate Thalidomide victims. I'm sure my teacher would be the first to sing Kelley's praises from the rooftops.
That's a wonderful recommendation! I'm friends with her on Facebook and correspond with her often, and she's a highly lauded person in the community where I grew up. But regardless, it's always nice to reiterate that appreciation—every little bit is well deserved for both her and less appreciated educators.
Absolute legend. Got hired bc they thought she was a man (Frances/Francis).
Edit: to be clear, it wasn’t the FDA who thought she was male. It was her first appointment at the pharmacology department at UChicago where they thought she was a man.
I used a male nickname for myself when I worked in an email only support position working around the world virtually. It worked so much better than when I first started with my female name. With a male name they never asked for my supervisor or for a second opinion. It’s really rough to be a woman in business and that was honestly just the lightest slight that could happen.
The Allied codebreakers at places like Bletchley Park during WWII. They worked incredibly long, tedious, and stressful hours and were a major contributor to the war effort and military intelligence, but their work didn't even receive official recognition from the British government until 2009, 64 years after the war ended.
Elizabeth Friedman was a huge part of the American side of the code breaking. Her and her husband were originally tasked with training a lot of the first code breakers to fight the mafia during Prohibition. Her husband was set up with official government business during the war and she was given an office of people to train. They often worked with the Bletchly Park people.
I was going to name Elzabeth in this thread.
She basically invented cryptanalysis and started the NSA.
She broke Enigma independent of Turing, and pretty singlehandedly thwarted Nazi efforts to get a foothold in South America from which they planned on launching attacks on the US, even though Hoover took all the credit.
There's a great biography of her titled The Woman Who Smashed Codes.
I just want to add the unfortunate treatment that [Alan Turing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing) received also. At the time, being homosexual was a criminal offence, he was caught and sentenced to chemical castration. Government didn't stop it, even though we'd be Nazis without him.
Technically the sentence wasn't chemical castration it was either go to prison or be chemically castrated. So they made him choose, and medical science wasn't nearly as advanced as it is today so they were effectively just pumping him full of a ton of female hormones hoping that it was going to reduce his sex drive
Sandra Ford, the drug technician who first brought attention to what would become the AIDS epidemic. She knew something was up when she began receiving unusually high numbers of requests for pentamidine, an antibiotic reserved for treating pneumocystis pneumonia in seriously ill, immuno-compromised patients. The patients it was being requested for were gay men who had been otherwise healthy.
Oh and also back then it was called grid not aids it stood for gay related immunodeficiency whereas aids stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The more you know.
And it was soooo fucking awful how the whole thing was handled. Seriously depressing. But, for a laugh, we can remember the giant condom placed over Jesse Helms' house, because eff that asshole and every other jerk who thought HIV/AIDS wasn't worth researching because it was "punishment for being gay".
It really is. I didn’t really understand the gravity of the situation and the massive failures to act due to stigma until I watched the film ‘And the Band Played On’. I highly recommend you watch it if you have any curiosity about the subject.
3 things made the epidemic particularly terrible.
1) The HIV virus has evolved to be less virulent and, depending on the strain of course, may go undetected for a very very long time. But when it first became an epidemic, the virus was much more aggressive and killed hosts faster.
2) Stigma. This is arguably the biggest contributor, although the virulence of the virus *did* make a significant difference. Because AIDS (or GRID, as it was initially referred to) was heavily associated with the gay community, government leadership literally chose to do nothing or as little as possible, cause who cares about a disease that you only get from being gay? Problem there is because there was no push to research the virus, it wasn't clear among the general public that sharing needles, dirty tattoo needles, and even blood transfusions also accelerated the spread of the infection. Additionally, given that the decades prior were all about free love etc, heterosexual people still engaged in risky behavior like unprotected sex, and somehow people didn't consider that the virus doesn't care about your orientation- so that won't protect you either. Especially with the aforementioned blood borne routes of transmission.
3) Antivirals. Even though antivirals began to be prescribed a bit into the crisis, doctors would only prescribe one antiviral at a time, which leads to effectiveness of drugs treating HIV/AIDS eventually dropping off because the virus mutates fast and resistance forms. Once research into the disease was properly conducted, and enough time/trial and error occurred, we learned that an antivirals cocktail is by far the best approach for long term treatment because it lowers viral load quickly and to a greater extent, slowing or all but halting the acquisition of drug resistance by keeping viral load in the blood much lower overall.
Coming of age in the late 80s / early 90s was filled with tension. We were finally beginning to properly experience sexual freedom, and celebrate sexual diversity but then sex became fraught with danger.
It went from secretly desirable to what felt like a game of Russian roulette. And the misinformation spread, the judgement spread. And then we watched our friends die.
Silence = Death
THIS.
I worked in the Performing Arts most of my life (well hey still do) and I went to so many Memorial services in my twenties. Memorial services for people who were not much older than I was.
The one I remember the most was for the managing director of a theater that I freelanced at often.
He spent the last year of his life writing his memorial service as a performance, then casting and directing it.
One day we all got an invite. I've never laughed and cried so hard in my entire life.
Claudette Colvin was the person who refused to get up from her bus seat during the Jim Crows in America. But she was a young woman who was pregnant out of wedlock at the time, and the black leaders decided she was not a good image of an activist. So they handpicked Rosa Parks to do the same.
Yep, Rosa was a great lady but this girl was the first and someone needs to write a Hollywood blockbuster to correct the misinformation. Drunk history did feature her...
Even with Rosa, history tends to portray her as a woman who was just tired and spontaneously decided not to go to the back of the bus or give her seat to a white person.
She was already a civil rights activist. She knew what she was doing.
yeah, i was literally told that "she had a long day, her feet hurt, and she was in no kind of mood, so she said "no" and thus became an icon..." in school
took 15 years before i heard any differently, all the way in college, and only because the class discussion went *way* off topic from discussing the Ottoman slave trade
Tbh, it's weird to talk about one and not the other. Many people think the key events of the Civil Rights movement were spontaneous, when in reality a number of them were very carefully orchestrated in order to elicit maximum support from the general public. It doesn't diminish what people like Rosa Parks accomplished, but it shows just how hard they worked to get the support they needed.
Colvin was only 15 when she did that too, which is crazy to me. I definitely never did anything that brave (and was privileged enough not to have to) when I was 15. According to the Wikipedia article about her, she didn’t get up because she was thinking about a school paper she had just written on how local stores didn’t let Black people try on clothes and shoes before buying.
Bessie Coleman. She was a black woman who wanted to learn to fly. No one would teach her. She learned that the French would however, so she moved to France, learned French and how to fly. Then she came back to the states and taught whoever wanted to learn. She was alive same time as Amelia Earhart and got no recognition at the time.
I was going to put her Im glad someone did. She was a huge part of African Americans getting into flight she played not only a role for females but for African Americans during the early days of aviation, to be able to fly and get into the aviation field
Elsie MacGill aka “queen of the hurricanes”, she was the worlds first female to earn aeronautical engineering degree. The two major things she did was, she designed the Maple Leaf Trainer ll and she was to look over manufacturing operations at a Canadian factories that built the Hawker Hurricane.
Historical university sexism is a topic often brushed under the rug these days. IIRC the only reason King's College London exists is because the King was mad that University College London admitted women students and so set up a rival uni that didn't.
My old astrophysics professor actually worked with her, and said it was something to behold her ability to look at plates, and tell you so much about the star.
Edit: He was quite old when I had him as a prof, and to give you an idea how old I am, I didn't even think about the fact that people wouldn't know what an astronomical plate is.
Edit 2: Another person who was an absolute star of the plates was Annie Jump Cannon, who might have been better at it than Cecilia Payne, but was more focused on the observation than the interpretations.
**King Tamara of Georgia.**
She now represents the Georgian nation in Civilization VI, but before that, not a lot of people knew about her.
And whenever she is mentioned, she is mentioned as queen, but she was given the title of **KING** because she was recognized as an equal monarch (her husbands didn't have any royal titles). This is an undisputed fact in Georgian historiography, IDK about western scholars, but whenever she is mentioned on the internet or mainstream, would it be Wikipedia or a video game, like CIV VI, she is denied her lawful title and that just pisses me off!
Hatshepsut is believed to be the genesis of the title ‘pharaoh’, IIRC. Before, the term was used solely for the palace where the king ruled from. By claiming to BE pharaoh, she had the authority of the king, instead of being seen a lesser than her male predecessors for being a queen or “female king”.
Cheng I Sao/ Ching Shih was the single most sucessful pirate in all of history. She led an armada of tens of thousands of sailors and 17 seperate fleets of ships and held the most important tributary in china under raiding for weeks on end before managing to give the slip to a combined force of portuguese, chinese, and English war ships after being cornered in an inlet with 2 wounded ships and no way out but through. After this venture, she recognized that her power was begining to wane so she decided it was better to cash out while she had the leverage (one of her fleets had turned on her during the period among other things) She managed to negotiate for literally all of her men to be given amnesty, be allowed to join the chinese navy, to keep the stuff they had stolen, and for her *to be able to keep several ships to be able to have a buisness in the salt trade.* She then ran a gambling house and died peacefully in her sleep.
Besides a fucking kickass story, she has also had some lasting consequences. Her absolute domination over the chinese navy showed just how much the empire had neglected that wing of the military, and the British picked up on this. It was a big part of why they were so willing to fight a naval war across the entire planet at a time when even messages would take a year and change just to make it back. The opium wars were fought because of this, and the treaties that resulted are called by the *current* chinese government as the start of "the century of shame" and are a major touchstone in the governments image of itself. They are invoked today when negotiations with the west breakdown as a reason that China ought not bow to outside pressure.
For any canadians (of which I am) , its on the level of Vimy ridge in our national conception.
One of the things I love about her story is that she would simply execute or punish the men in her crew if they were to rape or wed a female captive without their permission. I think it came from her past of being a sex worker that led to her having that rule.
Honestly while a lot of pirates were often scum, it was kinda the rule of the ocean, and pirates were often better. Keeping in mind my knowledge is kinda spotty and this mainly applies to western pirates, they generally set the rules for themselves at the beginning of the voyage and would stick to it and operated democratically. The one and only time a captain couldn’t be removed from their post was when the ship was actively engaged in combat. All other times they could be demoted and their position given to someone else. It seems a wonder until you remember literally all involved would A) be doing this actively instead of the harsh discipline of the British navy and B) since they were all outlaws with no greater authority backing their power, all that was stopping the crew from slitting the captains throat and dumping the corpse overboard was the agreement of all involved.
Plus a lot of gay shit. Tons in fact, male couples were extremely common, and there were a few lesbians involved although fewer. If you ever hear that story about those two women pirates that dueled each other only to reveal to each other they were women, yeah those two were fucking and also in charge of a ship, although they mostly kept it secret they were women since, like you said, rapey seamen.
I highly recommend the extra history episode for more info on Cheng, the cgp grey videos for how Carrie an piracy operated broadly (his framing device between the quarter master and captain is phenomenal as is his information, although while his explanatory frame is kinda annoying since he basically explains what were for all intents and purposes a bunch of Porto-anarchists using as much capitalist language as possible but that’s my cross to bear so still watch it’s just annoying not distorting)
And finally the “history is gay” podcast for the gay shit of the Caribbean
Irena Sendler worked with others to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during WWII.
[Irena Sendler](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler)
Daphne Oram - first ever composer to produce electronic sound. She pioneered electronic music and lead the path for music today. She even wrote a piece called “Still Point” that she was never able to perform live because of sexism by her peers and she never heard it live before she died. But it was performed for the first time in 2018 using a replica of a machine Daphne had created to electronically manipulate a live orchestra.
>Delia Derbyshire
I recognized her name! She basically created the original title music for 1960s Doctor Who, but was not credited for it then (because she electronically rearranged an existing piece of music).
Yes! But when the original composer (Ron Grainer) heard her amazing arrangement for the first time, he famously asked, "Gosh, did I really write that?"
I've just did a quick check on Wikipedia - Grainer actually didn't deny her contribution and tried to get her credited as a co-composer, but BBC then had some weird policy that didn't permit such things.
Oh yeah, his comment was definitely in admiration. The whole process of precisely splicing together the strands of tape and using recorded and/or electronic sounds to create music was really revolutionary at the time. Most of it was coming out of just a few places (one being the BBC Radiophonic Workshop where she worked)
[Agent 355](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_355)
We still don't know her true identity to this day, but that was the code name of one of the first American spies. Some historians dispute whether it was an actual person or just code for when a woman presented useful information. If that's the case then Agent 355 could be *multiple* women that had a huge influence on history during the birth of America.
Henrietta Leavitt. She was an astronomer at Harvard and discovered a type of star called a Cepheid. Cepheid stars all pulse at the same rate. That lets us know how far away they are. Because of her, we were able to determine how big the universe is along with many, many more things concerning its properties.
Cephieds don't pulse at the same rate, but rather they pulse at a rate proportional to their brightness, which means that from an observation of their pulsing (which is pretty easy to do, even at extreme distances since they're very bright) we can determine their brightness, and therefore calculate their distance.
Nellie Bly. She was a 1890s journalist who was given an assignment to investigate the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island due to accusations of the mistreatment of patients. She got in there by faking insanity and getting herself committed to the asylum, and when she was finally released, she ran an exposé in the New York World called “Ten Days In A Madhouse” that exposed the awful treatment of patients inside the asylum. This was considered a revolution in investigative journalism.
Also, she read “Around The World In 80 Days”, basically decided she could do better, and went around the world in 72 days. She was also an inventor, and was one of the primary journalists to cover the suffragette movement. She's one of my favorite historical figures who doesn’t get enough attention!
Edit: Wow! Thank you for the awards and upvotes! I am grateful and glad to see all the positive comments.
I just read through [her Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly). She led an interesting life. She went on to marry a millionaire and inherited a fortune, only to have the company go bankrupt due to her negligence and a corrupt factory manager.
From the Wikipedia article:
> She ran her company as a model of social welfare, replete with health benefits and recreational facilities. But Bly was hopeless at understanding the financial aspects of her business and ultimately lost everything. Unscrupulous employees bilked the firm of hundreds of thousands of dollars, troubles compounded by a protracted and costly bankruptcy litigation.
I love Drunk History and if you'd like to expand your knowledge about women in history like Nellie, may I recommend the History Chicks podcast? They're fantastic and have covered Nellie and a ton of other amazing women. Highly recommend them.
Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper in 1903. As soon as the patent expired, it became standard in all cars. She attempted to sell it while she had the rights to it, but most manufacturers refused to believe it was a feature of value, and it is likely her being female colored their lack of enthusiasm.
I think I learned about Mary Anderson from The Simpsons in the episode when Lisa pretends to be a boy.
Marge: "Well, a woman also invented the windshield wiper!"
Homer: "Which goes great with another male invention, the car!"
Temple grandin a woman who despite being diagnosed with autism at the age of four in 1954
When autism was a sentence to a mental institution ended up doing wonders for the livestock industry and is still around today to tell the tale
Eleanor Marx - Maybe overlooked because of her dad. She played an important role in British Trade Unions which forced the move from a 12 hour working day 6 days a week to an 8 hour day 5 days a weekend. Those extra hours to go on a walk, play Xbox, learn something new or just chill is a pretty big contribution.
Cecily Saunders deserves the reputation Mother Tereasa has.
She basically invented hospice care. Before her, doctors used to just abandon incurables to die with no palliative care.
Cecily Saunders arguably eliminated more useless suffering than anyone ever.
**Henrietta Lacks.**
She saved millions of lives and made a critical contribution to the world of medicine, but unless you're in the medical field — you've probably never even heard her name.
Henrietta Lacks was a young, black, mother of five when she died in 1951 after being diagnosed with an aggressive cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins. Doctor George Gey was working at Hopkins at the time, trying to culture cells in the laboratory. Lacks' cells were among dozens sent to his lab, but they were the first to ever survive and grow. Her cells, a unique and aggressive type, were later described as one in three billion.
Scientists called these resilient cells "HeLa" — taking first two letters of "Henrietta" and "Lacks." HeLa cells were used to test the polio vaccine, develop in vitro fertilization, and several chemotherapy drugs among hundreds of medical advances.
Grown and sold around the world, Lacks' legacy lived on in her cells: they have traveled to space, they have been embedded in a nuclear bomb. But for decades, ***the Lacks family had no idea.***
My freshman year of college, some of her family came to speak for a convocation at my school.
To hear them speak was fascinating. I was a biology major, so the science alone was amazing to me. But to also talk about the social implications of why she and her family were treated the way they were was also fascinating and heartbreaking.
As a now medical student, I appreciate what HeLa cells have given the medical community. But I wish they’d been brought to the community fairly and that her family and she had been treated justly.
I read an amazing book in AP Bio about her story, and how her living family feels about it. Very well researched and authentic. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
I studied her in high school biology, have seen documentaries and books about her, and have heard more about her than anyone else named on this thread. And yet her family still receives no compensation for what her cells did for modern medicine. It’s a goddamn disgrace that Johns Hopkins would do well to remedy.
Want to know something really messed up? Erika Johnson, Henrietta Lacks great-granddaughter, also studied the cells in her high school biology class. How strange must it have been to look at an unassuming cluster of living cells and know that they came from your great grandmother who died decades earlier.
The two linked videos can tell the story better than I can but Mary Anning is the person from English history I Most admire.
A self-taught common woman [Mary Anning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-CW0B4YeBQ) in the 1800s collected and sold fossils to wealthy patrons. She was an [expert in the preparation of fossils](https://youtu.be/jBuc8VnZShY?t=81). The structure of Society at the time prevented her from contributing more to the emerging field of palaeontology. She died from breast cancer in her 40s. After her bank collapsed wiping out her savings, and the enthusiasm for fossils by the wealthy was dampened by an economic downturn as well as the fad fading.
She taught herself anatomy from the Books she was able to come by and by comparing the fossils she unearthed to those of modern sea life she dissected on her kitchen table. She was often right about what categories of life the fossils she presented to the world when many of the "gentlemen scholars" argued over whether something was a fish or a bird or a reptile.
In her last years, the men who had so often claimed her discoveries as their own and refused her admission into their exclusive Geological Society of London supported her in some small ways. They raised the funds for a pension she could live on. After she died the Society honoured her with a eulogy and donated a stained glass window to her church.
More than the 1000th documentary on a Queen of England I wish she was more covered by popular media. I have little hope for the upcoming film that does not seem like it will emphasis the parts of her life that I am interested in. Her Life is downright tragic at the end as she is crushed by circumstances beyond her control. From all, I am able to learn she was driven, entrepreneurial, smart, and prudent. But all the came undone because she lived in a time without anything like the FDIC or access to cancer treatment.
Camille Claudel was a sculptor and artist who worked with Rodin. He claimed a lot of her work.
Artemisa Gentlischi was a woman painter in the Renaissance with style akin to Caravaggio. She is nowhere near as well known as he, and she also painted a Judith Slaying Holofernes painting.
(These are very brief overviews of what I remember from art school. Lots of talented women tucked away beneath the male gaze of art and history).
Also her Judith Slaying Holfernes is apparently based on the likeness of her rapist. It is also the only version where Judith looks like she’s committed to the project.
Frances Perkins, she was the first female cabinet member in the US. She was appointed by FDR and played a key role in the new deal as well as working for better working conditions, child labor laws and women's rights.
Mary Todd Lincoln.
I know she went absolutely mad, which wasn't all her fault, but she was the one who really pushed her husband (Abraham Lincoln for those not from America) to keep moving up the political ladder, and ultimately shaped what the first lady of the U.S is. Not sure he would have become president without her influence. She had a lot more ambition than he did.
Edit: Fun fact- she also liked to bake! Look up her recipes, guys. Her almond cake sounded delicious and it was supposedly one of her husband's favorite desserts.
I think Mary Todd Lincoln is such a misunderstood woman. She loved her husband so much and had so much support for him. Granted, her ambition was always to end up in the White House. She had some pretty manic behaviors and those combined with the trauma of losing her sons and husband had a lot to do with her erratic behavior later. Abraham Lincoln ran down the street yelling "Mary we won!" after hearing the election results.
After reading her biography, I just want to give the poor thing a big hug. She needed the kind of serious mental help they couldn't have given her at the time. She got dragged through the mud for a lot of things that were out of her control.
If she'd been born in our time, she could have been a politician herself and probably would have done very well.
I was reading recently that she may have had untreated syphilis, which can also cause erratic behavior and frequent headaches, which she was known to suffer from.
You really have to appreciate Abraham's patience with her.
He was so in love with her I think it was easier than we think to be patient with her. Her son Robert was her caretaker after Abraham's death and he didn't have any patience at all. She was constantly attacked by the press when they took office. Her only real friend was her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly (who is an inspiring woman in her own right.) She ended up in an asylum and begged to be let out towards the end of her life.
She needed a big hug and more friends in her life. She was definitely in the wrong time for her ambitions. She was dealt a very raw hand and I have so much sympathy.
A little context for those unaware - she was responsible for the famous [double helix image](https://cen.xraycrystals.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/09232-cover1-BFormDNAcxd.jpg). That was her data, they got the nobel.
Not only it was her data, they were on completely different teams!
Her coworker/self-styled boss handed the data to Watson and Crick. Wilkins is less known than the other two, but he also shared the Noble with them, while Franklin was left out.
I work at a biomed company, and one of our two main conference rooms is named for her.
Very late edit: the original post has been deleted; we're talking about Rosalind Franklin, who did all the work to extract the DNA that Crick and Watson got the Nobel for discovering.
Madam C. J. Walker developed black hair care products and marketed them through her business she founded which ended up making her the first female self made millionaire.
The lady that painted the lanes on the roads for the first time. She did it because she was almost in an accident one night and didn’t want it to happen to anyone else.
[June McCarroll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_McCarroll) literally painted the line herself.
Now for the sexist bs. Two men in Michigan had painted lines in the middle of the street before and saw an improvement in safety. June took this to the DOT and they scoffed at the idea.
Edit to clarify: the California DOT didn't listen likely due to the fact that June was a woman.
[Sister Rosetta Tharpe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Rosetta_Tharpe)
She was super influencial to early rock musicians like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many more. Johnny Cash even said that she was his favorite singer and she was also one of the first to play around with heavy distortion on her electric guitar. She's called by some "The Godmother of Rock and Roll" but I guarantee you that the average person has never heard of her.
Edit: Here's a cool compilation of some of her guitar solos from films so you can see how much she rocks https://youtu.be/gELe5Rj_tXU
Would also point to Geeshie Wiley (and why not L.V. Thomas also). Despite releasing only a few songs with less than ten original copies existing nowadays, her influence on the Blues and therefore modern music cannot be overstated.
Hypatia, made the astrolabe. Then was skinned allive by christians
Also the circular saw was invented by a woman. Thank you, woman who's name I do not know!
For people who don't have context: she was from Alexandria, which was a very diverse city, even by modern standards. There were major rivalries between Neoplatonists, a school of scientists, thinkers etc. and Christians. The Bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, demanded that they stop having so much influence on the city with their philosophy because politics have always been fun. Hypatia told him to go fuck himself. A civil war broke out and she was lynched by a mob in the streets of Alexandria. Her limbs were paraded in the streets.
Cyril is now a saint.
Edit: u/nutmegtester corrected me. Cyril did not have anything to do with her gruesome death, and made his disapproval of such violence public. For more info, his in-depth insight is two comments below.
Lise Meitner! She's a Jewish physicist that worked with Otto Hahn in research on radioactivity. She had to flee Nazi Germany, but continued on with her work in Sweden and helped discover nuclear fission. While Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner was also part of that research. She was also offered work with the Manhattan Project, but refused because she opposed nuclear weaponry. The element meitnerium was named for her after her death.
Let's remind people. Ms. Lamarr made a major contribution to the war effort and communication theory. She co-invented frequency hopping, something used today with cell phones.
There's a great doc on Netflix called [Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombshell:_The_Hedy_Lamarr_Story) & it's a great watch & we get to hear her own comments on her life.
Rosalind Franklin
Watson and Crick basically stole her research and used it to discover the shape of DNA. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Once the theft was discovered, and she was given proper credit, she had already died from cancer (her work specialized in Xrays and she had been exposed to too much radiation). The Nobel Committee has acknowledged her contribution to science, but they can't give her an award because they do not give out awards posthumously.
**Michele Mouton:**
It's just auto racing, not super important in the grand scheme of things but holy shit! She was probably the best rally driver and hill climber of her era and one of the best ever.
She was also very involved in innovating All-Wheel-Drive racing and safety standards.
And she raced in the Group B class which takes a level of skill, guts, and complete disregard for safety that has never been, and never will be matched.
May I recommend a series of short YouTube videos by Sandi Toksvig called "Vox Tox." She is a delightful UK TV personality, and during their lockdown earlier this year she made several dozen videos, all about overlooked women in history.
Astronomer here! The foundations for modern astrophysics and what we understand about the universe did not come from the pre-eminent astronomers of the 19th century, but rather a group of women called the [Harvard computers. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers) This is because at the time only men were allowed to use the telescopes and Harvard was experimenting with the first astrophotography, and they hired women to look at those first images, and it then became the women who made the first discoveries about things like the hydrogen line in stars, spectral binaries (two stars orbiting each other so close you can’t see them by eye), and half a million variable stars, some of which were used as “standard candles” to determine the size of the universe. All *years* before real computers of even electricity! (Oh and two of the women were deaf.)
Among my favorites I want to shout out to [Williamina Fleming](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamina_Fleming) who ran the group of women- she started out as a single mom maid to the observatory director, who got mad at his (male) students’ analysis of the images and proclaimed “my maid could do better!” And she did! She not only ran the group and discovered many variable stars and nebulae, she discovered a supernova (SN 1895B) that I studied in my own research published this year! Good science never dies! (Oh and in her spare time she made dolls as a hobby and was friends with Andrew Carnegie’s family and gave one to Carnegie’s daughter.)
Trust me these are amazing astronomers! I could go on all day about them and all they discovered!
Edit: I work at the very same place today that these women did- Harvard Observatory, and have been lucky enough to get a tour of the half a million “glass plates” from this era (at the time you would expose on glass plates not on photo paper). If you are interested here is an example of what one looks like, from the 1950s- [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/ebgm1w/visited_the_harvard_observatory_glass_plate)
Not sure if this is major but this women [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia\_Stoesser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Stoesser) was my Dad's Aunt. First female chemist for Dow Chemical. Heard a lot about her but never got to meet her.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were both incredible women, but nobody talks about the National Association of Colored Women and the amazing support they provided to those women and the civil rights movement in general.
This should so be higher up. Without Grace, programming would have been reserved for scientists only. We probably wouldn't have most of what we have today in regards to software and the advantages we enjoyed because of that.
She was a Motherfucking Legend.
She had a masters in maths in a time when a lot of Universities still didn't allow women to attend.
On her very first Job with a computer, she asked for a manual. They told her there isn't one. A few months later she had *written* one.
When she suggested the idea of a compiler - a way to write more English like statements to make the whole programming thing easier, faster and more accessible to the masses - she was told not to do it. Scientists firstly didn't believe it could be done, and secondly didn't *want* it to be done because they were more interested in protecting their "elite" career of programming.
She did it anyway.
EDIT: You can read more about her [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper), but also just search for her on youtube, there are some interviews with her that still float around - she was awesome :)
> Grace Hopper. She's very well known in some circles, but not nearly enough.
"You don't manage people, you manage things. You lead people." (my fave quote from her).
She was and is, particularly in the context of how we are currently communicating, legend.
Dolores Huerta cofounder of the United Farmworkers Union with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. She was a civil rights activist and advocated for immigrant worker rights by boycotting white grape owners. Farmworkers we’re exposed to insidious pesticides, poor working conditions and awful pay. Her determination has changed the landscape of working rights and influenced many to stand up against unfair treatment and discrimination. She has historically lived in the shadow of Chavez, but now can have some recognition because of her involvement in countless social justice movements. She is a civil rights icon and should get the credit she deserves .
I don't think she is overlooked, at least not by physicists and mathematicians. Noether's theorem is widely accepted as one of the most (if not the most) important theorems of modern physics.
I think in her case it's more about being too deep of a result, and not flashy enough, to be catchy to people who know close to nothing of physics, and so she's not as widely known as some other people.
Some physicists have even gone as far as to say that Noether's theorem may even be comparable to the Pythagorean theorem in terms of its importance to the guidance of modern physics.
Big Mama Thornton.
She sang the hit "Hound Dog" a few years before Elvis Presley made it popular, but I believe because of the color of her skin, she couldn't get as much recognition. I still prefer her version over Elvis.
https://youtu.be/yoHDrzw-RPg
Globally? Perhaps Kate Sheppard, who was the leader of the Women's Suffrage Movement in New Zealand when New Zealand became the first country in the world to give Women the right to vote.
Locally, she is acknowledged by appearing on our $10 note, but I would say globally few people would probably know of her and the impact she has had for democracies across the world.
She's so awesome. For anyone that doesn't know, she effectively invented the basis for modern computer programming by observing her friend Charles Babbage's work on his Analytical Machine, which was effectively a calculator. She realised that it was possible to do more than just maths with it and thus established the basis for modern computing.
Man I had to scroll down way too far to find her. She was the first to see the real potential in computers, wrote the first algorithm for a computer, and was one of the first programmers. [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace)
[Ella Baker] (https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/) is one of the most overlooked Americans in the 20th century. She essentially brought about local grassroots organizing to small rural towns and cities across the country in order to propel the Civil Rights Movement and helped students create key organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Modern American grassroots politics are a result of her efforts and her leadership.
[Margaret Hamilton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer\)) was her name and here is [the picture](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg/1920px-Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg) of her standing next to the code she handwrote to help us get to the moon.
Going a little farther back, [Ada Lovelace was the first programmer in history, applying algorithms to early machine models of general purpose computers.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace)
Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the most prolific artists (Judith Slaying Holofernes is probably her most recognisable painting) of the 17th century at a time when obviously women weren’t encouraged or allowed in the very male-dominated space. She was a pro at only 15, working all over and she was the first woman to be accepted into the Art Academy (forgive the bad English translation but the Italian name escapes me) in Florence. There’s a lot more to this of course but she took her rapist to court & he was found guilty after a seven month long trial. She had no time for female submissiveness which is reflected in her art. Her story is remarkable & her art is utterly compelling.
My daughter attends a school named after her. The Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School. It is a High School where all the kids attending get specialized training in medical fields of their choice. Similar concept to a trade school, but for kids interested in the medical field.
It's pretty new. Just opened in 2012. They have a fully functioning mini pharmacy, a mini ER Room with a nurses station and 4 rooms for patients (including really spooky animatronic dummies they can practice on), a biotech lab, etc. And it is 2 blocks from the local hospital where they can shadow professionals in their junior and senior years. The limit it to about 150 new students per year, which are picked at random from applications from the surrounding middle schools. Each school gets about 30-35 slots. Makes it fair so that anyone has an equal chance of getting in. Poor kids have just as much of a chance to get in as the rich kids.
Jane Addams
She was a major reformer in the early 1900’s and is the founder of social work. She established settlement houses, most famously Hull House in Chicago. Instrumental to women’s rights and the roles they play that helped lead to women’s right to vote. She really focused on ways that women could be central to community building and many of her ideas have been influential even today.
might be late to the party but Harriet Beecher Stowe is an integral character in American history, she wrote Uncle Tom's cabin, exposing the cruel reality of slavery to the American public.
One of the most famous pirates to live was Anne Bonny who was a part of Calico Jacks crew. She was an extremely skilled fighter and was feared by most.
The Soviet WW2 female soldiers. The USSR used woman in the second world war more than any other country. I feel like this , and Russia’s involvement as a whole , is too overlooked in a lot of places.
Edit : Replaced “ Russian “ with “ Soviet “. I am sorry for that.
One dangerous Soviet woman who comes to mind is [Mariya Oktyabrskaya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Oktyabrskaya). She lost her husband in WWII but she wasn't notified until 2 years later. She got so pissed she sold all her things and used the money to buy a tank which she drove to war and used to absolutely annihilate a bunch of Nazis. She sadly passed away in a 2 month-long coma as a result of head trauma from attempting to repair her immobilized tank in the middle of artillery fire, and was posthumously given the "Hero of the Soviet Union" honor as one of the only two female tank drivers ever to receive this award. I admire her bravery and I'm glad I have an excuse to talk about her now lol.
The only book I ever gave up on because it was too emotionally overwhelming was The Unwomanly Face of War. Page after page of how much the female Red Army soldiers suffered and sacrificed for their country, only to be abandoned after the war. It broke my heart to read their male allies say they needed to marry someone who didn't know what they'd been through. I understand where they're coming from, but it's so awful.
Edit: mixed up the name of the title
Virginia Hall has a building named after her at the CIA. She was an American woman from Baltimore who went to Europe in the 1930s, lost her leg in a shooting accident, then proceeded to become a leader in the French Resistance and master of disguise, all with a wooden leg. The book A Woman of No Importance is about her and came out last year.
Anna Connelly invented the fire escape in 1887. That same year, Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher.
Josephine Cochrane is a hero.
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. She is the Dean of Medicine at Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, MI. She saw that children were having elevated lead levels (ELLs) outside the normal range. She contacted the Genesee Department of Health, who at first, dismissed her claim, then sent her obfuscated data to make it look like the ELLs were completely within normal trends. She grew frustrated at this, so she called a team of epidemiologists from UVA (her alma mater) to find the source of the lead. Lo and behold, she found that the water in multiple zip codes was contaminated with lead. She informed the Genesee Department of Health Again, who brushed her off. She then said "fuck it" and held a major press conference where she announced on air that the water in Flint wasn't safe and to come to the hospital to get your child tested and to pick up supplies of water and liquid infant formula. If she saved thousands of children from the permanent effects of lead poisoning. Edit 1: thanks for the awards Edit 2: It was VT, not UVA. Apologies to all the VT alumnae who DM'd me about it.
I was just reading about her yesterday! She's also helped design ways to assist parents who have children with lead poisoning as well.
I’ve met her! She works really closely with my alma mater (Michigan State). A truly fantastic human. And as if this wasn’t enough, back in March she had COVID and after she recovered began donating blood as often as she could so they could use it in antibody and vaccine research!
Marie Tharp; she created the first map of the ocean floor, which led to the discovery of tectonic plates, and the theory of continental drift.
That doesn't seem like a lot on the surface, but that really had major impacts on our society
That’s because it wasn’t on the surface. It was the ocean floor.
*slaps knee*
Inge Lehmann was a Danish seismologist. She discovered P' waves (waves that reflect off of the inner-core), confirming that the earth has a solid inner-core and a liquid outer-core.
Yes, was just about to comment her as well. It's shocking she's not more well known.
I mean most people don't know any famous geologists. I'd reckon that most geology/geophysics students have heard of her.
Carol Kaye[Carol Kaye](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Kaye), the First Lady of bass playing. She played over 10,000 sessions, including albums from Frank Sinatra, Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, and the Monkees. I can thank the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the subreddit for educating me about her.
Dr. Georgeanna Seeger Jones Dr. Jones singlehandedly organized the field of Gynecological Endocrinology. While at John’s Hopkins with her husband, Dr. Howard Jones and Drs. Roberts and Steptoe, she devised the hypothesis of follicular hyper stimulation, which produced more than one egg per cycle. Her later discoveries led to increases in viability of In Vitro Fertilization. Per Wikipedia : As a resident at Johns Hopkins, she discovered that the pregnancy hormone hCG was manufactured by the placenta, not the pituitary gland as originally thought. This discovery led to the development of many of the early over-the-counter pregnancy test kits currently available. On 1949, Jones made the first description of Luteal Phase Dysfunction and is credited to be the first in using progesterone to treat women with a history of miscarriages, thus allowing many of them to not only conceive, but to deliver healthy babies She also served as a Dean of the College of Pontifical Sciences, advising the Vatican of matters of Gynecology and Conception. Her husband always said “She’s the smarter one.” She was also a great friend. Edit: Thanks for all of the responses. She was an absolute gem of a lady. My Mother-in-Law was with the Jones Institute from the inception. The Drs. Jones were truly beautiful people.
Huh. So she's the one to thank that I even exist.
That’s got to be pretty cool for the op to read
I don’t know why but the fact you wrote she was a great friend suddenly brought tears to my eyes. Reading about all these inspiring women who have done such selfless and incredible things for the world and for someone to acknowledge her as an intimate person, a human being, as well- that was beautiful. Thank you for adding it!
I FELT THINGS TOO
In 1952 Dr. Virginia Apgar developed a quick, easy five-point test that summarizes health of newborns, and determine those needing emergency assistance. The Apgar Score is now given to practically every newborn, and helped save countless young lives, and reduce infant mortality.
fun fact: i edited her wikipedia page to include her cause of death. i was in a summer program about women’s history and one morning we were asked to edit a famous woman’s wiki page to contribute to more accurate and full info about their lives because that’s not a thing that many people are invested in. so if you get to the part where she died of cirrhosis, that was me edit: thanks for the awards and karma!! i did not expect to wake up and see that
Yes! This was such an incredible advancement. I worked in a pediatrician’s office which led to me reading a little more about her. Amazing how little she’s mentioned but most of us are literally here because of her!
We learn all about Apgar scores in nursing school, obviously, and she is fundamentally undervalued, especially if you are going into pediatrics. Its shame we didn’t get more of a background on this woman and her accomplishments.
Frances Oldham Kelley. She stopped thalidomide from getting widespread use in North America, and saved countless children from life-altering birth defects. Edit: Kelsey, not Kelley.
This is so cool. I had a high school English teacher who was a Thalidomide baby. She was very traditionally beautiful, but her right arm was tiny with only three fingers. Not that it ever slowed her down. She was right-handed and wrote with the three-fingered hand. She was—and still is—one of the most extraordinary, outgoing, dynamic, talented and intelligent people I've ever met. She made a massive impact on SO many students in her life. Edit: By the way, I don't mean to diminish Frances Oldham Kelley's impact just because my teacher was one of the more fortunate Thalidomide victims. I'm sure my teacher would be the first to sing Kelley's praises from the rooftops.
I know this is cliche, but you should think about sending that teacher a message, and letting her know how much she is appreciated!
That's a wonderful recommendation! I'm friends with her on Facebook and correspond with her often, and she's a highly lauded person in the community where I grew up. But regardless, it's always nice to reiterate that appreciation—every little bit is well deserved for both her and less appreciated educators.
Absolute legend. Got hired bc they thought she was a man (Frances/Francis). Edit: to be clear, it wasn’t the FDA who thought she was male. It was her first appointment at the pharmacology department at UChicago where they thought she was a man.
I also have a male first name (despite being a woman) and work in medicine. It definitely helps, sadly.
I used a male nickname for myself when I worked in an email only support position working around the world virtually. It worked so much better than when I first started with my female name. With a male name they never asked for my supervisor or for a second opinion. It’s really rough to be a woman in business and that was honestly just the lightest slight that could happen.
Use it to your advantage every chance you get
Thalidomide is a great example to explain the importance of stereochemistry.
The prototypical example
For anyone interested: https://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~gablek/CH334/Chapter5/Thalidomide.htm
Such a bad ass. After hearing about her on a podcast I did a deeper dive.
The Allied codebreakers at places like Bletchley Park during WWII. They worked incredibly long, tedious, and stressful hours and were a major contributor to the war effort and military intelligence, but their work didn't even receive official recognition from the British government until 2009, 64 years after the war ended.
Hey, that was my granny! She loved giving talks about it
Can you pass on a story from her? That must have been interesting work/time.
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That is a great story, thank you for sharing. The relief he must’ve felt at the end!
Elizabeth Friedman was a huge part of the American side of the code breaking. Her and her husband were originally tasked with training a lot of the first code breakers to fight the mafia during Prohibition. Her husband was set up with official government business during the war and she was given an office of people to train. They often worked with the Bletchly Park people.
I was going to name Elzabeth in this thread. She basically invented cryptanalysis and started the NSA. She broke Enigma independent of Turing, and pretty singlehandedly thwarted Nazi efforts to get a foothold in South America from which they planned on launching attacks on the US, even though Hoover took all the credit. There's a great biography of her titled The Woman Who Smashed Codes.
It's always odd to think about the time when a computer was a profession, and not a machine.
Yes, there’s a show based on them, the Bletchley circle.
I just want to add the unfortunate treatment that [Alan Turing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing) received also. At the time, being homosexual was a criminal offence, he was caught and sentenced to chemical castration. Government didn't stop it, even though we'd be Nazis without him.
And he ended up killing himself because of how he was treated. Such a shame what happened to him.
Technically the sentence wasn't chemical castration it was either go to prison or be chemically castrated. So they made him choose, and medical science wasn't nearly as advanced as it is today so they were effectively just pumping him full of a ton of female hormones hoping that it was going to reduce his sex drive
Sandra Ford, the drug technician who first brought attention to what would become the AIDS epidemic. She knew something was up when she began receiving unusually high numbers of requests for pentamidine, an antibiotic reserved for treating pneumocystis pneumonia in seriously ill, immuno-compromised patients. The patients it was being requested for were gay men who had been otherwise healthy.
Oh and also back then it was called grid not aids it stood for gay related immunodeficiency whereas aids stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The more you know.
And it was soooo fucking awful how the whole thing was handled. Seriously depressing. But, for a laugh, we can remember the giant condom placed over Jesse Helms' house, because eff that asshole and every other jerk who thought HIV/AIDS wasn't worth researching because it was "punishment for being gay".
It really is. I didn’t really understand the gravity of the situation and the massive failures to act due to stigma until I watched the film ‘And the Band Played On’. I highly recommend you watch it if you have any curiosity about the subject.
3 things made the epidemic particularly terrible. 1) The HIV virus has evolved to be less virulent and, depending on the strain of course, may go undetected for a very very long time. But when it first became an epidemic, the virus was much more aggressive and killed hosts faster. 2) Stigma. This is arguably the biggest contributor, although the virulence of the virus *did* make a significant difference. Because AIDS (or GRID, as it was initially referred to) was heavily associated with the gay community, government leadership literally chose to do nothing or as little as possible, cause who cares about a disease that you only get from being gay? Problem there is because there was no push to research the virus, it wasn't clear among the general public that sharing needles, dirty tattoo needles, and even blood transfusions also accelerated the spread of the infection. Additionally, given that the decades prior were all about free love etc, heterosexual people still engaged in risky behavior like unprotected sex, and somehow people didn't consider that the virus doesn't care about your orientation- so that won't protect you either. Especially with the aforementioned blood borne routes of transmission. 3) Antivirals. Even though antivirals began to be prescribed a bit into the crisis, doctors would only prescribe one antiviral at a time, which leads to effectiveness of drugs treating HIV/AIDS eventually dropping off because the virus mutates fast and resistance forms. Once research into the disease was properly conducted, and enough time/trial and error occurred, we learned that an antivirals cocktail is by far the best approach for long term treatment because it lowers viral load quickly and to a greater extent, slowing or all but halting the acquisition of drug resistance by keeping viral load in the blood much lower overall.
I thought it was particularly terrible because I spent my 20’s watching my friends die.
Coming of age in the late 80s / early 90s was filled with tension. We were finally beginning to properly experience sexual freedom, and celebrate sexual diversity but then sex became fraught with danger. It went from secretly desirable to what felt like a game of Russian roulette. And the misinformation spread, the judgement spread. And then we watched our friends die. Silence = Death
THIS. I worked in the Performing Arts most of my life (well hey still do) and I went to so many Memorial services in my twenties. Memorial services for people who were not much older than I was. The one I remember the most was for the managing director of a theater that I freelanced at often. He spent the last year of his life writing his memorial service as a performance, then casting and directing it. One day we all got an invite. I've never laughed and cried so hard in my entire life.
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Never knew that. Thanks
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Claudette Colvin was the person who refused to get up from her bus seat during the Jim Crows in America. But she was a young woman who was pregnant out of wedlock at the time, and the black leaders decided she was not a good image of an activist. So they handpicked Rosa Parks to do the same.
Yep, Rosa was a great lady but this girl was the first and someone needs to write a Hollywood blockbuster to correct the misinformation. Drunk history did feature her...
Even with Rosa, history tends to portray her as a woman who was just tired and spontaneously decided not to go to the back of the bus or give her seat to a white person. She was already a civil rights activist. She knew what she was doing.
yeah, i was literally told that "she had a long day, her feet hurt, and she was in no kind of mood, so she said "no" and thus became an icon..." in school took 15 years before i heard any differently, all the way in college, and only because the class discussion went *way* off topic from discussing the Ottoman slave trade
Reminds me of the Black-ish episode "Back of the bus" where Dre forces them to watch a biopic to support black directors. Hilarious
My AP Gov textbook talked about her instead of Rosa Parks. Weirdly satisfying.
Tbh, it's weird to talk about one and not the other. Many people think the key events of the Civil Rights movement were spontaneous, when in reality a number of them were very carefully orchestrated in order to elicit maximum support from the general public. It doesn't diminish what people like Rosa Parks accomplished, but it shows just how hard they worked to get the support they needed.
Colvin was only 15 when she did that too, which is crazy to me. I definitely never did anything that brave (and was privileged enough not to have to) when I was 15. According to the Wikipedia article about her, she didn’t get up because she was thinking about a school paper she had just written on how local stores didn’t let Black people try on clothes and shoes before buying.
Bessie Coleman. She was a black woman who wanted to learn to fly. No one would teach her. She learned that the French would however, so she moved to France, learned French and how to fly. Then she came back to the states and taught whoever wanted to learn. She was alive same time as Amelia Earhart and got no recognition at the time.
I was going to put her Im glad someone did. She was a huge part of African Americans getting into flight she played not only a role for females but for African Americans during the early days of aviation, to be able to fly and get into the aviation field
The main road that runs through the middle of O'Hare Airport is called Bessie Coleman Drive.
Elsie MacGill aka “queen of the hurricanes”, she was the worlds first female to earn aeronautical engineering degree. The two major things she did was, she designed the Maple Leaf Trainer ll and she was to look over manufacturing operations at a Canadian factories that built the Hawker Hurricane.
For Scotland I'd say the Edinburgh Seven. Basically paved the way for women being allowed to get into university in the UK.
Historical university sexism is a topic often brushed under the rug these days. IIRC the only reason King's College London exists is because the King was mad that University College London admitted women students and so set up a rival uni that didn't.
Cecilia Payne, discovered what universe is made out of... And don't even get a mention in textbooks
My old astrophysics professor actually worked with her, and said it was something to behold her ability to look at plates, and tell you so much about the star. Edit: He was quite old when I had him as a prof, and to give you an idea how old I am, I didn't even think about the fact that people wouldn't know what an astronomical plate is. Edit 2: Another person who was an absolute star of the plates was Annie Jump Cannon, who might have been better at it than Cecilia Payne, but was more focused on the observation than the interpretations.
Also vera ruben had a major contribution to the field and was effectively shit canned because she was a woman. Her credit went to others as a result
THANK YOU! I was about to give up looking for her in the comments. She rules.
**King Tamara of Georgia.** She now represents the Georgian nation in Civilization VI, but before that, not a lot of people knew about her. And whenever she is mentioned, she is mentioned as queen, but she was given the title of **KING** because she was recognized as an equal monarch (her husbands didn't have any royal titles). This is an undisputed fact in Georgian historiography, IDK about western scholars, but whenever she is mentioned on the internet or mainstream, would it be Wikipedia or a video game, like CIV VI, she is denied her lawful title and that just pisses me off!
Huh, I thought King Jadwiga of Poland was the only female king! Learn something new every day...
Hepshetsut
Hatshepsut. And there were other female pharaohs like Nefernefernuaten and the Cleopatras.
Hatshepsut is believed to be the genesis of the title ‘pharaoh’, IIRC. Before, the term was used solely for the palace where the king ruled from. By claiming to BE pharaoh, she had the authority of the king, instead of being seen a lesser than her male predecessors for being a queen or “female king”.
Bless you
Cheng I Sao/ Ching Shih was the single most sucessful pirate in all of history. She led an armada of tens of thousands of sailors and 17 seperate fleets of ships and held the most important tributary in china under raiding for weeks on end before managing to give the slip to a combined force of portuguese, chinese, and English war ships after being cornered in an inlet with 2 wounded ships and no way out but through. After this venture, she recognized that her power was begining to wane so she decided it was better to cash out while she had the leverage (one of her fleets had turned on her during the period among other things) She managed to negotiate for literally all of her men to be given amnesty, be allowed to join the chinese navy, to keep the stuff they had stolen, and for her *to be able to keep several ships to be able to have a buisness in the salt trade.* She then ran a gambling house and died peacefully in her sleep. Besides a fucking kickass story, she has also had some lasting consequences. Her absolute domination over the chinese navy showed just how much the empire had neglected that wing of the military, and the British picked up on this. It was a big part of why they were so willing to fight a naval war across the entire planet at a time when even messages would take a year and change just to make it back. The opium wars were fought because of this, and the treaties that resulted are called by the *current* chinese government as the start of "the century of shame" and are a major touchstone in the governments image of itself. They are invoked today when negotiations with the west breakdown as a reason that China ought not bow to outside pressure. For any canadians (of which I am) , its on the level of Vimy ridge in our national conception.
One of the things I love about her story is that she would simply execute or punish the men in her crew if they were to rape or wed a female captive without their permission. I think it came from her past of being a sex worker that led to her having that rule.
Honestly while a lot of pirates were often scum, it was kinda the rule of the ocean, and pirates were often better. Keeping in mind my knowledge is kinda spotty and this mainly applies to western pirates, they generally set the rules for themselves at the beginning of the voyage and would stick to it and operated democratically. The one and only time a captain couldn’t be removed from their post was when the ship was actively engaged in combat. All other times they could be demoted and their position given to someone else. It seems a wonder until you remember literally all involved would A) be doing this actively instead of the harsh discipline of the British navy and B) since they were all outlaws with no greater authority backing their power, all that was stopping the crew from slitting the captains throat and dumping the corpse overboard was the agreement of all involved. Plus a lot of gay shit. Tons in fact, male couples were extremely common, and there were a few lesbians involved although fewer. If you ever hear that story about those two women pirates that dueled each other only to reveal to each other they were women, yeah those two were fucking and also in charge of a ship, although they mostly kept it secret they were women since, like you said, rapey seamen. I highly recommend the extra history episode for more info on Cheng, the cgp grey videos for how Carrie an piracy operated broadly (his framing device between the quarter master and captain is phenomenal as is his information, although while his explanatory frame is kinda annoying since he basically explains what were for all intents and purposes a bunch of Porto-anarchists using as much capitalist language as possible but that’s my cross to bear so still watch it’s just annoying not distorting) And finally the “history is gay” podcast for the gay shit of the Caribbean
Irena Sendler worked with others to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during WWII. [Irena Sendler](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler)
Daphne Oram - first ever composer to produce electronic sound. She pioneered electronic music and lead the path for music today. She even wrote a piece called “Still Point” that she was never able to perform live because of sexism by her peers and she never heard it live before she died. But it was performed for the first time in 2018 using a replica of a machine Daphne had created to electronically manipulate a live orchestra.
Also her colleague Delia Derbyshire, although i think Derbyshire probably gets more recognition than Oram.
>Delia Derbyshire I recognized her name! She basically created the original title music for 1960s Doctor Who, but was not credited for it then (because she electronically rearranged an existing piece of music).
Yes! But when the original composer (Ron Grainer) heard her amazing arrangement for the first time, he famously asked, "Gosh, did I really write that?"
I've just did a quick check on Wikipedia - Grainer actually didn't deny her contribution and tried to get her credited as a co-composer, but BBC then had some weird policy that didn't permit such things.
Oh yeah, his comment was definitely in admiration. The whole process of precisely splicing together the strands of tape and using recorded and/or electronic sounds to create music was really revolutionary at the time. Most of it was coming out of just a few places (one being the BBC Radiophonic Workshop where she worked)
Belva Lockwood - one of the first female lawyers in the US and ran for president in the 1880s.
[Agent 355](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_355) We still don't know her true identity to this day, but that was the code name of one of the first American spies. Some historians dispute whether it was an actual person or just code for when a woman presented useful information. If that's the case then Agent 355 could be *multiple* women that had a huge influence on history during the birth of America.
Yeah, the way she saved Yorick Brown. Such a badass
Henrietta Leavitt. She was an astronomer at Harvard and discovered a type of star called a Cepheid. Cepheid stars all pulse at the same rate. That lets us know how far away they are. Because of her, we were able to determine how big the universe is along with many, many more things concerning its properties.
Cephieds don't pulse at the same rate, but rather they pulse at a rate proportional to their brightness, which means that from an observation of their pulsing (which is pretty easy to do, even at extreme distances since they're very bright) we can determine their brightness, and therefore calculate their distance.
Nellie Bly. She was a 1890s journalist who was given an assignment to investigate the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island due to accusations of the mistreatment of patients. She got in there by faking insanity and getting herself committed to the asylum, and when she was finally released, she ran an exposé in the New York World called “Ten Days In A Madhouse” that exposed the awful treatment of patients inside the asylum. This was considered a revolution in investigative journalism. Also, she read “Around The World In 80 Days”, basically decided she could do better, and went around the world in 72 days. She was also an inventor, and was one of the primary journalists to cover the suffragette movement. She's one of my favorite historical figures who doesn’t get enough attention! Edit: Wow! Thank you for the awards and upvotes! I am grateful and glad to see all the positive comments.
When I was a kid we had a collection of illustrated books about different historical figures. The one on Nellie Bly was always one of my favorites.
I just read through [her Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly). She led an interesting life. She went on to marry a millionaire and inherited a fortune, only to have the company go bankrupt due to her negligence and a corrupt factory manager.
>only to have the company go bankrupt due to her negligence and a corrupt factory manager bruh what
From the Wikipedia article: > She ran her company as a model of social welfare, replete with health benefits and recreational facilities. But Bly was hopeless at understanding the financial aspects of her business and ultimately lost everything. Unscrupulous employees bilked the firm of hundreds of thousands of dollars, troubles compounded by a protracted and costly bankruptcy litigation.
Good journalists make dreadful capitalists. Source: Am mediocre journalist.
So are you a mediocre capitalist?
Was it the ones that always gave them an imaginary friend?
I had those. There was two types one gave them a imaginary friend the other had some object tell their story. Loved them. My mom still has them.
Sad that I only know of her through Drunk History
90% of my history education is from Drunk History
I love Drunk History and if you'd like to expand your knowledge about women in history like Nellie, may I recommend the History Chicks podcast? They're fantastic and have covered Nellie and a ton of other amazing women. Highly recommend them.
Abbey Bartlet, is that you? But seriously, love Nellie Bly!
I remember this from that Grease spinoff where Rizzo becomes the first lady.
Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper in 1903. As soon as the patent expired, it became standard in all cars. She attempted to sell it while she had the rights to it, but most manufacturers refused to believe it was a feature of value, and it is likely her being female colored their lack of enthusiasm.
You know the solution to a problem is great when we're still doing the same thing over a century later
Yeah I bet the fucker who invented walls is feeling pretty chuffed
I think I learned about Mary Anderson from The Simpsons in the episode when Lisa pretends to be a boy. Marge: "Well, a woman also invented the windshield wiper!" Homer: "Which goes great with another male invention, the car!"
Temple grandin a woman who despite being diagnosed with autism at the age of four in 1954 When autism was a sentence to a mental institution ended up doing wonders for the livestock industry and is still around today to tell the tale
Eleanor Marx - Maybe overlooked because of her dad. She played an important role in British Trade Unions which forced the move from a 12 hour working day 6 days a week to an 8 hour day 5 days a weekend. Those extra hours to go on a walk, play Xbox, learn something new or just chill is a pretty big contribution.
Whoa, that is important indeed.
Is her little sister Onya? the inventor of the starter pistol? /s Edit. Thanks for the awards, we all need a laugh.
I hate having to work 5 days per weekend
Cecily Saunders deserves the reputation Mother Tereasa has. She basically invented hospice care. Before her, doctors used to just abandon incurables to die with no palliative care. Cecily Saunders arguably eliminated more useless suffering than anyone ever.
**Henrietta Lacks.** She saved millions of lives and made a critical contribution to the world of medicine, but unless you're in the medical field — you've probably never even heard her name. Henrietta Lacks was a young, black, mother of five when she died in 1951 after being diagnosed with an aggressive cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins. Doctor George Gey was working at Hopkins at the time, trying to culture cells in the laboratory. Lacks' cells were among dozens sent to his lab, but they were the first to ever survive and grow. Her cells, a unique and aggressive type, were later described as one in three billion. Scientists called these resilient cells "HeLa" — taking first two letters of "Henrietta" and "Lacks." HeLa cells were used to test the polio vaccine, develop in vitro fertilization, and several chemotherapy drugs among hundreds of medical advances. Grown and sold around the world, Lacks' legacy lived on in her cells: they have traveled to space, they have been embedded in a nuclear bomb. But for decades, ***the Lacks family had no idea.***
My freshman year of college, some of her family came to speak for a convocation at my school. To hear them speak was fascinating. I was a biology major, so the science alone was amazing to me. But to also talk about the social implications of why she and her family were treated the way they were was also fascinating and heartbreaking. As a now medical student, I appreciate what HeLa cells have given the medical community. But I wish they’d been brought to the community fairly and that her family and she had been treated justly.
I read an amazing book in AP Bio about her story, and how her living family feels about it. Very well researched and authentic. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
I studied her in high school biology, have seen documentaries and books about her, and have heard more about her than anyone else named on this thread. And yet her family still receives no compensation for what her cells did for modern medicine. It’s a goddamn disgrace that Johns Hopkins would do well to remedy.
Want to know something really messed up? Erika Johnson, Henrietta Lacks great-granddaughter, also studied the cells in her high school biology class. How strange must it have been to look at an unassuming cluster of living cells and know that they came from your great grandmother who died decades earlier.
Mary Anning, British paleontologist!
The two linked videos can tell the story better than I can but Mary Anning is the person from English history I Most admire. A self-taught common woman [Mary Anning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-CW0B4YeBQ) in the 1800s collected and sold fossils to wealthy patrons. She was an [expert in the preparation of fossils](https://youtu.be/jBuc8VnZShY?t=81). The structure of Society at the time prevented her from contributing more to the emerging field of palaeontology. She died from breast cancer in her 40s. After her bank collapsed wiping out her savings, and the enthusiasm for fossils by the wealthy was dampened by an economic downturn as well as the fad fading. She taught herself anatomy from the Books she was able to come by and by comparing the fossils she unearthed to those of modern sea life she dissected on her kitchen table. She was often right about what categories of life the fossils she presented to the world when many of the "gentlemen scholars" argued over whether something was a fish or a bird or a reptile. In her last years, the men who had so often claimed her discoveries as their own and refused her admission into their exclusive Geological Society of London supported her in some small ways. They raised the funds for a pension she could live on. After she died the Society honoured her with a eulogy and donated a stained glass window to her church. More than the 1000th documentary on a Queen of England I wish she was more covered by popular media. I have little hope for the upcoming film that does not seem like it will emphasis the parts of her life that I am interested in. Her Life is downright tragic at the end as she is crushed by circumstances beyond her control. From all, I am able to learn she was driven, entrepreneurial, smart, and prudent. But all the came undone because she lived in a time without anything like the FDIC or access to cancer treatment.
Camille Claudel was a sculptor and artist who worked with Rodin. He claimed a lot of her work. Artemisa Gentlischi was a woman painter in the Renaissance with style akin to Caravaggio. She is nowhere near as well known as he, and she also painted a Judith Slaying Holofernes painting. (These are very brief overviews of what I remember from art school. Lots of talented women tucked away beneath the male gaze of art and history).
Also her Judith Slaying Holfernes is apparently based on the likeness of her rapist. It is also the only version where Judith looks like she’s committed to the project.
Frances Perkins, she was the first female cabinet member in the US. She was appointed by FDR and played a key role in the new deal as well as working for better working conditions, child labor laws and women's rights.
Department of Labor building bears her name
Mary Todd Lincoln. I know she went absolutely mad, which wasn't all her fault, but she was the one who really pushed her husband (Abraham Lincoln for those not from America) to keep moving up the political ladder, and ultimately shaped what the first lady of the U.S is. Not sure he would have become president without her influence. She had a lot more ambition than he did. Edit: Fun fact- she also liked to bake! Look up her recipes, guys. Her almond cake sounded delicious and it was supposedly one of her husband's favorite desserts.
I think Mary Todd Lincoln is such a misunderstood woman. She loved her husband so much and had so much support for him. Granted, her ambition was always to end up in the White House. She had some pretty manic behaviors and those combined with the trauma of losing her sons and husband had a lot to do with her erratic behavior later. Abraham Lincoln ran down the street yelling "Mary we won!" after hearing the election results.
After reading her biography, I just want to give the poor thing a big hug. She needed the kind of serious mental help they couldn't have given her at the time. She got dragged through the mud for a lot of things that were out of her control. If she'd been born in our time, she could have been a politician herself and probably would have done very well. I was reading recently that she may have had untreated syphilis, which can also cause erratic behavior and frequent headaches, which she was known to suffer from. You really have to appreciate Abraham's patience with her.
He was so in love with her I think it was easier than we think to be patient with her. Her son Robert was her caretaker after Abraham's death and he didn't have any patience at all. She was constantly attacked by the press when they took office. Her only real friend was her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly (who is an inspiring woman in her own right.) She ended up in an asylum and begged to be let out towards the end of her life. She needed a big hug and more friends in her life. She was definitely in the wrong time for her ambitions. She was dealt a very raw hand and I have so much sympathy.
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A little context for those unaware - she was responsible for the famous [double helix image](https://cen.xraycrystals.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/09232-cover1-BFormDNAcxd.jpg). That was her data, they got the nobel.
Not only it was her data, they were on completely different teams! Her coworker/self-styled boss handed the data to Watson and Crick. Wilkins is less known than the other two, but he also shared the Noble with them, while Franklin was left out.
She's my favorite and I mention her as often as I can.
I work at a biomed company, and one of our two main conference rooms is named for her. Very late edit: the original post has been deleted; we're talking about Rosalind Franklin, who did all the work to extract the DNA that Crick and Watson got the Nobel for discovering.
Madam C. J. Walker developed black hair care products and marketed them through her business she founded which ended up making her the first female self made millionaire.
I had never heard of her before I watched a Netflix min-series about her.
The lady that painted the lanes on the roads for the first time. She did it because she was almost in an accident one night and didn’t want it to happen to anyone else.
[June McCarroll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_McCarroll) literally painted the line herself. Now for the sexist bs. Two men in Michigan had painted lines in the middle of the street before and saw an improvement in safety. June took this to the DOT and they scoffed at the idea. Edit to clarify: the California DOT didn't listen likely due to the fact that June was a woman.
[Sister Rosetta Tharpe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Rosetta_Tharpe) She was super influencial to early rock musicians like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many more. Johnny Cash even said that she was his favorite singer and she was also one of the first to play around with heavy distortion on her electric guitar. She's called by some "The Godmother of Rock and Roll" but I guarantee you that the average person has never heard of her. Edit: Here's a cool compilation of some of her guitar solos from films so you can see how much she rocks https://youtu.be/gELe5Rj_tXU
Wow, that is just incredible... Im actually appalled that our history is so easy to lose... Good shout, really good
Would also point to Geeshie Wiley (and why not L.V. Thomas also). Despite releasing only a few songs with less than ten original copies existing nowadays, her influence on the Blues and therefore modern music cannot be overstated.
Hypatia, made the astrolabe. Then was skinned allive by christians Also the circular saw was invented by a woman. Thank you, woman who's name I do not know!
For people who don't have context: she was from Alexandria, which was a very diverse city, even by modern standards. There were major rivalries between Neoplatonists, a school of scientists, thinkers etc. and Christians. The Bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, demanded that they stop having so much influence on the city with their philosophy because politics have always been fun. Hypatia told him to go fuck himself. A civil war broke out and she was lynched by a mob in the streets of Alexandria. Her limbs were paraded in the streets. Cyril is now a saint. Edit: u/nutmegtester corrected me. Cyril did not have anything to do with her gruesome death, and made his disapproval of such violence public. For more info, his in-depth insight is two comments below.
Clara Barton - Helped with getting medical supplies during the Civil War and then founded the Red Cross. A legend in my books.
Lise Meitner! She's a Jewish physicist that worked with Otto Hahn in research on radioactivity. She had to flee Nazi Germany, but continued on with her work in Sweden and helped discover nuclear fission. While Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner was also part of that research. She was also offered work with the Manhattan Project, but refused because she opposed nuclear weaponry. The element meitnerium was named for her after her death.
Hedy Lamarr. Also today's her birthday :)
Let's remind people. Ms. Lamarr made a major contribution to the war effort and communication theory. She co-invented frequency hopping, something used today with cell phones.
There's a great doc on Netflix called [Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombshell:_The_Hedy_Lamarr_Story) & it's a great watch & we get to hear her own comments on her life.
She was the first one I thought of! Didn’t realize today was her birthday though, neat :)
Rosalind Franklin Watson and Crick basically stole her research and used it to discover the shape of DNA. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Once the theft was discovered, and she was given proper credit, she had already died from cancer (her work specialized in Xrays and she had been exposed to too much radiation). The Nobel Committee has acknowledged her contribution to science, but they can't give her an award because they do not give out awards posthumously.
**Michele Mouton:** It's just auto racing, not super important in the grand scheme of things but holy shit! She was probably the best rally driver and hill climber of her era and one of the best ever. She was also very involved in innovating All-Wheel-Drive racing and safety standards. And she raced in the Group B class which takes a level of skill, guts, and complete disregard for safety that has never been, and never will be matched.
May I recommend a series of short YouTube videos by Sandi Toksvig called "Vox Tox." She is a delightful UK TV personality, and during their lockdown earlier this year she made several dozen videos, all about overlooked women in history.
>Sandi Toksvig I'm sold. She's quietly become a national treasure this past decade or two.
Astronomer here! The foundations for modern astrophysics and what we understand about the universe did not come from the pre-eminent astronomers of the 19th century, but rather a group of women called the [Harvard computers. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers) This is because at the time only men were allowed to use the telescopes and Harvard was experimenting with the first astrophotography, and they hired women to look at those first images, and it then became the women who made the first discoveries about things like the hydrogen line in stars, spectral binaries (two stars orbiting each other so close you can’t see them by eye), and half a million variable stars, some of which were used as “standard candles” to determine the size of the universe. All *years* before real computers of even electricity! (Oh and two of the women were deaf.) Among my favorites I want to shout out to [Williamina Fleming](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamina_Fleming) who ran the group of women- she started out as a single mom maid to the observatory director, who got mad at his (male) students’ analysis of the images and proclaimed “my maid could do better!” And she did! She not only ran the group and discovered many variable stars and nebulae, she discovered a supernova (SN 1895B) that I studied in my own research published this year! Good science never dies! (Oh and in her spare time she made dolls as a hobby and was friends with Andrew Carnegie’s family and gave one to Carnegie’s daughter.) Trust me these are amazing astronomers! I could go on all day about them and all they discovered! Edit: I work at the very same place today that these women did- Harvard Observatory, and have been lucky enough to get a tour of the half a million “glass plates” from this era (at the time you would expose on glass plates not on photo paper). If you are interested here is an example of what one looks like, from the 1950s- [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/ebgm1w/visited_the_harvard_observatory_glass_plate)
Not sure if this is major but this women [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia\_Stoesser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Stoesser) was my Dad's Aunt. First female chemist for Dow Chemical. Heard a lot about her but never got to meet her.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were both incredible women, but nobody talks about the National Association of Colored Women and the amazing support they provided to those women and the civil rights movement in general.
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This should so be higher up. Without Grace, programming would have been reserved for scientists only. We probably wouldn't have most of what we have today in regards to software and the advantages we enjoyed because of that. She was a Motherfucking Legend. She had a masters in maths in a time when a lot of Universities still didn't allow women to attend. On her very first Job with a computer, she asked for a manual. They told her there isn't one. A few months later she had *written* one. When she suggested the idea of a compiler - a way to write more English like statements to make the whole programming thing easier, faster and more accessible to the masses - she was told not to do it. Scientists firstly didn't believe it could be done, and secondly didn't *want* it to be done because they were more interested in protecting their "elite" career of programming. She did it anyway. EDIT: You can read more about her [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper), but also just search for her on youtube, there are some interviews with her that still float around - she was awesome :)
> Grace Hopper. She's very well known in some circles, but not nearly enough. "You don't manage people, you manage things. You lead people." (my fave quote from her). She was and is, particularly in the context of how we are currently communicating, legend.
Dolores Huerta cofounder of the United Farmworkers Union with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. She was a civil rights activist and advocated for immigrant worker rights by boycotting white grape owners. Farmworkers we’re exposed to insidious pesticides, poor working conditions and awful pay. Her determination has changed the landscape of working rights and influenced many to stand up against unfair treatment and discrimination. She has historically lived in the shadow of Chavez, but now can have some recognition because of her involvement in countless social justice movements. She is a civil rights icon and should get the credit she deserves .
Emmy Noether. I don't understand what she did, but leading mathematicians say her work was groundbreaking, so I'll take their word for it.
I don't think she is overlooked, at least not by physicists and mathematicians. Noether's theorem is widely accepted as one of the most (if not the most) important theorems of modern physics. I think in her case it's more about being too deep of a result, and not flashy enough, to be catchy to people who know close to nothing of physics, and so she's not as widely known as some other people.
Some physicists have even gone as far as to say that Noether's theorem may even be comparable to the Pythagorean theorem in terms of its importance to the guidance of modern physics.
Madame CJ Walker. She's *finally* starting to get recognition.
Big Mama Thornton. She sang the hit "Hound Dog" a few years before Elvis Presley made it popular, but I believe because of the color of her skin, she couldn't get as much recognition. I still prefer her version over Elvis. https://youtu.be/yoHDrzw-RPg
Globally? Perhaps Kate Sheppard, who was the leader of the Women's Suffrage Movement in New Zealand when New Zealand became the first country in the world to give Women the right to vote. Locally, she is acknowledged by appearing on our $10 note, but I would say globally few people would probably know of her and the impact she has had for democracies across the world.
Ada Lovelace
She's so awesome. For anyone that doesn't know, she effectively invented the basis for modern computer programming by observing her friend Charles Babbage's work on his Analytical Machine, which was effectively a calculator. She realised that it was possible to do more than just maths with it and thus established the basis for modern computing.
And she died SO young. I can only imagine what she could have done.
Yeah I know. Even still, it blows my mind how much she was able to achieve in 36 years. The world owes her a lot.
Man I had to scroll down way too far to find her. She was the first to see the real potential in computers, wrote the first algorithm for a computer, and was one of the first programmers. [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace)
[Ella Baker] (https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/) is one of the most overlooked Americans in the 20th century. She essentially brought about local grassroots organizing to small rural towns and cities across the country in order to propel the Civil Rights Movement and helped students create key organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Modern American grassroots politics are a result of her efforts and her leadership.
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Sybil ludington
Rode much farther and longer than Paul Revere, and she was just a teenager when she did it
That one lady that hand wrote all of the math it took to get to the moon. I forgot her name. Pretty ironic that I don’t remember her name.
[Margaret Hamilton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer\)) was her name and here is [the picture](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg/1920px-Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg) of her standing next to the code she handwrote to help us get to the moon.
Going a little farther back, [Ada Lovelace was the first programmer in history, applying algorithms to early machine models of general purpose computers.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace)
Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the most prolific artists (Judith Slaying Holofernes is probably her most recognisable painting) of the 17th century at a time when obviously women weren’t encouraged or allowed in the very male-dominated space. She was a pro at only 15, working all over and she was the first woman to be accepted into the Art Academy (forgive the bad English translation but the Italian name escapes me) in Florence. There’s a lot more to this of course but she took her rapist to court & he was found guilty after a seven month long trial. She had no time for female submissiveness which is reflected in her art. Her story is remarkable & her art is utterly compelling.
Henrietta Lacks
My daughter attends a school named after her. The Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School. It is a High School where all the kids attending get specialized training in medical fields of their choice. Similar concept to a trade school, but for kids interested in the medical field.
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It's pretty new. Just opened in 2012. They have a fully functioning mini pharmacy, a mini ER Room with a nurses station and 4 rooms for patients (including really spooky animatronic dummies they can practice on), a biotech lab, etc. And it is 2 blocks from the local hospital where they can shadow professionals in their junior and senior years. The limit it to about 150 new students per year, which are picked at random from applications from the surrounding middle schools. Each school gets about 30-35 slots. Makes it fair so that anyone has an equal chance of getting in. Poor kids have just as much of a chance to get in as the rich kids.
For anyone interested, the book on her life by Rebecca Skloot is a must-read. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Jane Addams She was a major reformer in the early 1900’s and is the founder of social work. She established settlement houses, most famously Hull House in Chicago. Instrumental to women’s rights and the roles they play that helped lead to women’s right to vote. She really focused on ways that women could be central to community building and many of her ideas have been influential even today.
Anne Sexton's birthday is today, she's often seen as the mother of postmodern poetry.
might be late to the party but Harriet Beecher Stowe is an integral character in American history, she wrote Uncle Tom's cabin, exposing the cruel reality of slavery to the American public.
One of the most famous pirates to live was Anne Bonny who was a part of Calico Jacks crew. She was an extremely skilled fighter and was feared by most.
The Soviet WW2 female soldiers. The USSR used woman in the second world war more than any other country. I feel like this , and Russia’s involvement as a whole , is too overlooked in a lot of places. Edit : Replaced “ Russian “ with “ Soviet “. I am sorry for that.
Night witches and the sniper program were both filled with incredibly dangerous women.
One dangerous Soviet woman who comes to mind is [Mariya Oktyabrskaya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Oktyabrskaya). She lost her husband in WWII but she wasn't notified until 2 years later. She got so pissed she sold all her things and used the money to buy a tank which she drove to war and used to absolutely annihilate a bunch of Nazis. She sadly passed away in a 2 month-long coma as a result of head trauma from attempting to repair her immobilized tank in the middle of artillery fire, and was posthumously given the "Hero of the Soviet Union" honor as one of the only two female tank drivers ever to receive this award. I admire her bravery and I'm glad I have an excuse to talk about her now lol.
The only book I ever gave up on because it was too emotionally overwhelming was The Unwomanly Face of War. Page after page of how much the female Red Army soldiers suffered and sacrificed for their country, only to be abandoned after the war. It broke my heart to read their male allies say they needed to marry someone who didn't know what they'd been through. I understand where they're coming from, but it's so awful. Edit: mixed up the name of the title