The achievements and stories of remarkable women have been routinely neglected, overlooked, or even deliberately suppressed throughout history. Yet the indelible marks these women left on the world could not be erased.
Here are 25 extraordinary women history tried to forget, but whose legacies endure to inspire us today.
1. Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks, a tobacco farmer, died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge or consent, a sample of her cancer cells was taken by doctors. Researchers found that her cells, known as “HeLa” cells, kept reproducing, making them essentially immortal.
HeLa cells have led to major medical breakthroughs, from cancer treatments to the polio vaccine, yet Lacks’ story also exposes the troubling history of medical ethics violations and mistreatment of people of color in healthcare.
2. Ada Lovelace
Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was a visionary mathematician and is considered the world’s first computer programmer. She wrote the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine and predicted the potential of computers to manipulate symbols, not just crunch numbers.
Her creative brilliance laid the groundwork for modern computing.
3. Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress in the 1930s-40s, was also a brilliant inventor. Working with composer George Antheil, she developed a radio guidance system using frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology.
This groundbreaking work served as a precursor to modern wireless communications like Wi-Fi and GPS.
4. Patsy Mink
Patsy Mink, a third-generation Japanese American, became the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1964.
She co-authored the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act, later renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act after her death.
Title IX was a landmark law prohibiting gender discrimination in federally-funded education programs. (ref)
5. Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an influential author, anthropologist, and filmmaker during the Harlem Renaissance. Her groundbreaking novels and short stories offered realistic portrayals of racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South.
Hurston’s work celebrated African American culture and vernacular at a time when it was often denigrated.
6. Mary Anning
Mary Anning was a pioneering English paleontologist in the early 19th century. She made several significant fossil finds, including the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton and the first two plesiosaur skeletons.
Her discoveries were groundbreaking but were often credited to the male scientists who bought them from her.
7. Nellie Bly
Born in 1864, Nellie Bly was a trailblazing journalist who went undercover to report on the abusive conditions inside a New York mental asylum. Her exposé, published as “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” pioneered investigative journalism. She also set a record by circumnavigating the globe in just 72 days.
8. Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th-century British writer and philosopher who advocated for women’s equality. Her work “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) was a landmark treatise calling for equal education and opportunities for women. She established the foundation of modern feminism.
9. Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker was a world-renowned entertainer, civil rights activist, and French Resistance agent. The first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, Baker also smuggled military intelligence to the Allies during WWII.
She was a vocal advocate for racial equality and refused to perform for segregated audiences in the U.S..
10. Bessie Coleman
Bessie Coleman was the first African American and first Native American woman pilot. She earned her international pilot’s license in 1921 after being denied entry to American flight schools due to her race and gender.
Coleman performed daring flying stunts at air shows, inspiring later generations of diverse aviators.
11. Gladys Bentley
Gladys Bentley was a gender-bending performer during the Harlem Renaissance.
An openly lesbian blues singer and pianist who often performed in men’s clothing, she boldly defied 1920s norms around sexuality and gender expression while creating music that gave voice to controversial issues like domestic violence.
12. Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneering feminist thinker. Her groundbreaking book “The Second Sex” (1949) examined the treatment of women throughout history and is credited with sparking second-wave feminism.
De Beauvoir’s theories on gender greatly influenced modern feminist thought.
13. Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo was a renowned Mexican painter known for her searing self-portraits and depictions of the female experience and form. Through her art, she explored questions of identity, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.
Her work has been celebrated as emblematic of national and indigenous traditions and by feminists for its honest depiction of female experience.
14. Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.
Her data and images were used to formulate Crick and Watson’s 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA, but her contributions were downplayed and uncredited initially.
15. Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics.
Dubbed the “First Lady of Physics,” Wu worked on the Manhattan Project and conducted the Wu experiment, which overturned the law of conservation of parity. Her male colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery, but Wu was excluded.
16. Edmonia Lewis
Edmonia Lewis was the first professional African-American and Native American sculptor. She earned critical praise for work exploring religious and classical themes.
Her 1876 masterwork “The Death of Cleopatra” was hailed as “the most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section” of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
17. Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics. She was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, but her contribution was overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee in favor of her male colleague Otto Hahn.
Meitner is often cited as one of the most glaring examples of women’s scientific achievement overlooked by the Nobel committee.
18. Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins was the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, making her the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet.
As a workers-rights advocate, she was the principal architect of the New Deal, credited with formulating policies to shore up the national economy following the nation’s most serious economic crisis, and helped create the modern middle class.
19. Claudette Colvin
Nine months before Rosa Parks’ famous bus boycott, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled bus segregation laws unconstitutional.
Despite her integral role in the fight to end bus segregation, Colvin’s story has been largely forgotten.
20. Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs was an African-American writer whose autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (1861), was one of the first open discussions about sexual abuse endured by slave women.
The book was remarkable for its details, at a time when the topic of sexual exploitation was taboo, and for using the real names of Jacobs and her oppressors.
21. Gertrude Benham
Gertrude Benham was an English adventurer and mountaineer who climbed more mountains than any other woman in history. She made a record eight ascents of Mount Kilimanjaro, and was the first woman to climb Mount Kenya.
Benham never used professional guides or porters and financed her travels by selling her watercolor paintings and embroidery.
22. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a 17th-century Mexican scholar, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque school, and Hieronymite nun. She was an outspoken advocate for women’s rights and education.
Criticized by the Church for her “waywardness,” she penned a searing defense of women’s right to education in “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (1691).
23. Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was an African-American journalist, abolitionist, and feminist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the 1890s.
She risked her life by reporting and exposing racial injustice in the face of personal threats and published works like “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1892). Wells was a founder of the NAACP.
24. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Harvard.
25. Harriet Boyd Hawes
Harriet Boyd Hawes was a pioneering American archaeologist, nurse and relief worker. She is best known as the first director of an archaeological excavation in Greece, leading an all-female team of excavators on the island of Crete in 1900.
Their discovery of the Minoan settlement of Gournia overturned the belief that ancient Greek civilization was exclusively male-centered.
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Martha A. Lavallie
Martha is a journalist with close to a decade of experience in uncovering and reporting on the most compelling stories of our time. Passionate about staying ahead of the curve, she specializes in shedding light on trending topics and captivating global narratives. Her insightful articles have garnered acclaim, making her a trusted voice in today's dynamic media landscape.
