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Mar 6, 2020 · In addition, to shed light on other lesser-known female history-makers, we asked historians to name a woman from the American past whose story should be better known. Here are their picks. Emilia...
- Chrissy Clark
- Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). Alcott worked to support her family through financial difficulties at an early age, and managed to write “Little Women,” one of the most famous novels in American history.
- Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906). Anthony played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1878, she and co-workers presented an amendment to Congress that would give women the right to vote.
- Clara Barton (1821-1912). Barton founded the American Red Cross and served as its first president. She was a nurse during the Civil War for the Union Army.
- Nellie Bly (1864-1904). A journalist, she launched a new kind of investigative reporting. She is best known for her record-breaking trip around the world by ship in 72 days.
- Sacagawea (1788-1812/1884) Sacagaewa was a Lemhi Shoshone woman from Idaho. As a young teenager, she was married off to a French-Canadian fur trader.
- Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in the American South but returned again and again over the next decade to lead her family and friends to freedom.
- Grace Hopper (1906-1992) Grace Hopper was interested in engineering and math from a young age, so after graduating college, she earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University.
- Rosa Parks (1913-2005) When seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for white customers, she sparked the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.
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- Maya Angelou. From her powerful poetry to her moving autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou forever changed the literary world and opened doors for Black authors everywhere.
- Lucille Ball. While she was an undeniable light onscreen in I Love Lucy, Ball was an extremely powerful figure off camera as well. She was the first woman to own a major studio, called Desilu Productions.
- Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth II served as head of the royal family for 70 years, making her the longest-reigning monarch in British history. She celebrated her Platinum Jubilee in June 2022, just three months before she passed away at 96 years old.
- Rosa Parks. Parks famously became a leader in the 1950s Civil Rights Movement when she refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger. Her bravery sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and was a major factor in the end of legal segregation.
- Bella Abzug (1920-1998) Daughter to Russian Jewish immigrants, Abzug was a lawyer specializing in labor and civil rights in 1950s and ’60s New York. With the start of the Vietnam War she became a vocal member of the anti-war movement.
- Abigail Adams (1744-1818) As wife to President John Adams, and her husband’s confidante and adviser, she opposed slavery and pushed for women’s rights and education.
- Julia C. Addington (1829-1875) Julia Addington became the first woman elected to public office in Iowa in 1869 when she became the Superintendent of Schools in Mitchell County—which, though records from the time may be incomplete, likely makes her the first woman ever elected to office in the U.S. When some challenged the legitimacy of her election because she was a woman, the state Attorney General ruled that she was allowed to continue in her role, setting an important precedent.
- Madeleine Albright (1937- ) In 1997, she became the first woman to be Secretary of State, and the highest-ranking woman ever in the U.S. Government. She knew the importance of that work: her Czech parents fled Nazi Germany in 1939, and she became a naturalized citizen while in college, but, having been raised Catholic, it was only as an adult that she learned her family was Jewish and that many relatives had died in the Holocaust.
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In celebration of the AWHI, Smithsonian magazine has collected representative examples of its coverage of diverse women throughout American history. Amelia Earhart (left) and Eleanor Roosevelt ...
Feb 26, 2019 · From Abigail Adams imploring her husband to “remember the ladies” when envisioning a government for the American colonies, to suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady...
