Amelia Bloomer was a women’s rights activist famous for popularizing “bloomers.” A women’s rights activist, writer, and editor, she founded a newspaper called The Lily which she used to advocate for women’s suffrage and temperance as well as more sensible dress for women. The Early Life of Amelia Jenks Bloomer Amelia Bloomer was born Amelia […]
Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar
Stephanie Kwolek is the chemist who invented Kevlar in 1965. “To invent, I draw upon my knowledge, intuition, creativity, experience, common sense, perseverance, flexibility, and hard work.” She started working as a chemist in 1946 just to earn enough money to go to medical school, to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a doctor. She […]
Who Invented Windshield Wipers? Mary Anderson
You may have never heard of Mary Anderson, but you’ve probably used her invention thousands of times in your life! One frosty day in 1903, Mary Anderson (1866-1953), a native of Birmingham, Alabama, was visiting New York City via a trolley car. She was trying to catch all the sights of the city’s crowded streets, […]
Gertrude B. Elion: Groundbreaking Chemist Who Helped Create the AIDS Drug
Gertrude B. Elion was a Nobel Prize winning biochemist who developed the first immunosuppressive drug and the first successful antiviral drug.
Ada Lovelace: World’s First Programmer
Augusta Ada King, known as Ada Lovelace, was a brilliant mathematician, exceptional writer, and one of the world’s earliest computer programmers.
Margaret Hamilton, the Woman Behind the Moon Landing
Nearly fifty years ago, history was made when Neil Armstrong took his famous first small step on the surface of the moon. But, as they say, behind every great man is a woman, and for Armstrong that woman was Margaret Hamilton, the programmer who invented the software that made the moon landing possible, not to […]
Admiral “Amazing Grace” Hopper, pioneering computer programmer
United States Navy Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was one of the first programmers in the history of computers. Her belief that programming languages should be as easily understood as English was highly influential on the development of one of the first programming languages called COBOL. It is largely due to Grace Hopper’s influence that programmers […]
Fe del Mundo, first female student at Harvard Medical School
Fe del Mundo was a Filipino pediatrician who was the first woman to be admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1936 — over ten years before the school officially began admitting women.
Sarah Guppy, Eclectic English Inventor
I used to live in Richmond Hill in Bristol and was aware of the green plaque a few doors down advising the world that it used to be the home of Sarah Guppy, an English inventor who lived between 1770 and 1852. Indeed I always parked my car in the tree-filled garden opposite her home […]
Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist
Katharine Dexter McCormick is a name that every woman today should know, because your life would probably be very different today if it wasn’t for her. Katharine funded what The New York Times called the “most sweeping sociomedical revolution in history. . . [whose] impact on the United States and other nations [is] almost too […]
