Amelia Bloomer: Temperance, Suffrage, and Rational Dress Advocate
She used journalism to argue for political rights and practical clothing, linking women’s ability to move freely with their right to participate in public life.
Women worth knowing
All Stories
Extraordinary women, overlooked stories, and a more complete history. Explore the lives, ideas, and achievements that changed the world.
Inventors
Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar
She recognized promise in an unusual laboratory solution, developing a remarkably strong fiber whose use in protective equipment helped save lives and reshape industrial materials.
Who Invented Windshield Wipers? Mary Anderson
Windshield wipers began with a woman noticing how snow blocked a driver’s view, turning a frustrating journey into an idea that changed everyday travel.
Gertrude B. Elion: Groundbreaking Chemist Who Helped Create the AIDS Drug
She helped change how medicines were developed, bringing a more targeted approach to drug research that produced treatments for serious diseases and earned major scientific recognition.
Ada Lovelace: World’s First Programmer
She saw that computers could work with more than numbers, envisioning creative applications long before modern machines and helping establish the foundations of programming.
Top 5 Brilliant Patented Inventions by Women
Women’s inventions transformed household tasks, industrial materials, and medical research, solving practical problems while challenging a patent system that underestimated their ideas.
Margaret Hamilton, the Woman Behind the Moon Landing
Her team’s software kept an overloaded spacecraft computer focused on landing, helping protect a historic mission and establish new standards for reliable software engineering.
Admiral “Amazing Grace” Hopper, pioneering computer programmer
She helped make computer programming more accessible through readable instructions, transforming how people communicated with machines and opening new possibilities for building software.
Fe del Mundo, first female student at Harvard Medical School
She sold her home to build a children’s hospital, then devoted her career to improving care and reaching families poorly served by existing services.
Sarah Guppy, Eclectic English Inventor
She devised practical inventions for bridges, boats, and the home, pursuing useful solutions when women faced formidable barriers to owning and patenting their ideas.
Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist
She put her fortune behind women’s ability to choose when to have children, funding research that helped make the birth control pill a reality.
Madam C. J. Walker, self-made millionaire
She built a haircare business that created jobs for Black women, then used her wealth to support education, community institutions, and resistance to racism.