These 3 brave female astronauts made history despite the odds, and paved the way for women in space and science after them.
Julia Chase-Brand, Breaking Down Barriers for Women Athletes
When Julia Chase-Brand was growing up, women didn’t run. Born in 1945 in Groton, Connecticut, Chase recalls being surrounded by four active brothers, in a time where girls couldn’t run, play soccer, and if they were to play basketball, it was at the half court line. Inspired by local distance runner John J. Kelley, Chase […]
Mary Treat, Victorian Entomologist and Visionary Biologist
Mary Treat (1830-1923) was a prolific scientific writer who earned a reputation as “the world’s most famous and industrious woman naturalist” at a time when few women were professionally engaged in biology. The daughter of a minister, Treat attended a private girls’ academy early in life. Such academies, or “seminaries,” were an answer to the […]
Mary Bunting, Champion of Women’s Education
Mary I. Bunting was the Rutgers dean who led the fight for coeducation at the United States’ most prestigious universities. The program she created in 1958 to support a community of mature women lives on at Douglass Residential College in her name. When Mary Bunting began her academic career in 1937, women like her had limited […]
Melanie Klein, the Founding Mother of Children’s Psychology
As with many fields of study, the canonical works of the social sciences are overrun with the findings of white males. But in the field of psychoanalysis, Melanie Klein, a Viennese Jewish woman, made an impact on the field with her unlikely-sounding theories published in her book The Psychoanalysis of Children, where she documents infants’ […]
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.
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 […]
