mayvaneday/women.md

The big list of women who did things

Unfinished, obviously.

Last updated: 2024-12-03

Art

• Aphra Behn: one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing
• Tina Bell: pioneer of the "grunge" music genre, before Nirvana
• Lisa Ben: created Vice Versa, the first known lesbian publication in North America
• Anne Bradstreet: first writer to be published in England's North American colonies
• Diemoth: 12th-century recluse who transcribed at least forty-five manuscripts; notable for her "beautiful handwriting"
• Emilia Lanier: first known woman in England to declare herself a poet
• Enheduanna: first known poet
• Herrad of Landsberg: 12th-century nun who wrote an early pictoral encyclopedia, Hortus deliciarum, to teach the women in her convent about the sciences of the time
• Hrotsvitha: first female writer (from German-speaking lands) and first female historian
• Baya Mahieddine: surrealist artist whose work was imitated by Picasso
• Marie de France: earliest known French woman poet
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: first woman (and second person!) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
• Julian of Norwich: author of Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving English-language works attributed to a woman
• Lucy Terry Prince: author of Bars Fight, the oldest known work of literature by an African American
• Lotte Reiniger: director/writer of the oldest surviving animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed
• Mary Shelley: novelist and pioneer of the science fiction genre of books
• Murasaki Shikibu: wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji
• Pamela Colman Smith: illustrator of the iconic Rider-Waite tarot deck
• Valerie Thomas: invented the illusion transmitter, critical for the invention of 3D movies
• Maud Wagner: first female tattoo artist in the USA

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Computers

• Ada Lovelace: the first computer programmer
• Kathleen Booth: inventor of assembly language
• Evelyn Berezin: designed the first computer word proecssor
• Edith Clarke: first woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering
• Marian Croak: invented VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
• Judith Estrin: instrumental in the invention of TCP
• Margaret Hamilton: lead programmer on the Apollo project
• Grace Hopper: created the first compiler for a programming language
• Susan Kare: "pioneer of pixel art"; designed many of the icons, fonts, and images for Apple, NeXT, and IBM in the 1980s
• Hedy Lamarr: invented Wi-Fi
• Ruth Teitelbaum: one of the six women who programmed ENIAC
• Gladys West: mathematician who developed the satellite geodesy models eventually developed into the Global Positioning System (GPS)

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Industry

• Tabitha Babbitt: invented the circular saw
• Katharine Burr Blodgett: invented non-reflective (invisible) glass
• Sarah Boone: invented the modern ironing board
• Josephine Cochrane: invented first commercially successful dishwasher
• Bette Nesmith Graham: invented Liquid Paper
• Margaret Knight: invented the paper bag machine
• Stephanie Kwolek: invented Kevlar
• Alice H. Parker: invented central heating

Medicine

• June Almeida: discovered the coronavirus group of viruses
• Leila Denmark: synthesised the first vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough)
• Gertrude Elion: biochemist and Nobel Prize winner instrumental in the creation of the first antiviral drug widely used to fight AIDS
• Rosalind Franklin: discovered the double-helix formation of DNA
• Mary-Claire King: discovered the BRCA1 gene and its role in causing breast cancer
• Barbara McClintock: discovered that genes can move between chromosomes
• Rita Levi-Montalcini: discovered nerve growth factor
• Andromachi Papanikolaou: key factor in the development of the pap smear test
• Candace Pert: discovered the opiate receptor in the brain
• Susan La Flesche Picotte: the first Indigenous woman to earn a medical degree
• Mildred Catherine Rebstock: first person to synthesise chloromycetin (an antibiotic)
• Trota of Salerno: first gynecologist
• Nettie Stevens: discovered that chromosomes determine sex
• Flossie Wong-Staal: proved that HIV causes AIDS

Science

• Patricia Bath: inventor of the Laserphaco Probe
• Ethel Bauer: planned lunar trajectories for the Apollo program, critical to 13's safe return
• Katie Bouman: led the development of the algorithm that took the first image of a black hole
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell: discovered first pulsar
• Annie Jump Cannon: developed the first stellar classification system; classified almost 400,000 stars
• Eunice Newton Foote: discovered the greenhouse effect
• Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: discovered what stars are made out of
• Sophie Germain: French mathematician and pioneer of elasticity theory
• Fanny Hesse: critical in the invention of the Petri dish by suggesting to use agar instead of gelatin
• Hypatia: first female mathematician whose life is "reasonably well recorded"
• Mary Jackson: NASA's first Black female engineer
• Mae Jemison: first Black woman in space
• Katherine Johnson: mathematician crucial for the success of the first USA spaceflights
• Mary Kenner: inventor of the menstrual pad; holder of the record for the most patents awarded to a Black woman in the USA
• Inge Lehmann: discovered the Earth has a solid inner core
• Rita Levi-Montalcini: discovered nerve growth factor
• Lise Meitner: discovered nuclear fission
• Maria Sibylla Merian: one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly
• Mary Sherman Morgan: invented hydyne (a liquid rocket fuel)
• Emmy Noether: mathematician; discovered her namesake First and Second Theorems (fundamental in mathematical physics)
• Cecilia Payne: discovered what the universe and sun are made of
• Clarice Phelps: part of the team that discovered element 117 (tennessine); first Black woman involved with the discovery of a chemical element
• Vera Rubin: discovered dark matter
• Seondeok of Silla: set up first astronomy tower in Asia
• Donna Strickland: winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification
• Judy Sullivan: biomedical engineer for the Apollo 11 spaceflight
• Maria Telkes: co-built first solar-power-heated heated home with Eleanor Raymond
• Marie Tharp: mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; proved the theory of continential drift
• Chien-Shiung Wu: first woman to become president of the American Physical Society; worked on the Manhattan Project and proved that parity is not conserved
• Maryna Viazovska: solved the sphere packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24
• ...and many more

Social Change

• Claudette Colvin: pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement; refused to give up her bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks did
• Ruth Ellis: LGBT rights activist; oldest known surviving open lesbian
• Barbara Gittings: "mother of the gay rights movement"; part of the movement to get the APA to drop homosexuality as a mental illness
• Temple Grandin: one of the first public figures to publically come out as Autistic; animal welfare activist that campaigned for humane treatment of cattle in beef processing plants
• Maura Healey: first open lesbian elected attorney general of a USA state, one of the first LGBT governors of a USA state, and first woman elected governor of the state of Massachusetts
• Judith Heumann: held the longest sit-in in a government building for the enactment of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (civil rights protection for disabled people)
• Qiu Jin: Chinese revolutionary, poet, and early feminist
• Elizabeth Peratrovich: instrumental in the passing of the USA's first anti-discrimination law
• Hannah Szenes: poet and volunteer parachutist who helped evacuate Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust
• Grunya Sukhareva: child psychiatrist; first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms
• Mary Edwards Walker: only woman to receive the Medal of Honor

Misc

• Marie Van Brittan Brown: co-invented home security surveillance
• Bessie Coleman: first Black woman to earn an international pilot's license; first known female aviator
• Martha Gellhorn: journalist and WWII war correspondent; pretended to be a nurse to be the only woman at Normandy on D-Day
• Helen Lewis: journalist and namesake of "Lewis' Law": "the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism"
• Elizabeth Magie: created the progenitor to the Monopoly board game
• Rose Valland: captain in the French military during WWII; saved thousands of works of art from being stolen by the Nazis
• Madam C. J. Walker: entrepreneur and first female self-made millionaire in the USA