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mayvaneday/women.md

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Raw Blame History

The big list of women who did things

Unfinished, obviously.

Last updated: 2024-09-25

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
  • Diemoth: 12th-century recluse who transcribed at least forty-five manuscripts; notable for her "beautiful handwriting"
  • Enheduanna: first known poet
  • Marie de France: earliest known French woman 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
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay: first woman (and second person!) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
  • 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

More information

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)

More information

Industry

Medicine

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
  • 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