Junko Tabei Junko Tabei (1939 – 2016) was the crazy mountain woman who scaled Mount Everest and the Seven Summits – that’s the tallest mountain on every continent. She was the first woman to accomplish both feats, and she did it in the 60’s – when mountaineering was not a woman’s world. Being female wan’t …
Amalia Eriksson The old saying goes that necessity is the mother of invention, and often, that necessity is a mother’s need to care for her child. Orphaned at age 10, Amalia Eriksson found herself widowed and impoverished at age 35 in 1859, just one week after giving birth to her daughter Ida. When baby Ida …
Virginia Apgar Virginia Apgar (1909 – 1974) always believed that being a woman didn’t impact her career – at least, that’s what her National Institutes of Health profile claims. Privately, though, she was known to express her frustrations with gender inequality. The facts verify her private opinion – Virginia became an anesthesiologist because no one …
Jeanne Baret Not only a glass-ceiling-shattering explorer, but also a groundbreaking botanist, Jeanne Baret sailed around the world as part of the first French circumnavigation of the globe, led by admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville from 1766 to 1769. Her journey was not smooth sailing, however. Because the French Navy did not allow women on their …
Ching Shih Ching Shih was one of the most badass pirates of all time. In a ten-year span, Ching’s “Red Flag Fleet”, a pirate armada consisting of somewhere around four hundred Chinese twenty-gun junks and several thousand men, sailed up and down the coast of Imperial China kicking asses, sacking towns, breaking necks and cashing …
Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi Manikarnika Tambe was born in November, 1928 in Varanasi India. She was only 4 when her mother died, and her father, a court advisor, was left to raise his children alone. She learned horsemanship, archery, self defense and shooting – unusual skills for an Indian girl. She was married at …
Rebecca Gratz Rebecca Gratz, a Jewish woman from Philadelphia who founded many organizations to help women and children. The first one was the Female Assoc. for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances, which she founded with her mother and sister. Then, still seeing need all around her, she founded the Fuel Society, …
Rose Fortune Rose Fortune left no words behind – only actions. As a freed slave in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia she started a carting business, hauling luggage and freight with her wheelbarrow. She also offered a wake up service, and was soon the self appointed law of the wharf and the town. The Association of …
Artemisia Gentileschi Artemisia Gentileschi’s first known work (which some scholars have attributed, in part, to her father) was painted in 1610, when she was 17 years old. Titled Susanna and the Elders, the work depicts a biblical story in which a fair, pious wife is ogled by a group of lecherous male elders as she …
Although her father, the poet Lord Byron, may be the more well-known of the pair, it was Ada Lovelace’s mother, Annabella Milbanke, who acted as the role model for her daughter’s iconoclastic and pioneering contributions to the field of computer science. Lady Byron encouraged Ada’s interest and aptitude in science and mathematics and shared her …
