Who are some women that often get overlooked in history but had major contributions to
society? Sandra Ford, the drug technician who first
brought attention to what would become the AIDS epidemic.
She knew something was up when she began receiving unusually high numbers of requests for pentamidine,
an antibiotic reserved for treating pneumocystis pneumonia in seriously ill, immuno-compromised
patients. The patients it was being requested for were
gay men who had been otherwise healthy. In 1952 Dr. Virginia Apgar developed a quick,
easy five-point test that summarizes health of newborns, and determine those needing emergency
assistance. The Apgar Score is now given to practically
every newborn, and helped save countless young lives, and reduce infant mortality.
Nellie Bly. She was a 1890s journalist who was given an
assignment to investigate the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island due to accusations
of the mistreatment of patients. She got in there by faking insanity and getting
herself committed to the asylum, and when she was finally released, she ran an exposé
in the New York World called “Ten Days In A Madhouse” that exposed the awful treatment
of patients inside the asylum. This was considered a revolution in investigative
journalism. Also, she read “Around The World In 80 Days”,
basically decided she could do better, and went around the world in 72 days.
She was also an inventor, and was one of the primary journalists to cover the suffragette
movement. She's one of my favorite historical figures
who doesn’t get enough attention! Edit: Wow!
Thank you for the awards and upvotes! I am grateful and glad to see all the positive
comments. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha.
She is the Dean of Medicine at Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, MI.
She saw that children were having elevated lead levels (ELLs) outside the normal range.
She contacted the Genesee Department of Health, who at first, dismissed her claim, then sent
her obfuscated data to make it look like the ELLs were completely within normal trends.
She grew frustrated at this, so she called a team of epidemiologists from UVA (her alma
mater) to find the source of the lead. Lo and behold, she found that the water in
multiple zip codes was contaminated with lead. She informed the Genesee Department of Health
Again, who brushed her off. She then said beep it" and held a major press
conference where she announced on air that the water in Flint wasn't safe and to come
to the hospital to get your child tested and to pick up supplies of water and liquid infant
formula. If she saved thousands of children from the
permanent effects of lead poisoning. Edit 1: thanks for the awards
Edit 2: It was VT, not UVA. Apologies to all the VT alumnae who DM'd me
about it. Frances Oldham Kelley.
She stopped thalidomide from getting widespread use in North America, and saved countless
children from life-altering birth defects. Edit: Kelsey, not Kelley.
Marie Tharp; she created the first map of the ocean floor, which led to the discovery
of tectonic plates, and the theory of continental drift.
Inge Lehmann was a Danish seismologist. She discovered P' waves (waves that reflect
off of the inner-core), confirming that the earth has a solid inner-core and a liquid
outer-core. Dr. Georgeanna Seeger Jones
Dr. Jones singlehandedly organized the field of Gynecological Endocrinology.
While at John’s Hopkins with her husband, Dr. Howard Jones and Drs.
Roberts and Steptoe, she devised the hypothesis of follicular hyper stimulation, which produced
more than one egg per cycle. Her later discoveries led to increases in
viability of In Vitro Fertilization. Per Wikipedia :
As a resident at Johns Hopkins, she discovered that the pregnancy hormone hCG was manufactured
by the placenta, not the pituitary gland as originally thought.
This discovery led to the development of many of the early over-the-counter pregnancy test
kits currently available. On 1949, Jones made the first description
of Luteal Phase Dysfunction and is credited to be the first in using progesterone to treat
women with a history of miscarriages, thus allowing many of them to not only conceive,
but to deliver healthy babies She also served as a Dean of the College of
Pontifical Sciences, advising the Vatican of matters of Gynecology and Conception.
Her husband always said “She’s the smarter one.”
She was also a great friend. Edit: Thanks for all of the responses.
She was an absolute gem of a lady. My Mother-in-Law was with the Jones Institute
from the inception. The Drs.
Jones were truly beautiful people. The Allied codebreakers at places like Bletchley
Park during WWII. They worked incredibly long, tedious, and
stressful hours and were a major contributor to the war effort and military intelligence,
but their work didn't even receive official recognition from the British government until
2009, 64 years after the war ended. Bessie Coleman.
She was a black woman who wanted to learn to fly.
No one would teach her. She learned that the French would however,
so she moved to France, learned French and how to fly.
Then she came back to the states and taught whoever wanted to learn.
She was alive same time as Amelia Earhart and got no recognition at the time.
Daphne Oram - first ever composer to produce electronic sound.
She pioneered electronic music and lead the path for music today.
She even wrote a piece called “Still Point” that she was never able to perform live because
of sexism by her peers and she never heard it live before she died.
But it was performed for the first time in 2018 using a replica of a machine Daphne had
created to electronically manipulate a live orchestra.
Claudette Colvin was the person who refused to get up from her bus seat during the Jim
Crows in America. But she was a young woman who was pregnant
out of wedlock at the time, and the black leaders decided she was not a good image of
an activist. So they handpicked Rosa Parks to do the same.
**King Tamara of Georgia. She now represents the Georgian nation in
Civilization VI, but before that, not a lot of people knew about her.
And whenever she is mentioned, she is mentioned as queen, but she was given the title of **KING**
because she was recognized as an equal monarch (her husbands didn't have any royal titles).
This is an undisputed fact in Georgian historiography, IDK about western scholars, but whenever she
is mentioned on the internet or mainstream, would it be Wikipedia or a video game, like
CIV VI, she is denied her lawful title and that just pisses me off!
Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper in 1903.
As soon as the patent expired, it became standard in all cars.
She attempted to sell it while she had the rights to it, but most manufacturers refused
to believe it was a feature of value, and it is likely her being female colored their
lack of enthusiasm. Henrietta Leavitt.
She was an astronomer at Harvard and discovered a type of star called a Cepheid.
Cepheid stars all pulse at the same rate. That lets us know how far away they are.
Because of her, we were able to determine how big the universe is along with many, many
more things concerning its properties. Eleanor Marx - Maybe overlooked because of
her dad. She played an important role in British Trade
Unions which forced the move from a 12 hour working day 6 days a week to an 8 hour day
5 days a weekend. Those extra hours to go on a walk, play Xbox,
learn something new or just chill is a pretty big contribution.
Elsie MacGill aka “queen of the hurricanes”, she was the worlds first female to earn aeronautical
engineering degree. The two major things she did was, she designed
the Maple Leaf Trainer ll and she was to look over manufacturing operations at a Canadian
factories that built the Hawker Hurricane. **Henrietta Lacks.
She saved millions of lives and made a critical contribution to the world of medicine, but
unless you're in the medical field — you've probably never even heard her name.
Henrietta Lacks was a young, black, mother of five when she died in 1951 after being
diagnosed with an aggressive cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins.
Doctor George Gey was working at Hopkins at the time, trying to culture cells in the laboratory.
Lacks' cells were among dozens sent to his lab, but they were the first to ever survive
and grow. Her cells, a unique and aggressive type, were
later described as one in three billion. Scientists called these resilient cells "HeLa"
— taking first two letters of "Henrietta" and "Lacks."
HeLa cells were used to test the polio vaccine, develop in vitro fertilization, and several
chemotherapy drugs among hundreds of medical advances.
Grown and sold around the world, Lacks' legacy lived on in her cells: they have traveled
to space, they have been embedded in a nuclear bomb.
But for decades, ***the Lacks family had no idea.
Rosalind Franklin - Crick & Watson got all the glory, and even the plaque at the Eagle
only mentiones their name. [Sister Rosetta [link redacted]
She was super influencial to early rock musicians like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley,
Jerry Lee Lewis and so many more. Johnny Cash even said that she was his favorite
singer and she was also one of the first to play around with heavy distortion on her electric
guitar. She's called by some "The Godmother of Rock
and Roll" but I guarantee you that the average person has never heard of her.
Edit: Here's a cool compilation of some of her guitar solos from films so you can see
how much she rocks [link redacted] [Agent [link redacted]
We still don't know her true identity to this day, but that was the code name of one of
the first American spies. Some historians dispute whether it was an
actual person or just code for when a woman presented useful information.
If that's the case then Agent 355 could be *multiple* women that had a huge influence
on history during the birth of America. For Scotland I'd say the Edinburgh Seven.
Basically paved the way for women being allowed to get into university in the UK.
Cecilia Payne, discovered what universe is made out of... And don't even get a mention
in textbooks Hedy Lamarr.
Also today's her birthday :) Cheng I Sao/ Ching Shih was the single most
sucessful pirate in all of history. She led an armada of tens of thousands of
sailors and 17 seperate fleets of ships and held the most important tributary in china
under raiding for weeks on end before managing to give the slip to a combined force of portuguese,
chinese, and English war ships after being cornered in an inlet with 2 wounded ships
and no way out but through. After this venture, she recognized that her
power was begining to wane so she decided it was better to cash out while she had the
leverage (one of her fleets had turned on her during the period among other things)
She managed to negotiate for literally all of her men to be given amnesty, be allowed
to join the chinese navy, to keep the stuff they had stolen, and for her *to be able to
keep several ships to be able to have a buisness in the salt trade.
* She then ran a gambling house and died peacefully in her sleep.
Besides a beep kickass story, she has also had some lasting consequences.
Her absolute domination over the chinese navy showed just how much the empire had neglected
that wing of the military, and the British picked up on this.
It was a big part of why they were so willing to fight a naval war across the entire
planet at a time when even messages would take a year and change just to make it back.
The opium wars were fought because of this, and the treaties that resulted are called
by the *current* chinese government as the start of "the century of shame" and are a
major touchstone in the governments image of itself.
They are invoked today when negotiations with the west breakdown as a reason that China
ought not bow to outside pressure. For any canadians (of which I am) , its on
the level of Vimy ridge in our national conception. Frances Perkins, she was the first female
cabinet member in the US. She was appointed by FDR and played a key
role in the new deal as well as working for better working conditions, child labor laws
and women's rights. Belva Lockwood - one of the first female lawyers
in the US and ran for president in the 1880s. Mary Todd Lincoln.
I know she went absolutely mad, which wasn't all her fault, but she was the one who really
pushed her husband (Abraham Lincoln for those not from America) to keep moving up the political
ladder, and ultimately shaped what the first lady of the U.S is.
Not sure he would have become president without her influence.
She had a lot more ambition than he did. Edit: Fun fact- she also liked to bake!
Look up her recipes, guys. Her almond cake sounded delicious and it was
supposedly one of her husband's favorite desserts. Irena Sendler worked with others to smuggle
Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during WWII.
[Irena [link redacted] Madam C. J. Walker developed black hair care
products and marketed them through her business she founded which ended up making her the
first female self made millionaire. Virgina Hall has a building named after her
at the CIA. She was an American woman from Baltimore who
went to Europe in the 1930s, lost her leg in a shooting accident, then proceeded to
become a leader in the French Resistance and master of disguise, all with a wooden leg.
The book A Woman of No Importance is about her and came out last year.
Anna Connelly invented the fire escape in 1887.
That same year, Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher.
That one lady that hand wrote all of the math it took to get to the moon.
I forgot her name. Pretty ironic that I don’t remember her
name. Ada Lovelace
Henrietta Lacks Hypatia, made the astrolabe.
Then was skinned allive by christians Also the circular saw was invented by a woman.
Thank you, woman who's name I do not know! Camille Claudel was a sculptor and artist
who worked with Rodin. He claimed a lot of her work.
Artemisa Gentlischi was a woman painter in the Renaissance with style akin to Caravaggio.
She is nowhere near as well known as he, and she also painted a Judith Slaying Holofernes
painting. (These are very brief overviews of what I
remember from art school. Lots of talented women tucked away beneath
the male gaze of art and history). Emmy Noether.
I don't understand what she did, but leading mathematicians say her work was groundbreaking,
so I'll take their word for it. Mary Anning, British paleontologist!
Cecily Saunders deserves the reputation Mother Tereasa has.
She basically invented hospice care. Before her, doctors used to just abandon incurables
to die with no palliative care. Cecily Saunders arguably eliminated more useless
suffering than anyone ever. May your day be filled with joy and happiness.
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