It’s officially March, and amongst other things, that means that it’s Women’s History Month! In celebration, here are a few pioneering women that history doesn’t talk about enough and their accomplishments.
1: Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852)
Ada Lovelace is regarded as the first computer programmer. She wrote the algorithm for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Machine, which is considered being the first computer program. Because of the lack of women in STEM, her work wasn’t highly valued during her lifetime, and she was not permitted to formally study mathematics at university. Despite these challenges, Lovelace remained in the field and became a pioneer.
2: Bessie Coleman (1892 – 1926)
Bessie Coleman was the first African American woman to earn her pilot’s license. No American flight schools would accept her based on both her race and gender, so she moved to France. There, she attended flight school and attained her pilot’s license. When she returned to the United States, she became known as a famous stunt pilot, performing in air shows across the nation.
3: Katherine Johnson (1918 – 2020)
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who worked at NASA and was the subject of the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. She worked at a racially segregated NASA facility, in a time when women were looked down upon for having STEM-based jobs. Her calculations proved crucial, however, for calculating the orbit of the first American in space, Alan Shepard.
4: Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888)
Alcott is best known for her novel Little Women, chronicling the lives of the March sisters during the Civil War era. She should be remembered for more than just her writing, though. She was also an ardent abolitionist, and her home was a stop on the Underground Railroad! Alcott was also outspoken about women’s rights, a radical position during her time.
5: Henrietta Lacks (1920 – 1951)
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was admitted to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, one of the few facilities in her area that would treat African Americans, where she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Lacks died in that hospital. However, without her consent, a sample of her cancer cells was taken from her. They discovered her cells had the property to survive and reproduce, even after being removed from her body. The cells were dubbed “HeLa cells,” and the Lacks family was not consulted about their use, even as research from the cells made huge strides in cancer and immunology research, and scientists profited off their use. Luckily, in recent decades, the Lacks family has reached agreements and acknowledgment regarding the use of HeLa cells.
6: Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958)
While Watson and Crick are usually thought to have discovered the double helix structure of DNA, it was actually Rosalind Franklin who discovered this information. Watson and Crick used her research and received a Nobel prize for it. Now, however, Rosalind Franklin is getting the recognition she deserves as a pioneering DNA scientist.
7: Claudette Colvin (1939 – Present)
Rosa Parks is well known for being the face of the Montgomery bus boycott, but did you know she wasn’t the first African American to refuse to give up her seat? Nearly nine months before Parks’ famous refusal, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Local civil rights leaders ostracized her, which she felt was because she was very dark-skinned and had gotten pregnant young, but her actions are an example of a brave woman standing up for her rights as an American.
8: Margaret Hamilton (1936 – Present)
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, who during NASA’s Apollo program headed the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which wrote software for the program. When checking the code for the Apollo 11 flight, Hamilton told her male superiors that a backup code was needed in case of an emergency. They dismissed her worry, but she defied orders and wrote extra code anyway. It was a good thing she did – just before the mission landed, an alarm went off and without Hamilton’s code, a disaster would have occurred.
9: Clara Barton (1821 – 1912)
When the Civil War began, Clara Barton first helped in the same way that many women did by gathering up bandages and other supplies. She soon realized that she could help even more by treating soldiers on the battlefield, which earned her the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield”. Following the war, she worked with other prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass to found the American Red Cross after seeing the Swiss version of such an organization. Barton served as the president of the American Red Cross until 1904 when she was 83.
10: Hypatia of Alexandria (roughly 350 – 415)
Hypatia was a Greek mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. She made multiple contributions to the field of algebra and is credited with inventing the hydrometer, which measures the density of liquids. Unfortunately, if things were difficult for women in science in more recent centuries, they were even worse in earlier ages. Hypatia was eventually murdered by a mob who disagreed with her discoveries and participation in an almost entirely male-populated field.
Hopefully, you learned something new by reading this article! 10 women barely even scratches the surface of the many amazing women throughout history. A few seconds of research will reveal hundreds of amazing women that you never even knew existed!
