Unladylike2020: Unsung Women Who Changed America

Bessie Coleman (1892-1926) spent her childhood picking cotton in rural Texas, and after being rejected from flight schools in the U.S. for being Black and a woman, traveled to France to learn to fly. In 1921, she became the first African American to obtain an international pilot’s license, and a media sensation because of her daredevil aerial stunts.

Grace Abbott (1878-1939), an architect of social work and an activist in the immigrant rights movement, was the highest ranking woman in the U.S. government from 1921 to 1934 as chief of the Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau. She led the fight to end child labor and maternal and infant childbirth death, and also helped draft America's Social Security Act.

Over 50 years before the Montgomery bus boycott, civil rights activist and entrepreneur Maggie Lena Walker (1864-1934) led a city-wide boycott against segregated streetcars in Richmond, VA. She also founded a newspaper, a department store, and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, making her the first African American female bank president in the United States.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the first female engineering professor at Purdue University. She invented time and motion studies with her husband Frank, and created the design of the L-shaped kitchen and numerous home appliances. Controversially, she was also involved in the early eugenics movement.

An early participant in the environmental movement, U.S.-born Mexican American Ynés Mexía (1870-1938) began her scientific career as a botanist at age 51, leading botanical expeditions across Mexico, Central America, and South America. She became one of the most accomplished plant collectors of her time, discovering over 500 new plant species of which 50 are named in her honor.

Anna May Wong (1905-1961), the first Asian American female movie star, had a long and varied career spanning silent and sound film, stage, radio, and television. Overcoming severe racism in an era when Asian protagonists in Hollywood movies were typically performed by white actors in yellow face, Wong starred in classics such as The Toll of the Sea, The Thief of Bagdad, and Shanghai Express.

Artist Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) moved to Paris from Philadelphia in 1899 to study sculpture, and was subsequently hailed for resisting stereotypical representations in her depictions of the Black body. She elevated African American history in the first federal art commission awarded to an African American woman, and in other exhibitions, including at several world fairs.

A self-taught polar scientist and photographer, Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972) was the first American woman to lead an Arctic expedition, where she mapped uncharted regions of Greenland, creating photographs that provide critical information to glacial ice and climate change researchers today. In 1955, she chartered an airplane and became the first woman to fly over the North Pole.

An early film pioneer, Lois Weber (1879-1939) was the first American woman to direct a feature-length film in 1913. She owned her own production studio, and was the first female member of the Directors Guild. Infused with the conviction that film could change culture, she directed over 135 films about controversial subjects such as capital punishment, police violence, birth control, and poverty.

Williamina Fleming (1857-1911) went from doing domestic work to being appointed the Curator of Astronomical Photographs at the Harvard College Observatory, making her the first woman to hold a title at Harvard University. She is credited with discovering 10 novae, over 300 variable stars, and 59 gaseous nebulae, and classified over 10,000 stars over the course of her career.

Tye Leung Schulze (1887-1972) resisted domestic servitude and an arranged child marriage to become a advocate for the rights of Asian immigrant victims of human trafficking in San Francisco. She became the first Chinese American woman to work for the federal government, as a translator at the Angel Island Immigration Station, and the first Chinese American woman to vote in a U.S. election.

Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972) began working in a factory at age 16, and helped organize a female-led union to fight for safe work conditions and equal pay. She popularized the phrase “Bread and Roses” to champion workers’ rights, and became president of the National Women's Trade Union League, and an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, informing many of his New Deal labor policies.

Margaret Chung (1889-1959), the first American-born Chinese female doctor, dressed in masculine clothing and called herself ‘Mike.’ In the early 1920s, she co-founded the first Western hospital in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and led its OB/GYN and pediatrics unit. She also helped establish WAVES, the women’s naval reserves, paving the way for women in the armed forces.

Gladys Bentley (1907-1960) joined New York’s Harlem Renaissance jazz scene at age 16, performing piano at the most popular gay bars, wearing men’s clothing, singing lesbian-themed lyrics to popular songs, and openly flirting with women in the audience. But the 1950s Lavender Scare crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community pressured her into announcing of her gender identity, “I am a woman again!”

Annie Smith Peck (1850-1935), one of the first women to become a college professor in the U.S., took up mountain climbing in her forties and continued to climb into her eighties. She gained international fame in 1895 when she first summited the Matterhorn in pants, was the first mountaineer to summit Mount Huascarán in Peru, and hung a “Votes for Women” banner on top of Mount Coropuna in 1911.

Susan La Flesche Picotte (1865-1915) became the first American Indian to graduate from medical school, founded a privately funded hospital on the Omaha reservation in Nebraska, and also fought the spread of infectious diseases and alcoholism at a time when the U.S. government was forcing American Indian tribes onto reservations, and mandating their assimilation into white society.

Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933) became the first African American woman to headline a concert on the main stage at Carnegie Hall in 1892. Heralded as the greatest singer of her generation, she performed opera internationally and at the White House for four presidents, and traveled the country as the star of a successful vaudeville show for almost two decades.

Queen Lili‘uokalani (1838-1917) was the first sovereign queen, and the last monarch of Hawai‘i, assuming the throne during a government takeover by American plantation and business owners supported by the U.S. military. After being deposed and put under house arrest, she fought to preserve native Hawaiian rights and traditions. A talented musician and songwriter, she also composed over 150 songs.

Olympic medalist Gertrude Ederle (1905-2003) made history in 1926 when, at age 19, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel, then considered one of the toughest endurance tests in the world. She beat the fastest man's existing record by nearly two hours, challenging notions about women being "the weaker sex.” After Ederle lost her hearing, she taught swimming to deaf children.

After answering an ad seeking a “young woman who can swim and dive; likes horses; desires to travel,” Sonora Webster Carver (1904-2003) became one of the most famous equestrians in the world, diving 40 feet on horseback into a tank of water. After being injured in a performance that led her to becoming blind in 1931, she continued diving for a decade and engaged in advocacy for the blind.

Educator and suffragist Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) became a national leader as founder of the National Association of Colored Women, coining its motto “Lifting As We Climb.” As a founding member of the NAACP, she actively wrote and spoke out about lynching and segregation throughout her life. In 1895, she became the first Black woman to serve on a board of education in the United States.

After her family emigrated from Wales to Utah as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Martha Hughes Cannon (1857-1932) completed medical school, and became a doctor, the fourth of six wives in a polygamous Mormon marriage, and a suffragist. In 1896, she was elected the country’s first female state senator, defeating her own husband who was also on the ballot.

At a time when signs announcing “No Negroes, Mexicans, or Dogs Allowed” were common throughout Texas, journalist Jovita Idar (1885-1946) helped organize the first Mexican American civil rights conference in 1911 to address racism, lynching and educational disparities. She also created and served as president of the League of Mexican Women, one of the first known Latina rights organizations.

Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) made history as the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1916. A lifelong pacifist, she was the only Congress member to vote against U.S. participation in both World War I and II. She championed legislation to protect children’s rights and women’s rights, and helped women secure the vote in her home state of Montana, and nationally through the 19th Amendment.

Zitkála-Šá, aka Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, (1876–1938) co-composed and wrote the libretto for the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance Opera, authored autobiographical essays for Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly exposing the pressures American Indians faced to assimilate into European American culture, and co-founded the National Council of American Indians to lobby for indigenous rights.