Women in History

The following resources are provided by the National Women's History Project (NWHP) Resource Center. AAUW is a NWHP national partner.

Patricia Bath (1942)
Ophthalmologic Surgeon, Inventor

Dr. Bath transformed eye surgery with the Laserphaco Probe and procedure for the removal of cataracts, receiving the first patent by an African American female doctor for a medical invention. She co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness and continues to advocate for the prevention, treatment, and cure of blindness.

Rachel Carson (1907–1964)
Biologist, Pioneer Environmentalist
AAUW Achievement Award Recipient, 1956

Carson's research and writings awakened worldwide concern for our environment. In 1962, Silent Spring, detailed the dangers of DDT and other pesticides. She warned that these chemicals contaminate humans, animals, and the entire "web of life." She wrote that "the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of [the] total environment." Considered very controversial at first, her ideas became the foundation of the modern environmental movement.

Linda Chavez-Thompson (1944-)
Labor Leader

Linda Chavez-Thompson, the daughter of sharecroppers, worked as an agricultural laborer before joining the labor union, eventually rising through the ranks of the AFL-CIO to become the first person of color, and the first woman, elected to be the Executive Vice-President of the AFL-CIO in 1995.

Shirley Chisholm (1924- 2005)
Activist and Congresswoman

In 1968, Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress where she served for 14 years. In 1972, she made history by campaigning for nomination by the Democratic Party for President, the first woman of color to seek the nation's highest office. Since her retirement from politics in 1982 she has lectured and written on human rights issues. As a professor at Mount Holyoke College, her courses included political science and women's studies.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)
Civil Rights Activist

Hamer devoted 15 years to winning voting rights for blacks in the South. Despite beatings by the police, losing her job, and being forced from her home, Hamer continued organizing and demanding recognition and power in national politics for southern blacks. In 1964, she led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the Democratic Convention, forcing a change in the representation of women and minorities within state delegations.

Kamala Harris (1964)
Attorney General, Author, Politican

Kamala D. Harris was sworn in as the Attorney General of the State of California on January 3, 2011. The former San Francisco District Attorney, is a the first female, first African American, and first Asian American attorney general in the state of California and the first Indian American attorney general in the United States.

Dorothy Height (1912-2010)
Humanitarian, Civil Rights Activist

As president of the National Council of Negro Women since 1958, her leadership gained international stature for the organization. Height has worked with every president and civil rights leader for 60 years. Her more than 50 awards include the 1989 Citizens Medal Award for distinguished service to the country, the 1993 Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, and the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest award, in 2004, for her work in promoting AIDS education.

Antonia Hernández (1948-)
AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship (1973)
Attorney, civil rights leader, philanthropist

After earning an AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship in 1973, Antonia Hernández became a noted attorney, and an expert on civil rights, immigration issues, and philanthropy. The AAUW fellowship was used to fund her last year of law school, and she began her law career at the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice and later served as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Hernández is perhaps best known, however, for her many years as president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national nonprofit litigation and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of the nation’s Latinos through the legal system, community education, and research and policy initiatives. Today, she is president and CEO of the California Community Foundation, the nation’s second largest community foundation by total giving, where she continues her passionate commitment to underserved communities and individuals through philanthropy. Hernández also serves on a number of prominent commissions, advisory boards, and committees, including the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, and the JFK Library Foundation Profile in Courage Award Committee. She earned her bachelor's degree and law degree at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dolores Huerta (1930-)
Labor Union Administrator

In the 1950s, Huerta began teaching in a farm workers' community and saw the brutal poverty surrounding her students. In 1962, she co-founded with Ceasar Chavez the United Farm Workers Union. She organized the members and through non-violence tactics, mounted a successful boycott of California table grapes. Her goal in life is to empower farm workers with information and skills to help them secure better living and working conditions.

Shirley Jackson (1946-)
Physicist

In 1973, Jackson was the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. from MIT. In 1991, she became a professor of physics at Rutgers University. Appointed chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1995, she helped set up the International Nuclear Regulators Association to provide assistance to other nations on matters of nuclear safety. She has been president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999. In 2003, Jackson was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general-scientific society. (Provided by NWHP and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.)

Mae Jemison (1956-)
Astronaut

With a medical degree from Cornell University, Dr. Jemison spent three years as a Peace Corps Medical Officer in West Africa, and then worked in a refugee camp in Thailand. In 1992, now a NASA astronaut, she participated aboard Spacelab-J, the cooperative mission between the U.S. and Japan that conducted life science experiments in space. Jemison now pursues health care and science projects related to women and minorities.

Gerda Lerner (1920-)
Historian
AAUW Achievement Award Recipient (1986) and AAUW Member

Lerner is the foremost historian in defining the scope and importance of women's history and is one of the founders of Women's History Month. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (1967) was the first of her ten authoritative books on women's history topics. Lerner has been insistent that theory and practice, consciousness and action, must dynamically inform each other. At the pinnacle of her career, Lerner's two-volume Women in History (1986, 1993) mapped the origins and persistence of patriarchy and the resistance to it that we now call feminism. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Provided by NWHP and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

Barbara McClintock (1902–1992)
Nobel Prize Scientist
AAUW Achievement Award Recipient, 1947

A genetic scientist, McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her 1951 discovery of "jumping genes." While studying maize, or Indian corn, McClintock found that some genes move around rather than remaining stationary as previously thought. She became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944 and received the National Medal of Science in 1970. McClintock is regarded as one of the most influential geneticists of the twentieth century.

Ellen Ochoa (1958-)
Astronaut

Ochoa was the first female Hispanic astronaut who, in 1993, served on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery. The astronauts were studying the earth's ozone layer. A pioneer of spacecraft technology, she patented an optical system to detect defects in a repeating pattern. At the NASA Ames Research Center, she led a research group working primarily on optical systems for automated space exploration.

Sally Ride (1951–)
Scientist and Astronaut

A physicist, Sally Ride was the first American woman in space and established nationwide Sally Ride Festivals for Girls. As a scientist addressing Global Climate Change, she has published many resources addressing the topic for schools. Her professional conference during the summer of 2008 brought together leading scientists and educators which provided a phenomenal setting for awareness on the earth's environmental concerns.

Emma Tenayuca (1916–1999)
Labor Organizer

As a student, Tenayuca realized her life of poverty as a Latina differed greatly from the living conditions of Americans described in her schoolbooks. As a labor organizer, she worked to improve the opportunities of poor people, especially Latinos. She worked to end unfair child labor practices. She is best known for her fiery speeches and union organizing work which began in a successful 1934 strike on behalf of pecan shellers in a Texas food processing plant.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff (1947-)
Molecular biologist

Dr. Villa-Komaroff is an internationally recognized molecular biologist and a key member of the team that first demonstrated that bacterial cells could produce insulin. This pioneering work is widely cited and is described in the book Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Clone the Insulin Gene by Stephen Hall.

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997)
Scientist, "First Lady of Physics"

Chien-Shiung Wu came to the United States to study science as a teenager and became "the world's foremost female experimental physicist" because of her significant contributions to nuclear physics. Experiments she devised and conducted disproved the "conservation of parity" principle. Wu received the National Science Medal in 1975 and the internationally respected Wolf Prize in 1978. At Columbia University she studied the movement of atomic particles, the tiniest known forms of matter.