The AAUW Northwest Central Region established the Achievement Award in 1943 and administered it until 1972, when it was transferred to the AAUW Educational Foundation. Beginning in 1991, the award was given every two years during Foundation Night at the AAUW convention the award was usually given to a mature woman whose accomplishments spanned 10 years or more. Effective February 2008, this award is no longer offered by AAUW.
Achievement Award Winners
2007 Mae C. Jemison – First African-American woman in space as a NASA astronaut; professor, author, scientist, engineer and entrepreneur. Founder of The Jemsion Group and BioSentient Corporation.
2005 Madeleine K. Albright - First female Secretary of State, author, scholar, foreign policy expert, Founder of The Albright Group, LLC, and chair of the Board of Directors, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.
2003 Gloria Steinem - Author, feminist leader, and co-founder of Ms. magazine.
2001 Rita R. Colwell - First woman director of the National Science Foundation, which annually awards $3.5 billion to support 20,000 research and education projects.
1999 Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Supreme Court justice, founder of the women's rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and first tenured woman faculty member at Columbia University.
1997 Marilyn Horne - Opera singer and founder of the Marilyn Horne Foundation.
1995 Antonia Hernandez - President and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the pre-eminent Latino civil rights and advocacy group in the United States.
1993 Wilma Mankiller - First woman principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the second largest Indian nation in the United States.
1991 Johnetta B. Cole - President of Spelman College, the historically black women's college in Georgia, and leader in higher education issues for African Americans.
1990 Evelyn Fox Keller - Expert in mathematical biology, physics, and the history and philosophy of science and feminist theory, and biographer of 1947 Achievement Award recipient Barbara McClintock.
1989 Marva Collins - Founder and director of Westside Preparatory School in Chicago and renowned trainer of teachers of "unteachable" and underachieving students.
1988 Sandra Day O'Connor - First woman Supreme Court justice, majority leader of the Arizona Senate, and president of the Heard Museum, the major private museum of the southwestern United States.
1987 Marian Wright Edelman - Founder and director of the Children's Defense Fund, the nation's most effective lobby on behalf of poor people and people of color, and first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar.
1986 Gerda Lerner - President of the Organization of American Historians and a founder of the women's history discipline.
1985 Eudora Welty - Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and short story writer.
1984 Joan Ganz Cooney - Founder and president of the Children's Television Workshop (producers of Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact).
1983 Grace M. Hopper - Commodore of the U.S. Naval Reserve (when she retired, she was the nation's oldest active-duty officer) and co-inventor of the computer language COBOL.
1982 Julia M. Walsh - First woman to graduate from the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School, first woman board member of the American Stock Exchange, owner of a financial brokerage firm, and one of the most prominent women in financial management.
1981 Juanita Kreps - First woman U.S. Secretary of Commerce and first economist to hold the post, vice president of Duke University, and first woman on the board of the New York Stock Exchange.
1980 Hanna Holborn Gray - President of the University of Chicago and professor of history and co-chair of President Reagan's Task Force on the Arts and Humanities.
1979 Nancy Roeske - Professor of psychiatry and coordinator of medical education at Indiana University and chair of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Women, she focused on a holistic and humanistic approach to patients, women's health issues, and the mental health problems of visually impaired children.
1978 Margaret Mead - World renowned anthropologist, second woman president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the first was 1964 Achievement Award recipient Mina Rees), curator emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History, and outspoken leader of the feminist movement.
1977 Gisela Konopka - Director of the Center for Youth Development and Research at the University of Minnesota and author of 250 professional journal articles and seven books, including the definitive The Adolescent Girl in Crisis.
1976 Jessie Bernard - Acclaimed feminist researcher in sociology, focusing on marriage, sex, motherhood, and changing family lifestyles.
1975 Dixy Lee Ray - First woman commissioner and chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, marine biologist and zoology teacher, and governor of Washington State.
1974 Edith Green - Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Oregon and supporter of education and women's rights.
1973 Mamie Phipps Clark - Co-founder of the Northside Center for Child Development to provide mental health services for the children of Harlem.
1972 Helen H. Nowlis - Director of the Drug Abuse Education Program at the U.S. Office of Education and author of Drugs on the College Campus, the invaluable guide for college administrators.
1971 Alona E. Evans - Professor of political science at Wellesley College and first woman president of the American Society of International Law.
1970 Margery W. Shaw - Inventor of the tools to identify and sort human chromosomes, researcher of chromosome damage, and director of the Medical Genetics Center of Houston, she used her AAUW Achievement Award to pay for law school.
1969 Dorothy W. Weeks - Spectroscopist for the solar satellite project at Harvard College Observatory and post-retirement lecturer in physics at Newton College of the Sacred Heart, where she established a physics major.
1968 Eveline M. Burns - Social economist, renowned authority on social security, and developer of alternative schemes for the support of dependent families and the elderly.
1967 Lucy Shields Morgan - Professor at the University of North Carolina, where she guided the establishment of the first department of health education, she is credited with improving and modernizing public health education.
1965 Dora J. Dougherty - Member of The Whirly-Girls, an international association of women helicopter pilots (she set the world record for women in distance and altitude helicopter flight) and human-factors aeronautical engineer and researcher of pilot performance and cockpit design.
1964 Mina Rees - First woman president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, dean of graduate studies at the City University of New York, distinguished mathematician, and collaborator on the development of the high-speed computer.
1964 Mildred Campbell - Distinguished historian, author, and teacher whose special interest was the impact of social and economic forces on the social structure.
1963 Helen B. Taussig - The first woman master in the American College of Physicians, she had a distinguished medical career studying congenital heart malformations and was responsible for significant increases in the survival rates for babies born with severe heart defects and for the improved health of people with common heart disorders.
1962 Gwendolyn M. Carter - Political scientist and director of the program of African Studies at Northwestern University, where she established the curricula on sub-Saharan Africa.
1961 Cora Du Bois - Zemurray-Stone Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Radcliffe College, she was distinguished for her research and teaching on Asia.
1960 Lily Bess Campbell - Eminent Shakespearean authority, expert on English Renaissance literature and the history of theater, and author of seven books.
1959 Chien-Shiung Wu - A pre-eminent woman in experimental physics, she disproved the "parity law," which held that objects that are mirror images of each other behave in the same way.
1958 Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel - Teacher of Greek, Latin, and medieval and modern Hispanic literature and author of numerous definitive studies on the survival of classical antiquity in literature.
1957 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - Stellar astronomer specializing in spectroscopy and photometry; chair of the Harvard University Department of Astronomy, and first woman at Harvard to be promoted to full professor.
1956 Rachel Louise Carson - Author of Silent Spring, the book that documented the effects of DDT on the environment and began the contemporary battle between environmentalists and industry.
1955 Rosemond Tuve - Distinguished scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature and specialist on the poets Spenser, Milton, and Herbert.
1954 Marjorie H. Nicholson - Chair of the English and comparative literature department at Columbia University, first woman to be appointed a full professor on the graduate faculty of Columbia, and authority on the relationship between poetry, philosophy, and science in the 17th century.
1953 Mabel Newcomer - Internationally recognized authority on governmental fiscal problems and chair of the economics department at Vassar College, she has an extensive record of public service.
1952 Lily Ross Taylor - First woman named professor-in-charge of the School of Classical Studies of the American Academy in Rome, dean of the Bryn Mawr College Graduate School, and professor of Latin.
1951 Mary Hamilton Swindler - Professor at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan and editor of the American Journal of Archaeology, she is widely acclaimed in the United States and Europe for her work in classical archaeology.
1950 Elizabeth Crosby - First woman medical professor at the University of Michigan and foremost authority on comparative and human neuroanatomy, she is said to have taught more anatomists than anyone in the world.
1949 Helen C. White - President of AAUW, author of historical novels and critical studies, and member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO.
1948 Sirarpie Der Nersessian - Professor for life of Byzantine art and archaeology at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University, an appointment that recognized her distinguished scholarly and administrative career.
1947 Barbara McClintock - First woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in physiology and one of the most influential geneticists of the 20th century.
1946 Ruth Fulton Benedict - One of the world's leading anthropologists, she used studies of human behavior patterns to argue against racial discrimination.
1945 Katherine Blodgett - Inventor of "invisible glass," which improved the efficiency of lenses used in submarine periscopes and aerial cameras.
1944 Gisela M.A. Richter - World authority in classical archaeology and curator of the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1943 Florence Siebert - Inventor of the first reliable tuberculosis test and improver of the safety of intravenous injections.
