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Tag: women's history
  • A photo collection of Mighty Girls who honored the suffragists who fought for women's right to vote this Halloween!

    On Halloween, many Mighty Girls took the opportunity to honor their heroes — and encourage adults to exercise their hard-earned right to vote this Election Day! These Mighty Girls dressed up as suffragists, or suffragettes as they were often called in Britain, paying tribute to the bold women who fought for women's right to vote. In America, the fight for the vote lasted for over 70 years, and countless women struggled, protested, and were imprisoned for the cause. As suffrage leader Lucy Burns, who served more jail time than any other American suffragist, once observed: "I think we have done all this for women, and we have sacrificed everything we possessed for them, and now let them fight for it now."
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  • Strict gender norms and fears of witchcraft pushed women out of a centuries-long tradition.

    By Laken Brooks, Doctoral Student of English, University of Florida; this article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

    What do witches have to do with your favorite beer?

    When I pose this question to students in my American literature and culture classes, I receive stunned silence or nervous laughs. The Sanderson sisters didn’t chug down bottles of Sam Adams in “Hocus Pocus.” But the history of beer points to a not-so-magical legacy of transatlantic slander and gender roles.

    Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women’s work – that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches. Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, may have emerged from their connection to female brewers. Continue reading Continue reading

  • Betty Reid Soskin began her career as a ranger at the age 85 at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

    Betty Reid Soskin, America's oldest National Park Service ranger, celebrated her 102nd birthday today! Soskin began her career as a ranger at age 85 at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in California — a park that she had helped plan in its early stages years earlier. Prior to her retirement in 2022 at the age of 100, Soskin gave a popular tour called “Untold Stories and Lost Conversations" during which she gave a tour of the park, shared her personal WWII story, and encouraged others to contribute their own stories to the park's collection of oral histories. Continue reading Continue reading

  • The top books and films for children and adults about the 72-year fight for women's suffrage in the United States.

    For children today, it's hard to imagine a time when women couldn't vote; realizing that they've had that right for only just over 100 years is astounding. It's equally shocking when they learn that women had to fight for 72 years before the 19th Amendment — which stated that no citizen could be denied the right to vote on account of sex — became law. So it's imperative that we teach today's children about the struggle for women's suffrage, not only to honor the dedication and sacrifices of the women who led the Women's Suffrage Movement, but also to ensure that future generations don't take the right to vote for granted. Continue reading Continue reading

  • Dr. Gerty Cori's groundbreaking work cracked the secrets of glucose, paving the way for treatments for diseases like diabetes.

    The groundbreaking scientist Dr. Gerty Cori was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine and the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. She shared the Nobel with her husband and lifelong research partner, Carl. Although their experience and education was identical, it took thirteen years before she was finally promoted to the same rank as him at the university where they worked. Together, the Coris made numerous breakthroughs in medical research, including discoveries that paved the way for understanding and developing treatments for diabetes and other metabolic diseases. Despite the institutionalized sexism she faced throughout her career, Gerty's tremendous scientific mind could not be denied — and her work would change the field of biochemistry forever. Continue reading Continue reading

  • Eliza Schuyler Hamilton outlived her famous husband Alexander by fifty years and went on to make her own mark on history.

    Many people have heard of Elizabeth (Eliza) Schuyler Hamilton from the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical Hamilton about her husband Alexander, but most know little of the life and legacy of this influential Founding Mother. Eliza lived for 97 years — and outlived her famous husband by 50 years — during a tumultuous period that included the American Revolution and the establishment of American government and democracy, as well as personal dramas and tragedies, including the deaths of both her oldest son and her husband in duels. Despite it all, she went on to devote her life both to preserving Alexander’s legacy and to charitable causes, including the creation of the first private orphanage in New York City, even while her own family struggled with financial hardship. "I think anyone else would have been broken," says Ron Chernow, the author of Alexander Hamilton, the biography that inspired the hit musical. "Not only did she live, she prevailed." Continue reading Continue reading

  • Susie King Taylor's extraordinary life is captured in her memoir, one of the most detailed accounts ever written by a woman about life in a Civil War camp.

    When Susie King Taylor was born in 1848, it was illegal to educate African Americans in Georgia but she learned to read and write thanks to a secret school. That gift of literacy would allow her to become a trailblazing teacher in her teens and, later, the first Black Army nurse during the U.S. Civil War; an experience she shared in her remarkable memoir about life in a Union camp. Today, more than a century later, her words show her fortitude and determination to make a contribution to the war effort. "I gave my service willingly for four years and three months without receiving a dollar," she wrote, adding that she was glad "to be allowed to go with the regiment, to care for the sick and afflicted comrades." Continue reading Continue reading

  • Stephanie Kwolek's invention of Kevlar has saved countless lives over the past 40 years.

    Stephanie Kwolek's invention of Kevlar has saved countless lives over the past 50 years. Kevlar is a fiber five times stronger than steel that is now used in numerous products ranging from boots for firefighters to spacecraft — and most famously, in bulletproof vests. It's estimated that since Kevlar's introduction to body armor in the 1970s, the lives of over 3,000 police officers have been saved, as well as those of innumerable soldiers and others in conflict zones. On the day that the pioneering chemist passed away in 2014 at the age of 90, DuPont announced that the one-millionth protective vest made using Kwolek's lifesaving invention was sold. Continue reading Continue reading

  • The Apollo 11 moon landing nearly ended in failure -- until Margaret Hamilton's flight software saved the day.

    In this iconic photograph, pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton stands next to the computer code that she and her team wrote to guide the Apollo spacecraft to the moon! Hamilton was the lead software designer for NASA’s Apollo program, and her forward thinking saved the 1969 Apollo 11 mission when the flight software she designed prevented a last-minute abort of the famous landing which brought the first humans to the Moon. Over the course of her career, Hamilton developed the concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling, and Human-in-the-loop decision capability, which became the foundation of modern software design. She also fought for programming to be given the respect it deserved, coining the term "software engineering" ; after all, as her work showed, software could make the difference between failure and a groundbreaking success. Continue reading Continue reading

  • Pioneering neuroscientist Brenda Milner, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, says that at 106, she's "still nosy."

    If you go to the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, you might catch a glimpse of 106-year-old Dr. Brenda Milner — a pioneering neuroscientist who's still breaking new ground in her 70-year long career as a brain researcher! The eminent British-born scientist revolutionized brain science as a newly minted PhD in the 1950s. Today, she is best known for discovering where memory formation occurs in the brain and is widely recognized as one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience. Her research to better understand the inner workings of the human brain continues today, although she says that people often think she must be emerita because of her advanced age. "Well, not at all," she asserts. "I’m still nosy, you know, curious.” Continue reading Continue reading

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