We consider an ‘unsung heroine’ a woman whose work/life has been under-recognized. Unfortunately, that still means most women! But here are our picks for groundbreaking inventors, artists, scientists, and more, who go beyond the “first woman to…” role.
Who is your Unsung Heroine? Here are some of ours:
• Joanne Bland is an activist who marched in the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March when she was just 11, and she’s the co-founder and director of the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, Alabama. She’s been working for justice her whole life. - Wayne Taylor
• Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first computer programmers, and a military officer. Among her many accomplishments, the COBOL computer language is based on her programming ideas, and the term ‘computer bug’ is attributed to her. - David Hirmes
• Cristeta Comerford: The first female (and as a Filipina, the first minority) executive chef at the White House, appointed in 2005 during the GW Bush administration. - David Chiu
• Margaret Knight, the ‘mother of the grocery bag’–an inventor during the mid-1800s who was the first woman to receive a U.S. patent…she ‘bagged’ about 89 patents during her lifetime. - Nick Miller
• Dori Seda, underground cartoonist. Seda threw herself at life so hard it eventually kicked back, and she died very young. But not before she’d produced a small but impressive body of work that combines the overactive id of R. Crumb with the sensitivity and self-awareness of, well, Seda herself. - Robin Edgerton
• Nellie Bly, Investigative journalism pioneer who, in 1887, faked insanity to report on a mental asylum from within, and then the following year traveled around the world in 72 days. - Jeremy Chernikoff
Other resources for lists of under-recognized women:
* Gallery of Women Engineers, from the University of Illinois
* Encyclopedia Brittanica’s “300 Women Who Changed the World”
* Women Artists in History
* The CLARA database of women artists
