In the early 19th century, when women couldn’t vote, own property, or speak at public gatherings, Eunice Newton Foote discovered the effect of greenhouse gas on the earth’s atmosphere. An amateur scientist and relative of Sir Isaac Newton, Foote was also an inventor, suffragist, and landscape painter.

Born in 1877 to a wealthy family in New York City, Rosalie Barrow Edge used her privilege and her invincible will to set the course for environmental activism in the 20th century. Her visionary approach to wildlife conservation gave the world Hawk Mountain, the first sanctuary for birds of prey in the U.S…

Born in Laredo, Texas in 1885, Idar was the second of eight children. Her father was the editor and eventual owner of the progressive Spanish-language newspaper La Cronica, so Idar was exposed to…

After escaping the violence of Jim Crow segregation in the South, in the 1890s and early 20th century, art model Hettie Anderson came to embody the face, figure, and spirit of America in monumental sculptures, paintings, and U.S. currency. Muse to many of the leading artists of the Gilded Age, Anderson portrayed the physical and spiritual representations of ideals such as Liberty, Fame, and Victory.

A brilliant entrepreneur, Walker became the first woman in the U.S. to found a bank. She launched many successful businesses and was a celebrated philanthropist and civil rights activist…

In 1865, Susan La Flesche Picotte was born on the wind-scorched prairie of Nebraska, during what would be the Omaha tribe’s last buffalo hunt. The word, Omaha, means against the current, and Picotte would live her life accordingly.

In 1967 when 26-year-old graphic designer Margaret Crane took a job with a pharmaceutical giant outside New York, she never imagined that her greatest contribution to the company—and to women worldwide—would be a scientific invention. Using a paper clip holder, reflective mylar, a test tube, and an eye dropper…

In the air and on the ground, Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman defied the laws of gravity and racial and gender discrimination. In the face of what seemed to be the impossible, Coleman always managed to find a way…

Born in 1890 in Concord, New Hampshire, Flynn was always on the side of marginalized workers, immigrants, and women. But her iron-clad defense of the First Amendment and her hell-or-high-water approach, cost her an education, her freedom, and her health…

In 1869, Ida Lewis captivated the country’s imagination as “the bravest woman in America” for her daring rescue of two soldiers whose boat had capsized in Newport Harbor, RI. Until her death in 1911, Lewis would …