Nellie Bly was an American journalist known for her investigative and undercover reporting. She earned acclaim in 1887 for her exposé on the conditions of patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and achieved further fame after the New York World sent her on a trip around the world in 1889.
1864-1922
Susan Butcher was a champion American dog musher and four-time winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
1954-2006
Jacqueline Cochran is a pioneering 20th century pilot who was an advocate for female aviators during WWII and the first woman to break the sound barrier.
1910-1980
In 1922, aviator Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman to stage a public flight in America. Her high-flying skills always wowed her audience.
1893-1926
Ann Dunham was the mother of Barack Obama, who became the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American to hold this office.
1942-1995
Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, mysteriously disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
1897-1939
American swimmer Gertrude Ederle achieved fame when she competed in the 1924 Olympics and became the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926.
1905-2003
Dian Fossey was a zoologist best known for researching the endangered gorillas of the Rwandan mountain forest from the 1960s to the '80s, and for her mysterious murder.
1932-1985
Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston was a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance before writing her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
1891-1960
Mary Leakey was a paleoanthropologist who, along with husband Louis, made several prominent scientific discoveries. Skull fossils found by the Leakeys advanced our understanding of human evolution.
1913-1996
Margaret Mead is best known for her studies and publications on cultural anthropology.
1901-1978
Annie Smith Peck was a trailblazing scholar, writer and athlete who set records as a mountain climber in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
1850-1935
In 1983, astronaut and astrophysicist Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger. Ride died on July 23, 2012 at the age of 61, following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
1951-2012
Sacagawea was a Shoshone interpreter best known for being the only woman on the Lewis and Clark expedition into the American West.
1788-1812