Hannah Elias was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of nine children of mixed-race parents. In 1884, at the age of 19, while working as a servant, she stole a ball gown for her sister’s wedding. She was sent to prison. To support herself, she worked as a sex worker in a brothel in Manhattan, NYC. There, she met John R. Platt, a wealthy white man who was 45 years older than her. A few years later, Elias, who was already married, met Platt once again. This time, their connection developed into a love affair. He gave her money, paid for her divorce, and appointed her as a boarding house manager. Later, she moved into a five-story and twenty-room mansion in Central Park West, purchased for her by Platt, who continued to shower her with gifts, money, and jewelry, including his deceased wife’s watch. In 1903, Cornelius Williams, a man who rented a room at the boarding house Elias owned and was in love with her, shot and murdered a prominent NYC figure who Williams mistakenly believed was Platt. This incident exposed Elias and Platt’s relationship. Pressured by his children, Platt accused Elias of extortion of $685,385. As a result, Elias, then 39 years old, was arrested by four policemen who broke into her home.   She was jailed but made the bail of $30,000. When she gave her testimony in court, detailing the true nature of her relationship with Platt, she revealed that she has 15 bank accounts, lands and property worth $150,000, furniture worth $100,000, and many valuable jewels. Elias’s list of fortune and assets determined that she is one of the richest black women in the U.S and probably the world. With no evidence of extortion, Elias was acquitted in court. However, Platt’s filed a suit against her in civil court, which also ruled in her favor. The story of the black prostitute who blackmailed her 84 years old lover made the headlines. The local tabloids referred to Elias as “ebony enslaver” and “The Negro Enchantress,” and her neighbors, who until then thought she is Cuban or East Indian because of her light skin, realize that a black woman is living in their prestigious neighborhood. After the trails, Elias moved to Harlem. She purchased several properties and became the real estate empress of the neighborhood. She teamed up with the real estate developer John Nail, and together they turned Harlem into a safe zone for black New Yorkers. By the end of the 1910s, Elias left for Europe, never to return. Her death date is unknown. Read more...

Since childhood, Stacey Cunningham loved math and science, so after high school, she went to study industrial engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. In 1994, while still a student, Cunningham looked for a summer job as a waitress, but no place would hire her due to lack of experience. Her father, a trader at a brokerage firm, arranged for her a summer internship at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Two years later, and after receiving her Bachelor’s degree, Cunningham was hired for a full-time job at the NYSE as a trading floor clerk, becoming one of the few dozen women on the floor among the thousand male employees. For the next 8 years, she worked as a specialist for the Bank of America. At 31, Cunningham decided that she wants to become a better cook, so in 2005 she left the NYSE to study at the Institute of Culinary Education and worked as a restaurant chef. In 2007, she returned to the finance field as director of capital markets at the Nasdaq stock exchange and soon got promoted to Head of Sales for US transaction services. In 2012, Cunningham returned to the NYSE, first as vice president of sales and relationship management and then as the head of the division. In 2014, she was appointed president of NYSE Governance Services. In the following year, at the age of 41, she was appointed Chief Operating Officer, managing the exchange’s equities, internal governance services, and exchange-traded products. In 2018, at the age of 43, Cunningham was nominated the 67th president of the NYSE, becoming the second woman president of the New York Stock Exchange and the first to have full leadership of the exchange. In this position, Cunningham oversees the exchange’s operations for its issuers, investors, and global financial institutions, assuring the exchange’s constant improvement and innovation. Read more...

Born Adena Robinson Testa in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned her BA in political science from Williams College in Massachusetts and an MBA from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. In 1993, at the age of 24, she married Michael Cameron Friedman. In that same year, she joined Nasdaq as an intern and soon began moving up. In her first 18 years at Nasdaq, Friedman served in various positions, such as marketing manager, head of data products, head of corporate strategy, and Chief Financial Officer. In 2011, at 42, Friedman left Nasdaq to join Carlyle Group, a private investment firm in Washington DC. There, she served as Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director. After three years, she returned to Nasdaq as president and Chief Operating Officer. In 2017, in addition to her role as president, 48 years old Freidman was appointed CEO of the Nasdaq. The first woman in this position and the first woman to lead a global exchange. She oversees the company’s business segments, focusing on efficiency, product development, expansion, and growth. Under her leadership, Nasdaq transformed into a leading global exchange and technology solutions company, operating across six continents. In addition to her work in Nasdaq, Freidman is also a member of several boards. Among them are – the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the board of FCLTGlobal – a non-profit organization that works on ways to encourage long-term investing, and the board of Greater Washington, DC. A Chapter of Junior Achievement – a non-profit organization that supports teens in their way to financial independence. Freidman often speaks about women in leadership positions, advocating for mentoring and creating career opportunities for women in the financial industry. Read more...

Eleanor Lambert was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana. She was always interested in art, and while growing up, she wanted to be a sculptor. Over time fashion became her passion, and after high school, she attended the John Herron School of Art and then the Art Institute of Chicago. At 22 years old, she moved to NYC and began her professional career at an advertising agency. After a short period, she was hired as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s first press director. At the same time, she helped found both the Art Dealers Association of America and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to store and preserve exceptional design trends. Lambert opened her advertising agency, specializing in representing artists and art galleries. Within a short time, she earned a reputation that drew world-known artists, such as Jacob Epstein and Jackson Pollock. In 1943, she was appointed as the press director of the New York Dress Institute. In this position, she developed the concept of fashion week in NYC, then called “Press Week.” In the beginning, there were two small-scale fashion weeks every year happening all over the city, but over time the events became the most important fashion events of the year, and she was called to produce similar events all over the world, from Japan to Australia and even in the Soviet Union. As a devoted advocate for American fashion, Lambert always thought of new ways to promote American designers. With that in mind, she founded two establishments that put American fashion on the map – the International Best Dressed List and the Coty Fashion Critics’ Award (today the CFDA Awards, that referred to as “the Oscars of the fashion world”). Lambert worked to bring together American designers, enabling them to unite their voices in issues that affected them, regardless to their success or status. So, in 1962, she founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She ran the council for more than a decade and was an honorary member until she passed away in 2003. Three years later, she was appointed by President Johnson as the first US representative to the National Council on the Arts. Afterward, she became active in European fashion circles, representing upcoming designers such as Valentino and Pierre Cardin and exposing them to the American clientele. In 1973, she produced a historical fashion show at the Palace of Versailles, in which five American designers showed alongside five French designers. This show was the turning point in the perception of the European fashion world toward American fashion. Lambert was active in the fashion world until the day she died at the age of 100. In her 75 years career, she worked tirelessly to promote American fashion in the US and abroad and make NYC one of the world’s fashion capitals. Read more...

Anna Wintour was born in London, England, the eldest of five children. Her interest in fashion started at a young age, watching music television broadcasts and reading Seventeen magazine. She attended North London Collegiate School, where she was known for being a rebel for shortening the hemlines of her skirts. At age 15, she began to work at a fashion boutique, and at 16, she dropped out of school to participate in a training program at Harrods while taking fashion classes. Not long after, she began to work at OZ magazine. At the age of 21, Harper’s & Queen magazine hired her as an editorial assistant, and a few years later, she moved to NYC to work as a junior fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, from which she got fired because she “did not understand the American market.” Afterward, she found an editor position at an erotic magazine for women, and when it shut down, she took a hiatus from work for a couple of years. In 1980, she returned to NYC and worked as a fashion editor in several magazines until she landed a position as Vogue’s first creative director. At the time, she began dating her future husband, David Shaffer and got married in 1984. The following year, she moved back to London to take over the UK Vogue. After two years, she relocated to NYC to edit House & Garden magazine but shortly after, she was appointed editor-in-chief of US Vogue. In her new position, she made radical changes in the magazine, renewing its focus on fashion and changing the style of the cover pictures. She began to present unfamiliar models and famous women on the covers and mixed high fashion with inexpensive clothes. Under her editorship, the magazine became at the forefront of the fashion world, setting new trends and launching the careers of many models, photographers, and designers. She became and still is the fashion world queen and a fashion icon. Read more...

When she was 58 years, old Madonna stepped on the stage to receive Billboard’s 2016 Woman of the Year award. The highest-grossing female touring artist of all time was selected due to her influence on music, her vision, innovation, philanthropic work, and her contribution to feminist change towards equal rights. Madonna used the occasion to deliver a daring speech, describing the sexist and ageist behavior that she had to overcome in her career as a musician, actress, and entrepreneur. She outlined her path from her childhood in a small Michigan town, through her first years as a struggling dancer in late 1970s New York City, to becoming the “Queen of Pop Music” with 14 albums, dozen of top hits worldwide, sales of 300 million records and many awards. In 2019 she released her 14th album, ‘Madame X,’ a name given to her by Martha Graham. She delivered her first birth at 38 and is now a single mother of six. Through her career, she pushed the boundaries of music and gender politics. Her influence on women’s liberation was by presenting new ways of owning her sexuality through mainstream media. Read more...

Born as Frances Levenstein in New Haven, Connecticut. At 18, just after graduating high school, she enrolled in the New York University School of Law, where she met her husband Charles G. Roth. To pay for school, she worked at a settlement house, a law office, and her father’s shoe store in New Haven. At 21, she became the first woman to be admitted to the Connecticut Bar Association. Afterward, she worked for 12 years as an assistant prosecutor at the New Haven city court and became the first female prosecutor in the city. She also worked for the domestic relations department with abused women, wayward girls, and violent husbands. Witnessing thousands of family disputes, she decided to take action and wrote articles presenting practical ways to improve the court system and creating a domestic relations court. At 41, she resigned from her job as a prosecutor to work in the Bureau of Child Welfare. There, she published two reports about juvenile delinquencies and created a form that simplifies the young offenders’ reporting of cases. It was later adapted in more than 160 cities. She then started to advise the juvenile court justices on improving its work methods and legislation interpretation. In 1939, she led 150 women to the Connecticut Senate chamber advocating for the passage of a juvenile court reform bill. When the bill passed two years later, she was assigned to supervise and organize the new juvenile court. During WW2, she was appointed secretary of the Social Protection Committee in the Connecticut War Council and founded an association of policewomen to deal with girls’ misconduct issues. She left the government at the age of 49 and began to work as a defense attorney, representing Connecticut in the American Arbitration Association. Because of her reputation as a “Doer,” she was asked by the New Haven Restaurant Association to direct a new culinary school, which later evolved into what is known today as The Culinary Institute of America. The school offered an education program under the GI Bill, training veterans in the culinary arts. When the school opened on May 22, 1946, it had only sixteen students, and by the time she retired, 18 years later, the school had 300 students. Today the school is considered one of the premier culinary colleges in the world. Upon her retirement from the school management, at the age of 68, she was appointed as a consulted for the Office of Economic Opportunity. She passed away seven years later, at the age of 75. Read more...

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, in a Jewish family. After graduating high school, she attended Western Reserve University but left when her father got ill, without getting a degree. At 22, she began her career working for various brokerages, and after moving to NYC at 26, she worked as an analyst at several financial services companies. In 1967, at the age of 39, she founded her own firm – Muriel Siebert & Co., Inc. In the same year, she applied for a seat on the NYSE but was declined with a request to secure $300,000 funding from a bank, but no bank would lend her the money until she is admitted at the NYSE. It did not stop her, and at the end of that year, her application was approved, and she became the first woman NYSE member. Ten years later, she was named Superintendent of Banks for the state of New York – overseeing all the banks in the state. During the five years she served in this position, not a single bank failed. During the 1990s, her company merged with another company, which enabled them to liquidate and to become a publicly-traded company. After the merger, she remained president of her firm. Siebert was a leading advocate for women and minorities in the banking and finance industry. She believed that undermining the contribution of women in government, business, and leading roles are putting the US at a disadvantage compared to other countries. She founded the “Siebert Entrepreneurial Philanthropic Plan,” in which she shared half of her company profits with charities of the issuer’s choice, offering them to help their community. Additionally, she served as president of the New York Women’s Agenda, in which she developed a program promoting financial literacy for women. Through the Muriel F. Siebert Foundation, she developed a financial literacy program for middle and high school students as well as adults, teaching them essential financial and business skills. Read more...

Born in 1879 to a working-class Irish Catholic family in Corning, NY, the 6th of 11 children. Her mother had 18 pregnancies in 22 years and died at the age of 50, which impacted Margaret tremendously, and so she decided to become a nurse. Sanger went to college, got married, had three children, and in 1911 moved to NYC. During this time, as a nurse, she encountered the horrible results of unsafe, self-induced, and back-alley abortions of unwanted pregnancies, which were illegal in those days. Due to her profession, women were reaching out to her, asking for her knowledge to prevent pregnancies. She got involved in women’s rights activities for fair labor and equality and became part of the bohemian life of Greenwich Village. All of this led her to realize that the only way to change women’s status, enjoy their sexuality, reduce poverty, and allow women more freedom is to educate them to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and this became her life mission. Key events in her life, courage, innovative thinking, and strong desire to change women’s lives led Margaret Sanger to establish the Birth Control Movement in the US during the early 20th century by educating women to prevent unwanted pregnancies. She wrote a series of columns about sex education in the New York Call (1911-1913) and in 1914, launched “The Woman Rebel” newsletter describing actual methods for contraception, there she started to use, for the first time, the term birth control. Her publications caused a sensation and were considered illegal due to the information about contraception, so she left for Europe and stayed there for a while, studying the methods and options of birth control available in Europe. After her return, Sanger opened the first Family Planning and Birth Control Clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and got arrested several times. In 1918 her appeal changed the law to allow doctors to prescribe contraception, and in 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League. Over the years, she founded more organizations, opened birth control clinics, and in 1948 helped to found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She lectured all over the world and wrote several books about birth control. Her last achievement before she died in 1966, was to support the research of the birth control pill (which was funded with a donation by Katharine McCormick) and get it to public use in 1960. Read more...

Born as Gertrude Vanderbilt in New York City to an upper-class family and received private education from a young age. She got married when she was 21 years old, to a member of the wealthy Whitney family and the couple had three children. A visit to Europe in the early 1900s exposed her to the art world and inspired her to become a sculptress. She studied art in New York, and later in Paris. At first, she presented her work under an assumed name because she was afraid that she wouldn’t be taken seriously both as a woman and as a socialite. The fact that neither her husband nor her family were supportive of her work contributed to her fears. At the age of 32, Whitney opened a studio which later evolved to the Whitney Studio Galleries. A year later she won her first prize for one of her sculptures. During WW1, Whitney invested both time and money to relief efforts and established a hospital for wounded soldiers in France. She used to draw the soldiers, and those sketches became the first drafts of her famous memorials in New York City. Over the years, Whitney’s art received critical acclaim worldwide. Her work can be found in many public areas in the US, and a few in Europe, among them, are ‘Women’s Titanic Memorial’ and ‘The Founders of the Daughters of the American Revolution’ memorial, both in Washington, DC. Throughout the years, she collected artworks of young American artists, encouraged the advancement of women artists and organized exhibitions to introduce them to the public. In 1930 she established the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC and appointed a woman to manage it. Whitney died in 1942, at age 67. Her daughter became the head of the Whitney Museum, and her granddaughter followed her upon her mother’s death. Read more...