Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan, Maine, the oldest of six children. To support her parents, she began working at the age of 12 at a local retail store. At high school, in addition to playing as the captain of the school’s girls’ basketball team, she worked as a telephone operator, where she met her future husband, Clyde Smith, a local politician who was 21 years older than her. After graduation, she taught for a short time at a one-room school and coached the girls’ basketball team at her old high school. At the age of 21, she joined the staff of the Independent Reporter magazine, working as a circulation manager. During this time, she became active at the local women organizations, co-founding the Skowhegan chapter of the Business and Professional Women’s Club, serving as the editor of the organizations’ magazine, and later as its president. At 31, she was appointed the treasurer of the New England Waste Process Company while holding a full-time job as an office worker at a local textile mill. In 1930, when she is 33 years old, Chase and Clyde Smith got married, and she became more involved in politics. In that year, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee, in which she served until she moved to Washington, DC, following her husband’s election to the US House of Representatives. Smith was more than the wife accompanying her husband, she worked as his secretary and speechwriter. In 1940, her husband fell ill, and he asked her to run in his stead in the coming election. After he passed away a few months later, in 1940, she won the special election, becoming the first woman elected to US Congress from Maine. Three months later, she was elected again for a full two-years term, and for the next eight years, she was re-elected three more times. During her service, she developed an interest in military and national security issues, she served on the Naval Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee. She played a key role in the passage of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which enabled women to serve as regular members of the armed forces, not only at war times, as well as giving them rank, privileges, and equal pay. Smith was known as a moderate Republican, braking ranks with her party and supporting President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. In the summer of 1948, Smith announced her candidacy for the US Senate, and when she won the general elections she became the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, as well as the first woman to represent Maine in the US Senate. In Congress, Smith was the first one to criticize Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt. In a fifteen-minute speech, which became known as the “Declaration of Conscience,” she protected citizens’ rights to criticize, to protest, to hold unpopular beliefs, and to have independent thought. Following the speech, McCarthy removed her from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, replacing her with Senator Richard Nixon. Not holding her opinions, she advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, for which she was referred to as “the devil in disguise of a woman” by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1964, at the age of 67, Smith announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Although she lost every primary election, she made history by being the first woman in the US to run as a presidential candidate for a major party. Afterward, she channeled her efforts toward Medicare, civil rights, and education funding. She was the first (and to this day the only) woman to chair the Senate Republican Conference, she promoted the foundation of the space program, and served as a charter member of the Senate Aeronautical and Space Committee. In 1973, after losing the re-election for her Senate seat, Smith retired from political life. She taught at various colleges as a visiting professor, and returned to Skowhegan, where she supervised the construction of the Margaret Chase Smith Library Center – the first library to focus on the work of a female Member of Congress. Smith passed away at the age of 97. Read more...

Zaha Mohammad Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class family. Growing up, her family used to visit ancient Sumerian cities, which inspired her interest in architecture, and by the age of 11, she made up her mind to become one. Her parents encouraged her ambition and allowed her to design the interior of their home. In her youth, she attended boarding schools in Switzerland and England, and later she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. At 22, she moved to London to attend the Architectural Association School of Architecture. After graduation, her professor recruited her to his firm in the Netherlands. At 30, Hadid returned to the UK and opened Zaha Hadid Architects firm in London, and later another branch in NYC. At the time, the typical architectural style was postmodernism, and Hadid, with her innovative perspective, was set apart with more colorful and radical designs. In 1983, at the age of 33, Hadid caught international attention when her proposal won in a competition to design The Peak center in Hong Kong, offering a horizontal skyscraper that diagonally moved down the hillside. Even though it was never built, this project established her aggressive geometric and dynamic aesthetic, as was reflected in her following designs proposals for the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, the Düsseldorf Art and Media Centre, and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales. Some of her designs were too avant-garde to be actualized and were displayed as artworks in various museums. In 1993, 43 years old Hadid received her first major-built project for the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The structure, made of glass and concrete, was composed of sharp-angled forms that resemble a bird in flight. This design has launched her career, allowing her to explore her interests in designing dynamic sculptural structures with interconnecting spaces. Many appear in her works from this period, such as the IBA Housing in Berlin, the Mind Zone exhibition space at the Millennium Dome in London, the Land Formation One exhibition space in Weil am Rhein, and the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck. One of Hadid’s biggest successes came when she won the commission to design the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the first woman to design an art museum in the US. Opened in 2003, the building, constructed of a series of vertical cubes and voids, was described as “the most important American building to be completed since the cold war.” Hadid continued winning more international competitions, designing buildings in her unique deconstructivist style. Including the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, for which she won her first Royal Institute of British Architects Award (RIBA) and the Guangzhou Opera House, Guangzhou, China, with a US$300 million budget. In 2004, at 54, Hadid won the most prestigious award in architecture -­ the Pritzker Architecture Prize, making history as its first female recipient. Her next ambitious projects included the waveform Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi, The National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century in Rome, and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. From the beginning of her career, Hadid taught architecture at various institutes, including- the Architectural Association, Cambridge University, and more. She also held the Sullivan Chair professorship at Chicago’s School of Architecture and served on the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation and the Encyclopædia Britannica Editorial Board. Among the many awards and accolades she received throughout the years, she was named Commander of the Civil Division of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). Hadid died of a heart attack at the age of 65. Read more...

Augusta Ada King was born in London, England, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron with his wife, the Baroness Anne Isabella Noel Byron. Five weeks after she was born, her parents separated, and she moved with her mother to her maternal grandparents in Kirkby Mallory. Lovelace did not connect with her father until he died when she was eight years old. Growing up, her mother insisted that she studied mathematics and science, believing it would prevent her from developing a moody and unpredictable temperament like her father’s. So, from an early age, she was educated by renowned figures, such as the social reformer William Frend, the physician William King, and the astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville. Lovelace became fascinated with numbers and engineering, designing boats and flying machines. At 17, she got introduced to Charles Babbage, a mathematician that later became known as “the father of computers.” Soon he became her mentor, and she studied advanced mathematics and helped him with his research. In the same year, she was presented at Court and became a regular and popular at aristocrat events. Two years later, she married Willia King, and when he was nominated the Earl of Lovelace, she became the Countess of Lovelace. The couple had three children. After her wedding, she continued to develop with Babbage the Analytical Engine device, an early prototype of the modern computer. In 1842, 27 years old Lovelace was asked to translate an article by the Italian Engineer Luigi Menabrea about the Analytical Engine. Her translation included an appendix note, in which she elaborated on the machine’s potential, explaining that in addition to calculating numbers, it can also create art such as music and pictures. The appendix also included a theorized engine process of instruction’s reputation, a method that is known today as Looping. Back then, her work did not get much attention, but centuries after the publication, it became recognized as the first computer algorithm, and she received the long-lost acknowledgment as the first computer programmer. Throughout her life, Lovelace developed and theorized different potential uses of the Analytical Engine. Like the mathematical model of how the brain creates thoughts and the nerves create feelings, which she called “a calculus of the nervous system.” She died at the age of 36 from uterine cancer. Read more...

Mary Baker Eddy was 44 years old when she made the discovery that changed her life from a farm girl to one of the most powerful women of her day. It was 1866, and she fell on ice in Lynn and knocked unconscious. While her doctors assumed that she was going to die, she was healed after a few days of reading her Bible. Motivated to share her revelation and heal others, she started with her niece as her first patient. She named her innovative ideas “Christian Science” and fast became a popular but controversial speaker about the link between spirituality and health. At the age of 54, Baker Eddy published “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”. It was an immediate best-seller, with sales of over 10 million copies, but she rewrote it 432 times, compulsively revisiting the book until her last month. Disappointed that existing Christian churches would not embrace her discovery, she started her own “Church of Christ, Scientist,” which today has branches around the world. In 1902 she hosted an international conference of over 15,000 participants in Boston. Despite her tremendous success, she was paranoid and distrusted her own followers. Read more...

Annie Cohen emigrated from Riga to the United States as a child. She was married to Max Kopchovsky and had three little children, when she stumbled upon an opportunity to become rich and famous, and promote feminism, all together. At the decade of America’s bicycle hype, she took on the challenge presented by two Boston businessmen to be the first woman to cycle around the world. Without prior cycling experience, she set for the road in 1894. 15 months later, she returned home as an international sensation, even though she skipped large parts of the journey by sailing. Her biggest talent was for storytelling: she reported back about a range of exotic and mostly fictitious adventures. Nonetheless, the gift of imagination secured her a series of lectures and a newspaper column upon her return. Another skill which she demonstrated was entrepreneurship: she adopted the name Londonderry as part of a paid sponsorship by a water company and used herself and her bike as a mobile billboard in France. At the end of the 19th century, Annie Londonderry was an icon of the “new woman” – an independent, liberated, and self-reliant person. Her story was soon forgotten, but after her great-grandnephew discovered that her brief death notice in the 1947 New York Times read: “devoted grandmother of Mary”, he published a book about her, 60 years after her death. Read more...

Wangarĩ Muta Maathai was born in the village of Ihithe, Kenya. At 11, she was sent to a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri, where she learned English and converted to Catholicism. At 16, after graduating top of her class, she was granted admission to Loreto High School, a Catholic high school for girls. In 1960, 20 years old Maathai was one of the 300 Kenyans selected to study in the US as part of the Kennedy Airlift and studied biology, chemistry, and German at Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas. After receiving an MSc in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, she worked as a research assistant in the microanatomy section Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University College of Nairobi. Later, she moved to Germany to write her doctorate, completing it at the University of Nairobi while serving as an assistant lecturer. In 1971, at 31, Maathai became the first Eastern African woman to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi. In the early 1970s, Maathai became an active member of various civic organizations. She held positions such as director of the Nairobi branch of the Kenya Red Cross Society and board chair of the Environment Liaison Centre. She also continued her academic career, and in 1976, at 36, she was appointed chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and associate professor the following year, becoming the first woman to serve in these positions. At the time, she began to work with the National Council of Women of Kenya, formulating a strategy to involve women in rural areas in environmental conservation by planting trees. This initiative aimed to address the challenges of deforestation and desertification while providing a sustainable fuel source for communities. In 1977, she founded The Green Belt Movement, which in 1986 led to the founding of the Pan African Green Belt Network. Since its inception, the organization has planted approximately 40 million trees in Africa. Following their successes, many African countries, such as Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe, have adopted tree-planting initiatives to act against deforestation and promote environmental sustainability. Besides environmental conservation, Maathai advocated for other social causes, including human rights, AIDS prevention, and women’s issues, representing these concerns in United Nations General Assembly meetings. In 2002, at 62, Maathai was elected as the representative of the Tetu constituency in Kenya’s parliament, and a year later was appointed Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources, serving in both positions until 2007. In 2004, Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her “holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights, and women’s rights in particular,” becoming the first Black African woman winner. She continued campaigning for environmental causes and human rights, becoming the first president of the African Union’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council and as a Goodwill Ambassador to the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem. In 2006, together with five other sister Nobel Peace winners, she founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative to unite and support global efforts for women’s rights, fostering peace, justice, and equality. Maathai died of ovarian cancer at the age of 71. Read more...

Millicent Garrett Fawcett was born in Aldeburgh, England. At 12, she left her family to attend a boarding school in London. There, she met the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who introduced her to women’s rights activists, including Henry Fawcett, a Member of Parliament who was 14 years older than her, and in 1867 the couple got married. After the wedding, she worked as her husband’s secretary and started her writing career. She published articles and essays discussing women’s issues and her beliefs on equal opportunities for women and specifically women’s education. At 22, Fawcett attended her first suffrage movement meeting and soon joined the London Suffrage Committee. In the following year, she gave a speech at the first public pro-suffrage meeting, after which she became one of the leading speakers of the movement, giving lectures on the importance of women voting rights, mostly in schools for girls, women’s colleges, and adults education centers. In 1870, 23 years old Fawcett published the textbook Political Economy for Beginners, which became an immediate success, running through ten editions, translated into several languages, and aspired two novels. Two years later, she and her husband published a collection of essays titled Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects. In 1875, she co-founded a college for women at the University of Cambridge, Newnham Hall, and served as its council. After her husband died in 1884, Fawcett sold her houses and moved in with her sister at Gower Street, Bloomsbury. She took a year off from public speaking. On her return to the Central Committee for Women’s Suffrage, they asked her to administer the joint meetings of the suffrage societies that merged into the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897. In 1907, she was appointed president of the NUWSS. Her campaign’s approach to achieving women’s right to vote was moderate and peaceful, in contrast to the militant position of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst. She gave lectures, wrote articles and pamphlets. During WW1, Fawcett harnessed the NUWSS activities for the war efforts, supporting the services of hospitals in training camps in Scotland and Russia. The organization continued to campaign for women’s suffrage by emphasizing the contributions of women during wartime. Fawcett’s plan worked, mainly due to the movement’s actions during the war, the Representation of the People Act passed in 1918, giving women limited voting rights. Shortly after, when she was 72, Fawcett retired from her position as the president of the NUWSS, dedicating her time to writing. She also continued to launch and support other human rights campaigns, such as equal divorce rights, criminalizing incest, raising the age of consent, women’s access to the legal profession, stopping the white slave trade, and regulating prostitution in India. One of her most notable campaigns was against the Contagious Diseases Act, which required prostitutes to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and imprisoned if positive, while the clients who infected the women were not required to get tested. She argued that the double standards of this and similar laws would continue to exist until women would be part of the decision-making process. Fawcett died at the age of 82 after dedicating her life to giving women a voice and promoting their rights, paving the way for generations of activist, feminist women. Read more...

Viola Davis was born in St. Matthews, South Carolina, and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The family often struggled to survive because her parents’ incomes were insufficient. She attended Central Falls High School, where she participated in school productions and theatre competitions. These performances earned her a scholarship at the Young People’s School for the Performing Arts in West Warwick, Rhode Island. She continued studying theater at Rhode Island College and furthered her education at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City. In 1992, while still in school, she starred in her first off-Broadway production, As You Like It, by William Shakespeare. Four years later, at 31, she made her Broadway debut in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, for which she earned her first Tony Award nomination. She continued to perform in various Broadway productions and had television guest appearances before landing the role of Nurse Lynnette Peeler in the TV drama City of Angels in 2000. A year after, Davis returned to Broadway to play Tonya in King Hedley II. For her portrayal of the married woman who advocates for her right to an abortion, she won her first Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. During the early 2000s, she played several small roles in films, mainly Steven Soderbergh’s, including Out of Sight, Solaris, and Traffic. In 2010, she performed in her third August Wilson Broadway play, Fences, which earned her second Tony Award, and made her the second African-American to win the Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. Later, Davis played in the movie adaptation of the play, for which she won several more awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. By then, Davis had become an acclaimed actress, playing roles in various TV shows and films, including The Help, Beautiful Creatures, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. In 2014, she got her first leading TV role as Annalise Keating in Shonda Rhimes’ How to Get Away with Murder. This character not only made her a household name but also gained her an Emmy award, becoming the first African-American to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Over time, Davis took on various positions behind the camera. With her husband, in 2011, she established a production company named JuVee Production. By 2022 they have released more than a dozen feature films, documentaries, and TV shows, including the political docuseries Two-Sides which explores police brutality towards the African-American community, Emanuel about the mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church, and The Woman King about the warrior leader of the kingdom of Dahomey in the 19th century. Davis uses her fame and fortune to support and promote causes close to her heart. She donated funds for the public library in her hometown of Central Falls, Rhode Island, and for the theater program of her alma mater Central Falls High School; she also collaborates with the Hunger Is, a program for eradicating childhood hunger in the US. Davis in known for her strong voice, which she often uses to inspire and empower black women and men, communities struggling with poverty, and race and gender equality. Read more...

Emily Pauline Johnson was born on the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario, Canada. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and her mother, an English immigrant, educated their children to respect both cultures and heritage. Johnson was a sickly child and could not attend the reserve school, so she was educated at home by her mother and non-Indigenous governesses. At 14, she went to study at Brantford Central Collegiate. There, she began to write poems and perform, continuing this at home after graduation. In 1883, at the age of 22, Johnson published her first full-length poem in a magazine. In the following year, her father died, and she moved with her mother and sister to Brantford. She continued to publish her poems and began to perform on stage to support her family. In 1886, 25 years old Johnson got the commission to write a poem for the unveiling ceremony of the statue of Joseph Brant, who was a Mohawk leader who allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War. In her poem, Ode to Brant, she called for brotherhood between Native and white Canadians. An article about her poem in the Toronto Globe increased the interest in her and her heritage, and afterward, she began to publish her poems regularly in various magazines. Her poetry portrayed the Indigenous culture and “traditional” topics, such as love, landscapes, and Canadian life. In 1892, at the age of 31, Johnson was invited to read her poetry at a Canadian authors’ event of The Young Men’s Liberal Association. She was the only woman who performed at the event and the only one to be asked for an encore. Recognizing her talent, the event organizer offered her a solo show to recite her poetry and stories. Her show emphasized both aspects of her culture and heritage. She began her performance as Tekahionwake, her great-grandfather’s Mohawk name, wearing traditional Mohawk dress and reciting “Indian” lyrics; in the second act, she changed into Victorian women clothing and read the “English” verses. Her show was tremendously popular, and she embarked on multiple speaking tours in Canada, the US, and England. During this time, Johnson continued writing poems and releasing two poetry collections, The White Wampum in 1895 and Canadian Born in 1903. In 1909, at 48, Johnson retired from the stage and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. She continued to write and publish poems and a series of tales based on folklore stories of the Squamish Chief Joe Capilano. In 1912, she published her last poetry collection Flint and Feather. Johnson died of breast cancer in the following year, at 52 years old. Throughout her life, she wrote hundreds of poems and stories, in which she broke the cultural barriers of her time, exploring identity as a mixed ethnic woman during the 19th century. Read more...

In her short life, she captured the American dream when transformed her life from an illegitimate child into a movie star and a national sensation. Her mother named her Norma Jean, and soon after the birth suffered from a nervous breakdown and was admitted into a mental institution. The newborn girl was shuffled between 12 foster homes, marrying at 16 to avoid going to an orphanage. When she worked in a war factory at 19, a photographer captured her while shooting an article about working women. That image surfaced and opened the doors for her modeling and acting career, which she dreamed of since age 5. Her success wasn’t immediate, but she kept on pushing – as she is said to have been “raised on a steady diet of rejections.” In an early stage of her career, she took on the stage name Marilyn and her mother’s maiden name Monroe. At 22 she got her first film role in a musical. When she “made it” to a movie star status – the fame was extreme. Some of the indicators of her popularity were a crowd of 4,000 people who came at 3 am to see her shoot a scene in New York, or being invited to sing for the president’s birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. Her film career lasted about a decade and included 33 credited films, some of the most popular are “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Some Like It Hot,” and “Don’t Bother to Knock.” She married two more times, both to famous men, both ending in divorce: baseball star Joe DiMaggio and play-writer Arthur Miller. Shortly after her 36 birthday, she was found dead in her bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her. She is still celebrated in the global culture as an icon of sexuality, beauty, and fame. Even though she capitalized on her image, she was critical of being treated as a commodity: “The trouble is, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate being a thing.” Read more...