Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her parents were alcoholics, and her father was abusive. At 12, she and her two brothers moved to live with her grandmother in Boston. At 14, she taught at a school for girls in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she developed a curriculum for her class that focused on natural sciences and ethical living. Five years later, she returned to Boston and opened a school for girls from wealthy families and a charity school for poor and neglected children she ran from her grandmother’s barn. Her declined health has forced her to give up her teaching career, and she began to work as a governess. In 1836, after suffering a breakdown, she was encouraged to travel to Europe to improve her health. While visiting England, she met a group of social reformers who advocated for government involvement in social welfare, especially in the management of mental institutions and asylums. Back in the US, she started teaching female prisoners at East Cambridge House of Correction. There, she observed the inhumane conditions of the mentally ill, who were locked in the dark basements without heat and sanitary facilities, being flogged and chained to the walls. Dix embarked on a two-year journey throughout the state, visiting asylums and prisons and recording the disgraceful conditions she examined. In 1845, she published her conclusions in a report titled Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States. After presenting it to the Massachusetts legislature, he increased the budget of the State Mental Hospital at Worcester. Her local successes drove her to expand her efforts to the entire country. She visited facilities in the north and the south, from New York and Pennsylvania to the Carolinas and Louisiana, documenting the treatment of patients, lobbing for improving asylums’ conditions, and adding more hospitals for the mentally ill. She reached out to politicians, advocation to pass federal legislation to establish supervised national asylums; in 1848, US Congress approved a bill to secure 12 million acres of land for the cause. Unfortunately, it got vetoed by President Franklin Pierce in 1854. Following the setback, Dix returned to Europe, continuing her investigation on mental treatment throughout the continent and lobbying for reforms for its improvement. Thanks to her efforts, numerous new institutes were established in Italy, Scotland, England, and the Channel Islands. During the American Civil War, she volunteered as a nurse in the Union Army and was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses. In this position, she was in charge of setting up field hospitals, managing supplies, recruiting nurses, and overseeing their training programs. While most male doctors opposed the presence of female nurses, Dix appointed more than 3,000 female nurses to the Union Army and advanced the role of field women nurses for years to come. When the war ended, Dix resumed her campaign to improve the caring conditions of the mentally ill and the disabled, leading to the founding of more than 30 institutes across the US and Canada. In 1870, at 68, she contracted malaria and had to give up her traveling, though she continued to promote the cause by every other means available to her. 1881, at 79, she moved into a designated suite built for her in the New Jersey State Hospital, an institute that she had founded. She died six years later, at the age of 85. Read more...

Ketanji Brown Jackson was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Miami, Florida. She attended Palmetto Senior high school, where she was a member of the debate team and president of the student body. She studied government at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude, and then worked for a short time as a researcher and reporter at TIME Magazine. In 1993, at 23, she continued her studies at Harvard Law School, where she served as the supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1996, the same year she received her law degree, she married Patrick Graves Jackson. For the next decade, she worked in both the private and public sectors. She clerked for several federal judges, including Judge Patti B. Saris of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Judge Bruce M. Selya of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Justice Stephen Breyer of the US Supreme Court. In 2003, at the age of 33, Jackson returned to work for the government, first as an assistant special counsel to the US Sentencing Commission and then as an assistant federal public defender. In 2009, President Obama nominated her to serve as vice-chair of the US Sentencing Commission for four years. After President Barack Obama’s nomination, she began serving on the US District Court for the District of Columbia in March 2013. In June 2021, following President Joe Biden’s nomination, she was confirmed as a circuit judge for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. In the following year, President Biden announced her nomination for associate justice of the US Supreme Court, and on April 7th, 2022, 52 years old Jackson became the first black woman in the Supreme Court. She is also the first federal public defender to sit on the court and the first justice in almost 30 years to have represented criminal defendants. Jackson is serving on various boards and committees, including the Judicial Conference Committee on Defender Services, Harvard University’s Board of Overseers, the Council of the American Law Institute, the board of Georgetown Day School, and the US Supreme Court Fellows Commission. Read more...

Dorothy Height was born in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in Rankin, Pennsylvania. Growing up, she attended, with her mother, the meetings of the Pennsylvania Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. There, she became aware of the importance of “sisterhood” and civil rights issues, and during high school, she led numerous anti-lynching campaigns. She was a talented orator, and after winning a national oratory competition, she got a college scholarship. She got accepted to Barnard College, but before the school year started, they canceled her admission because it had reached its black students’ unofficial quota. She went on to study at New York University, graduating in 1933 with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in educational psychology. After college, Height worked for several years as a social worker in the New York City Department of Welfare. In 1937, at the age of 25, she began to work as a counselor at the Harlem branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), climbing the ladder to become a prominent leader at the national level of the YWCA. After a meeting with Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Height began to volunteer at the NCNW. Throughout most of her life, she worked for both the YWCA and the NCNW, promoting civil rights and women’s rights. In 1944, at 32, she headed the national YWCA’s program of Interracial Relations, and two years later, she directed the integration of all the organization’s centers. In this role, she ran workshops, organized meetings, and wrote pamphlets to help white YWCA members and employees to overcome their fears and prejudices. Through the NCNW, Height worked on ending the lynching of black people and restructuring the criminal justice system. In 1957, at 45, she was nominated the president of NCNW, serving in this position for 40 years. Under her leadership, the NCNW supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s, creating scholarship programs for civil rights workers, organizing voter registration in the South, and giving financial aid to civil rights activists. Height became one of the leading figures of the civil rights movement, regularly advising politicians, such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. She was one of the organizers of the March on Washington. Alongside Polly Spiegel Cowan, she established Wednesdays in Mississippi, a recurrent gathering of black and white women from the North and South working together against segregation. Height seized the movement’s momentum to push harder to integrate the YWCA. She created a nationwide program for the desegregation of the YWCA communities and established its Center for Racial Justice in 1965, serving as its director. At 65, she retired from the YWCA, focusing all of her efforts on running the NCNW for 20 more years. She founded a vocational training program to assist women in opening businesses and initiated activities to strengthen Black families, such as the Black Family Reunion, an annual celebration of black traditions and values. Throughout the 1990s, she connected young people to the organization to encourage literacy employment and avoid drug abuse. She retired from the NCNW in 1996, not before securing the funding for a national headquarters in the historic Sears House in Washington, DC, that later was renamed in her honor. Even in her last decade, Height continued to work for human rights, serving as the chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights until she died at the age of 98. Read more...

Hannah Greenebaum Solomon was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a middle-class Jewish family who emigrated from Germany. Both of her parents were deeply involved with the Jewish community- her mother was one of the organizers of Chicago’s first Jewish Ladies Sewing Society, and her father founded the Zion Literary Society. Both were among the founders of the first Reform synagogue in Chicago – Kehilath Anshe Maarav. When she was 18 years old, Solomon and her sister became the first Jewish women the join the elite Women’s Club in the city. Inspired by the club’s emphasis on education and philanthropy, she conceived the idea of a similar club for Jewish women. At the age of 21, she married Henry Solomon, and they had three children. In 1893, after almost 20 years of planning, the Jewish Women’s Congress finally took place in Chicago. There, they vote to become a permanent organization named the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). In that same meeting, Solomon was elected unanimously as president, a position she held for the next 12 years. The NCJW mission was to preserve Jewish traditions through the education of Jewish women, to improve the community by social programs, and to celebrate motherhood by emphasizing the importance of women’s role. The members organized study circles where they were taught the fundamentals of the Jewish religion. They also acted as social workers within the community as well as supporting the new immigrants. Within three years, the organization had 3000 members in more than 50 sections. During her tenure, Solomon founded and chaired the Bureau of Personal Service, which supervised loan programs, worked for the improvement of housing conditions, provided family counseling, and assisted immigrants to receive social services. She promoted the organization’s activities throughout the country, becoming the first woman to speak from synagogue pulpits. In 1905, Solomon resigned from the NCJW presidency and was appointed as the president of the Illinois Industrial School for Girls. She also lobbied for the establishment of the first juvenile court in Chicago and the improvement of the city’s laws regarding minors. She served as a board member of various organizations, including the Chicago Civic Federation, the Illinois Federation of Women’s Club, and the Associated Jewish Charities – the only woman on the board. During WW1, she served as the chair for Chicago of the Women’s Division of the State Council of Defense. She passed away at the age of 84, after devoting her whole life to improving the community and helping those in need. Read more...

Sacagawea (also spelled Sacajawea) was born in Lemhi County, Idaho, the daughter of a Shoshone chief. Around the age of 12, she was captured by Hidatsa Indians, and at 13, she was sold to Toussaint Charbonneau – a French Canadian fur trader who was 20 years older than her. She was forced to marry him, becoming one of his wives. Afterward, they lived in the upper Missouri River area (today North Dakota) among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians. In November 1804, the Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, reached the area on their way to explore the newly acquired western lands and finding a path to the Pacific Ocean. They built Fort Mandan and stayed there for the winter. Lewis and Clark searched for an interpreter who spoke Shoshone to accompany them up the Missouri River and found Sacagawea, who was then pregnant with her first child. In February 1805, Sacagawea gave birth to her first son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, and two months later, left with the expedition, the only woman among the 33 members. In addition to been an interpreter, Sacagawea proved to be a valuable asset to the group. She knew how to find and identify plants, roots, and berries for food and medical aid, and her knowledge of the Shoshone trails in the area helped the team to navigate through the mountain pass. As a native woman with a newborn baby traveling with a group of white men, her mere existence was a symbol of peace. On their journey, the expedition encountered a group of Shoshone Indians, and their leader was Sacagawea’s brother. Thanks to the family reunion, the corps bought horses from the Shoshone, which helped them cross the Rocky Mountains. In November 1805, the expedition reached the Pacific coast. When they cast a vote where they would build a fort for the winter, Sacagawea’s vote was counted equally to the other members of the corps.   In 1806, the corps traveled eastward, and when they reached the Mandan and Hidatsa, Sacagawea left the expedition. Three years later, she and her husband traveled to St. Louis and left their son under the care of Clark, who became his legal guardian. Not long after, Sacagawea had her second child, Lizette Charbonneau. According to historical documents, Sacagawea died in 1812 at the age of 24. However, some Native American oral traditions suggest that she did not die but left her husband and married into a Comanche tribe before returning to the Shoshone in Wyoming, where she died in 1884. Read more...

Marie Jana Korbelová was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1939, when she was two years old, Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, and the family fled to England. When the war ended, the family relocated to Belgrade, then in Yugoslavia, where her father worked as the Czechoslovakian Ambassador. To avoid communist education, she was sent to a school in Switzerland and changed her name to Madeleine. In 1948, after the communist coup on Czechoslovakia, the family immigrated to the US as political refugees and settled in Denver, Colorado. After high school, she studied political science at Wellesley College. During vacations, she interned at The Denver Post, where he met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, a Medill newspaper-publishing family member. The couple married in 1959, shortly after she received her BA with honors. At 25, now with twin daughters, they moved to Washington, DC, and she studied Russian and international relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. A year later, the family relocated to Long Island, and Albright continued her studies at Columbia University, from which she earned a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government in 1975. In 1972, Albright worked as a fundraiser for the presidential campaign of Main’s Senator Ed Muskie, and later as his chief legislative assistant. In 1978, she was recruited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was her professor in Colombia, to work at the White House for the National Security Council’s congressional liaison. During the 80s and early 90s, she worked with numerous nonprofit organizations while teaching at Georgetown University as a specialist for Eastern European studies and serving as the university’s Women in Foreign Service Program director. At the time, her home became a gathering place for Democratic politicians, and she was a foreign policy advisor for the Democratic Party in the election campaigns of 1984 and 1988. In 1992, when President Clinton won the elections, Albright was chosen to handle the new administration’s transition at the National Security Council. In the following year, she was appointed as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. In Clinton’s second term, Albright was nominated Secretary of State – the first woman to serve in this position, becoming the highest-ranking woman in the US government’s history at the time. During her tenure, Albright advocated for democracy and human rights. She promoted American business, trade, labor, and environmental standards, pushed for the military intervention of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, mediated in peace negotiations in the Middle East, and played a pivot role in the efforts to stop nuclear arming of North Korea. In 2001, with the end of President Clinton administration, Albright returned to teach at Georgetown University and founded the Albright Group, an international strategy consulting firm that later got affiliated with Albright Capital Management. She accepted serval board positions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations Board of directors, the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Advisory Committee of the Brookings Doha Center. She serves as chairwoman of numerous boards, including the NYSE board’s nominating and governance committee, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and the World Justice Project. Albright passed away on March 23th, 2022, at the age of 84. Read more...

Mary Edmonia Lewis was born free in Albany, New York. Her mother was of Mississauga Ojibwe and African-American descent, and her father was African-American. She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, until her mother died, then she moved near Niagara Falls, New York, to live with her maternal aunts. At the time, she went by her Native American name – Wildfire. Her brother, who had made a fortune in the California gold rush, supported her financially and encouraged her to get a proper education. At the age of 12, Lewis participated in a pre-college program at New-York Central College, McGrawville, and at 15, she attended the secondary Oberlin Academy Preparatory School before entering the Oberlin Collegiate Institute to study art. There, she used the name Mary Edmonia Lewis. After being falsely accused of a series of offenses that include poisoning of two of her classmates, theft, and burglary, she left college before graduation. At the age of 20, Lewis moved to Boston and began her career as a sculptress. She became Edward Augustus Brackett’s student, and in that same year, she had her first solo exhibition in Brackett’s studio. Abolitionists figures and Civil War heroes inspired most of her work at the time. She created a bust of Colonel Robert Shaw, who had died while leading the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, and sold copies of the bust at $15 apiece. She earned enough money that allowed her to move to Europe. In 1866, she traveled to Paris, London, and Florence before settling down in Rome. On her arrival, she met the sculptor Hiram Powers, who gave her workspace in his studio. In Rome, Lewis felt social, artistic, and spiritual freedom, saying that “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.” She established her studio, sculpturing in marble in a Neoclassical style, exploring classical, religious, and African American themes. Among Lewis’s most famous works is the sculpture “Forever Free” – a depiction of an African-American man and woman emerging from the bonds of slavery. She exhibited and sold her work both in Italy and in the US, and her studio became a tourist destination. The peak of Lewis’s successes was in 1876 when she exhibited a two-ton sculpture titled “The Death of Cleopatra” at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The statue drew thousands of visitors and was declared as the most remarkable piece in the American section. Afterward, she continued to receive commissions, but the demand for her work reduced with the Neoclassical style’s decline. She continued sculpting and displaying her work in small venues, but soon she lost fame and overtime got forgotten by history. In 1901, she died of chronic Bright’s disease at the age of 73 in London. Read more...

Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, to free African-Americans and abolitionists parents. Her father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and their home was a refuge for fugitive slaves. When she was 10 years old, it became illegal for African-Americans to receive education in Delaware, so the family moved to Pennsylvania, where she attended a Quaker Boarding School. At 16, after graduating high school, she established a school for black children in East Chester, and later she taught in several cities, including NYC. At the age of 27, the family moved to Canada, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed everyone to capture free slaves and returning them to their masters. As a natural-born activist, Shadd became an outspoken advocate for full racial integration and encouraged African-Americans to immigrate to Canada. She founded a school for both black and white children, and in 1852, she published a pamphlet titled “Notes on Canada West,” in which she discussed the benefits and the opportunities that wait for African-Americans in Canada. In 1953, she established “The Provincial Freeman” – the first anti-slavery newspaper, which made her the first female journalist in Canada and the first black female editor in North America. In its seven years of publication in Canada and the US, it explored a variety of topics, from immigration to world events and culture. Her unorthodox approach toward immigration made her a controversial figure in her community, and it almost cost her speech at the Philadelphia Colored Convention of 1855. When Shadd was 33, she married Thomas F. Cary, and when he died four years later, while she was pregnant with their second child, she returned to the US. During the Civil War, she served as a recruiting officer, enlisting black volunteers for the Union Army. After the war, she settled in Washington, DC, where she worked as a teacher while attending evening classes at Howard University Law School. In 1883, Shadd graduated at the age of 60 and became the second black woman in the US to earn a law degree. She never stopped writing, publishing articles in numerous newspapers, including The People’s Advocate and the National Era. Shadd was also a women’s rights activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1880, she established the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise – an organization promoting equal rights of African-American women. She died at the age of 70 from stomach cancer. Read more...

Born Phyllis McAlpin Stewart in St. Louis, Missouri. Growing up during the great depression, her father was unemployed, and her mother supported the family. She studied at a private Catholic girls’ school, from which she graduated valedictorian. After high school, she was granted a scholarship to Maryville College of the Sacred Heart but moved to the Washington University in St. Louis. To pay for tuition, she worked night shifts test-firing guns at a munition factory. At the age of 20, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts, she continued to study for a Master’s degree in government at Radcliffe College. At 22, she joined a conservative think tank for a short time, before joining the Claude I. Bakewell’s campaign for the United States House of Representatives. At the age of 25, she married John Fred Schlafly Jr. – a wealthy attorney, and the couple moved to Alton, Illinois. She became politicly active after attending the Republican National Convention of 1952, and during this year, she made her first run for the US Congress but lost in the general election. After another loss in the 1960 elections, she began to serve as head of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women. In 1964, at the age of 40, she published her first book – A Choice Not An Echo, in which she discussed the issue of elitism in the Republican party. It sold millions of copies and was credited for the wide support of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign. In 1967. After losing the National Federation of Republican Women’s presidency, she began publishing a monthly newsletter titled “The Phyllis Schlafly Report,” promoting her political views. During 1972 when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, ERA, and its ratification in the states started, Schlafly launched a campaign to stop its ratification – Stop ERA. She argued that the ERA is threatening traditional gender roles, strip women from their gender privileges and housewives’ benefits, and force them to work and serve in the military. In 1975, she founded and led the Eagle Forum, which gathered hundreds of thousands of women from all over the country to fight against the ERA ratification. They reached out to their legislators in various ways, from writing letters to sending them homemade food with slogans such as “Preserve us from a congressional jam; Vote against the ERA sham.” She was a key player at the failure of the ratification of the ERA by 38 states. Following the ERA defeat, Schlafly remained politicly active, serving as a delegate at Republican national conventions, providing commentaries on the radio, appearing on TV, and writing a newspaper column, where she was outspoken against issues such as abortions and legalization of same-sex marriage. In 1993, after her husband died, she moved to Ladue, Missouri, where she lived until she died at the age of 92. Read more...

Fannie Perkins was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester. After high school, she attended Mount Holyoke College, where she discovered progressive politics and became active in the suffrage movement. At age 22, after receiving her Bachelor’s degree in physics and chemistry, she moved to Chicago and taught chemistry in various schools. During vacation and in her free time, she volunteered at the Hull House settlement house, where she worked with Jane Addams. At 25, she joined the Episcopal church and changed her name to Frances. In 1907, she moved to Philadelphia to study economics at the University of Pennsylvania while working as general secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association. Two years later, she moved to NYC, where she worked at the New York School of Philanthropy investigating childhood malnutrition as well as studying political science at Columbia University. At the age of 30, Perkins was appointed the head of the National Consumers League in New York. In this position, she lobbied to improve working conditions and to set working hours limitations for factory workers, especially for women and children. In 1911, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where 146 workers, mostly women, were trapped in the building and died. Following this event, she was chosen by the new mayor of NYC, Theodore Roosevelt, as the executive secretary for the Committee on Safety of the city. As secretary, Perkins served as an expert witness and led legislators on inspections of factories and worksites. The Commission formulated a set of laws for workplace health and safety, which became a federal government model. In 1913, she married Paul Caldwell Wilson, and three years later, she gave birth and left the office. Not long after, her husband was hospitalized for mental illness, and she returned to work in the New York State government. On February 18th, 1919, Perkins was appointed to head of the New York’s State Industrial Commission, becoming the first woman to serve at an administrative position in the state government, and the highest-paid woman in public office in the US. As a commissioner, she oversaw the industrial code and supervised the bureau of mediation and arbitration and the bureau of information and statistics. In 1929, at the age of 49, Perkins was appointed by the new governor Franklin Roosevelt as the inaugural New York State industrial commissioner. Supervising 1,800 employees, she reduced the workweek for women to 48 hours, expanded factory investigations, and pushed for ending child labor as well as unemployment insurance laws and minimum wage. Four years later, when Roosevelt was elected as the president, he asked Perkins to serve in his cabinet as Secretary of Labor, becoming the first woman in the US to hold a cabinet position and enter the presidential line of succession. She presented a list of labor programs, known as the “New Deal,” and in the 12 years she held the position, she had accomplished all the items on the list, but one – universal access to health care. Perkins also served as a member of the Special Board for Public Works, ensuring funds for social projects such as schools, housing, and roads. She chaired the President’s Committee on Economic Security, in which she established the She-She-She Camps for unemployed women and the Civilian Conservation Corps and drafted the Social Security Act. In 1945, when Truman was elected president, she was replaced in the cabinet but was asked to serve on the US Civil Service Commission. As a commissioner, she spoke against the requirement of secretaries and stenographers to be hired for their looks. She held this position for seven years, retiring in 1952 after her husband had died. She remained active as a lecturer and teacher in several academic institutes until she passed away at the age of 85. Read more...