Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born in New York City, New York. She was a curious child with technological tendencies who loved to dismantle alarm clocks and other household goods to see how they worked. Growing up, she attended private schools, and at 17, she started studying mathematics and physics at Vassar College. After graduating from Phi Beta Kappa, she attended Yale University, receiving her M.A degree in 1930. This same year, at 24, she married Vincent Foster Hopper, keeping the name Hopper after they divorced 15 years later. In the following year, she returned to Vassar as a math teacher while continuing her education at Yale, and in 1934 she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, becoming one of the first women to receive a doctorate in this field. In 1941, when the US entered WW2, the 34-year-old Hopper tried to enlist in the Navi but was rejected because of her age and low weight-to-height ratio. After two years, she applied again and got accepted into the United States Navy (women) Reserve. She took a leave of absence from Vassar and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she joined the staff who worked on Mark I computer – the first large-scale automatic calculator and co-authored its guidebook, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. After the war, Hopper stayed at the Harvard Computation Lab for a few more years as a civilian research fellow. In 1949, at 43, she was hired by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. as a head programmer. In this position, she worked on the design of UNIVAC I – the first general-purpose electronic digital computer for business applications and the first large-scale electronic commercial computer. At the time, Hopper recommended developing a programing language that would use English words which later will be translated into code by the computer. After having her initiative rejected, she published a paper about it in 1952, coining the term Compiler to describe the process. It took five more years and a change of management, and in 1957, under the Sperry Rand Corp., Hopper, who was now the first director of automatic programming, oversaw the development of the Flow-Matic – the first English-like data-processing compiler. This programing language has inspired the development of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in 1960. Over the next decade, Hopper promoted the new language, which gradually was adapted, becoming the most used programming language in the world by the 1970s. While working in the private sector, Hopper maintained her naval career as a reservist until 1966, when she reached 60 and had to retire. It took less than a year before the Navy recalled her to active duty to help standardize its computer languages. In 1971, she retired for the second time, and again, she was asked to return in the following year. In 1973, at the age of 67, Hopper was promoted from commander to captain, and in 1983, to the rank of commodore, which two years later incorporated into rear admiral, becoming one of the Navy’s few women in this rank. Hopper, the oldest serving officer in the Navy, retired from the service for the third time in 1985 at the age of 79. Afterward, she was hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, where she mainly served as a goodwill ambassador, giving lectures about computing, its early development, and future potential. In 1991, she became the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Technology. She died the following year, at the age of 85. Read more...

Catharine Alice MacKinnon was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She attended Smith College, graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. in government, continued her education at Yale University, earning her J.D. in 1977 at the age of 31, and her Ph.D. in political science at 41 in 1987. During the 70s, MacKinnon became an active member of the newly formed women’s liberation movement. While in graduate school, she initiated a course that later will develop into Yale’s women’s studies program. As part of her law studies, MacKinnon wrote a paper in which she argued that sexual harassment in the workplace is a form of sex-based discrimination. That paper was the foundation of her first book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, published in 1978. In the book, MacKinnon categorizes two types of sexual harassment – sexual compliance in exchange for benefits and sexual harassment as a persistent condition. In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted MacKinnon’s guidelines and prohibited both kinds of sexual harassment, and in 1986 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of MacKinnon’s argument in its first sexual harassment case. During the 80s, MacKinnon focused on legal issues in the sex industry, fighting it as a form of sex discrimination and human trafficking, arguing it as a civil rights violation. Alongside activist Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon wrote an ordinance that allows women harmed by trafficking in pornography to sue the producers for damages. In 1998, MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s law against prostitution passed in Sweden and was termed as the Swedish Model, and later was adopted in various countries, including Canada, France, Norway, and Ireland. In 1993, MacKinnon represented Bosnian survivors of Serbian sexual atrocities and achieved legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide. She continued to advocate against prostitution and trafficking crimes as a Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and practiced nationally and internationally with organizations such as Equality Now, the ERA Coalition, and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Throughout her career, MacKinnon served as a professor at several law schools; among them are Yale, Stanford, the Hebrew University, and the University of Basel. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She is also a Roscoe Pound Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and an Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. MacKinnon published 17 books about sexual harassment, pornography, and prostitution, helping to change the legal system in the U.S and abroad in gendered-based sex crimes.   Read more...

Prudence Crandall was born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, into a Quaker family. At the age of 10, she moved with her family to Canterbury, Connecticut. She attended the Black Hill Quaker School in Plainfield and later studied at the Quaker the New England Yearly Meeting boarding school. After graduation, Crandall taught in a school in Plainfield, and a few years later, she and her sister opened a private academy for girls in Canterbury. The school’s curriculum included subjects that at the time were not common for girls, such as history, geography, arithmetic, and grammar. Soon, it became known as one of the best schools in the state. In 1832, a black girl named Sarah Harris started studying in the school. By admitting her, Crandall established the first integrated school in the US. Many of the townspeople objected to this decision, putting pressure to dismiss Harris, and parents took out their daughters from the school. Following the backlash, and with the support of numerous prominent abolitionists such as Samuel J. May, William Lloyd Garrison, and Arthur Tappan, Crandall temporarily closed the school and reopened it as Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. She recruited black students from other states, publishing advertisements for the school in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. On April 1, 1833, 20 new students arrived at the first school in the US for black girls. The residences of Canterbury were furious, protested against the school, its students, and management. Crandall and the students received threats and suffered from violence, pelted with eggs, manure, and stones. Within a month since the school’s opening, the Connecticut legislature passed a “Black Law,” making it illegal to admit black students from other states without the consent of local authorities. Refusing to close the school or to stop teaching her non-residence students, Crandall was arrested and jailed for a night. Her first trial resulted in no verdict, the second she was convicted, but in her third trial before Connecticut Supreme Court, the case was dismissed. In response to the verdict, Canterbury’s residents set the school on fire, and the vandalism and harassment continued until Crandall felt she put her students in too much danger. On September 10th, 1834, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color was closed after 18 months of operation. A month earlier, Crandall married Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister and a widower with three children. After the school was closed, they tried to live in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Illinois before separated in 1842 after he became abusive toward her. Crandall continued to work as an educator and a principal at a school in LaSalle County, Illinois. In 1838, Connecticut repealed the Black Law, and in 1886, when she was 63 years old, the state honored her with an annual pension of $400 (approximately $11,500 in today’s terms). In 1877, at the age of 74, she moved to live with her brother in Elk Falls, Kansas, where she died at 86. Read more...

Ella Rosa Giovanna Oliva Tambussi was born in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, the only child of an Italian immigrant family. After high school, she attended Mount Holyoke College, earning a B.A and then an M.A in economics and sociology. During WW2, she worked as a researcher for the War Manpower Commission in Washington, DC, later serving as assistant director of research until 1946. In 1942, at the age of 23, she married Thomas Grasso. At the time, she became involved in politics, joining the League of Women Voters and working as a speechwriter for the Connecticut Democratic Party. She became more and more active in the local politics, and in 1952, at 33, Grasso was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives and reelected again in 1954. In this position, she fought against housing discrimination and for equal rights legislation. In 1955, during her second term, she became the first woman to be elected floor leader. In 1958, 39 years old Grasso got nominated as Connecticut Secretary of the State, serving in this position for 12 years. Grasso turned the office into a “people’s lobby” encouraging the citizens to seek solutions from their representatives. During this period, Grasso was the first woman appointed as chair of the Democratic State Platform Committee. She also was a member of the Platform Drafting Committee for the Democratic National Convention of 1960 and co-chaired the Resolutions Committees of the Democratic National Conventions in 1964 and 1968. In 1970, at 51, Grasso was elected to the U.S Congress, and then again in 1972. In this position, she served on the Education and Labor Committee and the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.   On January 8th, 1975, 56 years old Grasso became the first woman to be elected governor of Connecticut and the first in the U.S to be elected governor in her own right, without having been the spouse or widow of a former governor. She served in this position for 6 years after been reelected in 1976. In early 1980, Grasso was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, resigning from governorship on New Year’s Eve. Grasso died five weeks after leaving office when she is only 61 years old. Read more...