This page contains stories of powerful women defying the male/female status quo. I will update it regularly!
French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an “uncompromising” 50-year body of work exploring “a life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and class”.
She used “courage and clinical acuity” to tell largely autobiographical stories that uncover “the contradictions of social experience and describe shame, humiliation, jealousy or the inability to see who you are”.
Margaret Bourke-White, one of the pre-eminent photographers of the 20th century, is pictured here atop New York City’s Chrysler Building in 1930. A staff photographer for Life magazine since its founding in 1936, one of her photos was featured on the cover of the very first issue of the famous news magazine. Early in her career, she took dramatic pictures of architecture and inside steel mills and factories, pioneering a new style of magnesium flare that allowed her to capture incredible details and earned her national renown. In 1930, she became the first Western photographer allowed to take pictures of Soviet industry during the Soviet five-year plan. Like her contemporary Dorothea Lange, she spent much of the 1930s photographing the downtrodden victims of America’s Great Depression.
When World War II broke out, Bourke-White was the first woman permitted to work in combat zones. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded and she captured the bombardment of the Kremlin in a series of dramatic photos. LIFE staff started referring to her as “Maggie the Indestructible” after repeatedly coming under fire and surviving being on a torpedoed ship in the Mediterranean, stranded on an Arctic island, and getting pulled out of Chesapeake Bay after a helicopter crash.
For an extraordinary book about three more groundbreaking journalists who paved the way for female war correspondents, we highly recommend “You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” at https://www.amightygirl.com/you-don-t-belong-here
12 Women Pioneering The World Of Quantum Computing
Traditionally speaking, science has been the pursuit of men, both in the academic and experimental side of things. This has started changing, however, with the number of women in STEM fields (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) growing over the last few years… [READ ARTICLE]
Kamala D. Harris is the Vice President of the United States of America and the 2024 Democratic Presidential Candidate. She was elected Vice President after a lifetime of public service, having been elected District Attorney of San Francisco, California Attorney General, and United States Senator.
Vice President Harris was born in Oakland, California to parents who emigrated from India and Jamaica. She graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law.
The Navy has selected a woman to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for the first time in American history.
Capt. Amy Bauernschmidt was selected for the position by the fiscal year 2022 aviation major command screen board. Naval Air Forces confirmed the historic selection on Monday.
This isn’t the first time Bauernschmidt has made history. In 2016, she became the first female executive officer of a nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln. As such, she was second-in-command of a crew of about 5,000 people.
Acclaimed American architect and artist Maya Lin! As a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale in 1981, Maya Lin’s design was selected for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, beating out 1,441 other competition submissions. Her famous memorial features a black cut-stone masonry wall with the names of 58,300 fallen soldiers etched into its face. The American Institute of Architects has ranked it as number 10 on their list of America’s Favorite Architecture. Lin, who continues to work today as an architectural designer and artist, also designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama among many other works.
For adults who would like to learn more about this pioneering architect, we recommend her visually stunning book “Boundaries” at http://amzn.to/1WHhLAo
To learn about about heroic women who served during the Vietnam War, we also recommend “Courageous Women of the Vietnam War” for teens and adults, ages 13 and up, at https://www.amightygirl.com/courageous-women-of-the…
And, for fun ways to inspire the architects and builders of tomorrow, we’ve showcased our favorite girl-empowering building toys in our blog post: “Building Her Dreams: Top 60 Building and Engineering Toys for Mighty Girls,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10430
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded this year to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on “genetic scissors” that can cut DNA at a precise location, allowing scientists to make specific changes to specific genes.
Dr. Andrea Ghez
was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics this week for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy! The astrophysicist, who is the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics at UCLA, shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley; the other half recognizes Roger Penrose, a professor at the University of Oxford who proved that black holes must be a physical reality. Ghez was delighted to receive the award, particularly because she is only the fourth woman in history to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics. “I’m thrilled to receive the prize and I take very seriously the responsibility associated with being… the fourth woman to win,” Ghez said after the announcement. “[And] I think today I feel more passionate about the teaching side of my job than I have ever. Because it’s so important to convince the younger generation that their ability to question, and their ability to think, is just crucial to the future of the world.”
Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester
Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester drove a humvee in a mounted column as it was ambushed by over 50 Iraqi insurgents. She stopped the vehicle and directed her gunner to return fire as bullets and RPGs rained down. Hester got out and fired M203 grenades into the enemy position, then attacked forward with her squad leader. They moved over the berm into the irrigation ditches of an orchard where the ambush originated. Hester worked with her squad leader to clear the ditches, personally eliminating 3 enemy at close quarters. Their assault into the teeth of the ambush disrupted the enemy’s momentum and played a key role in stopping the attack.
For her initiative and heroic actions, Hester was awarded the Silver Star. She became the first woman to receive the award since WWII. She continued her service in the National Guard, deploying to Afghanistan for 18 months, and to the Virgin Islands in 2017 in the wake of Hurricane Maria. In civilian life, Hester serves as a police officer in her home state of Tennessee.
Cecilia Payne
Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock
— who transformed the understanding of genetics with her discovery of genetic transposition — was born on this day in 1902. McClintock’s breakthrough discovery challenged accepted genetic principles at the time by showing that genes can change position on a chromosome. She is only woman to have ever won an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Born in 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut, McClintock took her first course in genetics in 1921 at Cornell’s School of Agriculture — at a time when even her own mother feared college would make her “unmarriageable” — and was immediately fascinated. C.B. Hutchinson, the instructor, was so impressed by her that he personally invited her to take Cornell’s graduate genetics course. “Obviously, this telephone call cast the die for my future,” she said. “I remained with genetics thereafter.”
After a few years as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, McClintock ended up taking a full-time research position and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It was there, in 1948, that she discovered that two segments of genetic code in maize could change positions on the chromosome; when they did, the pattern of coloration on the seeds also changed. McClintock called these “controlling elements” and published several papers on her maize experiments. However, people responded to her research with “puzzlement, even hostility,” because scientists believed that chromosomes didn’t change over time except by mutation. While she continued researching controlling elements throughout her career, she stopped publishing papers about them in 1953.
In the late 1960s, though, French geneticists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod described a similar process in a different genetic component, which rekindled interest in McClintock’s work. Scientists eventually came to realize that the transposition of genetic material, and the genetic regulation — the capacity to turn genes “on” and “off” — that transposition allowed, were a major part of the evolutionary process. McClintock was philosophical about the sudden change in understanding: “One must await the right time for conceptual change,” she wrote in 1973.
Although McClintock won the Nobel Prize for her discovery in 1983 — in a ceremony during which the Swedish Academy of Sciences compared her to “Father of Modern Genetics” Gregor Mendel — as well as many other awards, relatively few people today know about her contributions to our understanding of genetics. For McClintock, however, the greatest satisfaction of her life was in discovering a secret that no one else had known. “If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off,” she once said. “No matter what they say.
Barbara McClintock is one of 50 notable women featured in the excellent illustrated biography, “Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers,” for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/women-in-science
She is also one of the 52 women profiled in the fascinating book “Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – and The World,” recommended for teens and adults alike at https://www.amightygirl.com/headstrong-52-women
For adult readers, we also recommend the insightful biography, “The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/a-feeling-for-the-organism
She is also one of the pioneering women of science featured in the book for adults: “The Madame Curie Complex” at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-madame-curie-complex
To introduce children and teens to more inspiring female scientists, visit our blog post, “60 Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
Madame Marie Curie
Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students’ revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following his tragic death in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.
Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.
Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L’Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes and the classic Traité’ de Radioactivité (1910).
The importance of Mme. Curie’s work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.
For further details, cf. Biography of Pierre Curie. Mme. Curie died in Savoy, France on July 4, 1934.