Kickass Women have been fighting for equality and rights for ages, but since history is always written by the victors – a lot of them have never been heard of other than in niche circles. While today we have a lot of role models to look up to, history has pushed a lot of women underground painting over their victories with the ones of men. However, worry not, women have been kicking ass and taking names since way back when!
Women have been doing a whole lot of great things that has helped set in motion some amazing events – spying, inventing the first programming language or even working out the mathematics for space flight are just a few of them!
Here are 15 Kickass women that have changed history but are often forgotten in the history books.
1. Emmeline Pankhurst, (1858 – 1928)
If you ever wanted to know how women got the power to vote, well then look no further than Emmeline Pankhurst. She was a British suffragette and a force to be reckoned with fighting for over 40 years for equal voting rights for men and women in Britain. Her ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’, an all-women suffrage advocacy organisation was dedicated to “deeds, not words” and used a more direct and active approach towards getting the government to pay them attention. She finally succeeded in getting full equal voting rights for British women in the year that she passed away.
2. Ada Lovelace, (1815 – 1852)
Ada wasn’t just your ordinary housewife and the Countess of Lovelace, but also the first computer programmer. Born as the daughter of a poet and a housewife with mathematical training, her mother pushed her to learn about machines, mathematics and science after her father left them. Growing fascinated by how machines and mathematics worked together, she would design boats and steam flying machines and go over the diagrams of the new inventions of the Industrial Revolution. But everything changed when she met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and a professor who was building his own clockwork calculating machines. Growing entranced by the machine, she was the first to write a published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems, as well as the different applications that the machine could be used for in addition to simple mathematics.
3. Marie Curie, (1867 – 1934)
Marie Curie has done a lot of firsts – she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, first woman to win two Nobel Prizes, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, first female professor at the University of Paris and lastly the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. She not only discovered some of the most dangerous elements on the planet but also subsequently worked with them all her life. Her achievements include developing the theory of radioactivity, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, discovering radium and polonium, treating neoplasms using radioactive isotopes, and also building mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals during the war. Although, she died due to complications from exposure to radioactive materials, her contributions to science is undeniable.
4. Rosalind Franklin, (1920 – 1958)
Franklin was one of the many women who never got the credit for their work. For someone who made one of the most important discoveries related to DNA and its structure, no one has ever heard her name associated with it. Franklin was one of the few girls that were enrolled in a school that taught physics and chemistry and at 15 decided that she wanted to become a scientist. However, women in science during those days were not taken seriously and similarly her peers often treated her as an assistant rather than an equal. However, after learning X-ray diffraction techniques in Paris for three years, she returned to England in 1951 and started working with it on further understanding the DNA structure. She was the first person to get two sets of high-resolution photos of crystallized DNA fibers, from which she correctly deduced the now popular theory of DNA’s double helix structure. However, she died at the age of 37 to cancer and was never awarded the Nobel Prize that were given to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
5. Mary Wollstonecraft, (1759 – 1797)
Mary Wollstonecraft is a woman who lived by the own rules, growing up with an abused father, she soon left her house and started working as a teacher. She also wrote a lot of articles on the importance of women’s education and sexual liberation. Her writings and teachings often kept her under controversy and she lived her life no differently. Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminists, through both her writings and how she lived her life. She is also the mother of the famous Mary Shelley, the author of the well-known book, Frankenstein.
6. Florence Nightingale, (1820 – 1910)
Florence Nightingale was a revolutionary figure when it came to modernizing the nursing industry. Born in a wealthy family, she gave up her comforts and went into nursing which is said was her calling. During the Crimean War, she and a group of nurses drastically improved unsanitary conditions at a British base hospital, which helped reduced the death count. She kept doing her round well into the night, ensuring that her patients were comfortable which earned her the nickname, ‘Lady with the Lamp.’ She has also pushed for reforms and even opened her first nursing school to provide formal nursing training.
7. Savitribai Phule, (1831 – 1897)
They say behind every great man is a great women, and this statement definitely defines Phule. She and her husband, Jyotirao Phule played important roles in improving women’s rights in India during the British rule. She and her husband opened the first all-girls’ school in Pune where both of them educated girls. In addition to being regarded as the first female teacher in India, she is also considered as a social reformer, educationalist, anti-abortionist and poet.
8. Amelia Earhart, (1897 – 1937)
The story of Amelia Earhart includes everything for a good movie – adventure and mystery. She has set a lot of world records when it has come to flight, including being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She has received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for her journey, but she has also garnered other accomplishments that include best-selling books about her flying experiences, being a huge part of the formation of The Ninety-Nines (an organization for female pilots), a member of the National Women’s Party and visiting faculty member at Purdue. However, what fuels her popularity even more is the mystery behind her disappearance. Earhart was attempting a circum-navigational flight across the globe, but somewhere over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island, she and her navigator disappeared – never to be seen or heard from ever again.
9. Josephine Butler, (1828 – 1906)
Josephine Butler was a true feminist and social reformer. After the accidental death of her youngest child, she sought to help others. She ended up fighting for women’s rights in all forms. She campaigned for suffrage, i.e. the right for women to vote. She campaigned for the right of women to better education. She campaigned for women to retain rights and legal entity after marriage, in a time which generally believed that the women became a man’s property after marriage. She also campaigned for better rights and to stop ill treatment of women prostitutes. She was especially passionate about stopping child prostitution after finding a 12 year old girl being forced to work as a prostitute. She also helped bring to light the rampant human trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution, with help of a friend who purchased a 13-year-old girl from her mother for £5. Josephine Butler literally fought for those who no one else would fight for.
10. Grace Hopper, (1906 – 1992)
They say that programming is a man’s game, but little did they know that the entire profession is led by women. Not only was Ada Lovelace the first person to write a binary program, but Grace Hopper, or “Amazing Grace” as she was commonly called, created one of the first programming languages, which is still used today. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer. She also popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages. She was also part of the development of COBOL, which was an early high-level programming language and is still in use today. Not only was she a computer scientist, but also United States Navy rear admiral. She did most of her work for the US Government.
11. Hedy Lamarr, (1914 – 2000)
Actress, Scientist, Inventor, Drug Addict – sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie, but it all describes Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr was born in Austria. She escaped her abusive Austrian husband, who sold ammunitions to the Nazis, and came to America to reinvent herself, and reinvent she did. She become a blockbuster hit as an actress and is often referred to as one of the most gorgeous and exotic of Hollywood’s leading ladies. Not just a pretty face, she is also renowned for developing a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology for the government. Most people did not understand the technology, but it was the basis for WiFi and BlueTooth which is commonly used today. She did all of this while secretly struggling with a drug addiction which did not become known until much later.
12. Tegla Loroupe, (1973 – )
Tegla Loroupe is a long-distance track and road runner from Kenya. Growing up with 24 siblings can’t have been easy. She would have had trouble standing out among so many children. In fact, her father deemed running as unladylike and even banned her from it. However, she didn’t listen and she stayed her course. She went on to become one of the fastest women, and human being out there. She was the first woman to win the New York City Marathon, and the first woman from Africa to do so as well. She actually won it twice. She also holds the world records for 25 and 30 kilometres and she even previously held the world marathon record. Additionally, she is a three-time World Half-Marathon champion. She has also won marathons in London, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Berlin and Rome. She now devotes much of her time to humanitarian and peace activities, through her Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation.
13. Margaret Sanger, (1879 – 1966)
Birth Control is commonly used in today’s world. Infact, many men and women depend on it and even take it for granted. However, all of that is only possible due to women like Margaret Sanger. She was one of the first women to help popularized modern methods of birth control. While there have been many methods of birth control used since the beginning of time, many of them were either unsafe or didn’t work at all, sometime both. She helped popularize the term “birth control” and advocated for its use. She believed that women have the right to choose when to have children, and that contraception was the only way to avoid abortions which were generally illegal and dangerous at the time. In order to promote birth control, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, as well as established many organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Women today owe a lot of women like Margaret Sanger, who fought and were even arrested on behalf of women everywhere.
14. Katherine G. Johnson, (1918 – )
One of the greatest milestones of humanity has been our flight to space and back. We have put people on the Moon and Mars is just around the corner. While all of that is common knowledge, what or rather who isn’t, is the person behind it all, Katherine Johnson. Katherine is an African-American mathematician who was an integral part of NASA’s first manned mission. She helped send the first American man into orbit. She was also involved in subsequent missions such as Apollo missions, and even worked on missions to Mars. Her primary work revolved around calculating trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury space flights. Basically, she was a human computer for NASA. Her calculations were also important for the beginning of the Space Shuttle program.Taraji P. Henson recently portrayed her as a lead character in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which focuses on strong African American women working in NASA.
15. Malala Yousafzai, (1997 – )
Most of us take school for granted. After all we are forced to go to school by our parents and the state, even though we don’t really want to. But imagine not being able to go to school, imagine having to stay at home but instead of having fun and playing video games, you have to learn house chores like cooking and cleaning because you have been told all your life that is all what girls are good for. That is exactly the situation that millions of girls around the world are in. They are forbidden to learn because girls are not allowed to go to school. However, Malala demanded the right to be able to go to school and learn even though she was a girl, and she was shot in the head for it. She was only 15. Luckily she survived and continues to work for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children. She is also the youngest person ever to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, which she did at the age of 17.
These are just some of the most kickass women in History. There are so many more who don’t get the recognition they deserve, whose contributions have been suppressed by our patriarchal society. There are also so many women who are kickass in their own everyday life, women all around you are kickass in their own way. They have troubles and achievements. If you think of any other kickass women who we’ve not incorporated in this list, then please mention them in the comments below.
One Comment on “Kickass Women Throughout The Ages You Should Know About”