Inventors and Scientists

Read the entire story of these and many other women inventors in Girls Think of Everything. This is a great book and written to be easily read by girls in third grade and up.

Mary Anderson was awarded a patent in 1903 for a window-cleaning device – a windshield wiper. A Canadian company told her it had little, if any, commercial value. Several years after the patent expired, someone else revived her idea, got a new patent, sold it and made a lot of money.
Stephanie Kwolek, a scientist working for DuPont, was looking for something to reinforce radial tires. One day she prepared an unusual solution, which after much work and experimenting became Kevlar.
Bette Nesmith Graham got tired of erasing her mistakes. She remembered her artist friends who never erased but just painted over. She made a mixture of thinned down paint and started using it. Eventually she began making “Mistake Out” in her kitchen and supplying all the secretaries at her place of employment. Twenty years after her initial inspiration Bette sold Liquid Paper to the Gillette Company for $47.5 million dollars.

Athletes

Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim across the 21 mile English Channel finishing two hours faster than anyone had before. After losing her hearing due to damage from ocean water she worked to help deaf children learn to swim.
Florence Griffith-Joyner qualified for the 1984 Olympic team and won an Olympic Silver Medal in the 200-meter dash. “Fluorescent Flo” wore her famous shimmering bodysuits for the first time in Olympic Trials. In 1988 she won three Olympic Gold medals (100 meter, 200 meter and 400 meter relay) and one Silver medal (1600 meter relay) in Seoul, South Korea. She broke the world record in the 200-meter in the semifinals, then broke her own record in the finals, by running 200 meters in 21.34 seconds.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s outstanding Olympic career included six medals, three of them gold.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias was the ultimate multi-sport athlete who won three Olympic medals to go with 31 LPGA titles. You can visit her museum in Beaumont, Texas.

Authors

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983, making her the first African-American woman to capture this prestigious award.
Jade Snow Wong, author of Fifth Chinese Daughter, tells her story of growing up between two worlds. She wanted to be independent and won a scholarship to Mills College. Wong began to work with clay and started her own pottery business. Despite being laughed at and told by men she would fail, she became famous for her artwork.
Yoshiki Uchida wrote her first book when she was ten years old. She wrote 28 books for children, most of them about the lives of young Japanese Americans.
Emily Pauline Johnson, daughter of a Mohawk chief, used her skills as a writer and artist to tell the story of the mistreatment of Native Americans.

Artists

Marian Anderson had been barred from singing in the Washington Constitution Hall because she was African-American. Her 1939 Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial drew a crowd of 75,000.
Maria Tallchief gained international stardom as prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet in a career that spanned 23 years. In 1980, she and her sister, Marjorie, founded the Chicago City Ballet. She is regarded as the greatest ballerina born in America. Her father was a leader of the Osage Indians.
Margaret Bourke-White was a famous photojournalist who could tell a story in a single picture. Her photos focused on the Great Depression, World War II, and many famous people.
Judith F. Baca, designs murals to interpret the Mexican-American culture. The “Great Wall of Los Angeles” is a ½ mile long mural in the San Fernando Valley, which was painted by 450 teenagers from the neighboring barrios during five summers.

Community Change Makers

Jovita Idar lived on the Mexican border. During the Mexican Revolution she and her friends formed “La Cruz Blanca” (the White Cross) to take care of the injured on both sides. She later started a kindergarten for Mexican-American children.
Mary Harris Jones led a 125-mile march of child workers all the way from the mills of Pennsylvania to President Theodore Roosevelt’s vacation home on Long Island to bring the evils of child labor to the attention of the president and the national press.
Dolores Huerta, a longtime Latina activist, co-founded the United Farm Workers union in 1962. Before the 1960s, farm workers in the U.S. were not paid even the minimum wage, and had no one to fight for them.
Jane Addams was one of the first generation of female college graduates at a time when the world was not yet ready to give educated women positions of responsibility. She found her own way to lead a useful life by opening “Hull House,” a community center to improve conditions for poor immigrants, in a run down Chicago neighborhood. The program of English language classes, childcare, health education and recreational opportunities soon inspired hundreds of other settlement houses throughout the country. She won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize for her lifetime dedication to the cause of international peace.
Suzette La Flesche of the Omaha Tribe spent her life telling the story of the theft of Indian lands and the corruption of government agents.

Entrepreneurs

In 1905, Madam C.J. Walker began developing an effective hair lotion, and then a special comb to straighten curly hair. She eventually employed 3,000 people, mostly African-American women, to work in her factories and sell her line of products. The line of beauty products she created made her the first African-American female millionaire in the United States.
Romana Acosta Banuelos, appointed U.S. Treasurer in 1971 became the first Latina to hold such a high government office. At the age of 24 she bought a tortilla stand, which was the beginning of Ramona’s Mexican Food Products, Inc. By 1970 the company was doing a $6 million business in Southern California.