TEN DARING WOMEN WHO SHAPED THE COURSE OF HISTORY
1.Sybil Ludington: The Woman Paul Revere
On the night of April 26, 1777, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington drove nearly 40 miles to warn about 400 militias that British troops were approaching. Like Paul Revere’s trip, Ludington’s message helped the patriot leaders prepare for battle. But Ludington was less than half Revere’s age and drove more than twice as far to obey her warning.
The daughter of militia leader Colonel Henry Ludington, Sibylla entered the fray on that fateful day in 1777 when a horseman arrived at the Ludington home in Dutchess County, New York, to warn them of a British attack on nearby Danbury, Connecticut. When Colonel Ludington’s men were on leave, and the messenger was too tired to continue on the journey, it was Sybil who rode all night, having gathered almost the entire regiment by dawn.
While Paul Revere’s trip was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, the homage to Ludington was somewhat less. In 1975 she was awarded a postage stamp. It is said that Ludington even received the acknowledgment of the grateful general when George Washington himself came to her house to say “thank you.”
2. Claudette Colvin: teen civil rights activist.
Claudette Colvin, too tired to give up her seat on the bus home from high school, refused to ride on March 2, 1955, because of a white passenger - nine months before Rosa Parks did the same. She later said that the memories of the pioneers of the past inspired her to stand - or sit - on her land. As she told Newsweek, “I felt Sojourner Trout was pressing on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pressing on the other, saying, 'Sit down girl! “I was glued to my seat.”
Colvin, 15, was arrested for violating Montgomery, Alabama’s segregation laws, and her family feared for their safety when news of the incident spread. Colvin pleaded not guilty and received a suspended sentence. Although Colvin was not selected by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to challenge segregation laws in the South due to her youth, she later became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gale, which ruled that Montgomery’s split bus system was unconstitutional.
3. Jane Addams: a pioneer of social change
Jane Addams, a suffragette, settlement founder, peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, abandoned marriage and motherhood in favor of a lifelong commitment to social reform.
Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr traveled to England in 1881, where they were inspired by the famous Toynbee Hall in London, a special institution for helping the poor. In 1889, they moved to an old mansion in the immigrant neighborhood of Chicago, where Addams lived for the rest of her life.
Hull House, as it was called, provided a place for immigrants from different communities to gather. Addams and other Hull House residents sponsored legislation to abolish child labor, create juvenile courts, limit working hours for women, recognize trade unions, attend school, and ensure safe working conditions in factories.
Addams wrote and lectured openly against the First World War. After the armistice, she founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as president from 1919 until her death in 1935. Remembered as the mother of social work, Addams shaped social legislation that continues to influence the world today.
4. Hedy Lamarr: invention of Wi-Fi technology
Often referred to as “The Most Beautiful Woman in Cinema,” Hedy Lamarr was more than eye-catching. Although Lamarr’s on-screen presence made her one of the most popular actresses of her time, she was also an inventor with a keen mind. Together with avant-garde composer George Entiel Lamarr, he developed a new “frequency hopping” method, a method of masking radio broadcasts by forcing the signal to hop between different channels in a predetermined pattern.
Their “secret communications system” was created to fight the ■■■■■ during World War II, but the US Navy ignored their findings. It wasn’t until years later that other inventors realized how innovative this work was. If you are using a smartphone today, you can thank Lamarr - her communications system was the forerunner of wireless technologies, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
7. Sojourner Truth: A Voice That Changed a Nation
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York and escaped to freedom with her young daughter in 1826. Among many legacies of truth, the tone and substance of their language play a major role. She amazed the country and spoke about emancipation, politicians, political action, racism, women’s rights and segregation.
Perhaps her most famous speech was the rousing “Am I not a woman?” When Truth died in 1883, her ■■■■■■■ in Battle Creek, Michigan was the largest the city had ever seen. This was a testimony to how her heroic and courageous life touched so many people around her.
8. Jeannette Rankin: Broke barriers before women could choose
Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, didn’t always know she wanted to be in politics. Her political interest began when she returned to school at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1910 and joined the state suffrage organization. For the next four years she spoke and advocated women’s suffrage.
Rankin ultimately served two terms in the House and was the only member of Congress to vote against US participation in both world wars. She also served as a civil servant for the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom and advocated health care for mothers and children and the regulation of hours and wages for women workers.
Rankin continued her pacifist traditions and helped found the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a collection of about five thousand feminists, pacifists, students and other opponents of the Vietnam War.
9. Chien-Shiung Wu: Refuted a 30 year old law of nature
Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Liu Ho, China, in 1912 and was recruited from Columbia University through the Manhattan Project. In 1943 she worked as a senior scientist on the atomic ■■■■, doing research on radiation detection and uranium enrichment.
In the mid-1950s, Wu was approached by two theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang. They wanted help refuting the law of conservation of parity (which says that two mirrored physical systems, like atoms, behave in an identical way and do not distinguish between left and right).
With the chemical isotope cobalt-60, Wu showed that the laws of nature were not always symmetrical, which refuted the law that had been accepted for more than 30 years. Despite Wu’s most important contribution to this discovery, only Yang and Lee received the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1957.
10. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rae Rivera: LGBTQ activists who dared to be themselves
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rae Rivera, LGBTQ activists and drag queens who played prominent roles in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s, were key members of the burgeoning ■■■ rights movement.
Johnson allegedly defied arrest and threw the first bottle (or brick or stone) at the police during the 1969 Stonewall Riots that sparked the national LGBTQ movement. Rivera, a civil rights activist, feminist, and pacifist, founded the ■■■ Liberation Front and the ■■■ Activists Alliance, and was also a participant in the Stonewall Riots.
In the early 1970s, Johnson and Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which worked with runaway or homeless transgender and drag queen women in color. Tragically, Johnson’s body was found in the Hudson River on July 6, 1992, shortly after the 1992 Pride March. Her death was originally classified as a suicide, but friends reported that she was molested earlier that day, leading to suspicion of her death. Rivera died in 2002.