Women have brought countless amazing contributions to society throughout history, yet their accomplishments have often been passed over due to their gender.
From successfully getting an astronaut into space to leading the suffragette movement, these women have done remarkable things.
Credit where credit is due. Here are 25 women you probably don’t remember from history, but should.
Caresse Crosby
A key figure in 1920s ex-pat Paris, Caresse Crosby was a rebellious socialite who is said to have launched the career of Salvador Dali and founded a publishing house whose writers included Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce.
Her most notable contribution, however, was inventing the modern bra - an accomplishment that has largely gotten lost in history.
Jeannette Rankin
Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to US Congress, and served two terms in the House of Representatives. She was also a lobbyist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and lead 5,000 people in an anti-Vietnam War march in Washington, D.C.
Hedy Lamarr
Actress Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood's top glamour girls during the Golden Age - but few people remember that she was also an inventor.
She worked alongside composer George Antheil to develop her idea of "frequency hopping," which would've prevented military radios from being bugged. Her patent was brushed off by the US Navy, who classified it and filed it away - until they gradually began developing technologies based on it, with zero credit to her.
Luckily, a researcher unearthed the original patent, and Lamarr was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award shortly before her death in 2000.
But frequency hopping is the reason we have many modern technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Its invention spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of the 21st century - which Lamarr's estate still hasn't received a cent of.
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker was a famous dancer and performer, becoming the first person of color to star in a major motion picture (the 1934 film "Zouzou"). Refusing to perform for segregated audiences in the US, she's also known for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. If that all wasn't enough, she was also a spy for the French Resistance during WWII, as she smuggled messages in her sheet music.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was a 19th-century mathematician who is said to have worked with Charles Babbage to write instructions for the first computer code in the 1800s. She was also the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron, who called her his "Princess of Parallelograms."
George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin)
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin was a French novelist who used the male pen name "George Sand," which ensured her literary success upon the publication of her first novel, "Indiana" in 1832.
She was a prolific writer in her lifetime, penning both fiction and political texts. Sand was also a trailblazer off the page - she was known to wear men's clothes and smoke tobacco in public, two things women didn't do at the time.
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was a brilliant journalist and social activist whose articles and political essays lead to her becoming part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in 1892. She went on to form the National Association of Colored Women before later co-founding the NAACP.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped organize the world's first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. She also helped form the National Women's Loyal League with Susan B. Anthony, and co-established the National Woman Suffrage Association, which ultimately helped women in the US gain the right to vote.
Martha Graham
Martha Graham was a modern dance pioneer whose signature Graham technique is regarded as a groundbreaking style that changed the face of dance. Today, Graham technique is taught at institutions all around the world, including the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, which was founded in 1926.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, and was the first black woman to hold a position as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. She frequently wrote about the struggle for racial equality in the US, which received harsh criticism at the time.
Zelda Fitzgerald
If you were one of the many students whose required high school reading assignments included "The Great Gatsby," then you may or may not know that many of the words that were thought to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's may have actually been written by his wife, Zelda.
A writer herself, Zelda Fitzgerald is said to have been a very large inspiration for her husband's work. Outspoken and ahead of her time, he described her as "the first American Flapper."
Adrienne Rich
Author and activist Adrienne Rich was a poet and radical feminist best known for bringing the "oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." She won countless honors for her work, and was one of the most- read poets of the 20th century.
One of her most famous essays, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," was a major influencer of the radical feminist movement of the 1980s.
Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the British suffragette movement, which helped women win the right to vote. She died only a few weeks before women were given the right to vote.
Katherine Johnson
Recently celebrated in the film "Hidden Figures," mathematician Katherine Johnson (aka the "human computer") spent over 30 years at NASA, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. She is credited with doing the calculations that first sent a man to the moon.
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi was the first and only female Prime Minister of India. While often considered ruthless and authoritarian, she was a successful leader, having helped India gain self-sufficiency in food grain production by spearheading agricultural improvements, and leading the country through the Pakistan war. She is the world's longest-serving female Prime Minister to this day.
Esther Lederberg
Esther Lederberg discovered a virus that infects bacteria in 1951. And the combined research of her and her husband, Joshua, led to a successful technique called The Lederberg Method, which is still being used by scientists today.
However, Joshua won a Nobel Prize, and Esther's contributions are largely forgotten.
Huda Sharawi
Her best-known act of protest includes removing her face veil in a crowded Cairo train station upon returning home from an International Women Suffrage Alliance conference, which was a turning point in making wearing a veil a woman's choice, not a requirement.
Valentina Tereshkova
In 1963, Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. Having spent a total of 71 hours out there, orbiting the Earth 48 times, she returned to solid ground having been in space longer than any other astronaut at the time.
Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly was a famous journalist known for her investigative and undercover reporting. Her 1887 expose on the conditions of asylum patients at Blackwell's Island in New York City, in which she feigned insanity to study the hospital from within, is one of her most famous pieces, and marked a new era of investigative reporting. She's also known for her trip around the world in 1889, which she completed in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds - setting a world record at the time.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win two, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different fields (physics and chemistry). Her research into radioactive compounds was groundbreaking for the time, leading to the discovery of polonium and radium, and thus the development of X-rays. She also developed of the theory of radioactivity and coined the term.
Mary Wollstonecraft
A famous author and feminist icon of her time, Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her essay "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," which was one of the first works arguing in favor of women receiving a proper education.
Colette
Colette - known solely by her last name - was a French novelist at the turn of the century, and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Her most widely recognized work is "Gigi," a novella that became the basis for a popular musical in the 1940s. Previously under the radar, her life is now chronicled in a 2018 film starring Keira Knightley, which details her boundary-breaking lifestyle.
Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner was an American abstract expressionist painter, active in the second half of the 20th century.
She is most known as the wife of artist Jackson Pollock - and therefore was largely overlooked in her lifetime - though she was an accomplished painter in her own right. Her artwork was "rediscovered" in the '70s and continues to grow in popularity, and Krasner is one of few female artists given a retrospective exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.
Lee Miller
A 20s fashion model turned photographer, Lee Miller is known for the stunning photos she took of women serving in World War II. One of her most iconic images is a photo of herself in Adolf Hitler's bathtub, which she took after having accompanied American forces who raided his Munich apartment in 1945.
Margaret Knight
One of the most brilliant inventors of her time - and a pioneer for women in the field - Margaret Knight was one of the first women to ever receive a patent. In addition to inventing a shuttle system that helped child factory workers in the early 20th century, Knight invented the flat-bottomed brown paper bag.
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