At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio paralyzed or killed over half a million people worldwide every year. The Woman with the Cure delves into the intense race to find a cure for the disease. Jonas Salk gets the credit for the polio vaccine, but there was a team of medical researchers around the globe racing to find a cure. Dorothy Horstmann was one of them. An American epidemiologist, virologist, and pediatrician and the first woman appointed as a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, her research showed how the poliovirus circulated in the body, setting the stage for the development of the vaccine. Jonas Salk and […]
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Harriet Tubman, American Abolitionist
Harriet Tubman’s accomplishments in the abolition of slavery, the Civil War, and the women’s suffrage movement changed the arc of American history. She was born Araminta “Minty” Ross to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross sometime between 1820 and 1822 on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. When she was five years old, Tubman’s owners rented her out to neighbors as a nursemaid where she was whipped whenever the baby cried. Two years later, she was rented out to set muskrat traps and later as a field hand. Early signs of her resistance to slavery came at age twelve when she intervened to keep her master from throwing a heavy weight […]
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Clara Barton, philanthropist
Clarissa “Clara” Harlowe Barton, is one of the most honored women in American history. Her contributions in education, during the Civil War, and at The Red Cross made a difference in the lives of an untold number of people. Clara began teaching at age 18, founded a school for the children of mill workers, and established the first free school in Bordentown, New Jersey when she was 31. She resigned when she discovered that the school had hired a man at twice her salary. “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a […]
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Katherine Stinson, Aviator
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-B2-1234] I don’t enjoy flying—well, actually sitting in an airplane while somebody else flies it is problematic. There’s something about hurtling through the air locked in a metal box that freaks me out. Call me crazy. So when I read about Katherine Stinson, who was clearly unafraid to fly, it duly impressed me. At 19, she became one of the first women in the United States to receive a pilot’s license. One year later, the Stinson family established the Stinson Municipal Airport and the Stinson School of Flying, where Katherine and her sister, Marjorie, opened a flying school, teaching their […]
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The Greatest Women in History – Marie Curie
Photo by Henri Manuel, Public Domain March is Women’s History Month here in the United States of America, a time when we can collectively celebrate women’s contributions to American history. It began in 1978 as a week-long celebration in Santa Rosa, California, and a consortium of women’s groups and historians successfully lobbied for national recognition the following year. It took until 1987, but now every March is designated Women’s History Month by presidential proclamation. Sadly, many of the women who changed the world remain obscure to most, a tremendous disservice to champions of science, literature, the humanities, the armed forces, politics, and business. Each day this month, I’ll be profiling […]
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