Anthony was arrested for voting! She and 14 other women cast ballots in Rochester, New York. She was convicted and fined $100. She refused to pay, and the government never collected the fine. Anthony co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She never married, devoting her entire life to the cause. She died in 1906, 14 years before the 19th Amendment passed. The Susan B. Anthony dollar coin (1979-1981, 1999) was minted in her honor. Her home in Rochester is a National Historic Landmark. She is considered one of the most influential women in American history. The phrase "Failure is impossible" is attributed to her in her final speech.

Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat! She was sitting in the "colored section" but the "white section" filled up, and the driver demanded she give her seat to a white man. She refused. She was not the first person to resist bus segregation (Claudette Colvin had done so nine months earlier), but NAACP leaders believed Parks would be a better symbol because of her impeccable character. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. Parks was fired from her job and received death threats. She and her husband eventually moved to Detroit. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999). When she died in 2005, her casket lay in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda – the first woman to receive that honor.

Marie Curie died from radiation exposure! In her time, the dangers of radioactivity were unknown. She carried test tubes of radium in her pockets and kept them in her desk drawer. She died at age 66. Her remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1995 – the first woman honored there for her own achievements (not as a wife). Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1935). The curie (unit of radioactivity) is named after her. Albert Einstein said of her: "Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted." She was the first female professor at the Sorbonne. When she won her second Nobel Prize, the French Academy of Sciences had still not elected her as a member (they never did).

Harriet Tubman was called "Moses"! She escaped slavery in 1849, fleeing from Maryland to Philadelphia. Despite a bounty on her head, she returned to Maryland multiple times to rescue others. She carried a gun for protection and threatened to shoot anyone who lost courage. She was never captured and never lost a passenger. During the Civil War, she was the first woman to lead an armed military raid (the Combahee River Raid, 1863). After the war, she campaigned for women's suffrage. She suffered from severe headaches and seizures (caused by a head injury as a child, when an overseer threw a heavy weight at another enslaved person and hit her instead). She had difficulty reading and writing but was an eloquent speaker. The U.S. Treasury announced in 2016 that Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill (delayed but still planned).

Eleanor Roosevelt helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! She famously said that human rights "begin in small places, close to home." The declaration was adopted on December 10, 1948, now observed as Human Rights Day. She was a leading voice for racial justice; she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) when they refused to allow Marian Anderson, a Black opera singer, to perform at Constitution Hall. She then arranged for Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial (1939). She had a close friendship with journalist Lorena Hickok (documented in thousands of letters). She was the first First Lady to hold regular press conferences (women reporters only, to force newspapers to hire women). She is buried alongside FDR in Hyde Park, New York.

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer! She translated an article about Babbage's Analytical Engine and added her own notes, which were three times longer than the original. In her notes, she described an algorithm for the engine to compute Bernoulli numbers – the first published algorithm. She also predicted that machines could eventually compose music and produce graphics. The programming language "Ada" (developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1980) is named in her honor. She was the legitimate daughter of Lord Byron (who abandoned the family a month after her birth). Her mother insisted she study mathematics to avoid inheriting her father's "poetic madness." She died at 36 (the same age as her father). She was buried next to Lord Byron, at her request, in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.

Malala advocated for girls' education! She began blogging for the BBC about life under Taliban rule in 2009 at age 11. The Taliban banned girls from school and destroyed hundreds of schools. On October 9, 2012, a gunman boarded her school bus and asked "Who is Malala?" then shot her in the head. She was flown to the United Kingdom for treatment and recovered. She continued her activism from Birmingham, England. Her memoir, "I Am Malala" (2013), became an international bestseller. She graduated from Oxford University in 2020. The Malala Fund, which she co-founded, supports girls' education globally. Her 17th birthday (July 12, 2013) was declared "Malala Day" by the UN. She is the youngest-ever UN Messenger of Peace. In 2021, she married Asser Malik, a cricket official.

Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932! She was only the second person to do so (Charles Lindbergh was first). She received the Distinguished Flying Cross (the first woman to receive it). She also flew solo from Hawaii to California (1935, first person to do so). She was a member of the National Woman's Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1937, she and Noonan attempted a round-the-world flight. They completed over 22,000 miles (35,000 km) before disappearing. The U.S. government spent $4 million searching for them (the most expensive search in history at that time). The official conclusion was that they ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. Theories persist: they were captured by the Japanese, they assumed false identities, or the Navy covered it up. Her plane has never been found. Her birthplace, Atchison, Kansas, is a museum.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity! The order began in 1950 with 13 members; by her death, it had over 4,000 sisters running orphanages, AIDS hospices, leper colonies, and soup kitchens worldwide. She was born in Skopje (now North Macedonia) to Albanian parents. She felt a "call within a call" to serve the poor in India. She became an Indian citizen. She opened the "Home for the Dying" in Calcutta, where people could die with dignity. She was criticized by some for the quality of care in her hospices, for her views on abortion, and for accepting donations from dubious sources. After her death, her personal letters were published, revealing decades of spiritual doubt and feeling abandoned by God. She was canonized on September 4, 2016. Her feast day is September 5 (the anniversary of her death). Her name is synonymous with selfless charity.

Goodall discovered tool use in chimpanzees! In 1960, she observed a chimpanzee inserting a twig into a termite mound to extract termites. This was revolutionary because tool-making had been considered a defining human trait. Louis Leakey (her mentor) famously said: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans." Goodall also discovered that chimpanzees hunt and eat meat (colobus monkeys) and engage in warfare (the "Four Year War" between rival communities at Gombe). She was not a trained scientist when she started; she had a secretarial diploma. She taught herself observation techniques. She has no formal PhD (Cambridge University allowed her to earn a doctorate based on her field research). She has been married twice (first to a photographer, then to the director of Tanzania National Parks). She travels 300 days a year advocating for conservation. She is a vegetarian.