In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and that women’s historical contributions are overlooked. So, when I saw this post on the popular Ask Reddit page from a now-deleted user asking people, “Who are some women [who] often get overlooked in history but had major contributions to society?” I had to read through the answers, and I learned a lot that I hadn’t known before! I figured it’d be worth it to share, so here are some of the most interesting answers:
1. “Virginia Hall has a building named after her at the CIA. She was an American woman from Baltimore who went to Europe in the 1930s, lost her leg in a shooting accident, then proceeded to become a leader in the French Resistance and master of disguise, all with a wooden leg. The book A Woman of No Importance is about her and came out last year.”
“She’s the most remarkable spy you never knew existed.”
2. “Marie Tharp. She created the first map of the ocean floor, which led to the discovery of tectonic plates and the theory of continental drift.”
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3. “Inge Lehmann was a Danish seismologist. She discovered P waves (waves that reflect off the inner core), confirming that the Earth has a solid inner core and a liquid outer core.”
“It’s shocking she’s not more well-known.”
—u/EmulsionPast
4. “Carol Kaye, the First Lady of bass playing. She played over 10,000 sessions, including albums from Frank Sinatra to The Beach Boys to Stevie Wonder to the Monkees. I can thank the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for educating me about her.”
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
—u/Cerrida82
“She features pretty heavily in the documentary The Wrecking Crew about the Los Angeles session musicians of her era, directed by the son of Tommy Tedesco.”
—u/deleted
5. “Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. She’s the Dean of Medicine at Hurley Children’s Hospital in Flint, MI. She saw that children were having elevated lead levels (ELLs) outside the normal range.”
Ben Gabbe / Getty Images
“She contacted the Genesee Department of Health, who, at first, dismissed her claim, then sent her obfuscated data to make it look like the ELLs were completely within normal trends.
She grew frustrated at this, so she called a team of epidemiologists from Virginia Tech (her alma mater) to find the source of the lead. Lo and behold, she found that the water in multiple zip codes was contaminated with lead. She informed the Genesee Department of Health again, who brushed her off.”
“She then said ‘fuck it’ and held a major press conference where she announced on air that the water in Flint wasn’t safe, and to come to the hospital to get your child tested and to pick up supplies of water and liquid infant formula. She saved thousands of children from the permanent effects of lead poisoning.”
Saul Loeb / Getty Images
—u/MadameBurner
6. “Anna Connelly invented the fire escape in 1887.”
Photo By Kathy Feeney / Getty Images
—u/fergi20020
7. “…That same year, Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher.”
Josephine Garis Cochrane / Via commons.wikimedia.org, Unknown author / Via commons.wikimedia.org
—u/fergi20020
“Josephine Cochrane is a hero.”
—u/deleted
8. “In 1952, Dr. Virginia Apgar developed a quick, easy five-point test that summarizes the health of newborns and determines those needing emergency assistance. The Apgar Score is now given to practically every newborn, and has helped save countless young lives and reduce infant mortality.”
Archive Photos / Getty Images
9. “Belva Lockwood. One of the first female lawyers in the US, and she ran for president in the 1880s.”
Library Of Congress / Getty Images
10. “The Allied codebreakers at places like Bletchley Park during WWII. They worked incredibly long, tedious, and stressful hours and were major contributors to the war effort and military intelligence, but their work didn’t even receive official recognition from the British government until 2009, 64 years after the war ended.”
—u/TheSorge
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11. “Sandra Ford was the drug technician who first brought attention to what would become the AIDS epidemic.”
“She knew something was up when she began receiving unusually high numbers of requests for pentamidine, an antibiotic reserved for treating pneumocystis pneumonia in seriously ill, immunocompromised patients. The patients it was being requested for were gay men who had been otherwise healthy.”
12. “Claudette Colvin was the first known person who refused to get up from her bus seat during Jim Crow in America. But she was a young woman who then became pregnant out of wedlock…and Black civil rights leaders eventually decided she was not a good image of an activist, so they handpicked Rosa Parks to do the same.”
The Visibility Project, Claudette Colvin / Via commons.wikimedia.org, Underwood Archives / Getty Images
—u/GovMajor
“Rosa Parks mentored Claudette Colvin, and they met at the NAACP Youth Council. Yes, Colvin was impregnated by a married man, so they thought white people wouldn’t care about her. Even Rosa Parks said, ‘If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They’d call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn’t have a chance.’ They also chose Rosa Parks because she was older, lighter-skinned, and had ‘good hair,’ so white people were more likely to care.”
—u/gorgeouspink
13. “Bessie Coleman. She was a Black woman who wanted to learn to fly. No one would teach her. She learned that the French would, however, so she moved to France, learned French, and how to fly. Then she returned to the States and taught anyone who wanted to learn. She was alive at the same time as Amelia Earhart and got no recognition at the time.”
George Rinhart / Getty Images
—u/daschle04
“The main road that runs through the middle of O’Hare Airport is called Bessie Coleman Drive.”
—u/rckid13
14. “Elsie MacGill, aka the ‘Queen of the Hurricanes.’ She was the world’s first female to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering. The two major things she did: She designed the Maple Leaf Trainer II, and she was to look over manufacturing operations at the Canadian factories that built the Hawker Hurricane.“
Elsie Gregory MacGill / Library and Archives Canada / Via commons.wikimedia.org, User:Bzuk / Via commons.wikimedia.org
15. “For Scotland, I’d say the Edinburgh Seven. They basically paved the way for women being allowed to get into university in the UK.”
—u/ETTConnor
“Historical university sexism is a topic often brushed under the rug these days.”
—u/deleted
Smithsonian Institution/Science Service / Via en.wikipedia.org, Handout / Getty Images
“She discovered that stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium. At the time (1925), it was thought that the Sun and the Earth were made of basically the same stuff.”
—u/Bensemus
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17. “Zheng Yi Sao was the single most successful pirate in all of history. She led an armada of tens of thousands of sailors and 17 separate fleets of ships, and held the most important tributary in China, raiding for weeks on end before managing to give the slip to a combined force of Portuguese, Chinese, and English warships after being cornered in an inlet with two wounded ships and no way out but through.”
“After this venture, she recognized that her power was beginning to wane, so she decided it was better to cash out while she had the leverage (one of her fleets had turned on her during the period, among other things).
She managed to negotiate for literally all of her men to be given amnesty, be allowed to join the Chinese navy, to keep the stuff they had stolen, and for her to be able to keep several ships to be able to have a business in the salt trade. She then ran a gambling house and died peacefully in her sleep.”
—u/Dovahkiin419
18. “Daphne Oram was one of the first ever composers to produce electronic sound. She pioneered electronic music and led the path for music today.”
Daily Herald Archive / Getty Images
“She even wrote a piece called ‘Still Point‘ that she was never able to perform live because of sexism by her peers, and she never heard it live before she died. But it was performed for the first time in 2018 using a replica of a machine Daphne had created to electronically manipulate a live orchestra.”
19. “Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She was an astronomer at Harvard and discovered a type of star called a Cepheid. Cepheid stars all pulse at a similar rate. That lets us know how far away they are. Because of her, we were able to determine how big the universe is, along with many, many more things concerning its properties.”
Boston Globe / Getty Images
—u/deleted
“Cepheids don’t pulse at the same rate, but rather at a rate proportional to their brightness, which means that from an observation of their pulsing (which is pretty easy to do, even at extreme distances since they’re very bright) we can determine their brightness, and therefore calculate their distance.”
20. And finally: “Nellie Bly. She was a 1890s journalist who was given an assignment to investigate the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island due to accusations of the mistreatment of patients. She got in there by faking insanity and getting herself committed to the asylum, and when she was finally released, she ran an exposé in the New York World called ‘Ten Days In A Madhouse‘ that exposed the awful treatment of patients inside the asylum.”
Bettmann / Getty Images
“This was considered a revolution in investigative journalism. Also, she read Around The World In 80 Days, basically decided she could do better, and went around the world in 72 days. She was also an inventor, and was one of the primary journalists to cover the suffragette movement. She’s one of my favorite historical figures who doesn’t get enough attention!”
If you know any women with a great historical contribution, tell me about her down in the comments! Or, if you want to write in but prefer to stay anonymous, you can check out this anonymous form. Who knows — your story could be included in a future BuzzFeed article!
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