The pages of history are filled with examples of women making major contributions to society and helping propel humankind into the future. However, some of these examples tend to be glossed over and overlooked by some historians. In fact, The Representation Project claims that women are only represented in 0.5 percent of recorded history.
Wanting to improve all of our understanding of history, Reddit user Dundermifflinhoe urged their fellow redditors to share examples of great women that we may not have heard of. And when you’re done reading through this list and sharing who you personally think some women that often get overlooked in history are, check out Bored Panda’s post about people sharing their female heroes whom they admire right here.
The author of the thread told Bored Panda that they'd turned to Reddit with their question because they're currently working on a paper on the history of women and hysteria for a class in school.
"I realized that I don't know many famous women throughout history. Learning about how so many women who had thoughts or opinions on a subject were deemed crazy put into perspective how little I knew, and I wanted to educate myself more. Hopefully, some other people who were curious about it can benefit as well. I absolutely did not expect it to blow up as big as it did, but I’m happy that so many people are wanting to further educate themselves on the topic as well." Read on for our full interviews with Dundermifflinhoe and with an expert on gender discrimination.
#21
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.
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94points
#22
Cecilia Payne, discovered what universe is made out of... And don't even get a mention in textbooks
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93points
#23
Anna Connelly invented the fire escape in 1887.
That same year, Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher.
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93points
#24
Eleanor Marx - Maybe overlooked because of her dad. She played an important role in British Trade Unions which forced the move from a 12 hour working day 6 days a week to an 8 hour day 5 days a weekend. Those extra hours to go on a walk, play Xbox, learn something new or just chill is a pretty big contribution.
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92points
#25
Inge Lehmann was a Danish seismologist. She discovered P' waves (waves that reflect off of the inner-core), confirming that the earth has a solid inner-core and a liquid outer-core.
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83points
#26
Dr. Georgeanna Seeger Jones
Dr. Jones singlehandedly organized the field of Gynecological Endocrinology. While at John’s Hopkins with her husband, Dr. Howard Jones and Drs. Roberts and Steptoe, she devised the hypothesis of follicular hyper stimulation, which produced more than one egg per cycle. Her later discoveries led to increases in viability of In Vitro Fertilization.
Per Wikipedia : As a resident at Johns Hopkins, she discovered that the pregnancy hormone hCG was manufactured by the placenta, not the pituitary gland as originally thought. This discovery led to the development of many of the early over-the-counter pregnancy test kits currently available. On 1949, Jones made the first description of Luteal Phase Dysfunction and is credited to be the first in using progesterone to treat women with a history of miscarriages, thus allowing many of them to not only conceive, but to deliver healthy babies
She also served as a Dean of the College of Pontifical Sciences, advising the Vatican of matters of Gynecology and Conception.
Her husband always said “She’s the smarter one.”
She was also a great friend.
83points
#27
The Soviet Air Force's 588th Night Bomber Regiment. An all-female bombing wing during WWII that had to make do with a lot of outdated equipment.
However, they were a MAJOR thorn in Germany's side, taking out encampment after encampment. Their secret? They struck by night and cut their engines right before bombing the enemy. This gave them the nickname "Night Witches." Comparatively, I'm pretty sure they had one of the higher survival rates when it came to bombing squadrons.
Sabaton actually based one of their songs off of them in their album "Heroes."
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80points
#28
Daphne Oram - first ever composer to produce electronic sound. She pioneered electronic music and lead the path for music today. 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.
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76points
#29
Tapputi-Belatekallim, who lived around 1200 B.C. in Babylonia. She is considered the world's first chemist. Her filtering and distillation of various materials is the world's oldest mentioned still.
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76points
#30
Margaret Hamilton and her team wrote all of the math it took to get to the moon.
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70points
