This page contains stories of powerful women defying the male/female status quo. I will update it regularly!
Margaret Bourke-White, one of the pre-eminent photographers of the 20th century, is pictured here atop New York City’s Chrysler Building in 1930. A staff photographer for Life magazine since its founding in 1936, one of her photos was featured on the cover of the very first issue of the famous news magazine. For decades, Bourke-White traveled the world photographing key events of her time. Early in her career, she took dramatic pictures of architecture and inside steel mills and factories, pioneering a new style of magnesium flare that allowed her to capture incredible details and earned her national renown. In 1930, she became the first Western photographer allowed to take pictures of Soviet industry during the Soviet five-year plan. Like her contemporary Dorothea Lange, she spent much of the 1930s photographing the downtrodden victims of America’s Great Depression.
When World War II broke out, Bourke-White was the first woman permitted to work in combat zones. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded and she captured the bombardment of the Kremlin in a series of dramatic photos. LIFE staff started referring to her as “Maggie the Indestructible” after repeatedly coming under fire and surviving being on a torpedoed ship in the Mediterranean, stranded on an Arctic island, and getting pulled out of Chesapeake Bay after a helicopter crash.
While attached to General Patton’s forces in Germany, she was one of the first photographers to document the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp after it was liberated. The following year, she photographed Mahatma Gandhi in India, including taking a now iconic photo of him at his spinning wheel. She is considered “one of the most effective chroniclers” of the violence that erupted during the partition of India and Pakistan. Bourke-White had a reputation for being relentless in her pursuit of the perfect photograph to embody her subject. “I feel that utter truth is essential,” she asserted, “and to get that truth may take a lot of searching and long hours.”
Margaret Bourke-White is one of the women featured in “Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists” for teens and adults, ages 13 and up: https://www.amightygirl.com/reporting-under-fire
For a historical fiction novel about Margaret Bourke-White, we also recommend “Girl with a Camera: Margaret Bourke-White, Photographer” for ages 12 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/girl-with-a-camera
For an extraordinary new book for adult readers about three more groundbreaking journalists who paved the way for female war correspondents, we highly recommend “You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” at https://www.amightygirl.com/you-don-t-belong-here
There is also a fantastic book for adult readers about six courageous female journalists who reported on WWII: “The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-correspondents
For two children’s books about another famous female photographer, Dorothea Lange, we recommend “Dorothea’s Eyes: Dorothea Lange Photographs the Truth,” for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dorothea-s-eyes) and “Dorothea Lange” for ages 5 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dorothea-lange-faces-of…)
To introduce children and teens to more trailblazing women like Margaret Bourke-White, visit our “Role Models” biography section at http://amgrl.co/2wRJudE
Credit: This photo of Margaret Bourke-White was taken by her dark room assistant Oscar Graubner
French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an “uncompromising” 50-year body of work exploring “a life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and class”.
She used “courage and clinical acuity” to tell largely autobiographical stories that uncover “the contradictions of social experience and describe shame, humiliation, jealousy or the inability to see who you are”.
12 Women Pioneering The World Of Quantum Computing
Traditionally speaking, science has been the pursuit of men, both in the academic and experimental side of things. This has started changing, however, with the number of women in STEM fields (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) growing over the last few years… [READ ARTICLE]
Vice President Harris was born in Oakland, California to parents who emigrated from India and Jamaica. She graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law.
Capt. Amy Bauernschmidt was selected for the position by the fiscal year 2022 aviation major command screen board. Naval Air Forces confirmed the historic selection on Monday.
This isn’t the first time Bauernschmidt has made history. In 2016, she became the first female executive officer of a nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln. As such, she was second-in-command of a crew of about 5,000 people.
For adults who would like to learn more about this pioneering architect, we recommend her visually stunning book “Boundaries” at http://amzn.to/1WHhLAo
To learn about about heroic women who served during the Vietnam War, we also recommend “Courageous Women of the Vietnam War” for teens and adults, ages 13 and up, at https://www.amightygirl.com/courageous-women-of-the…
And, for fun ways to inspire the architects and builders of tomorrow, we’ve showcased our favorite girl-empowering building toys in our blog post: “Building Her Dreams: Top 60 Building and Engineering Toys for Mighty Girls,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10430
For her initiative and heroic actions, Hester was awarded the Silver Star. She became the first woman to receive the award since WWII. She continued her service in the National Guard, deploying to Afghanistan for 18 months, and to the Virgin Islands in 2017 in the wake of Hurricane Maria. In civilian life, Hester serves as a police officer in her home state of Tennessee.
Born in 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut, McClintock took her first course in genetics in 1921 at Cornell’s School of Agriculture — at a time when even her own mother feared college would make her “unmarriageable” — and was immediately fascinated. C.B. Hutchinson, the instructor, was so impressed by her that he personally invited her to take Cornell’s graduate genetics course. “Obviously, this telephone call cast the die for my future,” she said. “I remained with genetics thereafter.”
After a few years as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, McClintock ended up taking a full-time research position and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It was there, in 1948, that she discovered that two segments of genetic code in maize could change positions on the chromosome; when they did, the pattern of coloration on the seeds also changed. McClintock called these “controlling elements” and published several papers on her maize experiments. However, people responded to her research with “puzzlement, even hostility,” because scientists believed that chromosomes didn’t change over time except by mutation. While she continued researching controlling elements throughout her career, she stopped publishing papers about them in 1953.
In the late 1960s, though, French geneticists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod described a similar process in a different genetic component, which rekindled interest in McClintock’s work. Scientists eventually came to realize that the transposition of genetic material, and the genetic regulation — the capacity to turn genes “on” and “off” — that transposition allowed, were a major part of the evolutionary process. McClintock was philosophical about the sudden change in understanding: “One must await the right time for conceptual change,” she wrote in 1973.
Although McClintock won the Nobel Prize for her discovery in 1983 — in a ceremony during which the Swedish Academy of Sciences compared her to “Father of Modern Genetics” Gregor Mendel — as well as many other awards, relatively few people today know about her contributions to our understanding of genetics. For McClintock, however, the greatest satisfaction of her life was in discovering a secret that no one else had known. “If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off,” she once said. “No matter what they say.
Barbara McClintock is one of 50 notable women featured in the excellent illustrated biography, “Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers,” for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/women-in-science
She is also one of the 52 women profiled in the fascinating book “Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – and The World,” recommended for teens and adults alike at https://www.amightygirl.com/headstrong-52-women
For adult readers, we also recommend the insightful biography, “The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/a-feeling-for-the-organism
She is also one of the pioneering women of science featured in the book for adults: “The Madame Curie Complex” at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-madame-curie-complex
To introduce children and teens to more inspiring female scientists, visit our blog post, “60 Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
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