Silkwood was a chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee’s plutonium fuels production plant in Crescent, Oklahoma, and a member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers’ Union. She was also an activist who was critical of plant safety and her suspicious death remains unsolved.
Irish nationalist and social advocate
Margaret Tufts Swan Yardley (1844-1928) was a founding member and the first president of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs.
Ethel Lennox drove the creation of Upham’s Corner Neighborhood Health Center and was a community health advocate across Boston.
Lugenia Burns Hope was an early 1900s social activist, reformer, and community organizer. Spending most of her career in Atlanta, she worked for the improvement of Black communities through traditional social work, community health campaigns, and political pressure for better education and infrastructure.
Globetrotting African-American nutritionist Flemmie P. Kittrell revolutionized early childhood education and illuminated ‘hidden hunger’
In 1909, Dr. Rosalie Slaughter Morton was the first chair of the Public Health Education Committee of the American Medical Association. She was one of the first women faculty members at the New York Polyclinic Hospital and Post-Graduate Medical School and the first woman faculty member at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Irish missionary doctor and public health campaigner
As Collingwood’s (Melbourne) first social worker in 1972, she led the development of community services provided on the basis of rights not charity.
Katherine Schaub (1902-1933) was a dial painter who played a pivotal role, with her court testimonies and self-documentation, in getting radium recognized as a harmful substance and subsequently phased out of use in manufacturing altogether.