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.
Dr. Olivia J. Hooker, a survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, blazed a trail as the first Black woman on active duty in the US Coast Guard.
Australian lawyer Barbara Hocking dedicated over 30 years of her professional career not only to educating the public, but also to changing the law of Native Title.
Kaurna woman who made South Australian legal history
Mary Ellen Pleasant was perhaps the most powerful Black woman in Gold Rush-era San Francisco.
In 1884, she tried to enroll her eight-year-old daughter Mamie at a white public school in San Francisco. When school authorities turned Mamie away because of her Chinese ancestry, Mary and her husband sued the Board of Education. The lawsuit became a landmark civil rights case for public school desegregation.
Seeds of commitment to Palestinian liberation began to sow in Souheir Edelbi at a young age as she learned about the Nakba and oppression faced by Palestinians from her father.
No historian has done more to recover the stories of enslaved African-Americans than Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as wide acclaim.
Catherine “Kitty” Payne was an enslaved woman in the U.S. in the 1800s
Serena, a Native American woman, filed a civil lawsuit in 1974 seeking damages for violations of her constitutional rights to procreate and bear children