Helen Thayer was the first woman and oldest person to make a solo journey to the magnetic North Pole. She competed internationally as a world-class discus thrower, and in 1975 became the U.S. National Champion in the ice-sledding sport luge.
Dr. Lovejoy was the first woman to direct a city department of health, the Portland Board of Health, in Oregon and was co-founder and first director of the Medical Women’s International Association.
1902: Dr. Emily Barringer was the first woman ambulance physician at New York City’s Gouverneur Hospital and the first woman medical resident at New York City’s Gouverneur Hospital.
Jan Anderson was an international expert on photosynthesis research.
Australian surgeon and one of the first women to study medicine at the University of Melbourne.
Doris Hayashi (1920–2012) was a social worker who participated in the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study as a researcher while incarcerated at the temporary detention center at Tanforan, in California, and the permanent concentration camp at Topaz, Utah.
Mari Okazaki (1916-2005) was a psychiatric social worker who participated in the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) as a researcher and continued her career in social care in the postwar years.
An early Issei female physician, Ishiko Shibuya Mori (1899–1972) was one of eight women from Hawai’i sent into internment on the mainland during WWII.
Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota (U of M). She worked in public health and student health services at a time (the mid-twentieth century) when there were few women in either of those fields.
Katharine Densford was a pragmatic leader of American nursing as it gained political and academic recognition in the 1940s and 50s. She is remembered as a stateswoman whose leadership of Minnesota’s flagship school of nursing at the University of Minnesota provided the model for nursing education throughout the state and nation.