March is Women's History Month!

1. Rigoberta Menchu	A. This artist became one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. She has had major shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Whitney. She was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest honor possible for an artist. In 1971 she began to go blind. She stopped painting in 1972 and died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.
2. Shannon Lucid	B. She is a fully licensed pilot who has flown in space five times, more often than almost any other astronaut. She currently holds the United States single session space flight endurance record and has logged more hours in space than any other woman. She has traveled 75.2 million miles in 188 days on the Russian Space Station Mir.
3. Georgia O'Keeffe	C. She was born in China. No woman in her family had ever worked outside the home or been interested in science. Upon earning her Ph.D. she took a research position at the National Cancer Institute. There she co-discovered how to clone the HIV virus that is the precursor to AIDS. This discovery allowed her to map out the virus's structure, as well as allowed others to create the HIV screening test. In 1990, she was selected by the Institute for Scientific Information as the top woman scientist of the past decade and the fourth-ranking scientist of either gender under age 45.
4. Flossie Wong-Staal	D. After seeing her first airplane at the Iowa State Fair when she was 10, she knew that she had to fly. On May 20, 1932, exactly 5 years after the Lindbergh flight, she would begin hers. She successfully completed the trip when she landed in Northern Ireland. This feat made her the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo. She also became the only person to do it twice. She had also flown the longest distance in the shortest amount of time. She died with less than 7,000 miles to go to complete her around-the-world flight in 1935.
5. Hypatica	E. She wrote commentaries on Diophantus' Arithmetica, Apollonius' Conics, and on Ptolemy's astronomical works. She was the first woman to make a substantial contribution to the development of mathematics. According to Socrates her attainments in literature and science far surpassed all the philosophers of her own time. Educated in the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions.
6. Amelia Earhart	F. She fled to Mexico where she wrote her autobiography, dictating it in Quiche, which was the only language she spoke. She and her two sisters joined the guerilla movement against the Guatemalan government. Her book won the Nobel Peace Prize and succeeded in bringing the attention of other nations to the atrocities of the Guatemalan government. She used her Nobel Peace Prize money to set up a foundation to fight for human rights in Guatemala.
7. Lady Augusta Ada Byron	G. She was elected the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, the second largest tribe in the United States. As chief she ruled over 140,000 people and 7,000 square miles. People did not take easily to the idea of a woman as chief: during her campaign she received death threats. has brought about major economic and social improvements for her tribe, including economic development and education.
8. Wilma Mankiller	H. In spite of graduating in the top of her class, she had a hard time in 1959 getting a job as a lawyer because she was a woman. She finally got a job as a clerk, then went on to teach at Rutgers and Columbia Law schools, becoming the first tenured female professor at Columbia. She has always fought against gender discrimination, creating and leading the ACLU's (American Civil Liberties Union) Women's Rights Project. After arguing six cases on women's rights before the U.S. Supreme Court, she became the second woman appointed to that Court.
9. Ruth Bader Ginsburg	I. When she was 18, she visited the Mechanics Institute to hear Dr. Dionysius Lardner's lectures on the "difference engine," a mechanical calculating machine built by Charles Babbage. She became so interested in the device that she arranged to be introduced to Babbage. She and Babbage became good friends and she worked with him for the rest of her life, helping to document his designs, translating writings about his work, and developing programs to be used on his machines. Unfortunately, Babbage never completed construction of any of his designs. Even so, she is recognized to be the first computer programmer in history.

Links

• Women's International Center- Biography Index
• Rigoberta Menchu
• Shannon W. Lucid
• Georgia O'Keeffe
• Flossie Wong-Staal
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Women of the Week