INSPIRING WOMEN

ARTS

In 1939, this contralto with a beautiful voice, was denied the right to sing in Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. Instead, she sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of 75,000 and a radio audience. Inducted, 1973.

ATHLETICS

Named woman athlete of the half century in 1950, Babe Didrikson Zaharias dominated every sport she tried. Zaharias won two gold medals and a silver medal in the 1932 Olympics. She helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) in 1950. Inducted, 1976.

BUSINESS

At age 39, Linda Alvarado was the first woman to successfully bid for ownership of major league baseball team - the Colorado Rockies. She serves on major corporate boards and helps others achieve their dreams. Inducted, 2003.

EDUCATION

She helped organize seventeen tribally run colleges and was a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991. Locke worked tirelessly to preserve tribal languages and culture.Inducted, 2005.

GOVERNMENT

The first Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (1952-1955). The director of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and the first women colonel in the U.S. By the end of World War II, she had commanded 100,000 women at 200 posts throughout every theater of war operations. Inducted, 1996.

HUMANITIES

In 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first African-American to receive an international pilot’s license. Coleman became a barnstormer – flying stunts and performing for paying audiences. Her untimely death prevented her from opening a school for black pilots. Inducted, 2001.

HUMANITIES

Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts; an organization that today has more than three million girls and adult women members. Low’s vision was to establish an organization whereby women could learn leadership, self-reliance, and self-resourcefulness. Inducted, 1979.

PHILANTHROPY

The "Mother of Charities, in 1887 Frances Wisebart Jacobs founded what today is known as United Way. She also founded National Jewish Hospital. Inducted, 1994.

At age 21, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC, Maya Lin has spent her architecture career blending nature, landscapes and the environment with history.

The 1983 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock discovered that genetic information could transpose from one chromosome to another – so-called “jumping genes.”