Women who changed the world.
That you didn't know about
Tis' I, the Queen of Nigeria. Just kidding, it's me Adesubomi. I recently realized that when people talk about history, what happened, who did what, who changed what, etc. Women’s names are rarely called. At first, I thought it was probably me overthinking things till I found out that it was true, shocker!?.
A woman built the first university in the world, yet we never hear about her;
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering how I concluded. I made my in-depth research through our popular and reliable search engine Google by typing the clause “people who helped change the world” and on the first link, I saw a hundred names. While scrolling through those names, I didn’t see any woman’s names till I reached the third page, THE THIRD PAGE!, and sadly the name wasn’t even at the top, it’s funny to know that women have impacted world history without the world even realizing their achievements. I mean it’s funny how women have pioneered entire fields yet we never hear about them. A woman built the first university in the world, yet we never hear about her; a woman became the first person to win two Nobel prizes. This same woman found the solution to cancer, a solution, which is now being used by doctors around the world. Yet we never hear about her. A woman led the discovery of DNA which is now helping the world in so many ways but are all these accomplishments recognized by people, by society? No.
When people are asked if they know any woman who made an impact on the world, names like Indira Gandhi, Queen Victoria, Malala Yousafazai, Mother Teresa, and Frida Kahlo, etc are mentioned but apart from these great women there are many others.
These are great women who made great contributions to their various fields.
*Fatima Al-Fihri*(800 AD – 880 AD):
Fatima was a Tunisian woman who was credited with building the first university in the world, the university predates Oxford and Cambridge universities by around 200 years.
Fatima used her inheritance to build and supervise the construction of the mosque ( which had an educational center within it ), this mosque is still the largest in Africa, and the university remains since it was founded in 859 AD. It is a traditional university, focusing on Islamic religion and legal sciences.
* Mary Wollstonecraft ( 1759 – 1797):
Mary can be referred to as the mother of feminism because of her book “ A Vindication of The Rights of A Woman” published in 1792. The book is still seen today as one of the foundational texts of modern feminism as it argued that women should have the same fundamental rights as men.
*James Miranda Stuart Barry a.k.a Margaret Ann Bulkley (1789 – 1865):
Margaret Ann was a successful British Army Surgeon who pretended to be a man. She used the name, James Barry. She rose to the rank of Inspector General in charge of military hospitals following service in India and South Africa, in her travels she improved the conditions for soldiers and the local population. It came as a surprise to the people that James Barry was a woman. She had disguised herself as a man to attend medical school in Edinburgh because at this time women had very few career choices and were not allowed to study medicine. As James Barry, she went on to have a remarkable career as a highly accomplished surgeon and a pioneer of hygienic practice; among her achievements was the first cesarean section in Africa by a British surgeon in which both the mother and child survived. Bulkley’s true identity was only revealed once her sex was discovered after death and it is only recently that her attainments in being the first qualified female British Doctor and becoming the first woman to graduate from the University of Edinburgh were recognized. The story of Margaret Ann Bulkley shows the determination and length of women to achieve their dreams.
Elizabeth Fry (1780 – 1845):
Elizabeth Fry was a pioneering campaigner for prison reform in Europe. She found out that the living conditions in the prison were unsanitary and repulsive and imagined that giving prisoners more humane conditions would improve their self-respect and help them to reform.
She published a book in 1819 titled Prisons in Scotland and the North of England, which raised awareness of the issues in the larger society, she also provided many realistic solutions to contribute to the prisoner’s well-being; separating the sexes, classifying criminals, female supervision for women, useful employment, etc. People like Queen Victoria and Robert Peel supported and were impressed with her work. Elizabeth’s efforts led to the passing of the 1823 Gaol Act which sought to enforce minimum living standards in prisons.
*Sacagawea (1778 – 1812):
She Was credited with making huge contributions to the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which took place between 1803 and 1806.
Sacagawea was invited to join the Lewis and Clark expedition as a Shoshone interpreter a few years after being captured and sold to a French Canadian at the age of twelve with substantial survival skills, including the ability to identify edible plants. With these skills, she was able to lead the expedition to its success. Sacagawea acted as a symbol of peace to the native tribes, as well as the translator between explorers and the indigenous population.
It was through Sacagawea, the Corps of Discovery was able to cooperate peacefully with tribes to cross the Rocky Mountains. This led them to make useful advancements in mapping Missouri and confirming overland access to the Pacific, traveling to places that had never been seen before by settlers.
The expedition also produced many important zoological and botanical discoveries, noting dozens of previously unknown species. Her contribution to the exploration of the United States led her to feature on a dollar coin minted in 2000.
*Harriet Beecher ( 1811 – 1896).
Harriet was a slavery abolitionist, meeting the fugitive slaves on the covert network at “The Underground Railroad”. Harriet wanted to inspire social justice and positive change and seeing the tightened laws on fugitive slaves, she wrote and published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 which initiated the anti-slavery movement before the American civil war.
The novel explores the long-suffering of the black slaves, uncovering many of the harsh realities of a life in slavery, and features a strong call to end the oppression of African Americans. Now her home in Hartford, Connecticut has been preserved and is now a museum.
*Angela Burdett Coutts ( 1814 – 1906).
Described as “one of the most radical philanthropists of her time”, the granddaughter of the banker Thomas Coutts, was able to inherit a huge sum of money at his death. Angela wanted to enter the business world but wasn't allowed due to the nineteenth century’s social conventions, she decided to shift her focus to philanthropic projects.
A fraction of her projects includes building homes for the poor, installing a source of fresh water in London, funding scholarships at prestigious ededucationalnstitutions, supplying equipment to Florence Nightingale to improve nursing hygiene, supporting army hospitals in South Africa, financing the construction of London hospitals, supplying lifeboats to the British authorities, and funding relief efforts during the Great Potato Famine of Ireland.
Angela was later granted a peerage in 1871 by Queen Victoria for her efforts in philanthropy.
*Ada Lovelace* ( 1815-1852):
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. She is considered to be the first computer programmer, as she’s known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine which Charles built a small part. In the 1970s, the computer language ADA was named after her, and on the second Tuesday in October has become Ada Lovelace Day, on which contributions of women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are honored.
*Florence Nightingale ( 1820- 1910):
Born in Florence Italy in 1820, Florence can be described as a heroine because she spent her life helping others, she went against what was traditionally expected from her ( as she was from a wealthy family) by wanting to enter the nursing profession.
She moved to London to work before receiving a letter from the Secretary of War asking her to put a team together to go to work in a place called Crimea during the Crimean War and look after British soldiers. This was the first time that women had been officially allowed to serve in the army.
When she first arrived in November 1854, the army doctors wanted nothing to do with her. But she wouldn’t go away and soon got to work cleaning up the conditions there were terrible. For example, there weren’t enough beds, everything was filthy, there weren’t proper loos and there were rats everywhere. She quickly got the more able soldiers to work making them scrub the hospital clean.
She used to walk around the hospital at night to make sure the poor soldiers were comfortable. This is how she became known as the lady with the lamp, Florence Nightingale completely transformed the quality of care in war and went on to improve healthcare all over the world, she was later welcomed home a hero and then Queen Victoria wrote a letter to say thank you for what she’d done.
Emmeline Pankhurst (1867 – 1934):
Emmeline Pankhurst was a founding member of a group of women called the Suffragettes, who fought incredibly hard to get women the right to vote in the UK. The women often used violent and extreme tactics. This made Emmeline no stranger to the prison cell.
When World War One broke out, the men were away fighting in the war, she the suffragettes and other women like them took on jobs that men would traditionally do. They earned lots of respect doing this and it showed just how much women contributed to society and therefore they deserved to vote.
Later in 1918, a law was passed that allowed certain women the right to vote. This was a big of n ineqinequalitybetweenn men and women and for this, we have Emmeline to thank.
*Marie Curie (1867- 1934)
Marie Curie was a Polish scientist – and is probably one of the most famous scientists of all time due to her discovery which changed the world, she became the first woman professor of general physics and held master’s degrees in both physics and mathematical sciences and was the first woman to obtain a science doctorate.
She was also the first person to win two Nobel Prizes: the first in physics in 1903, with her husband, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, for their study in spontaneous radiation, and the second in chemistry in 1911 for her work in radioactivity.
Radioactivity happens when certain special chemical elements give off energetic particles when a part of them called their nucleus breaks down this led to the discovery of two new chemical elements – polonium and radium.
This work was used to develop something called radiotherapy, which is used to treat certain illnesses like cancer, these discoveries also helped in developing X-rays, which are vital in hospitals today. It also meant that during World War One, Curie was able to develop a portable X-ray unit that could be used near the battlefront.
*Barbara Bodichon ( 1827 – 1891)
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a woman who lived a truly remarkable life from the start. Her father was the only son of the prominent abolitionist MP William Smith, and among her eminent cousins, she counted Florence Nightingale and the Bonham-Carter family. But her mother was from a lowly background, and her parents lived openly together out of wedlock. After her mother’s death when she was just 7, she and her younger siblings were raised by their radical politician father and educated at a local school alongside working-class children. Unusually, she was also given an allowance from the age of 21 which she used to travel, study and fund many good causes. Her unconventional upbringing had set her on course for a life of writing and political campaigning as one of the earliest advocates of women’s rights. From the 1850s she was a key figure in a group of radical women who met at No. 19 Langham Place, London, to discuss women’s issues; the group went on to found the English Woman's Journal, which focused on campaigning on women’s employment and education. In 1866 Barbara and Emily Davies founded what later became Girton College, Cambridge, the first college in England to offer a university education for women. That same year, she founded the first-ever group to campaign for women’s suffrage. Perhaps most important, though, was her Brief Summary of the Laws of England Concerning Women, published in 1854. This pamphlet documented every legal restriction affecting women under English law and sparked a major national campaign that eventually resulted in The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 – significantly altering English law to recognize married women as legal entities in their own right. For the first time, married women could now own, inherit and control their property, independently from their husbands. Despite being the architect of such a groundbreaking step for women, Barbara is virtually unknown today, and she deserves to be highlighted for her many achievements on International Women’s Day.
I could go on and on about women who were pioneers but I'm sure you get my point. Women have made mad contributions to the world and deserve to be recognized for it. The same way that men are.
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Great work love
I'm pretty sure the world needs more of Adesubomi. Keep it up