Katherine Johnson (August 26, 1918- Present)

Mathematician and computer scientist Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia to Joylette and Joshua Coleman. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a farmer and janitor. From a young age, Johnson enjoyed mathematics and could easily solve mathematical equations. Her father moved Johnson’s family to Institute, West Virginia, which was 125 miles away from the family home so that Johnson and her siblings could attend school. She attended West Virginia State High School and graduated from high school at age fourteen. Johnson received her B.S. degree in French and mathematics in 1932 from West Virginia State University (formerly West Virginia State College). At that time, Dr. W.W. Schiefflin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. degree in mathematics, created a special course in analytic geometry specifically for Johnson. In 1940, she attended West Virginia University to obtain a graduate degree. Johnson was one of the first African Americans to enroll in the mathematics program. However, family issues kept her from completing the required courses.

After college, Johnson began teaching in elementary and high schools in Virginia and West Virginia. In 1953, she joined Langley Research Center (LaRC) as a research mathematician for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Johnson was assigned to the all-male flight research division. Her knowledge made her invaluable to her superiors and her assertiveness won her a spot in previously all-male meetings. NACA became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. Upon leaving The Flight Mechanics Branch, Johnson went on to join the Spacecraft Controls Branch where she calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space in 1959. Johnson also verified the mathematics behind John Glenn’s orbit around the Earth in 1962 and calculated the flight trajectory for Apollo 11’s flight to the moon in 1969. She retired from NASA in 1986.

Johnson has been the recipient of NASA’s Lunar Spacecraft and Operation’s Group Achievement Award and NASA’s Apollo Group Achievement Award. She received the NASA Langely Research Center Special Achievement Award in 1971, 1980, 1984, 1985 and 1986. Johnson has co-authored twenty-six scientific papers and has a historically unique listing as a female co-author in a peer-reviewed NASA report. She also received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the State University of New York in Farmingdale in 1998 and in 1999, was named Outstanding Alumnus of the Year by West Virginia State College. In 2006, Johnson was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from Capitol College of Laurel, Maryland. Johnson lives with her husband Lt. Colonel James A. Johnson in Hampton, Virginia and has three daughters Constance, Joylette and Kathy.

Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889)

Maria Mitchell is best known for being the first professional female astronomer in the United States. She discovered a new comet in 1847 that became known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet."

“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.”

—Maria Mitchell

Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. She studied astronomy on her own time with the support of her father. In 1847, Mitchell discovered a new comet, which became known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet," gaining her recognition in astronomy circles. She went on to become a professor of astronomy at Vassar College in New York, tracking and taking photos of sunspots with her students.

Astronomer and educator Maria Mitchell was born one of nine children to Quaker parents William and Lydia Mitchell on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, where was raised and received her early education.

Mitchell's father, recognizing her interest in the heavens at an early age, encouraged her interest in astronomy and taught her how to use a telescope. She worked as the first librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum library from 1836 to 1856, all the while still gazing at the sky at night, studying solar eclipses, the stars, Jupiter and Saturn.

On October 1, 1847, a 28-year-old Mitchell, while scanning the skies with her telescope atop the roof of her father's place of business, the Pacific National Bank on Main Street in Nantucket, discovered what she was sure was a comet. It turned out that she was right, and that what she had spotted was in fact a new comet, previously uncharted by scientists. The celestial object subsequently became known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet," with the formal title of C/1847 T1.

In recognition of her important discovery, Mitchell was presented with a gold medal by Frederick VI, king of Denmark, who had an amateur interest in astronomy himself. Consequently, Mitchell became the first professional female astronomer in the United States.

The breakthrough brought Mitchell respect and recognition among astronomers and other scientists, and in 1848, she became the first woman to be named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year, Mitchell made computations for the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. In 1850, she was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1856, Mitchell left the Atheneum to travel the United States and abroad, and in 1865, she took a job as professor of astronomy at Vassar College in upstate New York, where she quickly became a well-liked and respected educator. Among many projects, Mitchell and her students continuously tracked and photographed sunspots. In 1882, they documented Venus traversing the sun—one of the rarest planetary alignments known to man, occuring only eight times between 1608 and 2012.

Mitchell was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1869. Four years later, in 1873, she co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Women, serving as the organization's president for the next three years.

According to the National Women's History Museum, Mitchell once stated, "We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."

In 1861, after her mother died, Mitchell moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, with her father. In ill health, she retired from teaching at Vassar in 1888, and died on June 28, 1889. She is buried with family members at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket.

In honor of the first female astronomer, the observatory in Nantucket was named the Maria Mitchell Observatory. Additionally, the Maria Mitchell Association, also in Nantucket; a World War II ship, the SS Maria Mitchell; and a crater on the moon ("Mitchell's Crater") were named after her.

Mitchell was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (July 25, 1920 – April 16, 1958)

There is probably no other woman scientist with as much controversy surrounding her life and work as Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. The story of DNA is a tale of competition and intrigue, told one way in James Watson's book The Double Helix, and quite another in Anne Sayre's study, Rosalind Franklin and DNA. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for the double-helix model of DNA in 1962, four years after Franklin's death at age 37 from ovarian cancer.

Franklin excelled at science and attended one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. When she was 15, she decided to become a scientist. Her father was decidedly against higher education for women and wanted Rosalind to be a social worker. Ultimately he relented, and in 1938 she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941. She held a graduate fellowship for a year, but quit in 1942 to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, where she made fundamental studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. This work was the basis of her doctorate in physical chemistry, which she earned from Cambridge University in 1945.

After Cambridge, she spent three productive years (1947-1950) in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de L'Etat, where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951, she returned to England as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College, London.

It was in Randall's lab that she crossed paths with Maurice Wilkins. She and Wilkins led separate research groups and had separate projects, although both were concerned with DNA. When Randall gave Franklin responsibility for her DNA project, no one had worked on it for months. Wilkins was away at the time, and when he returned he misunderstood her role, behaving as though she were a technical assistant. Both scientists were actually peers. His mistake, acknowledged but never overcome, was not surprising given the climate for women at the university then. Only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Franklin's colleagues went to men-only pubs.

But Franklin persisted on the DNA project. J. D. Bernal called her X-ray photographs of DNA, "the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken." Between 1951 and 1953 Rosalind Franklin came very close to solving the DNA structure. She was beaten to publication by Crick and Watson in part because of the friction between Wilkins and herself. At one point, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic portraits of DNA. When he saw the picture, the solution became apparent to him, and the results went into an article in Nature almost immediately. Franklin's work did appear as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal.

A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank. Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's lab at Birkbeck College, where she did very fruitful work on the tobacco mosaic virus. She also began work on the polio virus. In the summer of 1956, Rosalind Franklin became ill with cancer. She died less than two years later.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934)

Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students' revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics, in 1894 and in the following year they were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.

Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.

Mme. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Iréne, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work. She retained her enthusiasm for science throughout her life and did much to establish a radioactivity laboratory in her native city - in 1929 President Hoover of the United States presented her with a gift of $50,000 donated by American friends of science, to purchase radium for use in the laboratory in Warsaw.

Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (Investigations on radioactive substances) (1904), L'Isotopie et les Eléments Isotopes (Isotopy and isotopic elements) and the classic Traité de radioactivité (Treatise on radioactivity) (1910).

The importance of Mme. Curie's work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.

The Curie's elder daughter, Iréne, married Frédéric Joliot in 1926 and they were joint recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935. The younger daughter, Eve, married the American diplomat H.R. Labouisse. They have both taken lively interest in social problems, and as Director of the United Nations' Children's Fund he received on its behalf the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1965. She is the author of a famous biography of her mother, Madame Curie (Gallimard, Paris, 1938), translated into several languages.

Mme. Curie died in Savoy, France, after a short illness, on July 4, 1934.

Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (May 15, 1857 – May 21, 1911)

Williamina was a scottish astronomer born in 1857 in Dundee, where she also attended public schools. When she was 21 she moved to Boston with her husband, and fell pregnant. However, her husband abandoned her and she had to seek work to support herself and her new son, Edward.

She became a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, who ran the Harvard College Observatory. He famously stated that he was frustrated with his male assistants and that his maid, Williamina, was capable of doing a better job. Thus, she was employed to do clerical work at the observatory. She soon demonstrated her flare for astronomy and devised a system to classify stars according to how much hydrogen they displayed in their spectra. She also contributed to the cataloguing of stars that would be published as the Henry Draper Catalogue, and in nine years she catalogued over 10,000 stars as well as discovering 59 gaseous nebulae, 310 variable stars and 10 novae. She also discovered the Horsehead nebula on a photographic plate taken by William Pickering.

In 1899, Williamina had proved herself to the extent that she became Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard, and was placed in charge of dozens of other women hired to perform star counts and classifications. In 1906 she became the first American women to be given hononary membership to the Royal Astronomical Society of London. She was also awarded the Guadalupe Alemndaro medal by the Astronomical Society of Mexico for her discovery of new stars. She published A Photographic Study of Variable Stars  in 1907 and Spectra and Photographic Magnitudes of Stars in Standard Regions in 1911.

She died of pneumonia at the age of 54. She has the crater Fleming named jointly for her and Alexander Fleming.

Antonia Maury (March 21, 1866–January 8, 1952)

American born Antonia Maury came from a family with a distinguished scientific background. She was a cousin of Matthew Maury, the oceanographer, a niece of Henry Draper, the physician and astronomer after whom the Harvard star catalogue was named, her sister became a paleontologist, while her father, a clergyman, was also a well-known naturalist.

Maury was educated at Vassar and graduated in 1887; two years later she became an assistant to Edward Pickering at Harvard College Observatory, as well as lecturing at various eastern colleges between 1899 and 1908. Her first assignment for Pickering was to determine the orbital period of the spectroscopic binary Zeta Ursae Majoris, also called Mizar, which was first discovered by Pickering in 1887. Maury independently discovered the second binary, Beta Aurigae and determined its orbital period.

Maury also did a lot of work on spectra, and around the same time that Cannon was revising the system of spectral classification of stars, Maury proposed an additional modification. She argued that not just the absence or presence of a particular spectral line was important, but also its appearance.

Within Cannon’s system, Maury noticed that two stars having the same pattern of lines and colour were also displaying differences in line width and sharpness. She therefore introduced three further subdivisions that recognised these features. She marked stars with normal lines ‘a’, those with hazy lines ‘b’, and those that were sharp, ‘c’; intermediate cases were marked ‘ab’ or ‘ac’. This has been described as the first step in using spectroscopic criteria for the luminosities of stars. However, the system was ignored by her Harvard contemporaries as being too cumbersome, and brought her into direct conflict with Pickering, forcing her to temporarily leave the project in 1892.

Even having left the Observatory, Pickering urged her to complete her work or else hand it over to someone else. Maury demanded to be acknowledged as the author of her work, a gesture commonly denied to women scientists. After much conflict, she eventually got her way, and her catalogue of over 600 stars appeared in volume 28 of the Harvard Annals in 1897, and was the first issue to have the name of a woman on the title page.

Although Pickering continued to downplay the importance of Maury's work,  one person, Ejnar Hertzsprung was quick to see the significance of her classification system and in 1905 pointed out that c-type and ac-type stars were brighter than a- or b-type stars. Of all the catalogues published, only Maury's classification provided the distinction that he was looking for. Maury's work was vital in Hertzprung's formulation which came to be known as the Hertzprung-Russel diagram. Her contribution to spectral analysis was finally acknowledged in 1922 when the International Astronomical Union modified its official classification system based on Annie Cannon's system to include the prefix c-to a certain spectral type defined by narrow and sharp lines.

Although Maury did not return to Harvard for over a decade after the publication of her catalogue, she continued to research spectroscopic binary stars. She turned her attention to the complex spectroscopic binary, Beta Lyrae, and publishing her conclusions based on over 300 spectra of the star in a treatise in the Harvard Annals in 1933.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, (July 4, 1868—December 12, 1921)

Henrietta Leavitt, American astronomer known for her discovery of the relationship between period and luminosity in Cepheid variables, pulsating stars that vary regularly in brightness in periods ranging from a few days to several months.

Leavitt attended Oberlin College for two years (1886–88) and then transferred to the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (later Radcliffe College), from which she graduated in 1892. Following an interest aroused in her senior year, she became a volunteer assistant in the Harvard Observatory in 1895. In 1902 she received a permanent staff appointment. From the outset she was employed in the observatory’s great project, begun by Edward C. Pickering, of determining the brightnesses of all measurable stars. In this work she was associated with the older Williamina Fleming and the more nearly contemporary Annie Jump Cannon. Pickering's staff, being primarilly made up of women, became known as "Pickering's Harem" or "Pickering's Computers".

Leavitt soon advanced from routine work to a position as head of the photographic stellar photometry department. A new phase of the work began in 1907 with Pickering’s ambitious plan to ascertain photographically standardized values for stellar magnitudes. The vastly increased accuracy permitted by photographic techniques, which unlike the subjective eye were not misled by the different colours of the stars, depended upon the establishment of a basic sequence of standard magnitudes for comparison. The problem was given to Leavitt, who began with a sequence of 46 stars in the vicinity of the north celestial pole. Devising new methods of analysis, she determined their magnitudes and then those of a much larger sample in the same region, extending the scale of standard brightnesses down to the 21st magnitude. These standards were published in 1912 and 1917.

She then established secondary standard sequences of from 15 to 22 reference stars in each of 48 selected “Harvard Standard Regions” of the sky, using photographs supplied by observatories around the world. Her North Polar Sequence was adopted for the Astrographic Map of the Sky, an international project undertaken in 1913, and by the time of her death she had completely determined magnitudes for stars in 108 areas of the sky. Her system remained in general use until improved technology made possible photoelectrical measurements of far greater accuracy. One result of her work on stellar magnitudes was her discovery of 4 novas and some 2,400 variable stars, the latter figure comprising more than half of all those known even by 1930. Leavitt continued her work at the Harvard Observatory until her death.

Leavitt’s outstanding achievement was her discovery in 1912 that in a certain class of variable stars, the Cepheid variables, the period of the cycle of fluctuation in brightness is highly regular and is determined by the actual luminosity of the star. The subsequent calibration of the period-luminosity curve allowed American astronomers Edwin Hubble, Harlow Shapley, and others to determine the distances of many Cepheid stars and consequently of the star clusters and galaxies in which they were observed. The most dramatic application was Hubble’s use in 1924 of a Cepheid variable to determine the distance to the great nebula in Andromeda, which was the first distance measurement for a galaxy outside the Milky Way. Although it was later discovered that there are actually two different types of Cepheid variable, the same method can still be applied separately to each type.

Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941)

Oh, Be A Fine Girl--Kiss Me! 

This phrase has helped several generations of astronomers to learn the spectral classifications of stars. Ironically, this mnemonic device, still used today, refers to a scheme developed by a woman.

Annie Jump Cannon was the eldest of three daughters of Wilson Cannon, a Delaware shipbuilder and state senator, and his second wife, Mary Jump. Annie's mother taught her the constellations and stimulated her interest in astronomy. At Wellesley, Annie studied physics and astronomy and learned to make spectroscopic measurements. On her graduation in 1884, she returned to Delaware for a decade, but became impatient to get back to astronomy. After the death of her mother in 1894, Cannon worked at Wellesley as a junior physics teacher and became a "special student" of astronomy at Radcliffe.

In 1896, she became a member of the group that historians of science have dubbed "Pickering's Women," women hired by Harvard College Observatory director Edward Pickering to reduce data and carry out astronomical calculations. Pickering's approach to science was thoroughly Baconian: "the first step is to accumulate the facts."* The accumulating was supported by a fund set up in 1886 by Anna Draper, widow of Henry Draper, a wealthy physician and amateur astronomer.

Pickering conceived the Henry Draper Memorial as a long-term project to obtain optical spectra of as many stars as possible and to index and classify stars by their spectra. While the measurements were difficult enough, the development of a reasonable classification scheme proved as much a problem in "theory" (which Pickering was slow to recognize) as "fact accumulation."

The analysis was begun in 1886 by Nettie Farrar, who left after a few months to be married. Her place was taken by Williamina Fleming, the first of Pickering's female crew to be recognized in the astronomical community at large. Fleming examined the spectra of more than 10,000 stars and developed a classification system containing 22 classes. The work was carried further by Antonia Maury, who developed her own classification system. The system was cumbersome by comparison with Fleming's, and Pickering could not sympathize with Maury's insistence on theoretical (what we would today call astrophysical) concerns that underlay her scheme.

It was left to Annie Jump Cannon to continue, beginning with an examination of bright southern hemisphere stars. To these she applied yet a third scheme, derived from Fleming's and Maury's, an "arbitrary" division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M, and so on. It was as "theory-laden" as Maury's ordering, but greatly simplified. Her "eye" for stellar spectra was phenomenal, and her Draper catalogs (which ultimately listed nearly 400,000 stars) were valued as the work of a single observer.

Cannon also published catalogs of variable stars (including 300 she discovered). Her career spanned more than forty years, during which women in science won grudging acceptance. She received many "firsts" (first recipient of an honorary doctorate from Oxford, first woman elected an officer of the American Astronomical Society, etc.). At Harvard she was named Curator of Astronomical Photographs, but it was only in 1938, two years before her retirement, that she obtained a regular Harvard appointment as William C. Bond Astronomer.

Florence Bascom (July 14, 1862 – June 18, 1945)

Florence Bascom collected many “firsts” in her geological career: she was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (sitting behind a screen so the male students wouldn’t know she was there); the first woman geologist hired by the USGS; the first woman to present a scientific paper at the Geological Society of Washington; and the first woman officer of the Geological Society of America.

Bascom was born in 1862 in Williamstown, Mass., and died in Northampton 83 years later. Her father, president first of Williams College and later of the University of Wisconsin, encouraged her interest in geology, and she went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from the University of Wisconsin in the 1880s.Her professors at Wisconsin, Roland Irving and Charles Van Hise, were also employed by the USGS, as was her professor at Johns Hopkins, George Williams. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1893, she began teaching geology at Bryn Mawr College (the first women’s college to offer graduate education through the Ph.D), but she combined her teaching career with active field and laboratory work for the USGS.She was an authority on the rocks of the Piedmont and published maps and folios. She also studied water resources of the Philadelphia region. Her writing was vigorous and incisive; her conversation was forceful and clear, if sometimes caustic.

Bascom later developed the geology curriculum at Bryn Mawr from a single course to a full major and then to a graduate program which trained most American women geologists during the first third of the 20th century. At least three of her students later joined the USGS. Bascom retired from teaching in 1928 but continued to work for the USGS until 1936.

Peter Lyttle, current program coordinator for USGS national cooperative geologic mapping and landslide hazards, recounts a distant but clear connection to Florence Bascom:

“When I was mapping in the Piedmont near Philadelphia in the 1980′s, I was hammering away at an outcrop on the side of the road.  An elderly gentleman driving by saw me and parked his car so that he could talk to me. It was common for people to stop and ask me what I was up to, and I had my usual reply ready. His comment, however, was not one that I was expecting. He had already figured out that I was a geologist, and he angrily asked me why I was remapping an area already mapped by Florence Bascom. Fortunately, I was able to pull out a copy of Bascom’s 1909 USGS folio of the Philadelphia area and explain that, indeed, I was benefiting from her fantastic work. I assured the gentleman that I properly understood the role that Dr. Bascom had played in field of geology and appreciated that I was standing on the shoulders of a giant. He went away mollified, if not happy.”

Clarissa Harlowe "Clara" Barton (December 25, 1821 – April 12, 1912)

Clara Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts. She became a teacher, worked in the U.S. Patent Office and was an independent nurse during the Civil War. While visiting Europe, she worked with a relief organization known as the International Red Cross, and lobbied for an American branch when she returned home. The American Red Cross was founded in 1881, and Barton served as its first president.

Early Life
Educator, nurse and founder of the American Red Cross Clara Barton was born Clarissa Harlowe Barton on December 25, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts. Barton spent much of her life in the service of others and created an organization that still helps people in need today -- the American Red Cross.

A shy child, she first found her calling when she tended to her brother David after an accident. Barton later found another outlet for her desire to be helpful as a teenager. She became a teacher at age 15 and later opened a free public school in New Jersey. She moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the U.S. Patent Office as a clerk in the mid-1850s.

'Angel of the Battlefield'
During the Civil War, Clara Barton sought to help the soldiers in any way she could. At the beginning, she collected and distributed supplies for the Union Army. Not content sitting on the sidelines, Barton served as an independent nurse and first saw combat in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1862. She also cared for soldiers wounded at Antietam. Barton was nicknamed "the angel of the battlefield" for her work.

After the war ended in 1865, Clara Barton worked for the War Department, helping to either reunite missing soldiers and their families or find out more about those who were missing. She also became a lecturer and crowds of people came to hear her talk about her war experiences.

The American Red Cross
While visiting Europe, Clara Barton worked with a relief organization known as the International Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–'71. Some time after returning home to the United States, she began to lobby for an American branch of this international organization.

The American Red Cross Society was founded in 1881 and Barton served as its first president. As its leader, Clara Barton oversaw assistance and relief work for the victims of such disasters as the 1889 Johnstown Flood and the 1900 Galveston Flood.

Later Years and Death
Clara Barton resigned from the American Red Cross in 1904 amid an internal power struggle and claims of financial mismanagement. While she was known to be an autocratic leader, she never took a salary for her work within the organization and sometimes used her funds to support relief efforts.

After leaving the Red Cross, Clara Barton remained active, giving speeches and lectures. She also wrote a book entitled The Story of My Childhood, which was published in 1907. Barton died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912.

Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817)

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England. While not widely known in her own time, Austen's comic novels of love among the landed gentry gained popularity after 1869, and her reputation skyrocketed in the 20th century. Her novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, are considered literary classics, bridging the gap between romance and realism. 

Early Life
The seventh child and second daughter of Cassandra and George Austen, Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England. Jane's parents were well-respected community members. Her father served as the Oxford-educated rector for a nearby Anglican parish. The family was close and the children grew up in an environment that stressed learning and creative thinking. When Jane was young, she and her siblings were encouraged to read from their father's extensive library. The children also authored and put on plays and charades.

Over the span of her life, Jane would become especially close to her father and older sister, Cassandra. Indeed, she and Cassandra would one day collaborate on a published work.

In order to acquire a more formal education, Jane and Cassandra were sent to boarding schools during Jane's pre-adolescence. During this time, Jane and her sister caught typhus, with Jane nearly succumbing to the illness. After a short period of formal education cut short by financial constraints, they returned home and lived with the family from that time forward.

Literary Works
Ever fascinated by the world of stories, Jane began to write in bound notebooks. In the 1790s, during her adolescence, she started to craft her own novels and wrote Love and Freindship [sic], a parody of romantic fiction organized as a series of love letters. Using that framework, she unveiled her wit and dislike of sensibility, or romantic hysteria, a distinct perspective that would eventually characterize much of her later writing. The next year she wrote The History of England..., a 34-page parody of historical writing that included illustrations drawn by Cassandra. These notebooks, encompassing the novels as well as short stories, poems and plays, are now referred to as Jane's Juvenilia.

Jane spent much of her early adulthood helping run the family home, playing piano, attending church, and socializing with neighbors. Her nights and weekends often involved cotillions, and as a result, she became an accomplished dancer. On other evenings, she would choose a novel from the shelf and read it aloud to her family, occasionally one she had written herself. She continued to write, developing her style in more ambitious works such as Lady Susan, another epistolary story about a manipulative woman who uses her sexuality, intelligence and charm to have her way with others. Jane also started to write some of her future major works, the first called Elinor and Marianne, another story told as a series of letters, which would eventually be published as Sense and Sensibility. She began drafts of First Impressions, which would later be published as Pride and Prejudice, and Susan, later published as Northanger Abbey by Jane's brother, Henry, following Jane's death.

In 1801, Jane moved to Bath with her father, mother and Cassandra. Then, in 1805, her father died after a short illness. As a result, the family was thrust into financial straits; the three women moved from place to place, skipping between the homes of various family members to rented flats. It was not until 1809 that they were able to settle into a stable living situation at Jane's brother Edward's cottage in Chawton.

Now in her 30s, Jane started to anonymously publish her works. In the period spanning 1811-16, she pseudonymously published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice (a work she referred to as her "darling child," which also received critical acclaim), Mansfield Park and Emma.

Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986)

Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia.  Growing up in North Carolina, she developed a sense for social justice early on, due in part to her grandmother's stories about life under slavery.
As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner.  Her grandmother's pride and resilience in the face of racism and injustice continued to inspire Ms. Baker throughout her life.
Baker studied at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.
In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women's organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, "People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job."
Joining the Struggle Against Jim Crow
Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946.
Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.
In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service.
Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Miss Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born.
Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides.
In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters.
Miss Baker, and many of her contemporaries, believed that voting was one key to freedom.  Today, that is still the case: if we do not exercise our collective voice, we are unable to influence the policies and laws that impact our lives. To be counted, we must be heard.

The Audacity to Dream Big
With Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. Ella Baker once said, "This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real."
Her influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: "Fundi," a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.