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Inge Ginsberg
As a Holocaust survivor, her poetry was too dark for some, but it was perfect for death metal.
Mary Ellis
At age 101, this woman was one of the last surviving female pilots from WW2, and older than the Royal Air Force by one year - she died today.
Jess Wade
She wrote 270 Wikipedia articles in a single year -- “I had a target for doing one a day, but sometimes I get too excited and do three.”
Miriam O’Brien Underhill
She pioneered and argued for "manless" climbing in a hugely influential 1934 essay.
I saw no reason, why women, ipso facto, should be incapable of leading a good climb. They had, as a matter of fact, already done so, on some few scattered occasions. But why not make it a regular thing, on the usual climbs of the day?…I decided to try some climbs not only guideless, but manless.See also:
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- Virginia Hall (one-legged spy who climbed mountains to escape Nazis)
- Gertrude Bell (mountaineer, explorer, and diplomat)
- Fannie Quigley (miner, hunter, and brewer who used mine shafts as beer fridges)
- Ashima Shiraishi (incredibly successful teen mountain climber)
- Lhakpa Sherpa (who has climbed Everest more than any other woman)
- Junko Tabei (first woman to summit Everest)
- The Cholita climbers of Bolivia (whose outfits are so on point)

DeDe Phillips
She was attacked while putting up a “Women who behave rarely make history” bumper sticker on her truck. No, seriously.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
She was the first black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper, one of the first black female lawyers in the United States and an advocate for granting women the right to vote.
Pinar Toprak
She’s the first female composer to score a major superhero movie, with the female-led Captain Marvel.
Piera Aiello
Forced to marry a mobster, she escaped, ran for parliament and won -- while obscuring her face. But now, she's showing it freely.
Amelia Bloomer
The publisher of America's first newspaper by and for women - and someone sadly overshadowed by her more-famous contemporaries.
Nida Khan
This 15-year-old Pakistani girl who drives motorcycles, rickshaws, and garbage trucks to help earn money for her family. She is also a medal-winning boxer and a teacher.
Ana Brnabić
For a nation whose Pride events are often a target for violent bigots, the 2017 election of a lesbian Prime Minister is an important step - but there’s a long way to go.
Esther Morris
Fifty years before women got the federal right to vote, this legal agent became “the terror of all rogues.”
Esther Morris
50 years before women got the federal right to vote, Esther Morris became America's first female justice of the peace. A contemporary newspaper called her “the terror of all rogues” and said she offered “infinite delight to all lovers of peace and virtue."
Lee Meng
When Singaporean guerrillas tried overthrowing British rule, they turned to this gangster to run their communications. The cat-and-mouse game in which she was caught by a female police officer is riveting stuff.
Gertrude Jeannette
New York's first licensed female cabbie didn't let racism, sexism, or a speech impediment slow her down.
Maureen Mancuso
Without training, this 13-year-old shattered world records for running in 1967 -- unfortunately, it happened shortly after Kathrine Switzer's headline-making Boston marathon entry, and Mancuso's feat was all but forgotten.
Tammie Jo Shults
One of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots took a job with a commercial airline - and then saved the day when an engine exploded mid-flight.
Regina Anderson
Her apartment, which she dubbed Dream Haven, was a “who’s-who of the Harlem Renaissance: artists, poets, writers, songwriters, intellectuals, and activists” - everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes to W.E.B. Du Bois.
Beate Klarsfeld
Together with her husband Serge, this woman has spent her life tracking down war criminals and bringing them to justice.
Millie Veasey
Part of a WW2 unit that untangled a logistics nightmare, she lived to a hundred and helped run a chapter of the NAACP.
Franca Viola
In the 60s, an Italian woman was abducted and raped - and then pressured to marry her rapist. She instead took him to court and got him tossed into jail.
Georgia Gilmore
She organized the Club From Nowhere - a collection of chefs who helped the effort in anonymity, to avoid reprisals in their personal and professional lives.
Marielle Franco
When she was assassinated for her critiques of the police, protests broke out across Brazil.
Malvika Iyer
“Just know that a bad phase or a disability is a chapter in your book … it’s not the entire story,“ - Dr. Malvika Iyer, who lost both her hands at age 13.
Mary Kingsley
This trader published extensively about her travels into little-visited parts of the world, opening up the minds of the British public in the process.
Kim “Geguri” Se-Yeon
The first woman in the Overwatch e-sports league had to go through hell to prove herself.
Sarla Thakral
The first Indian woman to fly an airplane was a 21-year-old mom - who did it in a sari.
Lakshmikutty Amma
This 75-year-old can prepare 500 herbal medicines from memory - and she just won India's 4th-highest civilian honor, the Padma Shri Award!
Banda Didá
“They used to say drumming wasn’t for women because the instrument was heavy... But we’re warrior women, and yes, we can play."
Maria Rasputin
Man, this woman had a *life*. Celebrity, fugitive, circus performer, shipworker, and daughter of Rasputin...!
Fannie Quigley
This intrepid explorer used mine shafts as a beer fridge and shot bears to get lard for pie crusts.
Minnie Dean
An unlicensed foster mom in an era desperately in need of them, she was unjustly made out to be a bloodthirsty murderer when one of the children in her care died of an accident.
Wendy Carlos
She developed the moog synthesizer. She did the score for Tron. And she's trans. She's probably more awesome than I'll ever be.
Suzelle Poole
"Life is too short not to do what you want to do... It's never too late. So start doing what you love doing now."
Elizebeth Smith Friedman
J Edgar Hoover called America's first female codebreaker “one of the cleverest woman operators I have encountered. Cultured, businesslike, cunning… she presented one of the most difficult problems in detection the FBI has tackled in this war.”
Amla Ruia
This nonagenerian entrepreneur helps out villages across Rajasthan, India, by building dams.
Dana Fischer
And for those asking, yes, she's doing it in a cosplay outfit.
Kimiko Nishimoto
I love 89-year-old Kimiko Nishimoto’s self-portraits. I want to be as cool as her if I grow up.
Ann Gregory
“It was better for me to remember that the flaw was in the racist, not in myself.”
Domino Harvey
Starting her young life as a model, she soon turned to bounty hunting - and eventually to drugs. She got a movie in 2005, but it couldn't hope to cover her complexity.
Jeannie Rousseau
Using her photographic memory, this WW2 spy stole some of the most vital German rocket plans, and suffered a year in concentration camps for it. She died this year.
Gitanjali Rao
The Colorado seventh-grader was unimpressed by the options her parents had to test water in their home. So she created a sensor-based device using chemically treated carbon nanotubes to do it faster.
Judaline Cassidy
Not only is she a successful plumber, she started a nonprofit to get girls into technical trades!
Barbara Pratt
Modern-day refrigerated shipping is a marvel of science, technology, and hard work: much of which came from Barbara Pratt, who spent years living in a shipping container and doing experiments to perfect the shipping process.
Zainabu Hamayaji
In order to save her kids from Boko Hara, she went to extraordinary lengths: including stripping naked and pretending to be crazy.
Stephanie Steninger
“He invaded *my* space,” she said. “I have a right to be on that trail.”
Brenda Hale
On appointment to the Lords, she had created a coat of arms bearing the motto Omnia Feminae Aequissimae, meaning “women are equal to everything.”
Kakenya Ntaiya
At the age of seven, Kakenya Ntaiya made a bargain with her father: she would undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) if he agreed to let her finish her education.
Merritt Moore
“I think it’s silly to categorize people as either having an analytical brain or a creative brain."
Edith Windsor
She was a programmer, a wife, a lesbian -- and she wouldn't rest until she could legally marry her wife.
Hailey Dawson




Susan Burton
This woman has spent her life fighting the prison industrial complex, giving ex-convicts a new lease on life.
Masako “Katsy” Katsura
“Men want to beat me. I play men, six, seven hours a day. Men… they do not beat me.”
“Uncle” Olive Yang
So here's a wild story: lesbian (possibly trans) Burmese princess becomes opium-trading warlord to escape arranged marriage.
Beatrice Shilling
This engineer fixed a flaw in the allies' planes, allowing them to dive just as well as the Germans' - an innovation instrumental to winning the war.
Agafia Lykova
Russia's most famous hermit has lived outside of civilization for virtually seven decades, amidst some severe difficulties.
Cecile DeWitt-Morette
Cecile DeWitt-Morette was a pioneering mathematical physicist who worked with Albert Einstein, Irene Joliot-Curie, and Richard Feynman, and advocated for more women in the sciences.
Jasmin Moghbeli
This Iranian-American marine is now one of NASA's newest astronauts.
Simone Veil
Veil, who died last week, was a fierce lawyer, a Holocaust survivor, and the first woman elected as president of the European Parliament.
Amy Dickman
She turned lion hunters to lion defenders, was slept on by a lion, and got a dentist to work on a leopard - quite a story!
Pauli Murray
This queer, black, possibly trans lawyer was architect of two of the most important legal rulings of the 20th century - and deserves to be way better known.
Voice of Baceprot
“I think what we want to say to the young women of Indonesia is, don’t be afraid of being different,” said Kurnia. “Don’t be afraid to shout your independence.”
Zeinab Mokalled
This 81-year-old Lebanese woman organized her own all-female recycling team, partly to empower the women, and "partly because she thought they would do a better job."
The Cholita Climbers of Bolivia
These women in top hats and colorful clothes scale mountains in skirts.
Kára McCullough
In case you missed it, a nuclear scientist won the Miss USA pageant two weeks ago.
Holly Maniatty
Famous for her spirited interpretation of profanity-heavy rap songs, this woman has gone viral many times for her performances.
Pili Hussein
This Tanzanian miner has a 70-person-strong company, but she built it by pretending to be a man for many years.
V Nannamal
This 98-year-old yoga master continues to practice yoga, teaching students and performing poses like a woman a quarter her age.
Chandro Tomar aka ‘Shooter Dadi’
"She once defeated a deputy superintendent of police and he refused to come for the presentation ceremony saying he’d been slighted by an old woman,"
Um Hanadi
She lost 2 husbands, 3 brothers, and a father to her enemy. Now she's striking back.
Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker
When Japan's seaweed production suffered a crippling year, this scientist's work on commercial cultivation helped save the entire nation.
Rena Kanokogi
50 years after she won a judo championship while posing as a man, she finally got the gold medal owed to her.
Florence Finch
During World War II, this woman quietly undermined Japan's occupation of the Philippines, and was tortured for it. Then she quietly raised a family in the United States.
Grace Humiston
America’s first female chief federal prosecutor not only put herself in harm’s way to end abusive labor practices, she later became a PI and solved murders.
The Society of Woman Geographers
When they weren't allowed to join the men-only Explorers Club, these intrepid women started their own.
Susanna Salter
Men nominated her to make fun of her. Then she won.
Saglana Salchak
After her grandmother died, this 4-year-old walked 8km in -34C weather to get help.
Kyra Poh
The video of this 14-year-old Singaporean competing in the solo freestyle event at the Wind Games 2017 – which she won! – is beautiful, hypnotic stuff.
Sarah Lezito
After watching her work, I can see why many articles refer to her as the greatest stunt cyclist around.
Caramel Curves
They dye the rubber in their tires to burn out bright pink smoke. (SO. COOL.)
Roxy Wright
This 66-year-old won the vaunted Fur Rendezcous Sled Dog Race -- and not for the first time! She'd won it 24 years earlier as well.
Barbara Buttrick
In the 50s, this woman became a championship boxer by refusing to give up on her dream.
Ida Tarbell
30 years after John Rockefeller Sr laid her family low with his shady deals, she laid him low with her journalism.
Stephanie Lampkin
After facing hiring discrimination in the software engineering field, she made an app for that: Blendoor, which masks personal details of job applicants, so they can be hired based on their merits.
Mary Jennings Hegar
This Purple Heart warrior (and medical evacuation pilot) filed suit against the US military policy excluding women from combat - the military recanted it shortly thereafter.
Mildred Dresselhaus
This physicist was the first female institute professor at MIT - by one estimate, she was author or co-author on more than 1,700 publications and articles.
Lady Jane Franklin
Lady Jane Franklin was “a tenacious, well-traveled woman who fueled a series of polar missions to locate the expedition and find out the fate of her husband. As one newspaper of the era put it, ‘What the nation would not do, a woman did.’”
Hibah Rahmani
Hibah Rahmani fell in love with the stars on cold nights as a refugee, laying on desert sand and staring at the sky as she attempted to sleep - she's now a leading NASA engineer.
Fatima al Ali
This 18-year-old UAE hockey phenom was so good that her her favorite hockey team flew her out to skate with them.
Khatoon Khider
Khatoon Khider used to be a popular Yazidi singer. Now she’s the head of an all-women battle unit with ISIS in its sights.
Marie Duval
One of the first to push the limits of the format, Duval was a cartoonist long forgotten afterward.
Aisha Bakari Gombi
Once she hunted antelope. Now she hunts Boko Haram.
Tierra Guinn
Phenomenally talented Tierra Guinn is already a rocket engineer - and working with NASA on what will be one of the biggest rockets in history.
Maanasa Mendu
After witnessing rural Indian blackouts, this American teen invented a renewable energy lamp that won the Discovery 3M Young Scientist Challenge!
Sima Azimi
In Afghanistan, this Wushu trainer teaches women martial arts - to compete, and to defend themselves.
Christine Ha
Despite near-total blindness from an autoimmune disorder, this self-taught cook won the grand prize on MasterChef in 2012.
China Machado
Machado was the first woman of color to be a supermodel, challenging racial--and later, age--barriers in the fashion industry.
Martha Matilda Harper
Harper was an entrepreneur who essentially created the modern hair salon, which she grew into a franchise of hundreds of stores across the world.
Dorothy Levitt
Levitt was one of the first female racers, and worked to popularize driving and cars among women.
Ilhan Omar
Omar was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in the 2016 election, making her the first Muslim woman, and the first Somali-American, to be a legislator.
Bernice Dapaah
Dapaah founded the Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative to stimulate employment in her hometown.
Vera Rubin
Pioneering dark matter astrophysicist and trailblazing feminist icon, Rubin once wrote "There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman."
Bow Sim Mark
Donnie Yen is cool, but his mother is MUCH cooler - she started the first Wushu school in the United States, and is one of the grandmasters of the art form.
Freddie Oversteegen
When she was a teen, this now-90-year-old woman would seduce and kill Nazis. Now she plays a mean game of Scrabble.
Paige Sullivan
When Sullivan had surgery to correct a heart defect, her mother gave her a superhero cape. Sullivan loved it so much she decided other children should have them, too.
Mary-Claire King
Geneticist Mary Claire-King has had an astounding career: she discovered the breast cancer gene; she definitively linked humans and chimpanzees; she’s used gene testing to identify the descendants of kidnapped children – and she’s done it all as a single mother.
Lila Kalis
Kalis has an astounding talent and love for driving.
Zoe Terry
After being bullied for her appearance, Terry decided to collect and distribute dolls to other girls so they would feel that they're beautiful.
Tajamul Islam
Islam started kickboxing young, and at age nine has already won national and world championships.
Jin Xing
Already a famous dancer, she transitioned to female in her 20s. Now she's the host of a television show which draws millions of viewers weekly.
“Saalumarada” Thimmakka
Thimmakka and her husband were unable to have children, so they decided to plant trees--hundreds of them, lining a kilometers-long stretch of road between their village and the neighboring one.
Ashley Callingbull-Burnham
Callingbull became the first Canadian and first indigenous woman to win the Mrs. Universe pageant in 2015. She used that to launch a campaign advocating for First Nations rights.
Tish and Snooky Bellomo
Manic Panic, which has become practically synonymous with extremely vivid shades of hair dye, was started in 1977 by these two punk rock sisters.
CaiRollers
After being introduced to the sport in 2012, this group of Egyptian women have kept playing, even using YouTube to help teach themselves.
Selvi
Selvi escaped an abusive marriage she was forced into age 14. She went on to become South India's first female taxi driver, and an advocate to prevent other young girls from being forced to marry.
Angela Mao
Making thirty movies in the '70s, Mao is considered by some "the first female kung fu star" and "the first woman to star in her own action films without having to defer to a male star".
Sandy Robson
Robson paddled from Germany to Australia, a distance of over 23,000 km (or 14,000 miles), over five and a half years.
Tanya Smith
Tanya Smith practices Historical European Martial Arts--like fencing, but instead of a lightweight rapier she uses a three-pound longsword that's almost as tall as she is. To entice more women into the sport she organized a tournament by women, for women, called Fecht Yeah.
Shamim Akhtar
"Someone once said, 'A lady cannot drive, she is weak'. Well, it's not like I have to carry the truck on my head."
Gertrude Sanford Legendre
Legendre worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, during World War II. When she was captured by the Nazis, she managed to trick her captors and keep her knowledge secret.
Clementine Paddleford
Paddleford spent years writing about food in America, traveling all over the country (and the world) to report on regional cuisine.
Shirley Muldowney
Muldowney was the first woman to receive a license from the National Hot Rod Association to drive a Top Fuel dragster, the fastest sanctioned category of drag racers. She went on to be the first person to win the NHRA Top Fuel Championship twice, and then thrice.
Clare Hollingworth
After spending a year helping 3,500 refugees escape Poland to Britain, in 1939 Hollingworth broke the news that World War II had started. That was merely the first week of her decades-long career at the Telegraph.
Karrie Keyes
Keyes is one of very few female sound engineers, working with bands like Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers for over thirty years.
Sofia Tomov
Tomov has written an algorithm to detect mutations in a patient's genome to predict whether they would have an adverse reaction to a prescription drug. And did I mention she's only twelve?
Angelina Fanny Hesse
In the 1880s, scientists were trying to isolate and culture tuberculosis bacteria. Hesse's husband Walther was running into problems until she offered a solution.
Shirin Gerami
Gerami wanted to represent Iran in triathlons, but the Iran Triathlon Federation wouldn't support her because of clothes. So she worked for months to design a hijab she could compete in.
Daisy Kwok
Fleeing racism in her native Australia, Daisy Kwok made a life for herself in Shanghai - until the Cultural Revolution.
Shu Lam
A 25-year-old student has just come up with a way to fight drug-resistant superbugs without antibiotics.

Kiara Nirghin
The 16-year-old high schooler invented a polymer from orange peel and avocado skins, capable of storing massive reserves of water.
Ernestine Shepherd
She started exercising in her 50s, and now after turning 80 starts each day by running ten miles.
Sky Brown
At just eight years old, Sky Brown is the youngest girl to compete in the skating competition Van US Open in Huntington Beach.
Betty Pack
Betty Pack worked for MI6 by seducing men to obtain military secrets, even helping to crack the Enigma code in World War II.
Nantinki Young
Young is the head cook of the Native American protests of the Dakota pipeline, supervising food preparations for almost 3000 people a day.
Margaret Abbott
In 1900, Abbott made history as the first woman to come first place in an Olympic event. The rub? She didn't know it--and for decades, neither did anyone else.
Sellappan Nirmala
In 1985, India widely considered AIDS to be a disease of Western debauchery which would not infect their country. Until Nirmala, as part of her dissertation, took blood samples that tested positive for HIV.
Cree Summer
Summer has a career as a voice actor that spans over three decades and well over 200 roles. Chances are you've heard speak some lines before.
Aimee Semple McPherson
In the 1920s, Sister Aimee was one of the most popular evangelists in the United States, so her sudden disappearance in 1926 made national headlines. It also led to accusations of kidnapping, adultery, and hoaxes.
Jessie Graff
Already the first woman to scale American Ninja Warrior's 14 1/2-foot Warped Wall, Graff has also now become the first woman to complete stage one of the show's national finals.
Katharine Blodgett Gebbie
In nearly fifty years of working for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gebbie was the director for the Physical Measurement Laboratory and its two immediate predecessors. During her time as director, four of the scientists working under her won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Zahra Nemati
After a car accident left her legs paralyzed, Nemati took up archery because "this is the rare case when a disabled person can compete on equal terms with a healthy one."
Fu Yuanhui
After tying for bronze in the women's 100 meter backstroke, Fu became an internet sensation for her adorable reactions and interviews.
Meenakshi Amma
Meenakshi has been practicing kalaripayattu for decades, and now teaches it to a younger generation -- including increasing numbers of girls.
Kristin Armstrong
Armstrong is the only cyclist to win three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the same discipline. Though a few other cyclists have won more medals in more disciplines, Armstrong also won while older than all of them, turning 43 the day after her win.
Irom Sharmila
After Indian soldiers killed ten civilians, Sharmila began a hunger strike to demand the government repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. After sixteen years she finally ended her strike to enter politics.
Yusra Mardini
A dinghy, built for six but holding twenty refugees, broke down in the Aegean Sea. Mardini, her sister Sarah, and two others jumped out and swam for three hours, pushing the boat all the way to Lesbos.
Claressa Shields
The 2012 Olympic games were the first to feature women's boxing as an event, and at 17 years old--one of the youngest boxers there--Shields won gold in her weight class. But fame, money, and endorsements did not follow.
Yuriko Koike
On July 31, 2016, the city of Tokyo elected Koike as governor by a wide margin, making her the first woman to hold that position.
Stacey Kozel
After lupus left her legs permanently paralyzed, Kozel found some leg braces that would help her stand and walk. So she decided to hike the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail.
Nzingha Prescod
Nzingha is only 23 years old and already competing in her second Olympics.
Sam Gordon
After a video of her tackling boys in peewee football at eight years old went viral, Gordon has inspired the creation of the United State's first all-female tackle football league.
Susan Finley
Ms. Finley has been working on the US's space program since January 1958, several months before NASA even existed.
Maud Wagner
Wagner was a circus aerialist and contortionist who learned how to tattoo from the man who would become her husband.
Wanda Díaz-Merced
Dr. Merced is an astrophysicist who lost her sight due to illness when she was an undergrad. As part of her doctoral research, she developed sonification technology which translates data to sound instead of the traditional visual plots.
Virginia Raggi
Raggi is the first woman to lead Rome in a history that spans almost three millennia.
Lael Wilcox
Lael Wilcox is the first woman to win the Trans Am Bike Race, an unsupported ultra-distance cycling race that covers over 4,000 miles from the Pacific coast of Oregon to the Atlantic coast of Virginia.
Miki Koyama
Koyama has been interested in racing since she was five years old, even competing (and winning second place) as early as twelve.
Destyni Tyree
After Tyree's mother lost her job, the family moved into a homeless shelter. Despite this setback, Tyree graduated from high school with a 4.0 GPA, earning a full-ride scholarship to college, along with being the prom queen, cheerleading captain, while also working 25 hours a week.
“Marm” Mandelbaum
Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum ran an operation fencing millions of dollars worth of stolen goods in New York. To increase her client base, she opened a school to teach aspiring criminals skills such as pickpocketing, graduating up to safe-cracking and blackmail.
Negin Khpalwak
Khpalwak has ignored violent threats to play music, now conducting the all-women Zohra orchestra.
Janna Jihad
Janna began using a camera to record events when she realized she was witness to things that no journalists were covering.
Patrice Banks
Banks earned her mechanic's license and started a business to teach other women the basics of car maintenance, as well as performing auto maintenance and repair, to combat mechanics who lie and upsell to female customers.
Mary Shanley
A detective for the NYPD (eventually becoming the fourth woman there to make first-grade detective), Shanley was a frequent subject of contemporary newspapers.
Phoebe Snetsinger
After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Snetsinger became driven to become the world's best birder, eventually seeing around 85% of the bird species on the entire planet.
Helly Luv
Helly Luv is a pop singer whose songs against the terrorist group have earned her its ire, and several death threats.
Lhakpa Sherpa
Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed Everest more than any other woman, but almost no-one knows about her.
Mikaila Ulmer
After becoming fascinated by bees, Mikaila started a business selling lemonade in order to help them.
Rose Mackenberg
Mackenberg was recruited by Harry Houdini to help him uncover the fraudulent tricks of psychics and mediums. After his death, Mackenberg continued to expose them for several decades.
Milla Bizzotto
At 9 years old, Bizzotto was the youngest person to participate in--and complete--the BattleFrog Xtreme 24-hour race, running six 8-kilometer laps and numerous obstacles.
Cheryl Perera
When she was 16, Perera took several months off from school to investigate child prostitution in Sri Lanka, even participating in a police sting. At 19, she founded OneChild to raise awareness of and combat the issue.
Maria Toorpakai Wazir
Toorpakai, from the Waziristan region of Pakistan, pretended for years to be a boy named Genghis Khan so she could play sports. She's now an internationally-ranked squash player.
Ma Rainey
Ma Rainey made dozens of recordings, wore diamond tiaras and beaded gowns, and was once arrested for an intimate party involving several other women.
Neetu
Married off at age thirteen, Neetu has since taken up wrestling, winning a bronze medal in the 2015 National Games of India. She's currently aiming for the 2020 Olympics.
Mumtaz Shaikh
Shaikh campaigns to get more, cleaner, and safer toilets for women to use in India.
Oksana Chusovitina
Chusovitina will be competing in the 2016 summer Olympics--her seventh Olympics to date--at age 41, making her the oldest female Olympic gymnast ever.
Ridhi Tariyal
Tariyal, along with her friend Stephen Gire, has co-founded a startup company, NextGen Jane, to gather medical information from the blood in tampons.
Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid, the first woman to earn Pritzker Prize, architecture's Nobel, passed away on March 31, 2016.
Theresa Kachindamoto
Senior Chief Kachindamoto has worked to eliminate child marriages and sexual initiations of young girls, as well as providing for the education of girls.
Gerda Geddes and Sophia Delza
Prior to the "kung fu craze" of the '70s, two women were already spreading tai chi in Europe and America.
Hilde Kate Lysiak
Lysiak, the editor, publisher, and sole reporter of the Orange Street News, is the only reporter who covers community news for her town. When she broke the news of a murder, many citizens were upset... with her reporting it.
Lúcia da Silva Teixeira
Lúcia Teixeira is a visually impaired judoka from Brazil who won second place in the 2012 Summer Paralympics, and will be competing again in the 2016 events.
Mariam Ibrahim Yusuf
Yusuf migrated to the UK from Somalia in 2008. Eight years later, still homeless and trapped in the asylum system, she's working to make sure other refugees don't face the same troubles she did.
Amanda Nguyen
After discovering that Massachusetts could destroy rape kits within six months, Nguyen researched how various states protected survivors of sexual assault, and campaigns to get specific protections codified and standardized.
Halah Al Hamrani
Practicing martial arts since she was 12, Al Hamrani now runs her own gym, Flagboxing (which is an acronym for Fight Like a Girl Boxing).
Hanan Al Hroub
On March 13 Al Hroub won the second Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize for her work with children that have been exposed to violence.
Ovarian Psycos
The Ovarian Psycos describe themselves on their website as "womxn of color, sisters, mothers, overgrown knuckleheads, riders, writers, students, wage slaves, hustlers, artists, MCs, poets, intellectuals, radical scholars, passionate womxn, environmentalists, urban farmers, medicine womxn, militants, feminists, renaissance womxn, fearless fierro riders and modern-day charras on steel horses!"
Jara Krys
Krys wants to use sex work to fund future ventures, including a YouTube show, an online store for trans-friendly sex toys, and a line of gender-non-conforming clothes and lingerie.
Maeve O’Rourke
Maeve O'Rourke served as the only lawyer for the group Justce for Magdalenes, presenting information to the United Nations which compelled Ireland to finally investigate the Magdalene laundries.
Grace Brett
At 104 years old, this yarn-bombing great-grandmother may be the world's oldest street artist.
Keshia Thomas
When a crowd protesting a Ku Klux Klan rally noticed a man with a Confederate flag shirt and an SS tattoo, they chased and attacked him. Keshia Thomas protected him.
Betty James
Betty James named the Slinky in the 1940s. Years later, she saved it from bankruptcy.
Amani Yahya
Yahya is billed as Yemen's first female rapper. For International Women's Day, Oxfam brought her and four other rappers together to raise awareness of the struggles of women in war.
Egypt “Ify” Ufele
Ify was bullied at school for her size. In response, she started an Instagram account and a fashion line.
Hailey Fort
Fort constructs mobile shelters and grows food to help out the homeless.
Margaret Crane
In 1968, the tests to determine whether someone was pregnant were done in labs, and the results sent to a doctor, who would relay it to the patient--a process which could take weeks. Margaret Crane changed that.
Sarah Parcak
Parcak uses satellite imaging to identify potential archaeological sites. Now she wants to crowdsource that.
Shamsia Hassani
Shamsia Hassani is a prominent street artist, even teaching graffiti at the University of Kabul.
Andrée Geulen-Herscovici
During World War II, Geulen moved Jewish children to Christian families. After the war, she used the records she had kept to reunite the children with any surviving family.
Alexandra Elbakyan
Most scholarly articles are accessible only behind paywalls that sometimes not even their own authors have access to. Elbaykan created a website that bypasses these paywalls, providing free access to millions of articles.
Nangeli
In the 19th century, one woman's protest against an oppressive tax led to its end, as well as her own.
Megan Hine
She can climb, abseil, start a fire with a tampon, and catch a fish with her bare hands, making her more than qualified to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Nergis Mavalvala
Dr. Mavalvala's work helped confirm a prediction Albert Einstein made 100 years earlier.
Yukako Fukushima
In Japan, a severed pinkie brands you as a yakuza member. Fukushima makes prosthetics that help them cover that and move on from their past.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Rita Levi-Montalcini had to deal with patriarchal disapproval, Fascist anti-Semitism, misogyny and war before earning a Nobel Prize for discovering nerve growth factor. Says she, "If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize."
Sveta Vold
A couple weeks after giving birth, Sveta Vold ran a half-marathon with her baby in a stroller. Seven weeks after giving birth, she completed a 135-mile bicycling ultramarathon in the snow.
Aisholpan Nurgaiv
As the daughter of a renowned eagle hunter, Aisholpan wanted to follow in her father's footsteps and become an eagle hunter herself.
Agnes and Margaret Smith
These twin sisters made a significant historical discovery, while the scholars of the university that wouldn't admit women refused to credit them.
Mona Hanna-Attisha
When she found that cases of elevated lead levels had doubled, she warned the community.
Dawn Shaughnessy
Shaughnessy leads the team that helped discover six of the elements of the periodic table.
Jeanne Córdova
Editor of The Lesbian Tide & Los Angeles Free Press. President of the Stonewall Democratic Club. Co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Democratic Party. Publisher of the Community Yellow Pages. The list of what she did as an activist and journalist is voluminous.
Paddy Jones
Paddy Jones shows everyone you're never too old to dance.
Gisella Perl
"I learned that [pregnant women] were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.''
Fernande Grudet
In the 1960s she was known as the world’s most exclusive madam, whose clients were said to include John Kennedy, de Gaulle, Onassis, and multiple Rothschilds.
Fabiola Gianotti
The former project leader of one of the teams that discovered the Higgs boson has been promoted to director-general of CERN, the first woman to hold that position.
Edith Clifford
Edith Clifford was a sword swallower of such skill that her closing act involved a cannon firing a bayonet down her throat.
Maria Pereira
Pereira invented a surgical glue which may eventually replace the need for sutures and the resulting chance of tearing and infection.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson was a "human computer" at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (later NASA), doing the math that would get Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Buzz Aldrin to space and back.
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Isabella Stewart Gardner was a woman who defined how she wanted to be remembered, but figuring out what she wanted her legacy to be proves elusive.
Ali Stroker
Ali Stroker became the first person in a wheelchair to perform on Broadway after her debut as Anna in "Spring Awakening."
Saskia Niño de Rivera
In Mexico, children of prison inmates can live in the prison with them until they're six years old. Rivera's organization aims to change that, along with other prison reforms.
Katherine Folsom
She started skateboarding to get closer to her family. Now she competes against the best in the world as one of the oldest skaters, and only women, on the field.
Alondra de la Parra
When she steps up in 2016, she will be one of fewer than twelve women worldwide to lead a major orchestra.
Maria Fernanda Pineda Calero
Calero works to educate and train other girls on their sexual, reproductive, and citizenship rights.
Dieynaba Sidibe
Dieynaba Sidibe, with an artist name of Zienixx, uses graffiti to promote women's rights.
Jesse Jane McParland
When asked how she got started with martial arts, she explained "I used to do ballet ... but I didn't like it."
Mira Modi
When her mother started paying her to generate secure passwords, she realized other people would do the same.
Ishita Malaviya
For most of her life she thought she'd have to go to California to surf. When she discovered she could surf along India's own coast, she co-founded the Shaka Surf Club to let everyone else know that too.
Sonita Alizadeh
Her parents have tried to sell her into marriage since she was 10. She's fighting against that with song.
Tatsiana Khvitsko
Born without legs and most of her fingers in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Tatsiana Khvitsko has since taken up running and bodybuilding.
Constance Leathart
She was the first British woman outside London to get a pilot's license, and one of the first to join the Air Transport Auxiliary.
Tsuneko Sasamoto
She became Japan's first female photojournalist at the age of 25. 76 years later she's still going strong.
Abzeita Djigma
This Mossi Princess founded a company to provide solar-powered electricity to help her people, and others, who lack power.
Ruth Coker Burks
In 1984, when nurses would draw straws to avoid entering the room of a patient with AIDS, and pharmacies would refuse to keep the pens of someone who worked with people with AIDS, she cared for hundreds of them with compassion and love.
Margaret E. Knight
At 12 years old, she observed an accident at a cotton mill where she worked, and designed her first invention: a safety design for looms. By her death she had 90 inventions and 22 patents.
Deepika Kurup
During family trips to India, Deepika saw that people did not have access to clean water. At age 14, she decided to do something about it.
Emily Hahn
Emily Hahn led a life as varied as her writings. She got a degree in engineering to prove that she could, then made a career as a writer; she lived in a red-light district and dined with millionaires; she had a family in England and worked in New York.
Nicole Ticea
In 2014, Nicole Ticea won first place in the British Columbia Regional Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge for her development of a faster, cheaper test for HIV.
Shazia Perveen
Shazia Perveen joined Pakistan's Rescue 1122 emergency services, becoming the nation's first female firefighter. "Some women avoid and hesitate to work with men. That is where I differ with them and think that we, women, can work shoulder-to-shoulder with men," she told local media.
Tuira Kayapó
When the Brazilian government began building a dam on her people's land, she publicly cursed its leader - and for a time, the project fell apart.
Martine Rothblatt
Martine Rothblatt founded United Therapeutics, the company which she now heads as CEO, and earned a PhD in bioethics in order to create a treatment for her terminally ill daughter, and others like her.
Syeda Ghulam Fatima
Syeda Ghulam Fatima is the General Secretary of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front Pakistan, an organization devoted to eliminating bonded labor and economic exploitation of workers. So far she has helped free over 80,000 people.
“Grandma” Emma Gatewood
The first woman to hike alone across the 2,000 mile Appalachian Trail was a 67-year-old who told her kids she was going for a walk.
Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley
In the 60s, this pioneering businesswoman fought - and won - endless battles to carve out a living for her 300+ female programmer employees.
Yevdokiya Zavaliy
Yevdokiya Zavaliy joined World War II while underage, and eventually rose to commander of her own platoon. She and her platoon terrified the Nazis so much that they gave her the nickname Frau Black Death.
Alice Ball
For decades, the world's best leprosy treatment was the work of an unknown black chemist - whose work was stolen by her successor.
Eulalia Perez
This working-class Mexican woman once owned a huge chunk of the greater Los Angeles area -- until she was cheated out of the deed.
Alia Muhammad Baker
When war and looting swept up Basra, she smuggled thirty thousand books from her library to save them from destruction.
Shemika Charles
Shemika Charles has broken world records for limbo--the latest for limboing under a car.
Mary Sherman Morgan
A lack of a college degree and a child born out of wedlock couldn't stop this woman from saving the US Space Race with her custom rocket fuel.
Chien-Shiung Wu
She performed the experiment that overturned the law of conservation of parity and helped lead to the Standard Model of particle physics, while two men got the Nobel Prize for it.
Ingeborg Rapoport
After being refused the opportunity to defend her doctoral thesis due to Nazi anti-Semitism, she returned to it 77 years later.
Lin Zhao
When jailed for being a political dissident, Lin Zhao continued to write anti-Mao screeds using hairpins, bamboo, and her own blood as ink.
April Atkins
At 12 years old, April regularly performed incredible feats of strength
Bree Newsome
Instead of waiting for politicians to bring down the much-maligned Confederate flag flying nearby the South Carolina capitol building, Bree Newsome got some climbing equipment and did it herself.
Emily Warren Roebling
When the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge fell ill, his wife took over. For eleven years.
Thai Lee
The modest head of America's largest woman-owned business is a billionaire - but she'd rather you not call her that.
Betty Reid Soskin
America's most seasoned ranger, at 93, advocates fiercely for young women of color everywhere.
Phyllis Omido
After her son got lead poisoning from the plant she worked at, she campaigned to shut the plant down - and won.
Đặng Thùy Trâm
An American soldier found and kept the diary of this North Vietnamese civilian doctor for 35 years after her death. When it was finally released to the world, nobody could have guessed the reaction.
Annie Edson Taylor
Annie Taylor marked her 63rd birthday in uncommon fashion: going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Kathrine Switzer
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer entered the Boston Marathon - against the no-women-allowed rules - and changed the event forever.
Betty Robinson Schwartz
3 years after winning the first woman's Olympic gold medal for track and field, she was written off as dead after a plane accident. She worked hard at her recovery and was at the Olympics again 5 years later.
Munira Khalif
Most high schoolers are happy to get accepted by one of the eight Ivy League schools. Munira Khalif got into all eight. And that's just the start of her accomplishments.
Tu Youyou
Humanity's greatest weapon against malaria came from an unlikely source: a secret military program, where a woman worked in obscurity for decades.
Aïcha Mekki
Moroccan journalist Aïcha Mekki tirelessly devoted herself to advocating for the downtrodden, but it was only after her suspicious death that her colleagues learned the truth - that she was one of the slum residents, herself.
Ashima Shiraishi
This 13-year-old is one of the top female rock climbers in the world. And she's got a great sense of humor on top of that.
Dolly Shivani Cherukuri
Dolly Shivani Cherukuri has just set a new national archery record in India -- and what's most incredible is that this Mighty Girl is turning three years old next week! At an archery trial this week, Dolly fired over 70 arrows and scored a total of 388 points, making her the youngest Indian to score more than 200 points at a trial according to the Indian Book of Records.
The young archer from Andhra Pradesh comes from a family of archers. Her father, Cherukuri Satyanarayana, told AFP that "you can't put too much pressure on children" but explained that she has been introduced to archery from a very young age: "When we came to know that the baby was on her way we decided to mold her as an archer." He had special arrows made for the toddler out of carbon when she was first learning so they would be light enough for her to handle.
During the trial, Dolly shot 36 arrows from 15 feet (5m) and then 36 more from 21 feet (7m). Gunjan Abrol of the Archery Association of India stated, "We are all very proud of her. We are very impressed." And, of course, the young Mighty Girl and her family were thrilled at the record-breaking feat, which is also being submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records. As her father declared: "I can't express in words how happy my family is."

Sisa Abu Daooh
Finding herself a single mom, Sisa Abu Daooh, a woman "strong as ten men," began living as a man to provide for her daughter. She's continued to do so for forty years, and just won an award for "best mom."
Naziyah Mahmood
Scientist, artist, poet, martial artist: Naziyah Mahmood does it all.
Kitty O’Neil
This strong-willed stuntwoman barreled through measles, mumps, smallpox, meningitis, deafness, and cancer to become the fastest woman alive.
“Diana”
In areas of Mexico unsafe for women, a female vigilante calling herself Diana has begun striking terror into the hearts of bus drivers. A disturbing story.
Esther Okade
This 10-year-old math genius just enrolled in college, and plans on having her own bank by age 15.
1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment
When Nazi tankers invaded Stalingrad in 1942, they fought shot-for-shot against unlikely opponents - a squadron of girls barely out of high school.
Şafak Pavey
At 19, Şafak Pavey lost her left arm and leg making sure her friend with leukemia didn't fall off a train. Her ensuing disability barely slowed her down - now a Turkish parliament member at age 38, she fights for womens' rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression.
Annie Jean Easley
Annie Easley was given literacy tests. Annie Easley was told she didn't go to a good enough school. Annie Easley became a goddamn rocket scientist. Annie Easley did not listen to the haters.
Aloha Wanderwell
It's not every woman that leaves home at 16 to befriend Chinese bandits, join the Siberian army, and film indigenous Brazilians for the first time - but Aloha Wanderwell, the World's Most Traveled Girl, wasn't every woman.
Parinya Charoenphol
This transgender kickboxer helped revolutionize the image of LGBT people in her native country of Thailand in the best way she knew how - winning bouts.
Grace Hopper
Rear Admiral “Amazing” Grace Hopper was one of the first (and finest) computer programmers in history. She created the first compiler and spearheaded the creation of one of the first compiled computer languages. She was also a badass mofo.
Marie Wilcox
The last fluent speaker of her language, she's spent years preserving and teaching it to others.
Joyce Bryant
Joyce Bryant never had any record hits, didn't appear in any films, but to the people of the 50s, this now-obscure "blonde bombshell" singer was unforgettable.
Fatu Kekula
When her family became infected with Ebola, the 22-year-old nursing student donned trash bags and began treating them.
Hedy Lamarr
Actress Hedy Lamarr's dual identities as sex icon and brilliant inventor so baffled the press that the latter went virtually unknown for decades.
Linda Taylor
When journalist Josh Levin began investigating an infamous welfare cheat, his story spiraled into an expose of one of the most outrageous female criminals in modern history.
Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, which has largely confined her to her house for 25 years. Despite this, she's written two of the biggest best-sellers in modern history.
Ann Harvey
At the age of 17, Ann Harvey saved dozens of people from a shipwreck. Then, ten years later, she did it again.
Willie Murphy
Willie Murphy is 105 pounds. 105 pounds of pure rippling muscle that can deadlift 215 pounds and her own groceries, thank you very much. Not gonna lie. You kinda suck compared to Willie Murphy.
Safiya al Bibissi
Safiya Al Balbissi walks assertively, like a queen. With great self-confidence and talent, she drives a Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulance through the streets and alleys of Tulkarem Governorate. She has become a familiar sight for many Palestinians, although some people continue to raise astonished eyebrows when they see her behind the wheel.
Junko Tabei
The first woman to climb Mount Everest - she did so even when her native Japan wanted her to do nothing but raise children and serve tea.
Priya
A new comic book with a female rape survivor as its "super hero" has been launched to focus attention on the problem of sexual violence in India.

Margaret Hamilton
Hamilton's work prevented an abort of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hamilton coined the term "software engineering." Hamilton was a badass.
Phylis Latour Doyle
From A Mighty Girl:
At age 23, British secret agent Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy in May 1944 to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France's liberation in August. For seventy years, her contributions to the war effort have been largely unheralded but, last week, the 93-year-old was finally given her due when she was awarded France's highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Doyle first joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at age 20 in 1941 to work as a flight mechanic but SOE recruiters spotted her potential and offered her a job as a spy. A close family friend, her godmother's father who she viewed as her grandfather, had been shot by the Nazis and she was eager to support the war effort however she could. Doyle immediately accepted the SOE's offer and began an intensive training program. In addition to learning about encryption and surveillance, trainees also had to pass grueling physical tests. Doyle described how they were taught by a cat burglar who had been released from jail on "how to get in a high window, and down drain pipes, how to climb over roofs without being caught."
She first deployed to Aquitaine in Vichy France where she worked for a year as a spy using the codename Genevieve. Her most dangerous mission, however, began on May 1, 1944 when she jumped out of a US Air Force bomber and landed behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Normandy. Using the codename Paulette, she posed as a poor teenage French girl. Doyle used a bicycle to tour the region, often under the guise of selling soap, and passed information to the British on Nazi positions using coded messages. In an interview with the New Zealand Army News magazine, she described how risky the mission, noting that "The men who had been sent just before me were caught and executed. I was told I was chosen for that area (of France) because I would arouse less suspicion."
She also explained how she concealed her codes: "I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk -- I had about 2000 I could use. When I used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up." Coded messages took a half an hour to send and the Germans could identify where a signal was sent from in an hour and a half so Doyle moved constantly to avoid detection. At times, she stayed with Allied sympathizers but often she had to sleep in forests and forage for food.
During her months in Normandy, Doyle sent 135 secret messages -- invaluable information on Nazi troop positions that was used to help Allied forces prepare for the Normandy landing on D-Day and during the subsequent military campaign. Doyle continued her mission until France's liberation in August 1944.
Following the war, Doyle eventually settled in New Zealand where she raised four children. It was only in the past 15 years that she told them about her career as a spy. In presenting the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour to Doyle last week, French Ambassador Laurent Contini commended her courage during the war, stating: "I have deep admiration for her bravery and it will be with great honor that I will present her with the award of Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration."

Umm Abdu
This pistol-packing medic refuses to abandon her war-torn city. “Getting justice from this war has become a personal jihad for me,” she admits. “I can’t work without it [the gun] any more.”
Lumchuan
While browsing a book of woman warriors, I came across an entry that stopped me cold. You have to read this.
Alexandra Boiko
Along with her husband, Alexandra Boiko joined Mariya Oktyabrskaya in the "get permission from Stalin to buy her own tank and fight Nazis" club, which was apparently less exclusive than you'd think.
Reza Ghul
When her son was killed by Taliban militants while defending his outpost, this Afghan mother rounded up her family and continued the defense of his outpost - killing 25 Taliban fighters in the process.
Conchita Cintrón
This bullfighter overcame patriarchal attitudes to become, according to many bullfighting aficionados, the greatest torera in history.
Doris Payne
International jewel thief Doris Payne, now 84, has a criminal history that dates back to the 1950s.
Tig Notaro
Tig Notaro had a double mastectomy. She's mostly known for a half-hour standup routine she did about her breast cancer. So when a heckler catcalled her during her set, she ripped her shirt off and did the rest of the set without it.
Maggie Gee
Maggie Gee was one of only two Chinese-American women to fly for the military in WW2. After the war, she went on to be a nuclear physicist, because, I'm guessing, her previous job had somehow not been hard enough.
Cora Strayer
Miss Cora M. Strayer ran a detective agency on the South Side of Chicago in the early 1900s. She was awesome.
Gerda Lerner
"When I started working on Women's History about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. It was not recognized, people didn't think that women had a history worth knowing. ... For women, looking back to the past has usually been painful because what we would learn would be an absence. We would learn that women had not done this and they had not done that and that essentially, according to the traditional view, women had contributed very little to the making of human society and even less to the making of the intellectual product of Western civilization."
Bibi Ayisha
"She killed for hours and stole weapons from corpses. There were bodies everywhere. No man questioned her."

Michele Roberts
'My past,' she told the room, 'is littered with the bones of men who were foolish enough to think I was someone they could sleep on.'

Parisa Tabriz
Paid to attack her employer, Parisa Tabriz is a white-hat hacker on the front line in the fight against the Internet 'bad guys'.

Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi share Nobel Peace Prize
"Her award will not mark the end of her campaign to advocate for girls’ education, she said.
'I think this is really the beginning,' she said, adding that children around the world 'should stand up for their rights' and 'not wait for someone else.'”
Congratulations to Ms. Yousafzai and Mr. Satyarthi!

Anita Sarkeesian
This is a talk I was lucky enough to see live about a month ago. It’s delivered by Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist game theorist whose academic analysis of cultural shifts in the video gaming industry has led to harassment and death threats beyond imagining. This talk was her first public appearance after she fled her house due to said death threats. She is a brave human being and her talk is very worth watching.
Lydia Cacho
"Lydia Cacho is one of Mexico's most fearless journalists. Her investigations have led to attempts on her life, and now she has been forced to flee her country. What next?"
Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho: 'I don't scare easily'
Trigger warnings for threats of rape, intimidation, torture, and the like. Brave, brave woman.
(thanks to Medea Pond for sending her Wikipedia article in!)

Ronda Rousey
First American to ever win the world championships in Judo, undefeated UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion, one of the only women in the Expendables movies, and the person who got her into it all? Her mom.
Harnaam Kaur
A woman with a disorder that causes male pattern hair growth in women, she bravely maintains the Sikh tenets against hair removal, in spite of the bullying she receives.
Teresa Forcades
The Outspoken Spanish Nun Who's Made Herself A Political ForceSister Forcades is Spain’s most famous living nun. She’s a medical doctor with a master’s degree from Harvard. She’s a feminist who’s been reprimanded by the Vatican for supporting abortion rights. She’s a Benedictine nun in a country where the Catholic Church has historically sided with fascists.

Vulvatron
Gwar’s newest frontwoman is a “Spiky Purple Amazon” named Vulvatron "She’s nobody’s girlfriend, or groupie or background dancer; Vulvatron is in charge. She gets to be a monster instead of a princess, and that is immensely important for younger girls who are just starting to explore heavy metal.” (via the Mary Sue) YOU GUYS. VULVATRON.
Souer Sourire
If you watch American Horror Story: Asylum, you may know the song Dominique. What you may not know is that it is a cover of a song from Souer Sourire, known as The Singing Nun. Sourire gave most of the money earned from the song to her religious order, who then expelled her, likely for her controversial social work and advocacy of the contraceptive pill . She lived out the rest of her life with her long-life friend and lover, Annie Pecher, before the two met a sad end. They are buried together in Belgium, where they lived. More here. (thanks to @silverlady7!)
Susan Walters
The woman you are looking at right there? Killed the hitman her husband sent to kill her -- with her own bare hands.
Kamla Devi
Indian Woman Kills Leopard In Epic Fight To The DeathIt was a battle that raged for nearly a half-hour. A 56-year-old Indian woman — armed with only farm tools — is now recovering in hospital after killing a leopard that attacked her.

Ambreen Sadiq
Muslim Female Boxer Causing Controversy While Inspiring Other GirlsMuslim Female Boxer Causing Controversy While Inspiring Other Girls. Ambreen Sadiq faces opposition from her family but is the inspiration for a new play

Machine Gun Grandma
At the time of this 1990 photo, this woman was 106 years old. She is here pictured guarding her home in Degh village, in southern Armenia.
Florence “Woo-Woo” Ditullio
Meet Florence “Woo Woo” DiTullio Joyce, aka “Winnie the Welder.” During WW2, she and some 2,000 other women worked the shipyards building ships and subs. Why “Woo Woo”? According to her:“I was a curvaceous 119 pounds. Every time I walked by, the guys would go, ‘Woo Woo!’(some things never change)

Marie Colvin
Marie Colvin’s Private WarForeign correspondent Marie Colvin was on the front lines of conflict zones, no matter the physical and emotional toll. Marie Brenner learns what led Colvin to her death.

Judit Polgar
The queen who challenged the kings
The greatest female chess player in history has retired. Godspeed, Mrs Polgar.

Belorussian Front Sniper Squad
775 confirmed kills represented in this one picture. Female snipers of the 3rd Shock Army, 1st Belorussian Front, WW2. Not pictured: Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who would have boosted the count to 1083 just by standing there.
Tura Satana
Tura Satana: Amazonian star of Russ Meyer’s cult classic film ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’
This woman had a hell of a life. After being gang-raped in her youth, she trained in martial arts and over the course of her life, exacted revenge on every one of her attackers. “I made a vow to myself that I would someday, somehow, get even with all of them. They never knew who I was until I told them.”
Furthermore: she was a pinup idol, a burlesque dancer, a movie star, and even supposedly turned down a marriage proposal from Elvis Presley.

Maria Ginesta
This is French socialist revolutionary Maria Ginesta, 17 at the time of this picture, one of the most famous of the Spanish Civil War. She served as a reporter and translator, and this picture was almost the only time she took up a gun. She died at the age of 94 in January of this year.
Keiko Fukuda
Keiko Fukuda was the only woman to ever be awarded the highest degree black belt in Judo — and she did so in her late 90s. She gave up marriage, she gave up motherhood, she gave up everything for her love of Judo. All this, starting in a time when women didn’t even show their legs. This is a documentary about her remarkable life.(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Zula Kurahimbi
Schindler's Witch | VICE SwedenAmazing read. (thanks to the one of my many brethren who submitted this!)During the Rwandan genocide, Zula Karuhimbi saved more than 100 people through “sorcery.”

Rukhsana Kausar
An Indian farmer’s daughter disarmed a terrorist leader who broke into her home, attacked him with an axe and shot him dead with his own gun. via The TelegraphIf there’s one thing a childhood in Kentucky taught me, it’s to not mess with farmers’ daughters.

Hamida Gulistani
Got Your Back | This American Life
This episode of This American Life covers Hamida Gulistani, an amazing woman who advocates for womens’ rights in Afghanistan, despite persistent death threats. Her story is incredible - definitely worth a listen.

Maryam Mirzakhani
Stanford’s Maryam Mirzakhani wins Fields MedalMaryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to ever win the Fields Medal – known as the “Nobel Prize of mathematics” – in recognition of her contributions to the understanding of the symmetry of curved surfaces.Awesome — and congratulations, Maryam!

The Gulabi Gang
An all-female vigilante group wanders rural India, teaching women self defense and confronting abusive husbands.