100 Great American Women | Equal Visibility Everywhere
(in alphabetical order)
- Abigail Adams: “Remember the ladies!” she wrote to her husband, though John Adams and the Founding Fathers still managed to forget.
- Jane Addams: the founder of Hull House became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace.
- Madeleine Albright: the first woman to become Secretary of State.
- Marin Alsop: the first female conductor of a major American symphony (the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) and a regular guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic.
- Marian Anderson: the celebrated contralto whose open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial galvanized the conscience of the country.
- Maya Angelou: the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author who became the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost in 1961.
- Susan B. Anthony: called “the Napoleon” of the women’s movement, she spent 60 years leading the fight for suffrage.
- Sheila Bair: the current chairperson of the FDIC, she was one of the first government officials to recognize the problem of subprime loans.
- Clara Barton: called “the angel of the battlefield” for her ministrations during the Civil War, she went on to found the American Red Cross.
- Regina Benjamin: the current Surgeon General of the United States, and only the fourth woman to serve in that position.
