Discover the Women of the Hall

These are the Inductees of the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Select any of the women to discover their stories and learn how they have influenced other women and this country.

Achievements Year Born Where Born Year Inducted Last Name
Year Born: to
Birth State or Country: or
Year Inducted: to
First Letter of Last Name: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Inductee Name Achievements Born Where Born Inducted More

Mercy Otis Warren Arts 1728 Massachusetts 2002

Mercy Otis Warren

Year Honored: 2002
Birth: 1728 - 1814
Born In: Massachusetts
Achievements: Arts

Poet, dramatist, satirist and historian Mercy Otis Warren was widely known for using her pen to share her strong political views. She advocated for national independence and opposition to royal tyranny through works such as The Adulateur and The Group.


Margaret Fuller Arts 1810 Massachusetts 1995

Margaret Fuller

Year Honored: 1995
Birth: 1810 - 1850
Born In: Massachusetts
Achievements: Arts

Literary critic, editor, teacher and author. Fuller’s early writings inspired leaders of women’s rights. She was editor of the The Dial, a Transcendental journal, and she advocated liberation for all humanity.


Harriet Beecher Stowe Arts 1811 Connecticut 1986

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Year Honored: 1986
Birth: 1811 - 1896
Born In: Connecticut
Achievements: Arts

Author and daughter of a minister, Stowe became one of the first women to earn a living by writing, publishing the best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Although she wrote much more, her best-seller was often acclaimed as a major factor in the drive to abolish slavery.


Jane Cunningham Croly Arts 1829 England 1994

Jane Cunningham Croly

Year Honored: 1994
Birth: 1829 - 1901
Born In: England
Achievements: Arts

Journalist and driving force behind the American Club women’s movement that inspired thousands of women into a wide range of social reform activities. Probably the nation’s first woman syndicated columnist, Croly was also the founder of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.


Emily Dickinson Arts 1830 Massachusetts 1973

Emily Dickinson

Year Honored: 1973
Birth: 1830 - 1886
Born In: Massachusetts
Achievements: Arts

One of the world’s greatest poets. A New England woman who spent much of her life in one small community, her world vision and innovative style has had a lasting impact on literature.


Louisa May Alcott Arts 1832 Pennsylvania 1996

Louisa May Alcott

Year Honored: 1996
Birth: 1832 - 1888
Born In: Pennsylvania
Achievements: Arts

Author who produced the first literature for the mass market of juvenile girls in the 19th century. Her best-known work, Little Women, has appeared continuously in print since its first publication in 1868-69.


Mary Cassatt Arts 1844 Pennsylvania 1973

Mary Cassatt

Year Honored: 1973
Birth: 1844 - 1926
Born In: Pennsylvania
Achievements: Arts

American impressionist painter who captured the soul of family life, women, children, interiors and gardens. A friend and student of the great Impressionists of Paris, Cassatt powerfully influenced American art.


Emma Lazarus Arts 1849 New York 2009

Emma Lazarus

Year Honored: 2009
Birth: 1849 - 1887
Born In: New York
Achievements: Arts

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” These famous words from The New Colossus, were written by Emma Lazarus, one of the first successful Jewish American authors. Originally created in 1883, the sonnet was later engraved in bronze and placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Throughout her lifetime, Lazarus authored and published numerous poems, essays, letters, short stories and translations. She was an important forerunner of the Zionist movement, having argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before the term Zionist was even coined.


Ida Tarbell Arts 1857 Pennsylvania 2000

Ida Tarbell

Year Honored: 2000
Birth: 1857 - 1944
Born In: Pennsylvania
Achievements: Arts

Writer and editor, her expose of the Standard Oil Trust in the 1904 publication The History of the Standard Oil Company prompted the federal government to prosecute and break up Standard Oil for anti-trust violations. She founded the American Magazin, authored several biographies, and, in spite of her 1912 anti-feminist book, The Business of Being a Woman, remains a role model for women and men in journalism.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman Arts 1860 Connecticut 1994

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Year Honored: 1994
Birth: 1860 - 1935
Born In: Connecticut
Achievements: Arts

Philosopher, writer, educator and activist who demanded equal treatment for women as the best means to advance society’s progress. Her landmark Women and Economics (1898) argued that until women gained economic independence, real autonomy and equity could not be achieved.


Annie Oakley Arts 1860 Ohio 1993

Annie Oakley

Year Honored: 1993
Birth: 1860 - 1926
Born In: Ohio
Achievements: Arts

Markswoman, was probably the nation’s finest. A performer for many years with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Oakley was a staunch supporter of other women’s opportunities and raised funds to send needy women to college and nursing school.


Ida B. Wells-Barnett Arts, Humanities 1862 Mississippi 1988

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Year Honored: 1988
Birth: 1862 - 1931
Born In: Mississippi
Achievements: Arts, Humanities

African American leader, anti-lynching crusader, journalist, lecturer and community organizer who fought social injustice all her life. Wells-Barnett sued a railroad over segregated seating, criticized segregated education and became editor and part owner of a newspaper. The horrors of lynching inspired her to lead a major effort to abolish the atrocity.


Edith Wharton Arts 1862 New York 1996

Edith Wharton

Year Honored: 1996
Birth: 1862 - 1937
Born In: New York
Achievements: Arts

American novelist and short story writer of the 20th century. The first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for The Age of Innocence, 1929), Wharton was a prolific writer who averaged more than a book a year after the age of 40 until her death.


Elizabeth Jane Cochran Arts 1864 Pennsylvania 1998

Elizabeth Jane Cochran

Year Honored: 1998
Birth: 1864 - 1922
Born In: Pennsylvania
Achievements: Arts

Trail-blazing journalist considered to be the “best reporter in America” who pioneered investigative journalism.


Marian de Forest Arts, Humanities 1864 New York 2001

Marian de Forest

Year Honored: 2001
Birth: 1864 - 1935
Born In: New York
Achievements: Arts, Humanities

Founder of Zonta (1919, Buffalo, NY), a worldwide organization of women business and professional leaders dedicated to improving the legal, political, and economic status of women. Membership now runs 35,000 with 1,214 clubs in 68 countries.


Willa Cather Arts 1873 Virginia 1988

Willa Cather

Year Honored: 1988
Birth: 1873 - 1947
Born In: Virginia
Achievements: Arts

Newspaperwoman and editor who became an outstanding novelist with the publication of O Pioneers in 1913. Cather went on to write other great novels and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Her well-known works include My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop.


Georgia O'Keeffe Arts 1887 Wisconsin 1993

Georgia O'Keeffe

Year Honored: 1993
Birth: 1887 - 1986
Born In: Wisconsin
Achievements: Arts

Artist and perhaps the best-known American woman painter. An American original in both her lifestyle and painting, O’Keeffe produced works of high energy and vision throughout her long life.


Zora Neale Hurston Arts 1891 Alabama 1994

Zora Neale Hurston

Year Honored: 1994
Birth: 1891 - 1960
Born In: Alabama
Achievements: Arts

Novelist, anthropologist and folklorist who contributed greatly to the preservation of African American folk traditions and to American literature. Hurston’s best known works include Their Eyes Were Watching God and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road.


Pearl S. Buck Arts 1892 West Virginia 1973

Pearl S. Buck

Year Honored: 1973
Birth: 1892 - 1973
Born In: West Virginia
Achievements: Arts

Novelist whose writing evoked two different cultures, American and Asian. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth and was later the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her body of work.


Martha Graham Arts 1894 Pennsylvania 2015

Martha Graham

Year Honored: 2015
Birth: 1894 - 1991
Born In: Pennsylvania
Achievements: Arts

One of the greatest artists of the 20th century, she created a new dance language.  Named Dancer of the Century, she was the first dancer to perform at the White House and to act as a cultural ambassador abroad.


Bessie Smith Arts c.1894 Tennessee 1984

Bessie Smith

Year Honored: 1984
Birth: c.1894 - 1937
Born In: Tennessee
Achievements: Arts

One the nation’s great blues singers, Smith earned stardom from her first record 1923’s “Down Hearted Blues,” which sold two million records. The “Empress of the Blues,” made more than 160 recordings with many of the country’s finest jazz musicians.


Dorothea Lange Arts 1895 New Jersey 2003

Dorothea Lange

Year Honored: 2003
Birth: 1895 - 1965
Born In: New Jersey
Achievements: Arts

Lange was a pioneer in documentary photography, remembered for her wide-ranging photographs of Americans during the depression and the Japanese-American internment during World War II, and for her later work in Asia. She put a human face on political issues of the day, such as poverty and social injustice. Lange was the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 1940.


Catherine Filene Shouse Arts, Philanthropy 1896 Massachusetts 2007

Catherine Filene Shouse

Year Honored: 2007
Birth: 1896 - 1994
Born In: Massachusetts
Achievements: Arts, Philanthropy

Known for her visionary work in education, arts, politics and women’s affairs, Catherine Filene Shouse was the first woman to receive a Masters Degree in Education from Harvard University and the first woman appointed to the Democratic National Committee in 1919. Ten years later, she launched the Institute for Women’s Professional Relations. An ardent supporter of the arts and arts education, Catherine Filene Shouse founded and was the major benefactor of the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia – the first and only national park dedicated to the performing arts. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald R. Ford in 1977.


Marian Anderson Arts 1897 Pennsylvania 1973

Marian Anderson

Year Honored: 1973
Birth: 1897 - 1993
Born In: Pennsylvania
Achievements: Arts

First African American singer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera. An international star, Anderson was a brilliant musician whose talents helped shatter the color barrier for other African American performers.