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.


Faye Wattleton
Nurse who was the first woman since founder Margaret Sanger, and first African American to become president of the Planned Parenthood Foundation. Wattleton developed Planned Parenthood into an influential nationwide organization.


Gloria Yerkovich
Founder of CHILDFIND, a nationwide organization which helps locate missing children. Yerkovich developed the program after her own daughter was abducted. Her concept was the prototype for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.


Ellen Swallow Richards
The nation’s first professional woman chemist, an important figure in opening careers in science to women. By applying scientific principles to domestic life, Richards became a leader in the new disciplines of sanitary engineering, nutrition and home economics.


Mary Lyon
Founded the first college for women, Mount Holyoke (1837). Mount Holyoke became the model for institutions of higher education for women nationwide. Lyon based her school on sound finances and high quality education in all disciplines, encouraging and educating women to reach beyond teaching and homemaking.


Dolores Huerta
Co-founder (with Cesar Chavez) of the United Farm Workers of America, the nation’s first successful and largest farm workers union. The UFW is dedicated to helping immigrant / migrant people of all ages. Huerta is known as a brilliant organizer, speaker, lobbyist, political strategist and human rights advocate.


Alice Evans
Scientist who found the organism which caused undulant fever, a killer disease. Evans’s discovery led to mandatory milk pasteurization, saving countless lives worldwide. An outstanding scientist, she also advocated women entering the scientific professions.


Shirley Chisholm
First African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Chisholm was also the first African American woman to receive delegate votes for the presidential nomination of a major party. A member of Congress for many years, she was also an educator and writer.


Mary Mahoney
First African American woman to study and work as a professionally trained nurse. Mahoney received her diploma from the New England Hospital in 1879, one of only four of 18 to pass the difficult course.


Katherine Siva Saubel
Founder of the Malki Museum at the Morongo Reservation in California. Born on a reservation in great poverty, Saubel became determined to preserve her tribe’s culture and language, despite overwhelming odds. A learned ethno anthropologist, Saubel was a founder of this first museum run by Native Americans.


Annie Oakley
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.


Geraldine Ferraro
First woman nominated by a major political party as a candidate for Vice President of the United States. Chosen to serve as the running mate of Democratic Presidential Nominee Walter Mondale in 1984, Ferraro had been an Assistant District Attorney in New York and later served in the United States Congress.


Betty Bone Schiess
Religious leader. Schiess led the successful effort in 1974 to have women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church in America, elevating the position of women in the Episcopal Church at all levels.


Zora Neale Hurston
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.


Anne Hutchinson
Religious leader who insisted on practicing her religious faith as she chose, including holding religious meetings in her home, the first woman in the new world to do so. As a result, she was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.


Oprah Winfrey
The first Black woman to own her own television production company and who became television’s highest-paid entertainer. She is an advocate for ending child abuse, and she contributes generously to colleges and universities.


Annie Jump Cannon
Astronomer who perfected the universal system of stellar classification. While working at Harvard Observatory, Cannon compiled the largest accumulation of astronomical information ever assembled by an individual.


Susette La Flesche
Member of the Omaha Tribe and a tireless campaigner for native American rights. La Flesche was the first Native American published lecturer, artist and author. She helped change national perceptions about the rights of Native Americans.


Louise McManus
First American nurse to earn a Ph.D. Louise McManus was central to the establishment of schools of nursing in colleges and universities, providing the fundamental basis for nursing science growth.


Sarah Winnemucca
Paiute leader who dedicated her life to returning land stolen by the government back to the tribes, especially the land of her own Paiute Tribe.


Catherine East
“The midwife of the contemporary women’s movement,” as described by Betty Friedan. East was a key staffer on President John F. Kennedy’s first-ever Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in the 1960s. East persuaded Friedan and others to create the National Organization for Women to lead the drive to eliminate gender discrimination.


Frances Wisebart Jacobs
The driving force behind the concept of today’s United Way, founder of the Frances Jacobs Hospital (National Jewish Hospital for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine), an educator and philanthropist.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.


Jane Cunningham Croly
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.


Fanny Wright
First American woman to speak out against slavery and for the equality of women. An inspiration to Stanton, Anthony and other women’s equality advocates, Wright wrote and spoke out publicly for equal rights for all at a time when women were not accepted in such roles.