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Visit the National Women's History Museum virtually by clicking on the link 

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Visit the National Women's History Museum virtually by clicking on the link 

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Explore our collection of virtual exhibits and learn about trailblazing women, past and present.

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Women's History books worth reading. Click to enlarge picture.

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Women's History books worth reading. Click to enlarge picture.

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Click the link for more Women's History Month activities.

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Click the link for more Women's History Month activities.

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Women’s History During Women’s History Month, it is important to celebrate the vital role of women in American history, and acknowledge the many achievements, joys, and challenges experienced by women over the years. To help teach students about Women’s History, Britannica’s Curriculum Expert Team…

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Gloria Estefan is a singer who fled from Cuba with her family as a young child. She’s one of the most famous Hispanic women in history because she was the first wildly successful Cuban artist in the United States.

Gloria has millions of fans, and she opened the door for many  Latina artists. She started her musical career with the Miami Sound Machine and her music reached the top charts for years.

Gloria has also produced Broadway musicals. And she was the chairperson for a campaign that raised $40 million to build the Lois Pope LIFE Center and the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis.

Famous quote:

“As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don’t want our blunders in history to get repeated.”

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NASA Computer & Mathematician, Katherine Johnson 

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NASA Computer & Mathematician, Katherine Johnson 

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Before she helped send the first astronauts to the moon, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and became the subject of an award-winning film, Katherine Johnson—who passed away on February 24, 2020 at the age of 101—was an anonymous “female computer” doing thankless but vital work at NASA. Her accomplishments have since been recognized, leading her to be regarded as one of the pioneers of the space age.

Katherine Johnson helped to send astronaut, John Glenn into space. Astronaut John Glenn’s three orbits around Earth in 1962 marked a pivotal moment in the Space Race between the U.S. and Russia. His may be the face most people remember, but behind the scenes, Johnson played an important part in getting him off the ground. Before climbing into the cockpit, Glenn requested that Johnson check the computer’s work by redoing all the math by hand, saying, “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” The flight went off without a hitch.

Fun Fact: Katherine Johnson was played by actress, Taraji P. Henson in the movie "Hidden Figures".

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Born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on January 24, 1925, in Fairfax, Oklahoma, Tallchief was one of the country's leading ballerinas from the 1940s to the '60s. The daughter of an Osage tribe member, she was also a trailblazer for Native Americans in the world of ballet. Tallchief grew up in Los Angeles, California, where she studied ballet for years, working with Ernest Belcher and Bronislava Nijinska.

During her early career, in the 1940s, Tallchief danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In 1947, she became the first prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet—a title that she would hold for the next 13 years. That same year, Tallchief became the first American to dance with the Paris Opera Ballet.

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First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama

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First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama

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After a successful career as a lawyer in Chicago, Michelle Obama became the first woman of color to become first lady of the United States in 2008. She used her position to advocate for health initiatives, access to higher education, and international education opportunities for girls all over the world. In 2018, her book Becoming broke records when it became the best-selling book of the year, selling more than 10 million copies within the first year.

Fun Facts:
Michelle skipped second grade.
Michelle Obama isn't a fan of the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, because she believes you continue to grow, change, learn and do different things even as an adult.

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Rita Moreno is a Puerto Rican actress who burst onto the scene in the 1950s. Her iconic roles in The King and I and West Side Story put her on the radar. Moreno is the first Latina to ever earn an Emmy, an Oscar, a Peabody, and a Tony award.

She is an advocate for racial and gender equality, immigrants, and relief for Puerto Rico. Rita is a shining example of what can happen when you show up, work hard, be yourself, and give back to your community.

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Ferrera is an actress and an activist. She’s involved in many charities that help at-risk kids. She also co-founded Harness, which inspires, educates, and activates an interdependent community of cultural organizers and encourages people to use the power of storytelling to create a more equitable world.

America recently launched She Se Puede, a digital lifestyle community for Latinas. America continues to be involved in projects that help the greater good.

Famous quote: “To me, the tragedy about this whole image-obsessed society is that young girls get so caught up in just achieving that they forget to realize that they have so much more to offer the world.”

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Doing back-breaking work under the unforgiving sun, sleeping in rough shacks with dozens of men to a room, all for below-poverty-level wages; farm workers in the early Twentieth Century, most of whom were immigrants from Central America, had a hard, painful, unjust life. That is, until Dolores Huerta and others like her, came along. In 1965, Huerta created the United Farm Workers, an organization that worked tirelessly to improve the working conditions for farm workers. By leading boycotts, picketing, protesting and lobbying, Huerta was instrumental in bringing about legislation that protects some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

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Ferial Govashiri served as the Personal Secretary to the President of the United States. She got her bachelor of political science from University of California, Irvine in 2005 and got into Politics in 2007 when she joined Obama’s Presidential Campaign working in the Department of Scheduling and Advance at his Chicago Headquarters. After the election, she went on to work at the White House National Security Council where she first served as a Senior Advisor to Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Advisor and then as the Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff and the Director of Visits at the NSC. She helped plan the President’s foreign trips as well as foreign leaders’ visits to the White House. After five years on the NSC, she transitioned to serve as a personal aide to the President in 2014.

Fun Fact: Ferial is fluent in Farsi.

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Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, she began writing at only a few years of age.

She has received a Genius Grant from OZY Media, as well as recognition from Scholastic Inc., YoungArts, the Glamour magazine College Women of the Year Awards, and the Webby Awards. She has written for the New York Times newsletter The Edit and penned the manifesto for Nike's 2020 Black History Month campaign. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and is the youngest board member of 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the United States.

Fun Fact: Amanda has a speech impediment. That means it’s hard for her to say certain letters of the alphabet. As a kid, Gorman began writing poetry to help her find her voice. In high school, she began reciting her poetry out loud. This helped her improve her speech.

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Actress, Activist, & Animal Advocate Betty White

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Actress, Activist, & Animal Advocate Betty White

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Betty White was not just a show host and an actress: she was a producer, a writer, a singer and was one of the very first women to get full creative control both in front of and behind the camera back in the 1950s when such a thing was almost unheard of.

White rose to become the star and producer of her own national talk and variety TV program, "The Betty White Show." In 1954, White invited a Black tap dancer named Arthur Duncan to perform on the program -- an inclusion that did not sit well with a number of TV stations in the racially segregated American South. After they tried to intimidate White into firing Duncan by threatening to boycott the show, White responded to their demands with an unblinking, "Live with it." She proceeded to give Duncan as much airtime as possible.

White, who died on December 31, 2021, just seventeen days before she would have turned 100, was a groundbreaking proponent of gender justice, racial equity, and animal rights.

Fun Fact: If Betty hadn't been an actress, she said she would have been a zookeeper. She tried to visit local zoo's wherever she traveled.

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In 1983, the world watched as Sally Ride—an astronaut and physicist—became the first American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. She was the third woman ever in space, paving the way for future female scientists.

Ride felt responsible for paving the way for women in space. Her performance and skill, alongside her four male crewmates, made her a symbol of equality.

Fun Fact: Ride presented her in-flight suit to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in a ceremony shortly after the STS-7 mission. It can be seen on display in the National Air and Space Museum's Moving Beyond Earth exhibition.

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Dr. Saba Valadkhan  is an Iranian American biomedical scientist, and an Assistant Professor and RNA researcher at Case Western Reserve University. Saba Valadkhan was born in Tehran in 1974 to bright parents who had a great influence on her. She was qualified as a medical doctor in Iran, before moving to the United States to pursue post-graduate study at Columbia University in New York.

In 2005, she was awarded the GE / Science Young Scientist Award for her breakthrough in understanding the mechanism of spliceosomes – “akin to finding the Holy Grail of the splicing catalysis field” – a critical area of research, given that “20 percent or 30 percent of all human genetic diseases are caused by mistakes that the spliceosome makes” .

As a result of this success, Valadkhan received many invitations by universities to take up a research post. In 2004 she joined the Center for RNA Molecular Biology, one of the top research centers of its kind located at Case Western Reserve University. She is currently a biomedical scientist and assistant professor and RNA researcher there.

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After graduating from Yale Law School, Sonia Sotomayor served as Assistant District Attorney in New York before she was nominated to the U.S. District Court by President George H.W. Bush. In 2009, she became the first Hispanic and Latina Justice to serve on the United States Supreme Court after she was nominated by President Barack Obama.

“There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested”, says Sonia Sotomayor, “whether it's serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unexpected strengths.” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is herself testament to these words. Raised in a single parent household in the Bronx, Sotomayor went on to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton, went to Yale Law School, and from there became, first a U.S. District Court Judge, and then a Supreme Court Justice. During her time in the Supreme Court, Sotomayor has worked tirelessly to be a voice for women and ethnic minorities in criminal justice reform.

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The Freedom Forum's mission is to foster First Amendment freedoms for all.

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Before Rosa Parks, there was 15 year old, Claudette Colvin.

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Few people know the story of Claudette Colvin: When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person — nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing.

Most people know about Parks and the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that began in 1955, but few know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.

Colvin was the first to really challenge the law.

Now a 69-year-old retiree, Colvin lives in the Bronx. She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday.

The bus driver ordered her to get up and she refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. Two police officers put her in handcuffs and arrested her. Her school books went flying off her lap.

"All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily," Colvin says.

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First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt

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First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt

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Eleanor Roosevelt was the longest-serving First Lady of the United States, but she did much more than simply support her husband in the presidency. Although it was a bit taboo for a First Lady to speak on such issues in the 1960s, Roosevelt was outspoken about the civil rights movement. After leaving office, she went on to become the United State's first delegate of the United Nations where she served on the UN Commission on Human Rights and helped pass the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Women's Right's Activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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Women's Right's Activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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As a leader of the women's rights movement in the late 1800s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a firm advocate for equal rights for all. She hosted the first Women's Rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, wrote speeches for Susan B. Anthony, and even scheduled her honeymoon around a World's Anti-Slavery convention. She passed away before the 19th Amendment (which gave women the right to vote) was passed, but it could not have been passed without her advocacy.

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After a successful career as an attorney in Hawaii, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color elected to Congress in 1965. As a third-generation Japanese American, Mink was the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress where she fought for social welfare and civil liberties.

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After serving as District Attorney of San Francisco, California Attorney General, and United States Senator, Kamala Harris became the Vice President of the United States in 2021 and is the first female, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to hold the office. After the election in 2020, Harris said "While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last—because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities."

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Known for her iconic collars, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1993 until her death in 2020. She graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School, and was the first Jewish woman (and only the second woman) to ever serve. She spent much of her career fighting for women's rights and gender equality, and has since become an icon for the feminist movement.

Fun Fact: RGB's favorite color was blue, which is said to be the color of justice.

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Serena Williams is a professional tennis player with 23 Grand Slam singles titles to her name—the last of which she won while pregnant. She currently holds more titles than any other active player, has won four Olympic gold medals, and became the highest-paid female athlete in the world in 2016. She's spent much of her career advocating for equal treatment of women and women of color within sports, and has been outspoken about the gender pay inequality in athletics.

Serena Williams and her family also created The Yetunde Price Resource Center in honor of the life and memory of her older sister, Yetunde. The Center ensures that those affected by trauma have the resources necessary to flourish.

Fun Fact: Serena & her sister, Venus grew up in the city of Compton. Her favorite sport to watch other than tennis is gymnastics.

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Actress, Philanthropist, & Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle

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Actress, Philanthropist, & Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle

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Before Meghan Markle was an actress or known to the world as "Duchess of Sussex", Markle was an early advocate for women's rights. At the tender age of 11, Meghan was outraged by a commercial that outwardly suggested only women do dishes, so the budding feminist wrote a letter to Procter and Gamble asking them to amend the advertising language. The company agreed.

Meghan was also an active ambassador for World Vision Canada, one of her many philanthropic initiatives. “In 2016, the actress became the Global Ambassador for World Vision Canada, and has since traveled to Rwanda and India to support campaigns for clean water and women's education". She's also worked with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women as an Advocate.

Fun Fact: During the pandemic, Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, helped give out supplies to families at one of our very own LAUSD schools, Knox Elementary in South LA.

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After marrying into the royal family, Princess Diana could simply have sat back and enjoyed a life of relaxation and luxury without a care in the world. However, she took it upon herself to use her celebrity status to help as many people as possible, becoming the figurehead for charity campaigns around the world. Someone who had everything and was eager to share it with is many people as possible, Diana was an inspiration to people in all walks of life, and her death was met with worldwide mourning. Diana's selfess attitude is summed up by one of her most famous quotes; "Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can."

Fun Fact: Princess Dianna would have been the mother in law of Meghan Markle, who is married to Dianna's son, Prince Harry

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After a life dedicated to charity and humanitarian work, she is regarded as one of the most selfless people to have ever lived, and her efforts were recognized in 1979 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize. However, one of the most admirable things about Mother Teresa is that she wasn't doing it for the recognition – she spent nearly 30 years of her life helping others before anybody even knew who she was. She believed in doing whatever was possible to help, whether big or small, with her philosophy being; "If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."