Awesome Stuff Women Did

Because women have done more in the past 10,000 years than just pop out babies and make sandwiches.

DISCLAIMER: We make no claim that all women featured here are saints. They did awesome stuff; the women themselves might not have been. Keep that in mind before sending angry notes.

Pioneered comprehensive surveys of the night sky, carefully categorizing every visible object in the void.  Wrote an influential catalogue of nebulae, of which she discovered three.  Discovered eight comets and the dwarf galaxy Messier 110. (Caroline Lucretia Herschel)

Pioneered comprehensive surveys of the night sky, carefully categorizing every visible object in the void.  Wrote an influential catalogue of nebulae, of which she discovered three.  Discovered eight comets and the dwarf galaxy Messier 110. (Caroline Lucretia Herschel)

From Wonder Woman #113

From Wonder Woman #113

Struck out both Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth as a 17-year-old minor league pitcher, when both Ruth and Gehrig were Yankees. (Jackie Mitchell) ETA: The next day, MLB commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis voided Mitchell’s contract, claiming that baseball was “too strenuous” for women.

Struck out both Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth as a 17-year-old minor league pitcher, when both Ruth and Gehrig were Yankees. (Jackie Mitchell)

ETA: The next day, MLB commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis voided Mitchell’s contract, claiming that baseball was “too strenuous” for women.

Invented the Del-Em, a device to perform menstrual extraction—a form of both menstrual control and very early term abortion, which requires no anesthetic, is controlled by the woman receiving it, and can be performed at home (Lorraine Rothman)

Invented the Del-Em, a device to perform menstrual extraction—a form of both menstrual control and very early term abortion, which requires no anesthetic, is controlled by the woman receiving it, and can be performed at home (Lorraine Rothman)

(Possibly) created the first calendars, with bones marked for 6 lunar months—which is also in accordance with the average menstrual cycle.

(Possibly) created the first calendars, with bones marked for 6 lunar months—which is also in accordance with the average menstrual cycle.

Opened the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S., and the first that was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers, which received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onward. Introduced the diaphragm to the the U.S., smuggling them from the Netherlands. Helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva. Opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city’s health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community’s elder statesman, W. E. B. Du Bois. Toured Europe, Africa and Asia in the 1960s lecturing and helping to establish clinics (Margaret Sanger)

Opened the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S., and the first that was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers, which received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onward. Introduced the diaphragm to the the U.S., smuggling them from the Netherlands. Helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva. Opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city’s health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community’s elder statesman, W. E. B. Du Bois. Toured Europe, Africa and Asia in the 1960s lecturing and helping to establish clinics (Margaret Sanger)

The trouble is that if men start to vote, they will vote too much. Politics unsettle men and unsettled men means unsettled bills, broken furniture, broken vows, and divorce………if men were to get the vote who knows what would happen- its hard enough to keep them home know. History is full of unhappy examples of men in public life- Nero, Herod, King John………
Nellie McClung, as “Premier” at her brilliantly satirical mock Parliament in Manitoba where women discussed the “horrible consequences” that would occur should men be given the vote.  Two years later, Manitoba granted women the vote in provincial elections.


Escaped slavery and then returned several times to lead 70 other slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad.  During the American Civil War she was a Union Spy, recruited men for the war, led raids that freed hundreds of other slaves, was crucial to several ambushes, campaigned throughout for women’s right to vote, took care of her parents, and died at age ninety-three in a home for elderly African-Americans that she herself had founded earlier in her life.  All while having chronic head trauma that caused seizures most of her life. (Harriet Tubman)

Escaped slavery and then returned several times to lead 70 other slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad.  During the American Civil War she was a Union Spy, recruited men for the war, led raids that freed hundreds of other slaves, was crucial to several ambushes, campaigned throughout for women’s right to vote, took care of her parents, and died at age ninety-three in a home for elderly African-Americans that she herself had founded earlier in her life.  All while having chronic head trauma that caused seizures most of her life. (Harriet Tubman)

Composed some of the earliest secular music in Europe, including this piece, one of the few surviving works by a trobairitz, or Spanish female troubadour (Comtessa Beatritz de Diá)

Took these photographs. (Margaret Bourke-White)