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    Amazing Women In History: Inspiring Stories Of 20 Women The History Books Left Out
    Amazing Women In History: Inspiring Stories Of 20 Women The History Books Left Out
    Amazing Women In History: Inspiring Stories Of 20 Women The History Books Left Out
    Ebook139 pages1 hour

    Amazing Women In History: Inspiring Stories Of 20 Women The History Books Left Out

    By KeriLynn Engel

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    About this ebook

    When you think of people in history—artists, athletes, leaders, activists, you name it—what names immediately pop into your head? Maybe you think of famous artists like Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, athletes like Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali, leaders like Caesar or Napoleon or activists like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.
    How about the internationally famous sculptor Edmonia Lewis, or three-time Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph? Queen Sayyida al-Hurra, a pirate equal in power to the infamous Barbarossa? Or Katharine McCormick, without whom we wouldn’t have the birth control pill today?

    Many more amazing women’s names have been lost to history. Sons’ names, dates of birth, and deeds were diligently recorded while daughters went uncounted and forgotten. (Genghis Kahn had four sons with his wife Börte: Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei, and Tolui. They also had daughters, but no one knows their names or even how many there were.) Even for relatively famous women like Queen Sayyida, information is scarce. The exact year of her birth is unknown, and nobody has any clue what happened to her after she was deposed in 1542.

    I don’t know about you, but this really pisses me off. I want to know more about the lives of these amazing women. I want their names to be as well-known as their male contemporaries. I don’t want them to be forgotten anymore.

    In this book I’ve collected the stories of 20 of these amazing women. The history books may have robbed of the fame they deserve, but by passing on their stories we can give these women some measure of justice and inspire more amazing women today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKeriLynn Engel
    Release dateMar 21, 2014
    ISBN9781310788086
    Amazing Women In History: Inspiring Stories Of 20 Women The History Books Left Out
    Author

    KeriLynn Engel

    Hi, I'm KeriLynn Engel—call me Keri! I'm a Connecticut-based freelance writer who blogs about women's history at AmazingWomenInHistory.com, and as Answers.com's Women's History Category Expert Writer.

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      Book preview

      Amazing Women In History - KeriLynn Engel

      When you think of people in history—artists, athletes, leaders, activists, you name it—what names immediately pop into your head? Maybe you think of famous artists like Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, athletes like Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali, leaders like Caesar or Napoleon or activists like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.

      How about the internationally famous sculptor Edmonia Lewis, or three-time Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph? Queen Sayyida al-Hurra, a pirate equal in power to the infamous Barbarossa? Or Katharine McCormick, without whom we wouldn’t have the birth control pill today?

      Many more amazing women’s names have been lost to history. Sons’ names, dates of birth, and deeds were diligently recorded while daughters went uncounted and forgotten. (Genghis Kahn had four sons with his wife Börte: Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei, and Tolui. They also had daughters, but no one knows their names or even how many there were.)

      Even for relatively famous women like Queen Sayyida, information is scarce. The exact year of her birth is unknown, and nobody has any clue what happened to her after she was deposed in 1542.

      I don’t know about you, but this really pisses me off. I want to know more about the lives of these amazing women. I want their names to be as well-known as their male contemporaries. I don’t want them to be forgotten anymore.

      On my website, Amazing Women In History, I write about women most people have never heard of before. In this book I’ve collected the stories of 20 of these amazing women. The history books may have robbed of the fame they deserve, but by passing on their stories we can give these women some measure of justice and inspire more amazing women today.

      Admiral Amazing Grace Hopper, pioneering computer programmer

      (Davis, 1984)

      United States Navy Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was one of the first programmers in the history of computers. Her belief that programming languages should be written to look like English and be easily understood were highly influential on the development of one of the first programming languages called COBOL. It’s largely due to Grace Hopper’s influence that programmers today use if/thens instead of 1s and 0s.

      From a young age, Grace had a curious and analytical mind. When she was seven, she decided she wanted to figure out how clocks worked. To find the answer, she took apart every single alarm clock in the house. When her mother found out, instead of scolding Grace she limited Grace to taking apart only one alarm clock at a time.

      Grace’s parents encouraged her curiosity in other ways, too. Her mother, Mary Campbell Van Horne Murray, had been very interested in math as a young woman, but hadn’t been able to study anything beyond geometry because it wasn’t considered proper for a lady at the time. She made sure to encourage Grace in her interests and not to limit her based on her gender. Grace’s father, Walter Fletcher Murray, wanted all of his children to be self-sufficient and made sure his two daughters had the same education and opportunities as his son, which was unusual for the early 20th century. With this encouragement, she went on to study math and physics at Vassar and then Yale, earning her PhD in mathematics in 1931. After graduating, Grace stayed at Vassar to teach mathematics for the next ten years.

      A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.

      Grace Hopper took a leave of absence from teaching at Vassar to enlist in the US Navy Reserve in 1943, becoming a part of an all-female division called Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). She had to obtain an exemption in order to enlist since she weighed in at 15 lbs (about 7 kg or 1 stone) below the required weight of 120 lbs (about 54 kg or 8.5 stone). She graduated first in her class and was assigned the rank of lieutenant, junior grade. She was immediately assigned to the programming staff for the new Mark I computer (an electro-mechanical computer weighing over 10,000 lbs/4500 kg) at Harvard University.

      After the end of World War II in 1945, Grace requested a transfer from WAVES to the regular Navy, but her request was denied due to her age (she was 38 at the time). She was now completely hooked on computer programming, turning down a full professorship offer from Vassar to continue to work at Harvard as a research fellow under a Navy contract.

      It was in the 1940s that Grace Hopper’s most famous story occurred. Grace and her were having a hard time figuring out what was causing a glitch in the Mark II computer they were working with. Finally, they discovered the source of the issue: a live moth was stuck in one of the electrical switches controlling a circuit. Grace loved to tell the story about how they debugged the early computer, bringing the obscure engineering term into popular use in computer science.

      In the 1950s, Grace started working for a company called Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as the senior mathematician on the team developing a new computer called UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I), which became the second commercial computer produced in the United States. It was at this position that she created the A compiler. In computer programming, a

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