These women fought for their dreams, blazed trails, suffered trials, lived bravely, saved lives and influenced history forever.
Be inspired today by these incredible ladies in history. Enjoy!
1. Photograph of a samurai warrior (c. 1800s)
2. A Swedish woman hitting a neo-Nazi protester with her handbag. The woman was reportedly a concentration camp survivor (1985).
3. Sarla Thakral, 21, the first Indian woman to earn a pilot license (1936)
4. A woman suffrage activist protesting after “The Night of Terror” (1917)
5. Kathrine Switzer becomes the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, despite attempts by the marathon organizer to stop her (1967)
6. Annette Kellerman posing in a swimsuit that got her arrested for indecency (c. 1907)
7. The first women’s basketball team from Smith College (1902)
8. Filipino guerilla, Captain Nieves Fernandez, shows a US soldier how she killed Japanese soldiers during the occupation (1944)
9. Two women show uncovered legs in public for the first time in Toronto (1937)
10. American nurses land in Normandy (1944)
11. Voting activist Annie Lumpkins at the Little Rock city jail (1961)
12. Members of the Hell’s Angels gang (1973)
13. Komako Kimura, a prominent Japanese suffragist at a march in New York (October 23, 1917)
14. Marina Ginesta, a 17-year-old communist militant, overlooking Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War (1936)
15. Anna Fisher, “the first mother in space” (1980s)
16. 18-year-old French Résistance fighter, Simone Segouin, during the liberation of Paris (August 19, 1944)
17. Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, climbing the Chrysler Building (1934)
18. Maud Wagner, the first well-known female tattooist in the United States (1907)
19. Elspeth Beard, during her attempt to become the first Englishwoman to circumnavigate the world by motorcycle (1980s)
20. 106-year old Armenian woman protecting her home with an AK-47 (1990)
21. A Muslim woman covers the yellow star of her Jewish neighbor with her veil to protect her from prosecution in Sarajevo (1941)
22. Jeanne Manford marches with her gay son during a Pride Parade (1972)
23. Sabiha Gökçen of Turkey poses with her plane in 1937. She’s the first female fighter pilot in history.
27. Volunteers learn how to fight fires at Pearl Harbor (c. 1941 – 1945)
24. A captured Soviet soldier is given water by a Ukrainian woman after being captured (1941)
25. A mason high above Berlin (c. 1900)
26. Railroad workers at lunch. Many were the wives and even mothers of the men who left for war (1943)
27. Some of the first women sworn into US Marine Corps (August 1918)
28. Ellen O’Neal, one of the first professional female skaters (1976)
29. Parisian mothers shield their children from German sniper fire (1944)
30. Erika, a 15-year-old Hungarian fighter who fought for freedom against the Soviet Union (October 1956)
31. A Dutch woman refused to leave her husband, a German soldier, after Allied soldiers captured him. She followed him into captivity (1944)
32. Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel (1926)
33. Aviator Amelia Earhart after becoming the first woman to fly an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean (1928)
34. Afghan women studying medicine (1962)
35. A British sergeant training members of the ‘mum’s army’ Women’s Home Defence Corps during the Battle of Britain (1940)
36. Women’s Liberation Coalition March, Detroit, Michigan (1970)
37. Female snipers of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army (May 4, 1945)
38. Leola N. King, America’s first female traffic cop, Washington D.C. (1918)
39. Female pilots leaving their B-17, “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (c. 1941 – 1945)
40. A Red Cross nurse takes down the last words of a British soldier (c. 1917)
