Timeline of Women's History
400 BC - Greece
Agnodice recognized as one of the first female gynecologists. She is said to have courageously practiced medicine in Greece when women faced the death penalty for doing so. Eventually caught, she was vindicated and allowed to continue when patients came to her defense.
1691 - Mexico
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz received criticism for studying secular texts in a time where it was prohibited. She defended women's rights to education by proclaiming "one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper." She is a national icon and appears on Mexican currency.
1860 - Russia
Anna Filosofova was a women's rights activist and Russian philanthropist that believed it was better to educate and train the poor rather than provide cash benefits. In 1860, she co-founded a society to provide support to the poor, including not only affordable housing but also decent work for women.
1893 - New Zealand
Kate Sheppard, a suffragist, presented a "monster" petition to Parliament demanding women's suffrage with nearly 32,000 signatures. This led to New Zealand becoming the first self-governing country to grant national voting rights to women in 1893.
1911 - Japan
Raicho Hiratsuka, a pioneering Japanese editor, writer, and political activist, cofounded her country's first all-women run literary journal, Seito, in 1911 through which she challenged women's traditional roles at home. In the magazine's inaugural issue, she urges women to "reveal the genius hidden within us!"
1951 - Egypt
In 1951, Doria Shafik stormed parliament with 1,500 women demanding full political rights, pay equality and reforms to personal status laws. These efforts, along with countless others to come, helped pave the way to women's right to vote in 1956.
1951 - United Kingdom
Rosalind Franklin, British chemist, paved the way for the discovery of DNA's double helix structure through the revolutionary use of x-ray diffraction. Franklin captured the photo evidence through 100 hours of extremely fine beam x-ray exposure from a machine she had refined.
1960 - Guatemala
Rigoberta Menchu was the first indigenous person to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaigning for social justice, ethno-cultural reconciliation and indigenous peoples' rights during and after Guatemala's Civil War (1960-1996). In 2006, she cofounded the Nobel Women's initiative to magnify women's work on peace, justice and equality.
1973 - USA
Billie Jean King, American tennis champion and social change activist, threatened to boycott the U.S. Open in 1973 unless women were given equal prize money - a demand that was met, making the U.S. Open the first major tournament of its kind to offer pay equality.
1992 - Botswana
Unity Dow won a historic case in 1992 enabling women married to non-citizens the right to confer nationality to their children. Later, as Botswana's first female High Court judge, she gained international acclaim on a case that allowed Botswana's San people to return to their ancestral homelands.
1990s - India
Vandana Shiva, an environmentalist, formed Navdanya in India during the early 1990s to conserve unique strains of seed crops and to educate farmers on eco-diversity. She also created a program on biodiversity, food and water, which empowers women in protecting the livelihoods of their communities.
2016 - Zimbabwe
Loveness Mudzuru and Ruvimbo Tsopodzi, former child brides, went to court on child marriage with a ruling in their favor stating that nobody in the country may enter into marriage, including customary law unions, before the age of 18.
For those interested in the evolution of women in comics...
