Rosalynn Carter won the lasting affection of the American public as First Lady of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, she grew up in Plains, Georgia, where the Smith and Carter families were friends as well as neighbors. She began dating Jimmy Carter, the future President, after her freshman year at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus. They were married after his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946. Rosalynn and their children moved from post to...

When Amalya Lyle Kearse was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she was the first woman and only the second African American (after Thurgood Marshall) to serve on the court. Kearse was born in Vauxhall, New Jersey, where her father was a postmaster and her mother a pediatrician. A gifted student, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 with a degree in philosophy. She was the only black woman in her class at the University of Michigan Law School, where...

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was a pioneer in computer science, one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Hopper conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (motivated by...

Mother Antonia, or Madre Antonia as she is known in Spanish, is an American-born Roman Catholic nun and activist, who resides in a Mexican maximum security prison. Born as Mary Clarke in 1926, she has lived for the past three decades in a 10’ x 10’ concrete cell at La Mesa penitentiary in Tijuana, Mexico, one of Mexico’s most notorious prisons, caring for the inmates. In the 1970s, she chose to devote her life to the Church after she had a nightmare, in 1969, that she was a prisoner at...

Susie Marshall Sharp (July 7, 1907 – March 1, 1996) was a pioneer in the legal profession, and a distinguished jurist who became the first woman in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court. In 1926, she entered law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the only woman in her class. In 1929, Sharp went into private practice with her father, James, in the firm of Sharp & Sharp. For the first 17 years of her law practice, women in North...