This month, we're celebrating the birthdays of the following female trailblazers and leaders:
Hazel Dickens, bluegrass singer and songwriter (June 1)
Martha Washington, the inaugural First Lady of the United States (June 2)
Dorothy West, novelist and member of the Harlem Renaissance (June 2)
Josephine Baker, performer and civil rights activist (June 3)
Barbara Bush, former First Lady and one of only two women to be wife of one U.S. president and mother of another U.S. president (June 8)
Helen Marot, writer and librarian who investigated child labor and working conditions (June 9)
Phyllis Ann Wallace, economist who was the first woman to receive a doctorate of economics at Yale University and the first female tenured professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (June 9)
Hattie McDaniel, actress and the first Black American to win an Academy Award (June 10)
Jeannette Rankin, politician from Montana who became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916 (June 11)
Eleanor Norton Holmes, congresswoman representing the District of Columbia (June 13)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century (June 14)
Barbara McClintock, scientist who received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first woman to do so solo (June 16)
Mary Katharine Goddard, publisher who was the second printer of the Declaration of Independence (June 16)
Marita Bonner, essayist and playwright during the Harlem Renaissance (June 16)
Susan La Flesche Picotte, doctor who is known as the first Native American to earn a medical degree (June 17)
Sylvia Porter, economist, columnist, and author (June 18)
Katherine Dunham, dancer, choreographer, and civil rights activist (June 22)
Octavia Butler, science fiction writer and the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (June 22)
Helen Keller, suffragist, speaker, and author who was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree (June 27)
Lena Horne, performer and civil rights activist (June 30)
