This chapter recounts the story of Emily Warren Roebling, the woman who ensured the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge. On May 24, 1883, she was the first person to ride in a carriage across the newly opened bridge, a structure then called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” (143). Her central role was a well-kept secret, born of family tragedy and necessity. Her father-in-law, John Augustus Roebling, died from tetanus after a worksite accident at the very outset of construction in 1869. His son and Emily’s husband, Washington Augustus Roebling, took over but was left severely incapacitated by caisson disease, or “the bends,” in 1872.

For the final 11 years of the project, Emily became the de facto chief engineer. With no formal training, she mastered complex engineering principles, managed on-site construction, negotiated with suppliers, and managed political maneuvering. In 1882, when the mayor of Brooklyn tried to have Washington removed from his post, Emily successfully lobbied the bridge’s trustees to keep him. After the bridge’s completion, she earned a law certificate from New York University and became an advocate for women’s property rights. She died of stomach cancer in 1903 at age 59. A plaque erected on the bridge in 1951 honors all three Roeblings but places Emily’s name first, a belated acknowledgment of her indispensable work.

Katharine Wright was the younger sister of aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright. Her contribution to her brothers’ legendary flight was never fully recorded, which the author notes is common for women’s history. However, even at the time, newspapers acknowledged her role in the engineering feat. Katharine was the only Wright sibling to earn a college degree; she worked as a teacher, providing the family’s only steady income when her mother died. She also helped run the family’s bicycle shop, which funded her brothers’ experiments, and managed their business correspondence and media relations.

In 1908, after Orville was severely injured in a plane crash, Katharine quit her job to nurse him back to health and successfully negotiated an extension of the brothers’ first military contract with the US Army. She later joined her brothers in Europe, where her outgoing personality made her the public face of their enterprise, charming European royalty and securing business. She became an officer in the Wright Company and a vocal suffragist. Her life ended tragically after a falling-out with Orville, who felt betrayed when she married. They reconciled only at her deathbed in 1929, when she died at age 54. The author notes the ultimate symbol of her erasure: The directional sign at the family gravesite reads simply “Wright Brothers,” with no mention of their sister.

Inez Milholland, a lawyer and activist, became a charismatic symbol of the suffrage movement in the early 20th century. On March 3, 1913, she famously led the first major suffrage parade in Washington, DC, riding a white horse and wearing a white cape and a golden tiara. The image of her as a modern-day Joan of Arc was strategically crafted by organizer Alice Paul to attract media attention. A mob of hostile men brutally attacked the peaceful procession of 5,000 women while police stood by. The ensuing national outrage and Senate investigation brought significant publicity and momentum to the suffrage cause.

The chapter also highlights the racial tensions within the movement. Black women were asked to march at the back of the parade. Prominent activist and journalist Ida B. Wells defied the order, waiting for her Illinois delegation and joining the front of that section. More than two dozen students from Howard University’s Delta Sigma Theta also marched in cap and gown. Milholland continued her tireless activism but died in 1916 at age 30 from pernicious anemia after collapsing during a speech. Her last public words, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” (163), became a rallying cry for the movement, and she was immortalized as a martyr for the cause.

Maggie Lena Walker overcame the barriers of racism and sexism in the post-Confederacy South to become the first Black woman in the US to charter and preside over a bank. On November 2, 1903, she opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. Born in 1864 to a formerly enslaved woman, Walker dedicated her life to the economic empowerment of the Black community.

She rose through the ranks of the Independent Order of St. Luke, a mutual aid society, transforming it from a struggling organization into a financial powerhouse. The bank was founded on her principle of collective economics, encouraging community members to pool their resources, save their money (even if just pennies), and access fair loans that were denied to them by white-owned institutions. Walker was a demanding leader who also created opportunities for Black women by hiring them as bank staff. Beyond the bank, she founded a newspaper, the St. Luke Herald, and a department store, the St. Luke Emporium. A vice president of the NAACP, Walker created lasting institutions that served her community and proved the power of Black economic self-reliance.

Mary Tape, a Chinese American immigrant, fought for her child’s right to an education 70 years before Brown v. Board of Education. In 1884, Tape’s eight-year-old, American-born daughter Mamie was denied admission to a public school in San Francisco, California, solely because she was of Chinese descent. Mary and her husband, Joseph, sued the school principal and the board of education. The resulting 1885 court case, Tape v. Hurley, established a significant civil-rights precedent when the California Superior Court ruled that excluding Chinese American children from public schools was unconstitutional.

However, the victory was short-lived. State legislators quickly passed a new law establishing separate, segregated schools for children of “Mongolian or Chinese descent” (172), effectively creating the “separate but equal” system that would be nationally validated by Plessy v. Ferguson a decade later. Tape passionately protested this injustice in a letter to the school board, questioning if it was a “disgrace to be Born a Chinese” (173). Although her children were ultimately forced to attend the segregated school, Mary Tape’s legal challenge was a pioneering fight against racial exclusion in American education.

Zitkala-Ša, a Yankton Sioux writer, musician, and activist, fought for the rights and cultural preservation of Indigenous Americans. Born Gertrude Simmons Bonnin in 1876, she was taken from her reservation at age eight and sent to a missionary-run boarding school designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. She chronicled the trauma of this experience, including having her hair cut, in essays for national magazines like The Atlantic Monthly.

As an adult, Zitkala-Ša used her talents as a writer and orator to challenge racist stereotypes and advocate for her people. Her 1921 book, American Indian Stories, helped reshape white Americans’ views of Indigenous peoples. She argued that Indigenous Americans, who had been on the continent for centuries, were being denied the basic rights promised in the Declaration of Independence. After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 without enfranchising most Indigenous women, she campaigned for Indigenous American citizenship. Her tireless work was instrumental in the passage of the federal Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Upon her death, she became the first Indigenous American woman buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

This chapter honors the “Hello Girls,” the pioneering female telephone operators of the US Army Signal Corps who served on the front lines during WWI. At the request of General John J. Pershing, who was frustrated with inefficient battlefield communications, the Army recruited fluent French-speaking American women. These skilled operators dramatically improved efficiency, reducing call connection times from 60 seconds to just 10. Led by Chief Operator Grace Banker, the women worked under dangerous conditions, connecting hundreds of thousands of calls and becoming indispensable to the war effort.

Despite swearing an oath to the army, wearing uniforms, and facing the dangers of war, the women were classified as civilian contractors. Upon returning home, they were denied veteran status, benefits, and recognition. One of the operators, Merle Egan Anderson, led a decades-long fight to correct this injustice. Finally, in November 1977, after a long campaign supported by the National Organization for Women and other advocates, Congress passed a bill that recognized the Hello Girls as the first female veterans of the US Army. Anderson received her discharge papers in 1978.

This chapter details the final, militant push for women’s suffrage that led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. By the 1910s, the movement had adopted more confrontational tactics, led by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. In 1917, they began picketing the White House as “Silent Sentinels.” Hundreds of these peaceful protestors were arrested and imprisoned in inhumane conditions. The abuse culminated in the “Night of Terror” on November 14, 1917 (192), when guards at the Occoquan Workhouse beat 33 suffragists. News of this brutality sparked public outrage and increased support for their cause.

The political tide turned as women’s important contributions to the WWI effort became undeniable and President Woodrow Wilson finally announced his support. In 1918, Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, reopened debate on the amendment. The House passed it that year, but the Senate defeated it, and it would take another year in Congress before the 19th Amendment finally passed in 1919. The fight then moved to the states for ratification. The deciding vote came down to Tennessee in August 1920. A young representative, Harry Burn, had planned to vote against it but changed his mind at the last minute after reading a letter from his mother, Phoebe Ensminger Burn, who urged him to vote for it. His vote secured the amendment’s passage, enfranchising 26 million US women, though many women of color remained disenfranchised for decades.

Agnes Meyer Driscoll was a brilliant mathematician and cryptanalyst whose work was critical to US naval intelligence for over three decades. Known as the “First Lady of Naval Cryptology” (198), Driscoll was one of the first women to officially serve in the US military, enlisting as a “Yeomanette” in the Naval Reserve during WWI. Her genius for codebreaking was quickly recognized, and she became a foundational figure in the field.

During the 1930s, Driscoll led the team that broke Japan’s “Blue Book” naval code, providing important intelligence that allowed the US to anticipate Japanese naval capabilities and redesign its battleships. She also trained nearly an entire generation of male navy cryptanalysts who went on to lead intelligence efforts in World War II. After the war, she moved to the agency that would become the National Security Agency (NSA), where she worked on the Venona project to decrypt Soviet codes during the Cold War. Despite her key, life-saving contributions, her work remained largely unrecognized for decades. She was inducted into the NSA Cryptologic Hall of Fame in 2000.

This chapter details the partnership between activist Margaret Sanger and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, whose combined efforts led to the creation of the birth-control pill. O’Donnell contextualizes their work in an era when childbirth was a leading cause of death for women. The Comstock Act of 1873 criminalized the distribution of contraceptive information. A nurse, Margaret Sanger, was motivated by the suffering she witnessed from unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions. In 1916, she opened the nation’s first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, for which she was arrested and jailed. Her lifelong crusade led to the founding of the American Birth Control League, the precursor to Planned Parenthood.

Sanger’s dream of a “magic pill” was realized through the financial backing of McCormick, a biologist, suffragist, and heir to a vast fortune. After her husband’s death, McCormick dedicated her wealth to women’s health, funding the research that developed the pill. She was both a donor and an active overseer of the project. The Food and Drug Administration approved the birth-control pill in 1960, revolutionizing women’s autonomy. O’Donnell notes that Sanger’s legacy is complex due to her involvement in the eugenics movement, which specifically discriminated against people with disabilities and people of color. Planned Parenthood acknowledged and condemned Sanger’s involvement in this movement in 2021. The author acknowledges that the work of both women nonetheless was essential for women’s healthcare and changed history.