Aletta H. Jacobs was the first woman to officially attend a Dutch University and the first female physician in the Netherlands. She was also a women’s suffrage activist and inventor. Jacobs was born in 1854 in Sappemeer, Netherlands to Abraham Jacobs, a physician and Anna de Jongh. From an early age, Jacobs would accompany her …
Mae Jemison is an American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space in 1992, when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison was born in 1956 in Decatur, Alabama. At the age of three, Jemison’s family moved to Chicago so that she and her …
Dr. Justina Ford was an American physician who become the first female African American physician licensed to practice in Denver, Colorado, challenging and overcoming gender and racial barriers to succeed in her medical career. She practiced gynaecology, obstetrics, and paediatrics from her home for half a century. Ford was born in 1871 in Knoxville, Illinois. …
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was an English physician and feminist, she was the first female doctor to qualify in England. She opened a school of medicine for women, and paved the way for women’s medical education in Britain. Anderson was born in 1836 in Whitechapel, London to Newson and Louisa Dunnell Garrett. Her father had previously …
Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist. El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla. Her family were a mix of traditional and progressive. At the age of six El Saadawi was pinned down by four women in her home in Egypt and was subjected …