Women nowadays are breaking the entire gender barrier and achieving a historical feat. Their outstanding contributions always remembered and admired by the World. There are different fields of human endeavor where women have paved the biggest impact on world history and achieved monumental growth in the fields of politics, technology, human welfare, arts, culture, education, and the list goes on. So we compiled a list of famous top 10 first female achievements that will make everyone proud. We are not numbering this list because they all are best.
Top 10 First Female Achievements
Mary Tudor: First female to rule England
Though Elizabeth I receive all the praise, it was her half-sister Mary Tudor, the only grown-up daughter of King Henry VIII and his first spouse, Catherine of Aragon, who has crowned the first Queen of England in 1553. This was after the death of Henry in 1547 and a short reign by Henry’s unfortunate teenage son, Edward (who was Henry’s heir with his third wife, Jane Seymour). Recognized historically as “Bloody Mary” for her sometimes aggressive legislative laws, she was succeeded in death by Elizabeth in 1558.
Sophie Blanchard: First female pilot of hot balloon
Sophie Blanchard got her aeronautical experiences from her husband, who died of a heart attack beside Sophie while she was piloting a balloon. “Tiny” and “nervous,” according to Smithsonian, Sophie nevertheless found a flight to be a “sensation incomparable.” Unluckily, Sophie also became the first woman to die in an aviation crash, when her balloon caught fire and crashed to the ground in 1819.
Juliana Morell: First female to graduate from a doctoral program
Born in Barcelona in 1594, Juliana Morell was so intelligent that by the age of four, her teachers told her father they had nothing left to teach her. Home-schooled after that, Juliana had written and maintained theses on ethics and morality by the young age of 12. In 1608, she became the first female ever to receive a university doctoral degree.
Ada Lovelace: First female computer programmer
Ada Lovelace was not only the first female computer programmer but also the first computer programmer overall. A profound mathematician born in England, she composed the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computing machine called the “Analytical Engine.” It estimated Bernoulli numbers, thanks to Lovelace’s data input.
Winifred Edgerton Merrill: First female mathematics PhD
In 1886, Winifred Edgerton Merrill became the first woman to receive a degree from Columbia University, as well as the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Proving that practice makes a man (in her case woman) perfect, the choice to award her a doctorate was made collectively by the Board of Trustees on Merrill’s second try.
Raymonde de Laroche: First female licensed pilot
A former actress who’d been born Elise Raymonde Deroche in Paris in 1882, Raymonde de Laroche was spurred to take up flying after attending the Wright Brothers’ flight shows in 1907 in France. Though she wasn’t the first female aviator, de Laroche was the first woman to get a pilot’s license in 1910. She got the 36th airplane pilot’s license issued by the Aeroclub de France, the world’s first organization to issue pilot licenses.
Marie Curie: First female Nobel Prize winner
Possibly the most popular female scientist of them all, Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867, was a young revolutionist before she started her education in physics and math at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was there she met her husband, Pierre Curie, a physics professor. In 1903, the couple was given half the Nobel Prize for research on radiation led by Henri Becquerel (who got the other half). Curie received her own Nobel Prize in 1911 in chemistry and won the title of the first female Nobel Prize winner. This grat lady lies in every compilation of top 10 female achievements.
Edith Wharton: First female to win a Pulitzer Prize
Another EDITH (Even Dead, I’m The Hero) became a “first woman” in 1921 when Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize (Literature) for The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman ever to win this distinguished literary prize, and justly, the book, itself, was a critique of society.
Sandra Day O’Connor: First female Supreme Court Justice
In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was nominated by President Reagan to serve as the Supreme Court of the United States. With limited prior judicial practice, O’Connor nevertheless made a name for herself as one of SCOTUS’s most “thoughtful centrists.” But long before Justice O’Connor, another woman was making judicial history: In 1880, Belva Lockwood became the first woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Junko Tabei: First female to summit Everest
Junko Tabei was just 5-feet tall and weighed only 92 pounds, but her mini size was balanced by tremendous determination, courage, and endurance. In 1975, she co-led a group of 15 women to the summit of Mt. Everest, becoming the first female ever to reach the peak. She would finally climb the highest summit on every continent.
