# Corrected: Greatest American Woman (Elimination Game) **URL:** \ **Category:** Thread Games\ **Created:** [December 23, 2017, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167 "2017-12-23T21:51:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2018, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/21 "2018-01-03T15:02:28Z")
I’ll give 2 vote to **Edith Wilson** , I think we only need 1 more to boot her. I’ll give 2 votes to **Flannery O’Connor** , still can’t figure out why she is on the list. 1 point for Louisa May Alcott. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2018, 9:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/22 "2018-01-06T09:45:36Z")
Since the rule would have taken out only 3 women and the list could use to shorten a bit faster, I am going to take the total number of points spread throughout the names, divide that by two, and start removing from the top of the list until that number is reached. If the name I reached with that method is tied with other people, all people with the same score go. Bolded names are eliminated. **Betsy Ross - 7 Mary Baker Eddy - 6 Carrie Nation - 5 Louisa May Alcott - 4 Edith Wilson - 4** Dian Fossey - 3 Rachel Carson - 2 Flannery O’Connor - 2 Eleanor Roosevelt - 2 Margaret Sanger - 2 Frances Willard - 2 Sally Ride - 1 Total: 40 points. 20 points to remove. 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 \> 20. Remove all 4 votes and above. Updated list: **Bella Abzug** - U.S. Representative and a leader of the Women’s Movement. Founded the National Women’s Political Caucus **Abigail Adams** - Wife and advisor of the second President. Advocate for womens rights and abolitionist. **Jane Addams** - Co-founder of the ACLU, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and founder of social work as a profession in the USA **Marian Anderson** - Classical singer (contralto). First African American person to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. **Maya Angelou** - Prolific author, poet, dancer, actress, singer, director, and producer **Susan B. Anthony** - Abolitionist, leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, backer of the 19th Amendment **Clara Barton** - Founded the American Red Cross **Nellie Bly** - Undercover investigative journalist, circled the Earth in 72 days, industrialist and inventor **Mary Bowser** - Former slave turned anti-Confederate spy during the Civil War **Pearl S. Buck** - Author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Spread knowledge of Asia and China to the US **Annie Jump Cannon** - Astronomer who developed the stellar classification system. **Rachel Carson** - Environmentalist, wrote Silent Spring **Mary Cassatt** - Painter, one of the original Impressionist painters **Willa Cather** - Author, won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. **Shirley Chisholm** - First African American woman elected to Congress, first major-party black candidate for President of the United States **Georgia Neese Clark** - Actress, Banker, First woman Treasurer of the United States **Cornelia Clapp** - Pre-eminent zoologist of the late 19th century. **Jacqueline Cochran** - Aviator and racing pilot. Helped to form the Women’s Auxilliary Army Corps and Women Airforce Service Pilots. **Bessie Coleman** - First African-American woman pilot **Emily Dickinson** - One of American’s most reknowned poets **Amelia Earhart** - Aviator. First woman pilot to cross the Atlantic solo **Gertrude Belle Elion** - Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for research into AIDS and immunosuppressants **Ella Fitzgerald** - Jazz singer, winner of 14 Grammies **Dian Fossey** - Conservationist. Writer of Gorillas in the Mist. **Betty Friedan** - Initiated the second wave of 20th century feminism **Katharine Graham** - First woman CEO in the Fortune 500, Pulitzer Prize winner, head of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal **Martha Graham** - Modern dancer and choreographer. Created the Graham technique for dance. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction **Virginia Hall** - WWII spy for British and later with the American CIA. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross **Billie Holiday** - Pioneering jazz singer and songwriter. **Grace Murray Hopper** - Programmer. Inventor of COBOL and “debugging” **Zora Neale Hurston** - Author and influential libertarian, best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. **Virginia E. Johnson** - Pioneer of the medical and scientific investigation of sex and sexual disfunction **Barbara Jordan** - First southern black female elected to the United States House of Representatives **Christine Jorgenson** - First popular voice for transgender issues **Helen Keller** - Deaf-blind woman turned author and campaigner for women’s suffrage, labor rights, socialism, and pacificism. **Hedy Lamarr** - Actress, inventor of frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology **Dorothea Lange** - Photojournalist and originator of documentary photography **Mary Lyon** - Teacher focused on STEM training for women. Founded Wheaton College and Mount Holyoke College. Provided education to the poor. **Wilma Mankiller** - First woman chief of the Cherokee Nation. Improved relations between the US Federal government and Cherokee. **Barbara McClintock** - Cytogeneticist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. **Patsy Mink** - First woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, first Asian American to seek the presidential nomination **Lucretia Mott** - Pacifist, women’s rights activist, abolitionist, and writer of the Declaration of Sentiments **Madalyn Murray O’Hair** - Activist for atheism. Stopped Bible-reading in schools. **Flannery O’Connor** - Southern Gothic writer of Complete Stories, 1972 National Book Award for Fiction. **Georgia O’Keeffe** - Artist, “Mother of American Modernism”. Most expensive painting by a woman in the world. **Annie Oakley** - Sharpshooter and entertainer from the Wild West. Promoted women in the military and womens self defense. **Dorothy Parker** - Editor for The New Yoker, poet and wit, nominee for the Academy Award for Screenplays. **Rosa Parks** - Activist, symbol of the Civil Rights Movement **Alice Paul** - Principal champion of the 19th Amendment **Frances Perkins** - Secretary of Labor, first woman appointed to the US Cabinet, executor of the New Deal **Florence Price** - First African American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer and have her music played by a major orchestra. **Marion Pritchard** - Worked with the Dutch underground movement against the Nazis, estimated to have saved 150 lives through her work **Jeannette Rankin** - First woman to hold Federal office, serving two terms in the House of Representatives **Sally Ride** - Physicist and astronaut. First American woman in space. **Eleanor Roosevelt** - Longest serving First Lady, first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights **Deborah Sampson** - Served (in disguise) as part of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War **Margaret Sanger** - (More-or-less) founder of Planned Parenthood **Susan Sontag** - Essayist, writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist **Edna St. Vincent Millay** - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and feminist. **Elizabeth Cady Stanton** - Initiated the first organized women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements in the United States **Harriet Beecher Stowe** - Author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abolitionist. **Ida Tarbell** - Pioneer of investigative journalism, muckraker, wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company **Sojourner Truth** - Former slave, women’s rights speaker **Harriet Tubman** - Former slave, Union spy, abolitionist, and Underground Railroad operator **Elizabeth Van Lew** - Abolitionist. Founder and operator of an anti-Confederate spy ring during the Civil War **Mercy Otis Warren** - Writer and propagandist of the Revolutionary War. Compiled one of the first histories of the war. **Ida B. Wells** - Inventor (?) of data journalism, used data mining to demonstrate the financial causes of the lynching of African Americans **Edith Wharton** - Author of The Age of Innocence, first woman Pulitzer Prize winner **Frances Willard** - Campaigner for temperance and suffrage. Lead to the creation of the 18th and 19th amendments to the Constitution Next vote will be tallied EOD Tuesday the 9th! ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2018, 9:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/23 "2018-01-06T09:51:51Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > I’ll give 2 votes to **Flannery O’Connor** , still can’t figure out why she is on the list. I was strongly disinclined to add her, based on what I could tell from her Wikipedia page and from having never heard of any of her works. But my standard was that you needed to have some sort of significant award to qualify and, since I wasn’t sure how big the National Book Awards are, I opted to play it safe. > [@Velocity](#): > > 1 - Sally Ride I’m surprised to see our first woman astronaut get a vote so early. Any particular reason (negating circumstances, etc.)? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2018, 10:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/24 "2018-01-06T10:29:19Z")
I don’t see anyone remaining where it’s questionable if they’re even “good”, so I’m just going to vote scattershot at some of the ladies who simply seem “not great”. Marian Anderson - 1 - It looks like she was appointed as an “ambassador of goodwill” to Africa and Asia, by the Roosevelts, but I don’t see anything to indicate that she was really trying to affect change in any way, on her own. No indication that she lobbied for anything, that she went to any effort on her own part to break down barriers, that she tried to help others, etc. She trained hard to be a good singer and rose through the ranks on that basis, but it looks like it was the Roosevelts breaking the glass ceiling here, not Anderson. Cornelia Clapp - 1 - She was a good teacher, and that seems to be it. She didn’t do much original research, didn’t start the school that she was working for, didn’t win anything, no firsts. Hedy Lamarr - 1 - Beautiful woman, and I’m sure that she was very smart. However, beauty is not really a “skill” nor “goodness”, and while she was smart, I do note that the development of spread-spectrum technology was developed independently of her and that her version was just a wild idea and a guy playing on a piano. She had the money and connections that she probably could have gone to school, learned some science, and gotten a real job (or started a business) in R&D. I don’t see any indication that she was really very interested in putting in the hours to really learn her shit nor see her ideas through to reality. So while I do appreciate that she was a gorgeous genius, I couldn’t conscionably vote for her as someone “great”, when there are _actual_ scientists and engineers on the list. Flannery O’Connor - 1 - Never heard of her. Never heard of the National Book Awards. Doesn’t seem to have originated a writing style. Mercy Otis Warren - 1 - While I like that she helped to record history, I have a personal dislike of propagandists. ---
**Author:** ![DinoR](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dinor/32/2821_2.png) [@DinoR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DinoR)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/25 "2018-01-07T02:04:42Z")
I tend to be less enamored of “firsts.” Unless they were a big part of opening a new door or keeping it open, I’m generally not impressed by merely being first. 1 - Shirley Chisholm - She was not the first African-American or woman in Congress. She wasn’t even the first female person-of-color elected to Congress. She also benefited from a district designed to be majority minority. Being African-American was an **advantage** for her. The door was already open. 1 - Barbara Jordan - Add southern to the now three factoered venn diagram to define her first. She followed Chisholm four years later as an African American woman in Congress. She also benefited from a district redrawn under court order to be majority minority. Being the first black woman in the TX legislature is a much bigger deal IMO and almost made me skip her for now. 1 - Sally Ride - The door was mostly opened by the design of the space shuttle. No longer did astronaut mean having to be a pilot, usually a military pilot from a background that legally required being male. Russian women had been to space previously. All astronauts are a pretty special mix of brains and physical attributes. That is special. I can’t call her the greatest American simply for being the third woman in space, though. 1 - Georgia Neese Clark - First US Treasurer but there had already been a more senior cabinet level appointment, Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor. Her apppointment had more to do with being politically active and an early Truman supporter than being more than adeqautely qualfied. The beneficiary of political payback doesn’t deserve to be on the list of the greatest just because she was the first in one specific job. 1 - Emilia Earhart - Lindberg hadn’t even been particularly pioneering as the first solo. He was more a risk taker that used current tech to it’s limits and took risk; Evil Knievel jumping Snake River. Earhart did Snake River twice, once as a passenger before soloing. Then she added on some other daring stunts until one killed her. “Ms Knievel” doessn’t rate as the greatest American woman IMO. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/26 "2018-01-07T03:25:16Z")
So we get five more votes? **1** for Martha Graham, because I have seen performances of her dance, and whatever doors she may have opened for other people to express themselves, I did not personally like her own work. **4** for Helen Keller, mainly because she was against the use of sign language, and in favor of oral methods of education for the Deaf, and lent her image to the American Foundation for the Blind, which has not continued to serve blind people well, as it is mostly run and controlled by sighted people. The blind-run and controlled (all the officers and board members are blind) National Federation of the Blind is not collectively a fan of Helen Keller, and neither is any organized group of Deaf people. Even oralists (people who think Deaf people should only speak and lipread), who use some of her rhetoric, are embarrassed over the fact that she said it was worse to be Deaf than blind. She was a women’s suffragist, and a socialist, but much of her writing is very dated. She supported the Soviet Union-- mainly because, to her credit, she understood the desperate situation of Imperialist Russia, and realized the situation was sui generis, but she simply shut up about it when Stalin begin his reign of terror; she did not try to explain how this was not what the Bolsheviks had intended or imagined, and did not denounce him-- at least not that I have been able to find, and I have gone through some very obscure writings of hers. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/27 "2018-01-07T03:44:09Z")
> [@](#): > > **4** for Helen Keller There’s a 2 point limit per person. ---
**Author:** ![DinoR](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dinor/32/2821_2.png) [@DinoR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DinoR)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/28 "2018-01-07T03:45:23Z")
NM ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/29 "2018-01-07T04:38:48Z")
I’ll give 2 to Helen Keller then, to make up for what **Rivkah** couldn’t score. I’ll do it for the same reasons as **Rivkah** gave. Also, 2 points to Amelia Earhart. Americans don’t seem to like failures, and the fact is that Earhart failed at what she set out to do: to be the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air. She didn’t even fail at a point where she could continue her journey (as if it could have if her Lockheed Electra needed extensive repairs at some point); she failed by getting hopelessly lost. And 1 point to Sally Ride. Yes, she was the first American woman in space, but Valentina Tereshkova of the USSR beat her as the first woman in space, and did so by a wide margin–Tereshkova’s flight was in 1963, Ride’s was in 1983, twenty years later. It’s not necessarily Ride’s fault that NASA couldn’t (or wouldn’t) figure out how to put a woman in space before 1983, but celebrating her for something that had been done so many years before just doesn’t seem right. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/30 "2018-01-07T10:32:58Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > The principal flaw in her works are the basic assumption that wealthy people are good and noble in all cases… You mean like James Taggart, Orren Boyle and Lillian Rearden? Rand will be remembered for her work in epistemology and ethics, NOT politics or economics. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 10:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/31 "2018-01-07T10:53:17Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > Rand will be remembered for her work in epistemology and ethics, NOT politics or economics. Based on this thread, it doesn’t look like she’ll even be remembered for that much! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/32 "2018-01-07T13:16:19Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > Rand will be remembered for her work in epistemology and ethics, NOT politics or economics. I don’t think anyone even knows about her other than about her politics. Any ethics I know about her are those that form a part of her politics (the whole rational self-interest stuff). ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/33 "2018-01-07T15:08:07Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > There’s a 2 point limit per person. In that case, 2 for Helen Keller, and 2 for Amelia Earhart, for poor navigational skills. ---
**Author:** ![gkster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gkster/32/14107_2.png) [@gkster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gkster)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2018, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/34 "2018-01-07T17:32:41Z")
Working on the principle of wanting to get names off the list, my votes are for people already named: 1 for Amelia Earhart 1 for Helen Keller 1 for Marian Anderson 1 for Sally Ride 1 for Hedy Lamarr About Flannery O’Connor, there are many names whom I would vote off before her. She’s well known in literature and today she’s even more appreciated for her dark Southern Gothic humor than she was in her own day (she died relatively young, age 39, in 1964) ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2018, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/35 "2018-01-08T14:46:56Z")
Eliminate: Mary Cassatt Cornelia Clapp Jacqueline Cochran Zora Neale Hurston Sally Ride … _**And please do cross-over and join the very similar [Greatest Scientists (Elimination Game)](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=846223).**_ 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2018, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/36 "2018-01-08T15:01:48Z")
2 for Amelia Earhart 2 for Helen Keller 1 for Sally Ride ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2018, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/37 "2018-01-08T15:07:58Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > _**And please do cross-over and join the very similar [Greatest Scientists (Elimination Game)](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=846223).**_ 🙂 Alhazen. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2018, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/38 "2018-01-10T10:42:58Z")
Tally time! Only 3 are being removed. I’d hoped to cut a swathe out of their feminine forms…wait, that sounds bad…but alas, the hatred for women that fly and those that can’t see was too great. The top three ladies ate up all the points. Bolded names are eliminated. **Emilia Earhart - 8 Helen Keller - 7 Sally Ride - 5** Marian Anderson - 2 Cornelia Clapp - 2 Hedy Lamarr - 2 Mary Cassatt - 1 Shirley Chisholm - 1 Georgia Neese Clark - 1 Jacqueline Cochran - 1 Martha Graham - 1 Zora Neale Hurston - 1 Barbara Jordan - 1 Flannery O’Connor - 1 Mercy Otis Warren - 1 Total: 35 points. 18 to remove (rounding up) Updated list: **Bella Abzug** - U.S. Representative and a leader of the Women’s Movement. Founded the National Women’s Political Caucus **Abigail Adams** - Wife and advisor of the second President. Advocate for womens rights and abolitionist. **Jane Addams** - Co-founder of the ACLU, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and founder of social work as a profession in the USA **Marian Anderson** - Classical singer (contralto). First African American person to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. **Maya Angelou** - Prolific author, poet, dancer, actress, singer, director, and producer **Susan B. Anthony** - Abolitionist, leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, backer of the 19th Amendment **Clara Barton** - Founded the American Red Cross **Nellie Bly** - Undercover investigative journalist, circled the Earth in 72 days, industrialist and inventor **Mary Bowser** - Former slave turned anti-Confederate spy during the Civil War **Pearl S. Buck** - Author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Spread knowledge of Asia and China to the US **Annie Jump Cannon** - Astronomer who developed the stellar classification system. **Rachel Carson** - Environmentalist, wrote Silent Spring **Mary Cassatt** - Painter, one of the original Impressionist painters **Willa Cather** - Author, won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. **Shirley Chisholm** - First African American woman elected to Congress, first major-party black candidate for President of the United States **Georgia Neese Clark** - Actress, Banker, First woman Treasurer of the United States **Cornelia Clapp** - Pre-eminent zoologist of the late 19th century. **Jacqueline Cochran** - Aviator and racing pilot. Helped to form the Women’s Auxilliary Army Corps and Women Airforce Service Pilots. **Bessie Coleman** - First African-American woman pilot **Emily Dickinson** - One of American’s most reknowned poets **Gertrude Belle Elion** - Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for research into AIDS and immunosuppressants **Ella Fitzgerald** - Jazz singer, winner of 14 Grammies **Dian Fossey** - Conservationist. Writer of Gorillas in the Mist. **Betty Friedan** - Initiated the second wave of 20th century feminism **Katharine Graham** - First woman CEO in the Fortune 500, Pulitzer Prize winner, head of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal **Martha Graham** - Modern dancer and choreographer. Created the Graham technique for dance. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction **Virginia Hall** - WWII spy for British and later with the American CIA. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross **Billie Holiday** - Pioneering jazz singer and songwriter. **Grace Murray Hopper** - Programmer. Inventor of COBOL and “debugging” **Zora Neale Hurston** - Author and influential libertarian, best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. **Virginia E. Johnson** - Pioneer of the medical and scientific investigation of sex and sexual disfunction **Barbara Jordan** - First southern black female elected to the United States House of Representatives **Christine Jorgenson** - First popular voice for transgender issues **Hedy Lamarr** - Actress, inventor of frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology **Dorothea Lange** - Photojournalist and originator of documentary photography **Mary Lyon** - Teacher focused on STEM training for women. Founded Wheaton College and Mount Holyoke College. Provided education to the poor. **Wilma Mankiller** - First woman chief of the Cherokee Nation. Improved relations between the US Federal government and Cherokee. **Barbara McClintock** - Cytogeneticist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. **Patsy Mink** - First woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, first Asian American to seek the presidential nomination **Lucretia Mott** - Pacifist, women’s rights activist, abolitionist, and writer of the Declaration of Sentiments **Madalyn Murray O’Hair** - Activist for atheism. Stopped Bible-reading in schools. **Flannery O’Connor** - Southern Gothic writer of Complete Stories, 1972 National Book Award for Fiction. **Georgia O’Keeffe** - Artist, “Mother of American Modernism”. Most expensive painting by a woman in the world. **Annie Oakley** - Sharpshooter and entertainer from the Wild West. Promoted women in the military and womens self defense. **Dorothy Parker** - Editor for The New Yoker, poet and wit, nominee for the Academy Award for Screenplays. **Rosa Parks** - Activist, symbol of the Civil Rights Movement **Alice Paul** - Principal champion of the 19th Amendment **Frances Perkins** - Secretary of Labor, first woman appointed to the US Cabinet, executor of the New Deal **Florence Price** - First African American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer and have her music played by a major orchestra. **Marion Pritchard** - Worked with the Dutch underground movement against the Nazis, estimated to have saved 150 lives through her work **Jeannette Rankin** - First woman to hold Federal office, serving two terms in the House of Representatives **Eleanor Roosevelt** - Longest serving First Lady, first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights **Deborah Sampson** - Served (in disguise) as part of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War **Margaret Sanger** - (More-or-less) founder of Planned Parenthood **Susan Sontag** - Essayist, writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist **Edna St. Vincent Millay** - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and feminist. **Elizabeth Cady Stanton** - Initiated the first organized women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements in the United States **Harriet Beecher Stowe** - Author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abolitionist. **Ida Tarbell** - Pioneer of investigative journalism, muckraker, wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company **Sojourner Truth** - Former slave, women’s rights speaker **Harriet Tubman** - Former slave, Union spy, abolitionist, and Underground Railroad operator **Elizabeth Van Lew** - Abolitionist. Founder and operator of an anti-Confederate spy ring during the Civil War **Mercy Otis Warren** - Writer and propagandist of the Revolutionary War. Compiled one of the first histories of the war. **Ida B. Wells** - Inventor (?) of data journalism, used data mining to demonstrate the financial causes of the lynching of African Americans **Edith Wharton** - Author of The Age of Innocence, first woman Pulitzer Prize winner **Frances Willard** - Campaigner for temperance and suffrage. Lead to the creation of the 18th and 19th amendments to the Constitution Next vote will be tallied EOD Saturday the 13th! ---
**Author:** ![Tread](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/53a042/32.png) [@Tread](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tread)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2018, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/39 "2018-01-10T10:59:24Z")
2 Susan Sontag Because Crash Davis believes the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap 2 Georgia O’Keeffe 1 Dorothy Parker ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2018, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrected-greatest-american-woman-elimination-game/805167/40 "2018-01-10T13:49:59Z")
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