12 Women Who Did It First
First in space, first on Everest, first to a Nobel, first to a Fields Medal: twelve record-setting firsts that opened doors for everyone after.
Every "first" on this list marks the exact date a door opened that had been closed for all of human history. Some of these women are household names; others should be. All twelve hold records that can never be taken away — because no one else can ever be first.
The twelve firsts
- Marie Curie — first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903), and still the only person to win in two different sciences (1903, 1911).
- Elizabeth Blackwell — first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States (1849). Admitted after the all-male student body voted "yes" as a joke; she graduated first in her class.
- Sofia Kovalevskaya — first woman in modern Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics (1874) and the first to hold a full professorship in the field (Stockholm, 1889).
- Gerty Cori — first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1947), for uncovering how the body cycles glucose — the "Cori cycle" carries her name.
- Amelia Earhart — first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (1932), five years to the day after Lindbergh.
- Valentina Tereshkova — first woman in space (16 June 1963), orbiting Earth 48 times over three days. More than sixty years later she remains the only woman ever to have flown a space mission solo.
- Sirimavo Bandaranaike — the world's first woman prime minister (Ceylon, 1960), elected before the phrase "woman head of government" existed in most languages.
- Golda Meir — first (and to date only) woman to lead Israel (1969), one of the first women anywhere to head a government in wartime.
- Junko Tabei — first woman to summit Everest (1975), twelve days after being buried by an avalanche at 6,300 metres. She later became the first woman to climb the highest peak on every continent.
- Sally Ride — first American woman in space (1983), and later the only person to serve on the investigation boards of both shuttle disasters.
- Maryam Mirzakhani — first woman to win the Fields Medal (2014), mathematics' most famous honour, for work on the geometry of curved surfaces. Her story continues in our ranking of history's greatest women mathematicians.
- Kathryn Bigelow — first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director (2010, The Hurt Locker), 81 ceremonies after the category was created.
What the dates reveal
Read the years again: 1849, 1874, 1903, 1932, 1960, 1963, 1975, 1983, 2010, 2014. The firsts do not cluster in the distant past — more than half of them happened within living memory, and mathematics did not produce its first female Fields medallist until 2014. Doors we assume have been open forever were, in historical terms, unlocked last week.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_LpHffOqMTY" title="Valentina Tereshkova Seagull in Space RT Documentary" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen loading="lazy"></iframe>"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."
— Amelia Earhart
Watch: Valentina Tereshkova Seagull in Space RT Documentary
The next firsts
Some doors on this list have opened exactly once: Tereshkova still awaits a successor on a solo spaceflight, and only two women have followed Mirzakhani to a Fields Medal. For the women who conquered science's biggest prize in numbers — from Curie to the CRISPR laureates — see our companion story, The Women Who Conquered the Science Nobels.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova, who orbited Earth 48 times in June 1963 — and remains the only woman ever to have flown a space mission solo.
Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
Marie Curie, in Physics in 1903. She added a second Nobel, in Chemistry, in 1911.
Who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal?
Maryam Mirzakhani of Iran, in 2014 — 78 years after the medal was created.