The Women Who Built America While the Men Got the Credit

When John Adams left for the Continental Congress in 1776, Abigail wrote to him: "In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies."

He wrote back with a joke. The Constitution, when it came, mentioned neither women nor their rights.

But the women of American history built the country anyway — in uniform, in laboratories, in courts, in factories, and in the streets. Here are ten whose stories the textbooks still shortchange.

Abigail Adams (1744–1818)

She was her husband's most trusted political adviser, a prolific letter-writer whose correspondence gives historians the sharpest account of the founding era, and the first person to occupy the White House after it moved to Washington. She managed the family farm and finances for years while John was absent. She wrote about the injustice of slavery decades before abolition became a mainstream political cause.

History remembers her as "John Adams's wife." She was his most important collaborator.

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784)

Enslaved as a child and brought to Boston, Wheatley became the first African American and one of the first American women to publish a book of poetry — Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Her work was published in London because American publishers refused to print it.

She wrote to George Washington praising his leadership; he invited her to visit him at Cambridge, one of the few African Americans to receive such an invitation from the general. She was emancipated after her poetry brought her international fame, but died in poverty at around 31.

Deborah Sampson (1760–1827)

Sampson disguised herself as a man named Robert Shurtleff and served in the Continental Army for 17 months. She was wounded twice in battle — once removing a musket ball from her own leg to avoid having a doctor discover her identity. When she finally fell ill with a fever and a doctor did examine her, he kept her secret and arranged her honorable discharge.

She was the first woman to receive a pension from the United States government for military service. She also became one of America's first professional public speakers, touring New England giving lectures about her service.

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883)

Born into slavery in New York and named Isabella Baumfree, she escaped in 1826 (a year before New York formally abolished slavery), sued a white man in court to recover her son who had been illegally sold into Alabama — and won. She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 and became one of the most powerful speakers in the abolitionist and women's rights movements.

Her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron demolished the argument that women were too delicate for equal rights by pointing out that no one had ever treated enslaved women that way.

Clara Barton (1821–1912)

Barton worked as a clerk in the US Patent Office — one of the first women to hold a federal job — before the Civil War. During the war, she organized supplies and went to the front lines to nurse wounded soldiers, earning the nickname "Angel of the Battlefield." She founded the American Red Cross in 1881 at age 59 and ran it until she was 82.

She was also one of the first Americans to publicly advocate for the Geneva Convention — a treaty that now protects soldiers and civilians in conflict worldwide.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)

The intellectual architect of American women's suffrage. Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 — a document deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence — which opened with: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." It was the founding document of the American women's rights movement.

She spent 50 years fighting for suffrage she never lived to see. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, 18 years after her death.

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)

A journalist and civil rights activist who conducted the first systematic investigation of lynching in America — at personal risk. Her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases documented cases with names, dates, and facts, demolishing the narrative that lynching was a response to crime rather than a tool of racial terror.

She was a co-founder of the NAACP and spent her career holding America accountable for the distance between its stated ideals and its actual treatment of Black citizens. She was largely written out of early NAACP histories because her militancy made the organization's white allies uncomfortable.

Rosie the Riveter (1942)

Not one woman, but all of them. During World War II, over 6 million American women entered the workforce in industrial jobs — building tanks, planes, ships, and weapons that won the war. The iconic "We Can Do It!" poster (based on a photograph of Naomi Parker Fraley, a worker at a California naval station) became the symbol.

When the war ended, most were told to go home. Many didn't.

Grace Hopper (1906–1992)

A Navy rear admiral and computer scientist who invented the first compiler — a program that translated human-readable instructions into machine code. Without Hopper's compiler, modern programming as we know it wouldn't exist. She also coined the term "debugging" after literally removing a moth from a relay in an early computer.

She continued to influence computer science well into her 70s, retiring from the Navy at 79. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2016.

Katherine Johnson (1918–2020)

NASA mathematician whose orbital calculations made the Mercury and Apollo missions possible. When John Glenn prepared for his first orbital flight in 1962, he refused to launch unless Johnson personally verified the computer's numbers. "If she says they're good," he told NASA, "I'm ready to go."

Her story — and those of her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson — was largely unknown until the 2016 book and film Hidden Figures.

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In 250 years of American history, the country has never fully lived up to Abigail Adams's request. But every decade, it's gotten a little closer — because of women who refused to wait.