Editor’s Note: The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, as part of its Fourth of July Independence Day celebration, is honoring 19 outstanding Ukrainian and 29 American women. A reception featuring an exhibit of the distinguished women, past and present, from all walks of life, will be presented by William B. Taylor, the U.S. charge d’affaires, on July 5. Taylor returned to Ukraine on June 18 after serving as U.S. ambassador in Kyiv from 2006 to 2009.
UKRAINE
Lilia Podkopayeva is a gymnast and Olympic champion. She was the first athlete to win multiple medals while representing Ukraine. Born in Donetsk, she joined the Ukrainian national team in 1988 at age 11. Known best for her amazing floor exercise routines, Podkopayeva is the only woman in the world to execute an “Arabian double front brani out” in her routine. In 1995–96, she was the first gymnast in more than 20 years to hold the World, European & Olympic all-around title simultaneously. In 2005, Podkopayeva became a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador on HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. She is also an Ambassador of the Council of Europe for Sport, Tolerance, and Fair Play.
Olga Kudinenko is the founder of “Tabletochki,” an NGO that helps treat children with oncological diseases. It is the first independent fund to create an educational program for doctors and nurses in order to improve service and treatment for ill children and is considered one of the most effective charities in Ukraine, having helped 2,500 children and raised more than $5 million.
Kudinenko is included in Ukraine’s “30 under 30” (a list of young professionals with outstanding achievements under the age of 30) by Forbes.
Anna Petrova is a young Ukrainian entrepreneur and the founder of “Startup Ukraine.” As a leader in the Ukrainian entrepreneurial movement, business mentor, and one of Forbes “30 under 30” in Ukraine, Petrova founded the business camp “Made in Ukraine.” It was the first camp in Ukraine for entrepreneurs, managers and middle managers.
She also participated in the TV project “New Leaders” where she presented an ambitious entrepreneurship development program for Ukraine.
Oleksandra Matviychuk is a Ukrainian civil society leader and activist, chairwoman of the Center for Civil Liberties, and a member of the Advisory Board on Human Rights of the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine. She is the author of publications on human rights, and the co-author of an annual report on monitoring the political persecution of civil society in Ukraine. She coordinates the Euromaidan SOS civic initiative and authored several reports to various UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE and the International Criminal Court. In 2016 she received the Democracy Defender Award for “Exclusive Contribution to Promoting Democracy and Human Rights” from missions to the OSCE.
Yevhenia Zakrevska is a human rights activist and the lead lawyer for the Heavenly Hundred families. She is an advocate and lawyer who defends against persecution, intimidation and arrests of those defending the country’s most vulnerable groups, and combats corruption in police and government.
Elina Svitolina is a Ukrainian tennis champion. Svitolina turned professional in 2010 and reached her career-high ranking of number three in the world in 2017. She has won 13 Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) singles titles, her most significant coming at the 2018 WTA Finals. In February 2017, after winning the title in Dubai, Svitolina made history by becoming the first Ukrainian woman to break into the top 10 rankings.
Kateryna Handziuk was a political advisor and Ukrainian civil rights and anti-corruption activist. She worked to expose corruption in her hometown of Kherson and was attacked with sulfuric acid. She later died from her injuries. The First Lady and Secretary of State honored Handziuk’s memory this year at the International Women of Courage Award Ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Nina Matviyenko is a Ukrainian folk singer, born in Nedilyshche, Yemilchyne region. In 1968 she joined the vocal studio of the Ukrainian State Folk Choir named after Hryhory Veriovka and soon became a soloist. In 1988 she received the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest state award for works of culture and art.
Yevgeniya Smirnova is the chairperson for the NGO “Small Heart with Art.” She was the first to initiate an educational program for children receiving long-term medical treatment in the hospital. She started the “School of the Superheroes” and contributed to a law that will take effect in September 2019 to ensure children in major regional hospitals receive an education. The organization is planning to open new schools at additional medical institutions throughout Ukraine.
Lina Kostenko is a renowned author and poet. Her early works went unpublished until she participated in dissident movements in the 1960s, which spurred a literary revolution in Ukraine and led her to create more avant-garde and critical works regarding the then-totalitarian regime. Over the course of her career, she penned hundreds of poems and one novel, Notes of a Ukrainian Madman, which became an instant bestseller in 2010.
Maria Berlinska is chairperson of the Institute for Gender Studies. She is an ATO veteran who has made great strides securing equal rights and opportunities for men and women in the military. She was a co-author of the law establishing gender equality in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and works to improve rehabilitation and re-integration programs for women who serve in the military. She is also a producer of the award-winning documentary film “Invisible Battalion” which describes the views and experiences of women combatants in the Donbas conflict.
Olga Kobylianska was a key participant in the feminist movement in Ukraine. As an author, she portrayed the challenges faced by Ukrainian intellectuals of her generation. She was the first author to embrace feminist ideas in Ukrainian literature and to raise awareness in support of women’s emancipation.
Lesya Ukrainka was a great poet, writer, activist, and interpreter. She devoted 30 years of her life to literature, and she is the epitome of female heroism and strength. Despite being bedridden during most of her youth due to tuberculosis, she inspired millions through her poems and literature and encouraged people to listen to their hearts and be brave. She was also engaged in folklore studies and played an active role in the Ukrainian national movement.
Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko was one of the foremost Ukrainian historians and teachers of the 20th century. In the 1960s, she took an active role in the establishment of the American-based Ukrainian Historical Association, later serving as its vice president. She influenced several younger Ukrainian historians in the west, especially the founder of the Ukrainian Historical Association, Lubomyr Wynar. After the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in 1991 and the subsequent growth of intellectual freedom, her major works were reprinted in her homeland, where she finally became widely known.
Oksana Masters is a Ukrainian-born American Paralympic rower and cross-country skier from Louisville, Kentucky. At the 2012 Summer Paralympics, she won the first medal by a U.S. athlete in trunk and arms mixed double sculls. She was also a part of the U. S. Nordic skiing team, and won two Paralympic medals in 2014 and five Paralympic medals, including two gold medals, in 2018.
Oksana Zabuzhko is a leading novelist, poet, author, philosopher and intellectual. Her writing focuses mainly on national identity and gender, which earned her the Antonovych Prize for literary works written in Ukrainian and for research on Ukrainian studies in 2009. Her first novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, was met with great controversy by both critics and readers alike. With its publication, the Ukrainian readership and the intellectual community faced innovative, provocative and complex feminist writing. Zabuzhko became a U. S. Fulbright scholar in 1994.
Ruslana Lyzhychko is a singer, songwriter, and civil activist. Ruslana was the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004. She writes, composes and produces her own songs and music videos. As an activist, Ruslana was a driving force during the Revolution of Dignity. She appeared regularly on the Maidan stage during the cold winter, inspiring crowds, speaking to the people, and singing the Ukrainian national anthem.
Susana Jamaladinova is better known by her stage name Jamala. She is a Ukrainian singer of Crimean Tatar descent. She represented Ukraine in the Eurovision song contest in 2016, and won with her song “1944.” The song is about the Stalin’s regime’s deportation of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia in 1944. Jamala wrote the song’s lyrics in 2014 in the wake of the attempted annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.
Yana Klochkova is a Ukrainian swimmer who became the first woman to win consecutive pairs of Olympic gold medals in the same events — the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medleys in 2004. Known as the “Medley Queen,” she lost just one medley race in international competitions between 2000 and 2004.
UNITED STATES
Rosa Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The United States Congress has called her “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement.”
Condoleezza Rice is an American political scientist, diplomat. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first female African-American Secretary of State. Rice was President Bush’s National Security Advisor during his first term, and the first woman to serve in that position.
Jackie Mitchell Gilbert was one of the first female pitchers in professional baseball history. At age 17, she struck out baseball giants Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game against the Yankees in 1931 — a feat that, to this day, leaves many critics skeptical. Mitchell was the only female pitcher signed to a professional baseball team at the time. After the upset against the Yankees, it is believed the baseball commissioner voided her contract, perhaps embarrassed by the episode. It would be another nine years before the creation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the first Jewish woman to serve on the Supreme Court. She is an advocate for women’s rights and civil rights, and was the first woman to earn tenure at Columbia University, where she co-authored the first law school case book on sex discrimination. She was confirmed by the U. S. Senate by a 96 to three vote and took her seat on August 10, 1993.
Captain Rosemary Mariner was an American aviator and one of the first six women to earn their wings as a United States Naval Aviator in 1974. She was the first female military aviator to fly a tactical jet and the first to achieve command of an operational aviation squadron.
Gladys Bentley was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. She belted gender-bending original blues numbers and lewd parodies of popular songs, in her top hat and tuxedo. By the early 1930s, Bentley was Harlem’s most famous lesbian figure and among the best-known African-American entertainers in the United States. She was also the first prominent performer of her era to embrace a transgender identity. Her rise to fame demonstrated how liberated the Harlem Renaissance culture had become during the prohibition era in the United States.
Bessie Stringfield, nicknamed the “Motorcycle Queen of Miami,” was a dispatch rider for the United States Army in the 1940s — at a time when motorcycle riding was considered “unladylike.” When other women were relegated to housework, Stringfield revved and roared through Florida’s palm-tree-lined streets on her Harley-Davidson, sharing stories with friends of being chased off the road in the Jim Crow South and doing carnival stunts on the Wall of Death. Today, hundreds of women motorcyclists make an annual cross-country trek in her honor.
Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb is the first woman to run the entire Boston Marathon. At the time, women were banned from entering the Men’s Division Race. After being denied a bib by the 1966 Boston Athletic Association because woman were “not physiologically able” to run long distances, she snuck into the race and competed alongside the men, finishing at 3 hours and 21 minutes and beating half of her competition. Gibb’s run challenged prevalent prejudices and misconceptions about women’s athletic capabilities.
Jane Addams, also known as the mother of social work, was a pioneer social worker and leader in women’s suffrage and world peace. She co-founded Chicago’s Hull House, one of America’s most famous settlement houses, which provided community services to the poor. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the ACLU, and in 1931, she became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She is generally recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.
Ellen Ochoa is an American engineer, former astronaut and former Director of the Johnson Space Center. She was aboard the Discovery shuttle for a total of nine days while conducting important research into the Earth’s ozone layer. Since then, she went to space three additional flights, logging 1,000 hours in space in total. In 2013 Ochoa became the first Hispanic director, and second female director, of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Grace Brewster Murray was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming, who invented one of the first compiler tools. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
Christine Moseley is a social entrepreneur and the founder/CEO of Full Harvest, an online platform that works as a broker between farmers looking to maximize the value of their crops, especially produce considered too ugly for consumers to buy, and national food processors seeking more affordable sources of produce to turn into beverages, snacks and other processed foods.
Shirley Ann Jackson is an American physicist, and the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the first African-American woman to have earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the second African-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics, and the first to be awarded the National Medal of Science.
Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency. She became a central leader of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) based in Switzerland, for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.
Stephanie Lampkin is the CEO and founder of Blendoor, a “blind” recruiting app for job recruiters that hides the candidate’s name and photo to circumvent unconscious bias and facilitate diversity. She was a web developer by age 15 and holds degrees from Stanford and MIT. Through her company, she works to highlight the information that’s most relevant to a candidate being a “good fit,” independent of race, gender, (dis)ability, military history, or sexual orientation.
Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court — appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Prior to O’Connor’s tenure on the Court, she was a judge in Arizona and the first female Majority Leader of a state senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O’Connor was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. She was known to approach each case narrowly without arguing for sweeping precedents and most frequently sided with the Court’s conservative bloc.
Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court — appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Prior to O’Connor’s tenure on the Court, she was a judge in Arizona and the first female Majority Leader of a state senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O’Connor was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. She was known to approach each case narrowly without arguing for sweeping precedents and most frequently sided with the Court’s conservative bloc.
Madeleine Albright is an American politician and diplomat. She is the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history, having served from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Along with her family, Albright immigrated to the United States in 1948 from Czechoslovakia.
Esther Ross was a member of the Stillaguamish tribe. She spent 50 years advocating for federal recognition of her tribe in the Puget Sound area of Washington State. She was elected secretary, a position she held throughout most of her life, and became one of the driving forces among the Stillaguamish to restore the vitality of the tribe, win compensation for lands taken by the U.S. government, and achieve formal recognition for the Stillaguamish from the federal government.
Lucile Atcherson Curtis was the first woman in what later became the U. S. Foreign Service. Specifically, she was the first woman appointed as a United States Diplomatic Officer or Consular Officer. She supported women’s suffrage, joining a five-thousand-woman march through Columbus, Ohio, in support of a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote. She later became the first Columbus woman to join the National Women’s Party and helped organize the Ohio Suffrage Association.
Shirley Chisholm was an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she was the first African-American woman elected to Congress and an outspoken advocate for women and minorities during her seven terms in the House of Representatives. She was known as a politician who refused to allow fellow politicians, including the male-dominated Congressional Black Caucus, to sway her from her goals.
Carolyn Shoemaker is an American astronomer and co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She once held the record for most comets discovered by an individual (32) as well as more than 800 asteroids. She took up astronomy at the age of 51. Shoemaker is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 377 numbered minor planets made between 1980 and 1994.
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper is a U.S. astronaut of Ukrainian descent. She orbited the earth on board the space shuttle Atlantis for its rendezvous with the International Space Station on mission STS‑115 in 2006. During the flight that lasted for 11 days, 19 hours and 6 minutes, Piper performed two space walks with another astronaut, working quickly and efficiently enough to complete their mission ahead of schedule.
Helen Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She lost her sight and hearing due to a childhood disease, and became the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She overcame her disabilities, worked with the blind, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. A year later, she was elected to the Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair.
Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist. Considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century, she reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career.
Amelia Mary Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and author. She was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for the accomplishment. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean.
Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. She collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17, and later became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Anthony was harshly ridiculed and accused of trying to destroy the institution of marriage. Public perception of her changed radically during her lifetime, however, and she became the first American woman depicted on U.S. coinage.
Margaret Bourke-White was an American documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviet’s five-year plan, the first American female war photo journalist, and for having one of her photographs (the construction of Fort Peck Dam) on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.
Patsy Takemoto Mink made history when she was elected to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first Asian-American congressional representative and first woman of color in Congress. Mink was a trailblazer for women in politics and a strong advocate for women’s rights, education, civil rights, and social welfare. Mink sponsored the first childcare bill and legislation establishing bilingual education, student loans, special education, professional sabbaticals for teachers, and Head Start.
Eugenie Anderson was a United States diplomat and the first woman appointed chief of mission at the ambassador level in U.S. history. Anderson helped create the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in 1944, and she spoke frequently for the League of Women Voters, fighting the strong isolationist policies of the time. She was appointed by President Truman as U. S. Ambassador to Denmark (1949).
