She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World

Sometimes being a girl isn’t easy. At some point, someone probably will tell you no, will tell you to be quiet and may even tell you your dreams are impossible. Don’t listen to them. These thirteen American women certainly did not take no for an answer. They persisted.

HARRIET TUBMAN was born a slave, and her story could have ended there. Instead, she persisted, escaping from slavery and becoming the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. She risked her life many times to lead countless slaves to freedom, including her family, friends and strangers; every person she led to freedom arrived safely.

“I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted.”

Once HELEN KELLER became blind and deaf as a toddler, few people thought she’d be able to learn to read, write or speak. But she persisted. Helen learned how to do all three and not only became the first person with deafblindness to graduate from college, but she used her story to help fight for more opportunities for people with disabilities, in the United States and around the world.

“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

After her family fled poverty and the threat of violence in Ukraine for a new home in New York City, CLARA LEMLICH got a job working at a garment factory. She wrote that the factory’s conditions made women into machines, and so she persisted, organizing picket lines and strikes that ultimately helped win better pay, shorter hours and safer working conditions for thousands of workers—both women and men.

“I am one of those who suffers from the abuses described here, and I move that we go on a general strike.”

NELLIE BLY became a reporter in part because a male writer had said that working women were “a monstrosity,” and she wanted to prove that women could do anything. At times putting her safety at risk, she persisted throughout her career in exposing real monstrosities, pretending to be a sweatshop worker and a patient in a mental hospital to show how badly people were being treated.

“I have never written a word that did not come from my heart. I never shall.”

Inspired from an early age by her brothers’ childhood illnesses, VIRGINIA APGAR determined to be a doctor, long before many girls had such dreams. Even though she qualified to be a surgeon, the male head surgeon at her hospital discouraged her because she was a woman. Nevertheless, she persisted, becoming an anesthesiologist and creating the Apgar score to test a newborn baby’s health, which hospitals all over the world still use today.

“Nobody, but nobody, is going to stop breathing on me.”

After MARIA TALLCHIEF’s family moved to California, partly to support Maria’s dreams of becoming a dancer, she was teased by students in school for her Native American heritage and later was encouraged to change her last name to something that sounded Russian (since many professional dancers at the time were from Russia). She persisted, ignoring all the taunting and poor advice, to become the first great American prima ballerina.

“It never occurred to me to say, ‘It hurts to do that.””

As a fifteen-year-old riding a bus home from school in Montgomery, Alabama, CLAUDETTE COLVIN was expected to give up her seat to a white woman just because she was African American. In her refusal to get up, she persisted in taking a stand for what’s right, helping to inspire Rosa Parks to make the same choice nine months later, an act many point to as starting the modern Civil Rights Movement.

“I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.”