Women Scientists of the 20th-century

Profiles the lives and achievements of major women scientists of the twentieth century from a diverse fields of endeavor. These scientists have made a significant legacy in society and culture.

Hazel Bishop (1906-1998)

She was an American chemist and cosmetics manufacturer, born in New Jersey, who founded her own company Hazel Bishop, Inc. In 1950 she invented “lasting lipstick”, the first of the “non-smear, long lasting” type. Her sales rose to millions in the early 1950s. She continued to experiment, creating other beauty products. Bishop became the head of the cosmetics marketing program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1978. She was the first person to occupy the Revlon Chair at Fashion Institute of Technology.     

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941)

She was an American astronomer from Dover, Delaware. She was educated at Wellesley and Radcliffe and joined the Harvard College Observatory in 1911 as curator of astronomical photographers. In 1938, she was appointed William Cranch Bord Astronomer at Harvard where she spent her entire career.  Cannon classified some 400,000 stars in her lifetime and published The Henry Draper Catalogue which classified the spectra of all stars from the North to the South Poles as studied by photographing their light through a refracting prism.  

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

A polish-born French physicist, she is famous for radioactivity. She discovered polonium and radium and the first woman to win two Nobel prizes, one for physics in 1903, and another in 1911 for chemistry. Assisted by her husband Pierre Curie on her researches, she also worked with Henri Becquerel. The properties of radium laid the foundation for research in nuclear physics. Marie Curie served as head of the physics laboratory at the Sorbonne and succeeded her husband as physics professor after his accidental death in 1906. Her daughter, Irène, also became a scientist and Nobel Prize winner. Madame Curie published Traité de radioactivity in 1910.  

Dian Fossey (1932-1985)

She was an American zoologist born in San Francisco but moved to Africa in 1967 when she was sponsored by anthropologist Louis Leakey to study the endangered mountain gorillas on the Rwanda-Zaire-Uganda border. She completed an extended study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years, observing them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda. She became an outspoken advocate for the preservation of gorillas. Fossey left briefly to earn a doctorate at Cambridge University and to work on her book Gorillas in the Mist. She died of a tragic unsolved murder in 1985.