Frances Perkins was an American workers-rights advocate who served as the 4th United States secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position. A member of the Democratic Party, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped make labor issues important in the emerging New Deal coalition. She was one of two Roosevelt cabinet members to remain in office for his entire presidency.
Ruth McCormick, was an American politician, activist, and publisher. She served one term in the United States House of Representatives, winning an at-large seat in Illinois in 1928. She gave up the chance to run for re-election to seek a United States Senate seat from Illinois. She defeated the incumbent, Senator Charles S. Deneen, in the Republican primary, becoming the first female Senate candidate for a major party. McCormick lost the general election. A decade later, she became the first woman to manage a presidential campaign, although her candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, failed to capture his party's nomination.
Margaret Croft Scriven-Vivian was a British tennis player and the first woman from that country to win the singles title at the French Championships in 1933. She also won the singles title at the 1934 French Championships, defeating Helen Jacobs in the final. She was ranked No. 5 in the world in 1933 and 1934.
Emma Roberta Steiner was an American composer and conductor. She was one of the first women in the United States to make a living from conducting, and did so at more than 6,000 performances during her lifetime. She was additionally the first woman to conduct a Theatre orchestra in New York. Her career spanned nearly five decades, from the 1870s, when she first began conducting for touring comic opera companies, until her death in 1929. In the early 1900s, she took a decade-long hiatus from her musical career to move to Alaska, where she was a prospector and traveler. Steiner wrote hundreds of musical pieces, including seven operas.
Frances M. A. Roe, born Frances Marie Antoinette Mack was the daughter of Ralph Gilbert Make and Mary Colton Mack of Watertown, New York. On August 19, 1871, she married U. S. Army officer Fayette Washington Roe, who ultimately became a Lieutenant Colonel, and was sent to Fort Lyon in Colorado Territory in 1871. She accompanied him and recorded her life during these years in a memoir. While her husband's career has been described as "unremarkable", Roe continues to be known on the basis of her book for the accurate picture of Army life it painted. Black soldiers from this period became known as the "Buffalo Soldiers"; Roe's was the first documented use of the name. Roe said of the Buffalo Soldiers:
These ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ are active, intelligent, and resolute men; are perfectly willing to fight the Indians, whenever they may be called upon to do so, and appear to me to be rather superior to the average of white men recruited in time of peace.
Eastern High School is a public high school in Washington, D.C. As of the 2021–2022 school year, it educates 735 students in grades 9 through 12. The school is located in the eastern edge of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, at the intersection of 17th Street and East Capital Street Northeast. Eastern was a part of the District of Columbia Public Schools restructuring project, reopening in 2011 to incoming first-year students and growing by a grade level each year. It graduated its first class in 2015.
May Howard Jackson was an African American sculptor and artist. Active in the New Negro Movement and prominent in Washington, D.C.'s African American intellectual circle in the period 1910-30, she was known as "one of the first black sculptors to...deliberately use America's racial problems" as the theme of her art. Her dignified portrayals of "mulatto" individuals as well as her own struggles with her multiracial identity continue to call for the interpretation and assessment of her work.
Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian is a Black Catholic parish in Washington, D.C. established in 1966 by the merger of the predominately African-American St. Cyprian Catholic Church and the predominantly White Holy Comforter Catholic Church.
Mary J. Small (1850–1945) was a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and was the first woman to achieve the position of elder.
Seraph Young Ford was the first American woman to cast a ballot under a law that made women citizens' voting rights equal to men's. She voted in Salt Lake City's municipal election on February 14, 1870, becoming the first woman in Utah Territory and the United States to vote under a women's equal suffrage law.
Stuart Wesson Rockwell was an American diplomat who served as the American Ambassador to Morocco between 1970 and 1973.
Mary Louise Brown was a physician and teacher who devoted over 25 years of her life to servicing the Black community of Washington D.C. Brown was the first African-American woman to receive a wartime medical commission when she joined the Red Cross in 1918 during World War I. Brown graduated from the Howard University College of Medicine and comingled her teaching career at Black community high schools and normal schools with a medical career, often providing medical care for free.
Gertrude Divine Webster was an American philanthropist known for co-founding the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, and establishing Yester House, her summer estate which is on the National Register of Historic Places and houses the Southern Vermont Arts Center. During her marriage to William McClellan Ritter she was known as Gertrude Divine Ritter. She subsequently married Hugh Webster, and was known as Gertrude Divine Webster until her death on March 31, 1947.
Aime Rebecca Motter Awl, also known more commonly as Aime M. Awl, was an American scientific illustrator who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. National Museum. Awl is internationally recognized for her scientific illustration, especially of fish species.
W.E. Hill (1887-1962) was an American cartoonist and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th-century. He is best known for his weekly full-page illustration series "Among Us Mortals" published in the New York Tribune from 1916 to 1922, and for creating the most popular iteration of the optical illusion My Wife and My Mother-in-Law (1915).
Col. Philip Marsteller was a Revolutionary War officer, businessman, and politician. A friend of George Washington, Marsteller served as mayor of Alexandria and as a pallbearer in Washington's funeral.
Isabel Cooper Mahaffie was an American artist known for her work depicting animals. She was a staff artist for the New York Zoological Association who participated in multiple research expeditions.
