“They paved the way.”

We use the phrase casually now. But pavement is heavy work. It is laid stone by stone, often by women whose names were taken off the project before the road was finished. Some of them were called difficult. Some were called hysterical. Some were paid less than the janitors. Some were murdered by mobs. Many were simply forgotten — and then quietly absorbed into the histories of the men who came after them.

This series is for them.

I am honored to share these stories on ArtfulDesign because every woman alive today is walking on ground these women cleared. The biochemist who took fascia seriously when medicine wouldn’t. The Scottish housekeeper who classified ten thousand stars. The mathematician of Alexandria, killed for thinking too well, too publicly. The painter who hid her abstract canvases for half a century because she knew the world wasn’t ready. The journalist who counted lynchings until America had to look. The diplomat who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into being. The Kenyan environmentalist who planted thirty million trees and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Their fields are everything: history, science, mathematics, astronomy, art, sociology, medicine, politics, diplomacy, civil rights, human rights. Their methods were as varied as their domains. The thread that runs through them is this: they did the work whether or not the room was ready to see it. Many of them died before being believed. All of them are believed now.

I write about them here because their lives are part of how I understand my own — and how I understand the work of building something honest, in a world that does not always reward honesty in women.

— Celina