Estella Leopold is a paleobotanist and conservationist who conducted ground-breaking research on fossilized pollen.

University of Wisconsin scholar Gerda Lerner founded the academic field of women's history.

Barbara Lawton, forty-third lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, was the first woman to be elected to that position.

Community leader Helen Connor Laird was the inspiration for the Laird Endowment Fund for the Arts in central Wisconsin.

Belle Case La Follette was the first woman to graduate from law school in Wisconsin and an outspoken advocate for women's right to vote.

Ada James was a Wisconsin suffragist leader who worked for women’s rights and other reforms in the early 20th century.

Best known for her work on gender, race, and class, University of Wisconsin graduate bell hooks was a prolific writer, speaker, and scholar.

Mildred Fish-Harnack was the only American woman to die by Adolf Hitler's direct order for spying on Germany during World War II.

Lorraine Hansberry's first Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun, changed how Black people's lives were shown in American theater.

Margaret H’Doubler, “founder of American college dance,” created a dance major — the first in the U.S. — at the University of Wisconsin in 1926.