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.

Sarah Harder started the women's studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and built many women's coalitions in Wisconsin and nationally.

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.

Frances Hamerstrom, an ornithologist who helped save the prairie chicken population in Wisconsin, was the first woman in the U.S. to earn a master’s degree in wildlife management.

Ruth Gruber was a journalist and humanitarian known for her work documenting the lives of refugees.