Selected events & people
1903 Physicist and chemist Marie Skłodowska-Curie (APS 1910) is the first woman to win a science Nobel Prize, with husband Pierre Curie
1914–18 World War I; the U.S. enters in 1917
1920 19th Amendment ratified, legally giving U.S. women the right to vote
1941–45 U.S. involvement in World War II creates a hiring boom in science and technology
1953 Discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA
1964 Civil Rights Act signed into law
1969 Astronauts from the Apollo 11 mission walk on the Moon using the work of many female mathematicians to calculate space flight trajectories, including Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan
1972 Title IX signed into law and Roe v. Wade decision
1982 Invention of the World Wide Web
1983 AIDS virus identified and Sally Ride is the first American woman to fly in space
1989 Equal Rights Amendment–which guaranteed equal rights for women–failed to be ratified
1992 NASA astronaut Mae Carol Jemison is the first Black woman in space
1994-95 BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes linked to hereditary breast cancer, discovered by Mary-Claire King (APS 2012)