Women Scientists Posters, Prints, & Photographs, “B...-”
notable and famous women scientists for social studies and science classrooms.

Martha Ballard
b. 1734/35; Oxford, MA
d. 1812

Martha Ballard served as a midwife and healer from 1785 to 1812 in the Hallowell community on the Kennebec River, District of Maine. She made entries into her diary/accounting book for 27 years, recording daily events, weather, and medical practices. Her diary forms the basis of A Midwife's Tale.

FYI- Ballard was the great aunt of Clara Barton who is known for her Civil War work and founder of the American Red Cross.

Clara Barton
b. 12-25-1821; Oxford, MA
d. 4-13-1912

Humanitarian Clara Barton was a teacher and nurse who is remembered for her work with wounded in the American Civil War and organizing the American Red Cross. The International Committee of the Red Cross had been established in Europe “to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflicts ... the war wounded, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants.”

Barton could only ‘sell’ the idea of the Red Cross with the expanded vision including any great national disaster because post-Civil War Americans could not imagine the US would ever be involved in another conflict as horrendous as the Civil War.

Clara Barton quotes ~
• “I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.”
• “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.”

Laura Bassi
b. 10-31-1711; Bologna, Italy
d. 2-20-1778

Laura Bassi was the first woman scientist (anatomy and physics) to teach officially at a college in Europe.

Ruth Benedict
b. 6-5-1887; NYC, NY
d. 9-17-1948; NYC

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict was student of Franz Boas, a member of the faculty of Columbia University, and a friend and teacher of Margaret Mead.

• Ruth Benedict at Amazon

Mary Ann Bickerdyke
b. 7-19-1817; Knox County, Ohio
d. 11-8-1901; Bunker Hill, Kansas.

Mary Ann Bickerdyke practiced 'botanic' medicine as a means of supporting herself and sons after the death of her husband prior to the Civil War. Sent with medical supplies by the community of Galesburg, Illinois to help wounded Union soldiers, she won the confidence of U.S. Grant who appointed her his chief of nursing, and the appreciation of the soldiers who called her “Mother”. By the end of the Civil War Bickerdyke had built 300 hospitals and helped the wounded in 19 battlefields. After the Civil War she became an attorney and helped veterans with legal issues.

Elizabeth Blackwell
b. 2-3-1821; Bristol, England
d. 5-31-1910; Hastings

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman earn a Medical Doctor (MD) degree and become a doctor in the United States (1849), was from a Quaker family active as abolitionists and in the women's suffrage movement.

To prepare herself for medical school Blackwell boarded with physicians in order to read in their libraries as she taught school to earn money for a medical education.

Only one school admitted Blackwell, Geneva (NY) Medical College, and she was allowed to attend only because the male students voted her in as a joke. After graduation she was banned from U.S. teaching hospitals so she interned at La maternité, Paris, and St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. In 1857, she, along with her sister Emily (3rd woman medical graduate) and Marie Zakrzewska (also a physician), set up the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, after years of professional and social shunning. Blackwell helped trained nurses in the US Civil War, and in 1868 established the Women's Medical College.

Blackwell returned to England, and with Florence Nightingale opened a medical school for women there.

Elizabeth Blackwell was a sister-in-law to Lucy Stone.

Elizabeth Blackwell quotes ~
• “Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.”
• “For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.”
• “If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.”

• Elizabeth Blackwell: First Woman Physician (Great Life Stories)
• National Library of Medicine
• Heroes of Science & Technology posters

Sophie Blanchard
b. 3-25-1778; La Rochelle, France
d. 7-6-1819; Tivoli Gardens, Paris

Sophie Blanchard, the widow of French ballooning pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard, was the first woman to pilot her own balloon and work as a professional balloonist. She performed all around Europe, even crossing the Alps; she lost consciousness several times on high altitude flights and conducted experiements with parachutes.

FYI - Mme. Blanchard was also the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident when a fireworks display caused her balloon to fail.

Mary Breckenridge
b. 2-17-1881; Memphis, TN
d. 5-19-1965

Mary Breckinridge was a nurse-midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service, family care centers in the Appalachian mountains. Her grandfather, John C. Breckinridge, was US Vice President under Buchanan; she was a cousin of Sophonisba Breckinridge.