Science

Ana Pauker

Born to an impoverished Orthodox family in Bucharest, Ana Pauker joined the Romanian communist movement in 1915. She rose through the ranks, becoming one of the most powerful Communist leaders in Romania after World War II and, according to Time magazine, “the most powerful woman alive.”

Jessica Blanche Peixotto

Jessica Blanche Peixotto defied convention and her family to become a respected authority in the field of economics. Through her education, professorship, and departmental leadership at the University of California at Berkeley, she broke down barriers for women in education.

Lydia Pasternak

Born in Moscow into a family of highly successful artists, Lydia Pasternak made a name for herself in both scientific and literary realms. She worked as an assistant to American neurochemist Irvine H. Page in Munich and later became the preeminent translator of her brother Boris’s poetry while living in Great Britain.

Berta Ottenstein

A pioneer in skin biochemistry and dermatology, Berta Ottenstein became the first woman lecturer in the Medical Faculty at the University of Freiburg in 1931. Two years later she was forced to flee Germany and begin her scientific career anew. After occupying research positions at the universities of Budapest and Istanbul, she received a research fellowship at Harvard University in 1945.

Emmy Noether

Emmy Noether, a German mathematician, was the world leader in the twentieth-century development of modern “abstract” algebra. Her writing, the students she inspired, and those students’ books wholly changed the form and content of higher algebra throughout the world. She influenced a generation of mathematicians, several of whom borrowed heavily from her work to write the major textbooks of the field.

Nelly Neumann

Nelly Neumann completed her doctorate in synthetic geometry in 1909 at Breslau University, making her one of the first women in Germany to obtain such a degree. In her lifetime she provided career guidance to female university students and worked as a secondary school teacher, tackling the intersection of philosophy and mathematics.

Jewish Women in New Zealand

Although New Zealand’s Jewish community is small, “Kiwi” Jewish women have punched well above their weight and account for a significant number of the country’s “historic firsts” and remarkable achievements.

Elsa Neumann

Elsa Neumann was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree from the University of Berlin. She became prominent in Berlin’s scientific community, carrying out research for the newly established airship industry. In 1900 Neumann established a highly successful association that gave grants to female students.

Margaret Naumburg

By founding the Walden School and creating her own system of education based on principles of psychoanalysis, Margaret Naumburg laid the groundwork for the new discipline of art therapy. Naumburg also authored many works on psychology and art therapy.

Bernice L. Neugarten

Beginning the 1950s, Bernice Neugarten began groundbreaking research on aging that exploded many myths about the elderly and emphasized the importance of tailoring services to the needs of individual elderly people. She became the University of Chicago’s first tenured professor of human development in 1960 and wrote eight books and more than 150 articles on her research.

Elsie Margaret Binger Naumburg

Elsie Margaret Binger Naumburg was a researcher of South American avifauna and a gazetteer with the American Geographical Society. She put her research on hold during World War II to aid refugee and unemployed musicians.

Bessie Louise Moses

Gynecologist, professor, and contraceptive pioneer Bessie Louise Moses spent a long professional life as a public health advocate and women’s health specialist. She founded the first birth control clinic in Baltimore, organized clinics throughout Maryland, and lectured and wrote a book promoting contraception to the public.

Moshavah

Women played important roles in the moshavot (villages), the pioneer settlement form created by the Jews in Palestine at its formative period 1882-1914. Various types of women in the moshava had significant roles in creating the “new Jew” of the second generation and in establishing and consolidating the moshavot.

Mo'ezet Ha-Po'alot (Council of Women Workers)

The Mo’ezet Ha-Poalot was founded in 1921 as the women’s branch of the Histadrut, the General Federation of Workers in mandatory Palestine. In the name of women workers, the organization struggled for many years for equality in the eyes of the Histadrut, though it ultimately came to represent more broadly the interests of Jewish women in Palestine and Israel, including immigrants and housewives.

Hélène Metzger

Hélène Metzger was a French historian of chemistry and a philosopher of science, whose work remains influential today. Her independence and drive brought her great recognition, despite the lack of credibility given to her as a woman.

Dorothee Metlitzki

The work of multilingual historian Dorothee Metlitzki showed the importance of Arab contributions to Western thought and the progression of ideas across the entire expanse of the medieval world. Reflecting her academic pursuits, she lived all over Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, learning, teaching, and spreading ideas.

Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner’s influential work concerning radioactivity in the early 20th century made her a target of the Nazis. She fled to Sweden in 1938, and it was there that she discovered the power of the fission reaction. Even though Meitner never worked on nuclear weapons, her 1939 research was essential in the research of nuclear power.

Medieval Ashkenaz (1096-1348)

The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz are known for their prolific rabbis and for the Ashkenazic customs that became characteristic of many European Jewish communities. During the High Middle Ages, the women in these communities had many important roles women within the family and in the communal, economic, and religious life.

Martha Tamara Schuch Mednick

Both through her psychological research and through her collaboration with a diverse group of women scholars, Martha Tamara Schuch Mednick helped long–silenced minorities express their experiences. Her accomplishments included a paper that debunked the myth of Israeli settlers’ gender equality and the organization of the first international interdisciplinary conference on women, bringing together American, Israeli, and Arab women scholars.

Jessie Marmorston

Jessie Marmorston was a professor of experimental medicine, researching a stunning range of medical disciplines including immunology, endocrinology, psychoanalysis, and cardiology. Her research into hormone secretion led to breakthroughs in our understanding of the ways stress can contribute to heart attacks and certain cancers.

Judith Marquet-Krause

Judith Marquet-Krause was an archeologist who contributed her talents to early twentieth-century excavations of ancient cities across Palestine, most notably leading the excavation of Ai.

Selma Mair

Selma Mair was a German-born registered nurse who brought her education and devotion to the role of head nurse at the Sha’arei Zedek hospital in Jerusalem.

Hannah Maisel-Shohat

Combining her zeal for the Zionist movement and her extensive education in agriculture, Hannah Maisel-Shohat dedicated herself to the establishment of women’s farms and agriculture education programs in Palestine in the 1920s.

Sarah Malkhin

Sarah Malkhin was among the first women agricultural laborers to arrive in Palestine during the the Second Aliyah. Through efforts to establish new kinds of agricultural settlements founded on ideals of emancipation and independence, Malkhin and her colleagues clashed with veteran settlers of the Old Yishuv.

Margaret Mahler

Margaret Schönberger Mahler was a pioneering child analyst in the early twentieth century. She became a leading authority on the mother-child relationship and the separation-individuation process, which she examined in her best-known work, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant.