Game Changers

Florence Merriam Bailey 1886

Nature writer and ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey 1886 is credited with writing that inspired the study of birds in their natural habitats, as opposed to indoor settings. At Smith, she studied ornithology and co-founded a chapter of the Audubon Society, hoping to educate her classmates and convince them not to wear hats decorated with bird feathers. She wrote for Audubon Magazine and published what is considered to be the first field guide for identifying birds, Birds Through an Opera Glass. She also wrote Birds of New Mexico at the request of the U.S. Biological Survey. Bailey, who taught birdwatching classes at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., was one of the first women to be accepted as a member of the American Ornithological Union. She received the union’s prestigious Brewster Medal in recognition of her exceptional work in the field.

Angel DeCora 1896

Also known as Hinook-Mahiwi-Kalinaka (Fleecy Cloud Floating in Place), Angel DeCora was an acclaimed artist, designer, educator, and Native American rights activist. When she was a teenager, DeCora was forcibly removed from her home on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska. She then studied at prep schools in Virginia and Massachusetts before enrolling at Smith to study art. She became Smith’s first known Native American graduate in 1896, and continued her studies at Drexel Institute (now University), where she was accepted into renowned illustrator Howard Pyle’s extremely competitive summer art program. Her acclaimed art style combined Western techniques with traditional Native American styles, providing a lens into Native American culture for white Americans. While few of DeCora’s original works remain, her legacy as “the first real [Native American] artist” of her day remains intact.

Euphemia Lofton Haynes 1914

Euphemia Lofton Haynes was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, which she received in 1943 from the Catholic University of America. A mathematics major at Smith, she went on to teach public school for close to 50 years. She also served as the first woman to chair the Washington, DC, board of education. During her tenure, she was an outspoken critic of the “track system” that put African American students on educational tracks that left them unprepared for college. Her work eventually led to a federal court case that ended the track system in DC public schools. After retiring from teaching in 1959, she went on to establish the mathematics department at the University of the District of Columbia. Throughout her life, Haynes received numerous honors. Pope John Paul XXIII awarded her with a Papal Decoration of Honor in 1959, and in 1998, she became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At Smith College, the former Wilder House is now known as Haynes House in her honor.

Eunice Carter 1921

Eunice Carter 1921 channeled her Smith training as a social worker and her commitment to social justice into a remarkable legal career. The first female African American graduate of Fordham University Law School, she also served as the first Black woman assistant district attorney for the state of New York. In that role, she was a key strategist for the successful 1936 prosecution of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, exposing his part in prostitution rackets that supported organized crime. In helping to bring about Luciano’s conviction, Carter drew on her experience as an assistant DA for the New York City Women’s Court, building trust with women who provided information about the inner workings of the city’s prostitution rings. Carter later served as a legal advisor to the United Nations and in 1957 was elected chair of the UN’s International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations—the first woman to hold that position. Carter’s leadership at the UN helped expand global conversations about women’s rights, gender equality and international cooperation.

Ann Baumgartner Carl ’39

In October 1944, Ann Baumgartner Carl ’39 became the first woman to fly a US Army Air Forces jet plane. Initially inspired by a school visit from Amelia Earhart, Carl was an aviator through and through. As a child, she’d often accompany her father to Newark Airport in New Jersey to watch the planes come in at night. After studying pre-med at Smith, she joined the public relations department at Eastern Airlines and began flying lessons at a nearby airport. Later, she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) class of 1943 and was stationed at Camp Davis in North Carolina as a tow pilot. Multiple assignments followed, including stints as a test pilot. Then in March of 1944, she was assigned to the fighter test division at Wright Field in Ohio. Seven months later, she was in the cockpit of America’s first jet aircraft, the Bell YP-59A, making history. Later in life, Carl taught flight instruction for United Airlines and also became a respected science journalist.

Cornelia Oberlander ’44

Cornelia Oberlander ’44 once described her fellow landscape architects as “a combination of artists, designers, choreographers, and scientists.” An art major at Smith and one of the first women to study at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Oberlander—who died of COVID in 2021—was renowned for her naturalistic designs. From beloved public spaces in her adopted city of Vancouver, Canada, to Smith’s landscape master plan in the mid-1990s, her work elevates the idea that, in her words, “people want to be surrounded by nature—it is in our genes.” The daughter of a German Jewish engineer and a horticulturalist and children’s book author, Oberlander fled with her family to England in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. Inspired by her Smith classes in landscape design, she was determined that the college be among the first liberal arts institutions to train students in that field. Oberlander was also always ready with suggestions aimed at improving the campus landscape, according to a profile in the Smith Quarterly. Among them: “Reduce the number of lawns. Rethink the value of the pond. Show more respect for green space. Allow fewer vehicles on campus. Promote Smith as a leader in campus sustainability.”

Gloria Steinem ’56

Cofounder of Ms. magazine and author of the bestseller Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, along with several other books, Gloria Steinem ’56 is a high-profile activist and feminist icon who has helped organize and launch some of the most important women’s groups of the past century, including the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Women’s Action Alliance, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Women’s Media Center. A well-respected journalist who has been published in Esquire and The New York Times Magazine, Steinem famously went undercover for New York magazine as a Playboy bunny in the 1960s and wrote an exposé (called “A Bunny’s Tale”) about her eye-opening experience. Steinem has earned numerous accolades during her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 and a place in the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1993.

Ng’endo Mwangi ’61

Renowned as Kenya’s first female physician, Ng’endo Mwangi ’61 has been a role model for generations of Smith students. The college’s Mwangi Cultural Center, which has long been a hub for campus activism and community building, is named in her honor. Dr. Mwangi, who grew up in colonial Kenya, attended Smith, where she majored in biological sciences, on an African Airlift scholarship program launched with the support of then Senator John F. Kennedy. After earning her medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, she returned to Kenya, where she founded a rural health clinic serving 30,000 local Maasai tribespeople. Wambui Mwangi ’90 was still a young girl in 1973 when Smith named its Afro-American Cultural Center in honor of her mother. The younger Mwangi—a scholar and educator who was the first president of Smith’s African Students Association—recalls spending hours in the center organizing anti-racism activities on campus. At the time of Ng’endo Mwangi’s passing in 1989, students summed up her legacy this way: “We, the Smith students of today, owe Mwangi a great debt for being one of the vanguard of women who broke down racial and gender barriers, thereby making our progress a little easier.”

Jane Lakes Harman ’66

A Democrat from California, Jane Lakes Harman ’66 is a nine-term member of Congress and the first Smith alum to be elected to Congress. During her time in office, she became an internationally recognized authority on U.S. and international security, foreign relations and policymaking, and was the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee (2002–2006) and chaired the Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence Subcommittee (2007–2011). Prior to taking office, she held several positions within the government, including deputy secretary to the cabinet of President Jimmy Carter. Harman resigned from Congress in 2011 to lead the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as its first female president and CEO. She stepped down in 2021 and is currently a distinguished fellow and president emerita there. A Smith Medalist, she is the author of Insanity Defense: Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe (2021).

Laura D’Andrea Tyson ’69

Under President Bill Clinton, economics and public policy scholar Laura D'Andrea Tyson ’69 served as cabinet member (1993–1996), chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (1993–1995), and director of the White House National Economic Council (1995–1996)—the first woman to serve in these positions. She later became a member of President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Tyson was the first female named dean of London Business School (1998–2001) and then interim dean at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (2002–2006), where she is currently a distinguished professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley-Haas. Tyson has done considerable policy research on the links between women’s rights and national economic performance and is a co-author of the World Economic Forum Annual Global Gender Gap Report, which ranks each nation on economic, political, education, and health gender gaps.

Catharine MacKinnon ’69

Feminist legal scholar, writer, and activist Catharine MacKinnon ’69 broke new ground when she established in the late 1970s a legitimate legal basis for sexual harassment claims. She also worked with feminist Andrea Dworkin to create ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and the Swedish model (Equality Model) for abolishing prostitution by putting criminal penalties on the purchaser. In the late 1990s, she successfully filed suit on behalf of Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities against Radovan Karadzic, former president of the Republika Srpska, and received $745 million in damages. This was the first time rape was legally acknowledged as an act of genocide. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan Law School and the long-term James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her most recent book is Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women (2019).

Erin O’Shea ’88

Biologist Erin O’Shea ’88 is a champion of what she describes as “high-risk, high-reward science that can change the future.” As the first female president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, she has worked to expand diversity in the sciences and support groundbreaking medical research and education. For her own research contributions to cell and molecular biology, she received a National Academy of Sciences Award in 2001. O’Shea—who earned her Smith degree in biochemistry, and completed a doctorate in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in less than three years—taught at Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco. She became an HHMI investigator in 2000, where, among other research projects, she helped catalogue the location and amount of 75% of the proteins in the yeast genome. A member of the NAS and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, O’Shea was named president of HHMI in 2016.

Deborah Archer ’93

In 2021, Deborah Archer made history as the first Black woman to be named president of the American Civil Liberties Union. A renowned civil rights lawyer, teacher, and scholar, Archer was the first in her family to attend college. She chose Smith at the urging of a family friend who had graduated from Smith and told Archer that it was a “magical” place. When she received the Smith College Medal at Rally Day in 2022, Archer said, “I would not be the person I am without Smith. I came knowing that the world needed to change. But it was at Smith that I came to believe that I could change it.” Early in her career, she was a lawyer at the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she took on cases related to voting rights, employment discrimination, and school segregation. In addition to her position with the ACLU, Archer serves as associate dean of experiential education and clinical programs and co-faculty director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at New York University School of Law. She is also a member of Smith College’s board of trustees.

Shaharzad Akbar ’02

Shaharzad Akbar ’02 is an internationally recognized human rights activist. Currently in exile from her home in Afghanistan, Akbar has been an outspoken advocate for marginalized communities around the world. She was the first Afghan woman to complete postgraduate studies at Oxford University. Then, she founded Afghanistan 1400 to promote freedom of expression, gender equality, and voting rights. That work gave Akbar a national voice that she used as a deputy on the National Security Council for Peace and Civilian Protection, as a senior adviser to former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, and as chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. She has used her own story to inspire fellow Afghans to envision a democratic Afghanistan free from tyranny. “I want to change the destiny of my country,” she has said. An anthropology major, Akbar says that Smith was the “first place outside of my family where I felt fully recognized, appreciated, and supported. I thrived at Smith.”

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy ’02

A two-time Oscar winner for the short subject documentaries Saving Face (2012, as codirector) and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2015, as director), Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy ’02 is the first Pakistani ever to receive an Academy Award. Considered one of the most interesting and compelling storytellers in the film industry, Obaid-Chinoy directed episodes of the miniseries Ms. Marvel (2022) and is developing a new Star Wars film, which will follow the events of The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and center on the Rey character. Most recently, she directed the film Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge, which tells the story of the fashion designer credited with inventing the wrap dress. Obaid-Chinoy worked as a reporter for her local English-language newspaper in Pakistan as a teenager, and after graduating from Smith she set her sights on becoming the influential visual storyteller that she is today.

Elim Chan ’09

Renowned conductor Elim Chan ’09 was the first female to win the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, enabling her to spend the 2015–16 season as assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, where she worked closely with Valery Gergiev before becoming a Dudamel Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Chan has since served as principal guest conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra from 2018–2023 and principal conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra from 2019–24, while maintaining a demanding schedule of guest conductor appearances with top orchestras around the world. Recent engagements include collaborations with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Staatskapelle Berlin, Staatskapelle Dresden, and the Orchestre de Paris. Chan is also working with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León in a three-year collaboration (2023–26) focusing on the ballets of Stravinsky.