Mollie Steimer earned nationwide attention for her refusal to compromise her anarchist beliefs during the widely publicized 1918 trial in which she was sentenced to prison under the Sedition Act. Later deported to Russia and then to Germany, Steimer continued her anarchist activities throughout her life.

Gloria Steinem was a leader of second-wave feminism and the co-founder of Ms. Magazine, the first feminist periodical with a national readership. As a journalist and spokesperson, she mobilized a generation of women to advance the cause of women’s liberation. Steinem has worked tirelessly all her life as an advocate for change.

As a Holocaust survivor, Judith Steiner-Freud fulfilled her faithful and influential mission. From the 1940s to the 2010s, she devoted herself to the calling of transforming nursing into an academic profession, raising the status of Israeli nurses, and promoting the welfare of Israeli society and other diverse population groups.

Lina Shtern, biochemist and physician, was the first woman professor at the University of Geneva and the first woman named to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Born in Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, she returned to the Soviet Union out of political idealism. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, she was a victim of postwar repressions that targeted both scientists and Jews.

A prolific writer as well as an activist in the mental health field, Edith Stern authored four novels and many guides for laypeople on the subjects of mental illness, aging, and differently abled children.

Frances Stern’s experience as a second-generation American Jew dedicated to social reform and in contact with several prominent women engaged in social work led her to a career in scientific nutrition, applied dietetics, and home economics. Stern founded the Food Clinic of the Boston Dispensary, a center for dispensing practical advice on food and meal preparation for outpatients and their families that also served as a center for research on the relationships among health, nutrition, class, and ethnicity.

Originally a historian and researcher in Heidelberg and Berlin, Selma Stern-Taeubler settled at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinatti after fleeing Nazi Germany. She became the first archivist of the American Jewish Archives at the college and later wrote books of fiction and nonfiction. Despite her contributions to Jewish history, American-Jewish academe has largely undervalued Stern-Taeubler’s work, which continued until her death in 1981.

Believing in a future where all people had a voice and women’s work was valued, Estelle Sternberger found a myriad of ways to reshape public opinion, from hosting a political radio show to leading an organization for peace.

Florine Stettheimer's paintings are lively, diarylike accounts of her life and acute examinations of upper-class ways in New York between the wars. Her decorative style offered an alternative to prevailing modes of contemporary modernist painting. Through her work, she criticized the high-mindedness of modern art and the course of modern life. 

Rahel Goitein Straus, a pioneering woman medical doctor trained in Germany, was a model “New Jewish Woman” of the early-20th century. Successfully combining a career as a physician with marriage and motherhood, she committed herself to Jewish and feminist causes and organizations throughout her life, while also embracing Zionist ideals.

The best-known and least typical Jewish woman of early-modern Italy, Sarra Copia Sullam engaged publicly with leading intellectuals and produced poetry, letters, and polemics, particularly about the belief in immortality of the soul. The context of her literary activity was the academies (accademia) of Venice, including one that she held in her own house, which attracted a stream of distinguished visitors from the city states of northern Italy who discussed philosophy, theology, art, and literature and who engaged in domestic intrigue.

Author and actress Jacqueline Susann made history as the first author to have three consecutive New York Times bestsellers, starting with her famous 1966 novel, Valley of the Dolls. She is credited with drastically changing book promotion and marketing, using television and print advertising to promote her novels rather than relying on reviews.

Margarete Susman published her first writings, a book of poetry, in 1901 and went on to have a prolific writing career that included plays, books, and journal articles. Susman combined literature and theory, often reflecting seminal texts of modern theory and addressing political issues and women’s rights. Her writings concentrate on the most problematic issues of the modern world: God and human beings, man and woman, Jew and Christian.