Microbiologist and physician Gladys Dick codiscovers the microbe that causes scarlet fever and co-patents the Dick test (patented not to make money but to preserve its safety and purity) to determine an individual’s susceptibility to scarlet fever, which claimed thousands of lives in epidemics.
Novelist Edna Ferber publishes So Big and wins a Pulitzer Prize.
Writer, feminist, and political activist Emily Newell Blair works tirelessly for suffrage and then to organize women voters and train them as Democratic Party workers. In much of her writing and in her actions, she emphasizes the potential for political power among organized women.
Margaret Petherbridge Farrar is the first woman to produce a crossword puzzle book.
Alma Thomas the first graduate of Howard University’s art department; she becomes a successful painter and teacher.
Florence Sabin is the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to training the next generation of researchers, she studies the role of the body’s white cells in fending off diseases such as tuberculosis. She also makes important contributions to the histology of the brain. She is the first woman faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and its first full female professor.
Novelist Ellen Glasgow achieves critical success as a writer; later she receives the Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life.