YEARS
1946–1947

1946

Actress Jayne Meadows appears in Lady in the Lake. A critically acclaimed dramatic and comedic actress, she is an Emmy Award winner and five-time Emmy nominee. Later in her career, she receives the Susan B. Anthony Award for her contribution in portraying women in positive roles. She also tours the United States for six years in a one-woman show, Powerful Women in History.


1946

Edith Houghton, who plays baseball so well that at one time or another she plays every position, is the first woman scout for a major league baseball team when the Philadelphia Phillies hire her.


1946

Estée Lauder starts her cosmetics empire by selling face creams that she both formulates and makes herself. She said that she relied on three means of communication to build her multimillion-dollar empire. “telephone, telegraph, and tell a woman.”


1946

Actress and cultural icon Marilyn Monroe, who will become famous more for her beauty and breathy voice than for her acting talent, signs a short-term contract with 20th Century Fox. Her appearance in the 1950 movie All About Eve leads to another contract with Fox, and she becomes a household name after a large-scale publicity campaign.


1947

Businesswoman Dorothy Stimson Bullitt founds KING Broadcasting, based in Seattle. It is one of the nation’s first privately owned broadcast empires.


1947

Marjory Stoneman Douglas is considered the “patron saint of the Everglades”; she writes The Everglades: River of Grass and raises awareness of the need for environmental conservation efforts.


1947

Biochemist and physician Gerty Radnitz Cori is the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in the sciences. Her research involved studying the overall process of carbohydrate metabolism in the body, later called the Cori cycle.


1947

Actress Jessica Tandy appears on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she wins a Tony Award. Her long and distinguished career culminates in a Best Actress Oscar in 1989 (at eighty, she is the oldest actor to receive a nonhonorary Oscar) for Driving Miss Daisy.


1947

Alice Hamilton is the first woman to receive the Lasker Award of the U.S. Public Health Association. Dr. Hamilton is considered to be the founder of the field of occupational medicine.