From the first time in 1910, when working women gathered for a conference in Copenhagen/Denmark, to today’s 100-year benchmark, women have steadily been able to claim rights and privileges akin to male counterparts.

A short-list of women’s achievements from the past 100 years:

1910 Establishment of the first conference of working women in Copenhagen

1911 First time to celebrate International Women’s Day in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland

1913 Suffragist movement in England draws attention

1913 Norway becomes the second country in the world to grant women the right to vote (after New Zealand, in 1893)

1914 Princess Eugenie Shakhovskaya becomes the first female military pilot

1915 Helen Keller is the first blind and deaf female university graduate

1917 Russia grants its women the right to vote

1920 The U.S.A., Germany, Austria, Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia grant women the right to vote

1927 The Norwegian-born figure skater Sonja Henie wins her first world amateur championship

1930 British pilot Amy Johnson crosses the oceans form England to Australia on her first solo flight

1932 American pilot Amelia Earhart crosses the Atlantic in a solo flight

1944 France grants its women the right to vote

1945 Italy grants its women the right to vote

1950 India grants its women the right to vote

1953 Vijaya Laskhmi Pandit becomes the first woman to be elected president of the United Nations General Assemble

1955 Rosa Parks’s refusal of giving up her seat to a white man planted the seed for the black civil rights movement in the United States

1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) becomes the world’s first female prime minister

1963 The Russian cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, becomes the first woman in space

1975 The Japanese mountaineer, Junko Tabei, is the first woman to reach Mount Everest (in an all female 15-member group)

1975 Maria Estala Martínez de Perón becomes the first female president of Argentina

1980 Vigdis Finnbogadottir is the first woman to become elected president (Iceland)

1981 Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman to become an U.S. Supreme Court justice

1988 Benazir Bhutto becomes Pakistan’s prime minister and modern history’s first woman to lead a Muslim country

1995 Marie Curie becomes the only woman to be buried at the Panthéon in Paris (among 71 males, France’s national heroes)

2001 Irene Zubaida Khan, from Bangladesh, is the first woman, the first Asian, and the first Muslim to become secretary general of Amnesty International

2003 The Iranian lawyer and human rights activist, Shirin Ebadi, is the first Muslim woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

2004 Wangari Muta becomes the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize

2005 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf becomes Africa’s first elected leader and the world’s first black female president in Libya

2010 In Europe and the United States, nearly 60% of university degrees are earned by women

Tags: achievements, Copenhagen, first Asian, first black, first elected, first female, first Muslim, international, movement, suffragist, women's day

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