In 1907, when Annette Kellerman appeared on Revere Beach in a one-piece swimsuit ending in shorts above her knees, her bold choice created an uproar. Her legs, visible and daring by the standards of the day, led to her arrest for indecency. Yet those same l…
For centuries, the term “computer” meant a person, often a woman, performing complex calculations by hand. By the late 19th century, these human computers became the unsung heroes of numerous scientific advancements. Alan Turing described the "human comp…
In the next few decades after Wright brothers' first flight, women aviators became increasingly common and attracted an increasing amount of attention, culminating with Amelia Earhart's flights in the 1920s and 1930s. With Earhart's death in 1937, women avi…
In the Victorian era, the woman's hair was considered an important part of her appearance and it marked her status and her femininity. Women in that era were often expected to grow their hair to great lengths, and it was common knowledge that a woman’s crownin…
More so than any war in history, World War II was a woman’s war. Women, motivated by patriotism, the opportunity for new experiences, and the desire to serve, participated widely in the global conflict. Within the Allied countries, women of all ages pro…
A few months before Pearl Harbor was attacked, LIFE magazine ran a black-and-white photograph of an up-and-coming movie actress named Rita Hayworth. The redheaded beauty was kneeling on a bed made up with satin sheets, her silky nightgown is white, with bl…
Sophia Loren (born in1934, Rome, Italy), is an Italian film actress who rose above her poverty-stricken origins in postwar Naples to become universally recognized as one of Italy’s most beautiful women and its most famous movie star. She was named by the Am…
Born on September 30, 1968, Bellucci grew up in the small Italian village of Citta di Castello, where her father owned a trucking company. At 18, she enrolled at the University of Perugia with plans to study law. To pay her tuition, Bellucci started modelin…
Brigitte Bardot was born in September 1934 in Paris and is a French actress, singer, and model. Famous for portraying sexually emancipated personae with hedonistic lifestyles, she was one of the best-known sex symbols of the late 1950s and 1960s. Bardot…
Helen Mirren was born in London to a Russian-born father and a Scottish mother. The family’s last name was Mironoff until Helen’s father decided to Anglicize it when she was 10 years old. She joined Britain’s National Youth Theatre at age 18 and the Royal S…
When an amateur inventor and designer named Earl Silas Tupper first invented Tupperware around 1942 (from a refined version of polyethylene that he referred to as “Poly-T: Material of the Future), he envisaged the total “Tupperization” of the American home…
Before anyone ever heard the word “cowgirl,” there were women who ventured west. Most traveled with their families on covered wagons, beginning in the 1840s. They moved from crowded eastern cities to settle in western states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Co…
The flight attendant occupation took permanent shape in the 1930s as “women’s work,” that is, work not only predominately performed by women but also defined as embodying white, middle-class ideals of femininity. As the nascent commercial aviation indus…
The pretty ankle contest" appear in the early 1900s as special shows within women’s beauty competitions. Contestants would have to stand behind a curtain to conceal their bodies, so that all that could be seen was below the knee - legs clad in thick stocki…
The woman suffrage movement actually began in 1848, when a women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The Seneca Falls meeting was not the first in support of women’s rights, but suffragists later viewed it as the meeting that launche…
Ladies, this is how you land a man in 1938-style. We always find these vintage “dating tips” for single women hilarious. Just think about it: “Don’t drink too much, as a man expects you to keep your dignity all evening. Drinking may make some girls seem cle…
Edwardian fashion refers to the clothing that was in style between the late 1890s and 1914 or the beginning of the Great War. Also called La Belle Epoque (the Beautiful Era), and the Gilded Age, this was a time when women's fashions took on a new opulence …
Decades after her death, Eva Braun, the long-time mistress of Adolf Hitler, remains a mysterious and notorious figure. This is the photographic life story of a woman who met Hitler as a teenager and, in the last days of the war, became the Führer’s wife—on…
In 1941, LIFE magazine decided to document the lives of one of the biggest single demographics in the U.S.: the 30 million housewives who did most of the washing, made beds, cooked meals and nursed almost all the babies of the nation, with little help, no …
By the 1970s teenage pregnancies were recognized as a problem worldwide. The continuing apprehension about teenage pregnancy was based on the profound impact that teenage pregnancy could have on the lives of the girls and their children. Demographic stu…