Some remarkable women that history has forgotten

Women have brought countless amazing contributions to society throughout history, yet their accomplishments have often been passed over due to their gender.

From successfully getting an astronaut into space to leading the suffragette movement, these women have done remarkable things.

Credit where credit is due. Here are 19 women you probably don't remember from history, but should.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped organize the world's first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. She also helped form the National Women's Loyal League with Susan B. Anthony, and co-established the National Woman Suffrage Association, which ultimately helped women in the US gain the right to vote.

Jeannette Rankin

Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to US Congress, and served two terms in the House of Representatives. She was also a lobbyist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and lead 5,000 people in an anti-Vietnam War march in Washington, D.C.

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker was a famous dancer and performer, becoming the first person of color to star in a major motion picture (the 1934 film "Zouzou"). Refusing to perform for segregated audiences in the US, she's also known for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. If that all wasn't enough, she was also a spy for the French Resistance during WWII, as she smuggled messages in her sheet music.

Zelda Fitzgerald

If you were one of the many students whose required high school reading assignments included "The Great Gatsby," then you may or may not know that many of the words that were thought to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's may have actually been written by his wife, Zelda.

A writer herself, Zelda Fitzgerald is said to have been a very large inspiration for her husband's work. Outspoken and ahead of her time, he described her as "the first American Flapper."

Adrienne Rich

Author and activist Adrienne Rich was a poet and radical feminist best known for bringing the "oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." She won countless honors for her work, and was one of the most- read poets of the 20th century.

One of her most famous essays, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," was a major influencer of the radical feminist movement of the 1980s.

Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells was a brilliant journalist and social activist whose articles and political essays lead to her becoming part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in 1892. She went on to form the National Association of Colored Women before later co-founding the NAACP.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the British suffragette movement, which helped women win the right to vote. She died only a few weeks before women were given the right to vote.

Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi was the first and only female Prime Minister of India. While often considered ruthless and authoritarian, she was a successful leader, having helped India gain self-sufficiency in food grain production by spearheading agricultural improvements, and leading the country through the Pakistan war. She is the world's longest-serving female Prime Minister to this day.

Huda Sharawi

Huda Sharawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, and later became the founding president of the Arab Feminist Union in 1945.

Her best-known act of protest includes removing her face veil in a crowded Cairo train station upon returning home from an International Women Suffrage Alliance conference, which was a turning point in making wearing a veil a woman's choice, not a requirement.

Valentina Tereshkova

In 1963, Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. Having spent a total of 71 hours out there, orbiting the Earth 48 times, she returned to solid ground having been in space longer than any other astronaut at the time.

Lee Miller

A 20s fashion model turned photographer, Lee Miller is known for the stunning photos she took of women serving in World War II. One of her most iconic images is a photo of herself in Adolf Hitler's bathtub, which she took after having accompanied American forces who raided his Munich apartment in 1945.

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly was a famous journalist known for her investigative and undercover reporting. Her 1887 expose on the conditions of asylum patients at Blackwell's Island in New York City, in which she feigned insanity to study the hospital from within, is one of her most famous pieces, and marked a new era of investigative reporting. She's also known for her trip around the world in 1889, which she completed in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds — setting a world record at the time.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win two, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different fields (physics and chemistry). Her research into radioactive compounds was groundbreaking for the time, leading to the discovery of polonium and radium, and thus the development of X-rays. She also developed of the theory of radioactivity and coined the term.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace was a 19th-century mathematician who is said to have worked with Charles Babbage to write instructions for the first computer code in the 1800s. She was also the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron, who called her his "Princess of Parallelograms."

Martha Graham

Martha Graham was a modern dance pioneer whose signature Graham technique is regarded as a groundbreaking style that changed the face of dance. Today, Graham technique is taught at institutions all around the world, including the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, which was founded in 1926.

Katherine Johnson

Recently celebrated in the film "Hidden Figures," mathematician Katherine Johnson (aka the "human computer") spent over 30 years at NASA, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. She is credited with doing the calculations that first sent a man to the moon.

Mary Wollstonecraft

A famous author and feminist icon of her time, Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her essay "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," which was one of the first works arguing in favor of women receiving a proper education.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, and was the first black woman to hold a position as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. She frequently wrote about the struggle for racial equality in the US, which received harsh criticism at the time.