Seven Men Who Changed Women’s Lives

The next time your gyno cranks open the speculum and takes a scraping of cervical cells, say a silent thank you to Dr. Papanikolaou, who discovered that pre-cancerous cervical cell changes could be detected under a microscope. Introduced in 1923, the Pap test was responsible for lowering cervical cancer rates by about 70 percent, and is still among the most accurate diagnostic screening tools in all of medicine.

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Women have practiced primitive birth control since the dawn of civilization, but Dr. John Rock, a Boston infertility specialist, was responsible for making pregnancy prevention as easy as taking a pill. Despite being a devout, mass-attending Catholic, Rock headed the team that conducted the human trials on the first FDA-approved birth control pill. Rock was passionate about birth control and spent his life trying—and failing—to convince the church to change their position on contraception.

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A woman on her period used to have two choices: use old rags, diapers, and cloths as pads, or insert bits of sponge or cotton to absorb menstrual fluid. In 1931, after seeing the messy, inconvenient menstrual solutions his wife and other women had to endure, Dr. Haas applied for a patent for a device that would cleanly and quickly insert a compressed wad of cotton—the first applicator tampon.

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When the first Apple iMac splashed onto the scene in 1998, it wasn’t very powerful, but damn was it pretty. And simple to use, too—no manual required. There had always been covetable gadgets (Hello, Motorola StarTac!), but Jobs turned gadgets from utilitarian job-doers to beautiful accessories worth showing off. Once phones, PDAs, and computers became sleek, colorful, and fun, women’s lives went digital.

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You may not know Paul Poiret, but he’s the reason women no longer have to endure recreating the corset-pulling scene from Gone with the Wind. During his heyday in pre-World War I Paris, he had the radical idea that women should not have to wear oxygen-restricting, rib-crushing, health-affecting corsets all for the sake of fashion. His loose, draped dresses helped usher in a newfangled foundation garment that was much less restrictive—the brassiere.

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It’s hard to imagine a time when a mother would be urged not to comfort or show too much affection to her child, but until Dr. Spock published his book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care in 1946, those were accepted parenting techniques. Even women who don’t (yet) have kids have been affected by Dr. Spock’s permissive message of encouraging mothers to trust their instincts, abandon physical punishment, and lovingly attend to a baby’s needs, regardless of schedule. Although revolutionary at the time, Spock’s advice is now more or less standard parenting practice.

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He didn’t invent the Internet. Or the social network, for that matter. But he created the social network that enables millions of women to share and communicate with each other in real time, from baby pics to cute animal videos to breaking news. Facebook takes advantage of women’s natural propensity for community—it’s basically the greatest coffee klatch ever.

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