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Google’s International Women’s Day Doodle Celebrates Female Trailblazers Who Aren’t Yet Household Names—but Should Be

Google’s Doodle honors 13 trailblazing women—some of whom you may not recognize.

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Wednesday is International Women’s Day, an event dating back to the early 1900s that is being observed with an added layer of significance this year in the United States. Last year, Google marked the occasion with a homepage Doodle that celebrated women of the future by asking women and girls about their aspirations, be they widening education access, discussing environmentalism with the Pope, or swimming with pigs. (Hey, they can be fun aspirations, too.) This year, Google is taking the more traditional route by looking back at famous historical women—with a slight twist.

The 2017 Doodle honors female pioneers from around the world with a slideshow that begins with a grandmother reading a bedtime story to a little girl, sending her on a trip through time and space to hang out with 13 iconic women from history. Many are names you already know, including American journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and English mathematician Ada Lovelace, who became the world’s first computer programmer.

But Google’s Doodle also highlights the accomplishments of women whose stories you might not be familiar with. All of the women included, Google explains, have been celebrated on their homepage before but usually only in that woman’s country of origin, not on such a global scale.

The research of Soviet-born Olga Skorokhodova, who lost both her sight and hearing at a young age, was critical to developments in deafblind education. Halet Cambel was a groundbreaking Turkish archeologist, and she was also the first Muslim woman to compete in the Olympics. And Lee Tai-young became Korea’s first female lawyer in 1949, later going on to also become the country’s first female judge, too. She spoke of her work fighting for women, families, and human rights, comparing it to “a dam which can produce energy and power to lighten the darkened corners of society and reinvigorate its stalled and rusty engines.”

The decision to highlight some more localized heroines was a delibrate one, as Google explained: “After all, that’s part of the original spirit of International Women’s Day: giving a voice to women who might not otherwise be heard.” And the women they’ve chosen—with women of color, women with disabilities, and women from a wide variety of professions and passions represented—have voices that are not only worth hearing but that can echo well into the future, as the last slide of Google’s Doodle perfectly demonstrates.

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Cecilia Grierson and Lotfia El Nadi may not be household names around the world just yet. But starting today, they could be. You can read more about them, and all of the remarkable women featured in Google’s Doodle, here.