Not Done: Women Remaking America

Flight attendants had a very short career for at 32 they were forcible retired. They were the first case for the Equal Opportunity Commission.

In 1963 Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, and exposed he happy homemaker myth. Many women wanted the opportunity of a career of their own.

The Equal Rights Amendment passed both houses of congress in 1972 leaving only ratification before the law was adopted. 30 states ratified it in the first year but the culture war was just starting.

Phyllis Schlafly leads the protest against the ERA and focuses on the possibility of women being exposed to the military draft

Meet some of the Women who make America.

By pitching in the spring of 1972, Maria Pepe became the first girl in more than two decades to even try to participate in one of America’s most beloved youth pastimes. Little League’s national powers-that-be moved quickly to remove her from competition.The National Organization for Women brought a 1973 suit on behalf of Pepe’s right to play and the NJ Division on Civil Rights sided with Maria.

Billie Jean King on fighting for equality in professional tennis and the broader impact of her famous "Battle of the Sexes" match.

Linda Alvarado began her career as a laborer for a groundskeeper in college, moved into construction management, and formed her own company, Alvarado Construction. Now, with more than 35 years of experience in the construction industry, she builds high-rises, hotels, sports arenas, convention centers and more as a commercial general contractor, construction manager, developer and property manager

Michelle Rhee on her early teaching days, mission to improve public education, and controversial term as Public Schools Chancellor in DC. As Chancellor of Washington DC’s schools, Rhee instituted merit pay for teachers, fought for art and music classes, and championed charter schools (look for Rhee in the acclaimed documentary Waiting for Superman).

Ursula Burns on growing up poor, workplace discrimination, and becoming the first African-American woman to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Armed with engineering degrees from Columbia and NYU, she has rolled up her sleeves to reinvent the famed copier corporation for a post-copier age.

Sheryl Sandberg has spent more than two decades achieving at the highest reaches of corporate America. As V.P. of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, she was instrumental in building what is one of the most influential enterprise on the planet. Her next step was joining the then-fledgling Facebook in 2008 as it's COO and is credited with first establishing it as a profitable business.

Zainab Salbi on surviving rape, and finding her calling helping women survivors of war. Women for Women International, her nonprofit, is a grassroots humanitarian and development organization helping women brutalized by rape and war. Iraqi emigré, Zainab Salbi and her husband Amjad Atallah gave up their 1993 honeymoon to found the organization and aid survivors of the Yugoslav Wars.

Hillary Clinton has by now spent two additional decades at the very heart of the national consciousness—as a sometimes-embattled First Lady, as a distinguished senator from New York, as a groundbreaking 2008 Presidential candidate, and now as the 67th Secretary of State.

Kathrine Switzer on the prejudices women athletes faced, her historic Boston Marathon run, and the doors it opened for other women athletes. Switzer’s ongoing campaign to help women around the globe empower themselves through the simple act of running made her a 2011 Inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Carol Burnett spent the 1960s garnering acclaim for both her musical and comedic abilities. It earned her the deal that made her the first female host of a TV sketch and variety show with The Carol Burnett Show. The series’ 1967-’78 run made it the last (to date) successful prime-time variety hour and remains one of the most beloved and respected of all time.

Marissa Mayer is Googles Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services. In 1999, she joined a fledgling Silicon Valley startup as one of the company’s first twenty employees and its first female engineer. Mayer was a key player in the design of Googles era-defining homepage; Her work on the search engine helped expand usage from a few hundred thousand searches per day to over a billion.

Turned down by law firms who refused to hire women, Sandra Day O'Connor embarked on a distinguished prosecutorial career that led her to the Arizona Court of Appeals and, in 1981, to her appointment as the first woman ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court. She played a powerful role on the Court: she was famous for often casting the pivotal vote in narrowly decided cases.