WOMEN: While we’re at the beginning of the year and talking about firsts, let’s talk about some women who made history.

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie, the Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who made groundbreaking discoveries in radioactivity. She won two — one with her husband, Pierre, in 1903 in physics, and in 1911 on her own in chemistry, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences.

From NobelPrize.org, “Her relentless resolve and insatiable curiosity made her an icon in the world of modern science. Indefatigable despite a career of physically demanding and ultimately fatal work, she discovered polonium and radium, championed the use of radiation in medicine and fundamentally changed our understanding of radioactivity.”

The youngest Nobel Prize winner is Malala Yousafzai, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of 17 for her brave advocacy for girls’ education in Pakistan and the right of every child to receive an education.

She survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban in 2012, and co-founded the Malala Fund to champion education for every girl worldwide. She became the youngest laureate in history. 

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Edith Wharton in 1921 for her novel “The Age of Innocence.” She was a wealthy divorcee in Paris when World War I broke out, and used her money for charity. She was allowed to visit the front lines, and wrote about the realities of war. France awarded her the Legion of Honor, one of the country’s highest awards, in 1916.

She left Paris for the French countryside, and “The Age of Innocence” was published in 1920. It was a critique of high society in New York in the Gilded Age.