31 Badass Women Born in July

Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie.

Diana Spencer, princess and humanitarian.

Missy Elliot, multiplatinum rapper and producer.

Pauline Esther Friedman, aka Abigail Van Buren, aka advice columnist Dear Abby.

Frida Kahlo, painter of self-portraits and rocker of majestic unibrows.

Nettie Stevens, groundbreaking female scientist who, along with Edmund Beecher Wilson, discovered X and Y sex chromosomes.

Michelle Kwan, world champion figure skater.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Harlem Renaissance poet.

Mary McLeod Bethune, civil rights leader and educator.

Jane Lynch, comedic delight.

"Unsinkable" Molly Brown, Titantic survivor and philanthropist.

Doris Fleischman Bernays, the first woman to obtain a passport in her own name..

Martha Reeves, Motown darling and lead singer of Martha and the Vandellas.

Ida B. Wells, journalist, suffragist and abolitionist.

Barbara Stanwyck, classic Hollywood icon and the highest-paid woman in the U.S. in 1944.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author.

Rosalyn S. Yalow, winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her research on type II diabetes.

Louise Bethune, America's first female architect.

Janet Reno, the first female U.S. Secretary of the State.

Emma Lazarus, poet whose verse "The New Colossus" is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

Miriam Underhill, mid-century mountaineer.

Ruth Whitney, editor of Glamour magazine for 31 years who put the first black woman on the cover of a major fashion magazine (pictured above).

Alison Krauss, Grammy-winning musician.

Amelia Earhart, aviatrix.

Bella Abzug, women's rights activist and politician aptly nicknamed "Battling Bella."

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, First Lady.

Clara Bow, Hollywood's original "It Girl."

Mary Roebling, first woman elected to the New York Stock Exchange.

Marlen Esparza, the U.S. Olympic team's qualifying female boxer.

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, World War II worker and artistic inspiration for the Westinghouse "We Can Do It" poster.

JK Rowling, literary wizard.