Serena Williams to be inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame

WTA Legend and 23-time major champion Serena Williams will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2024.

“The 2024 inductee class has broken barriers, challenged the status quo, and left an impact on history,” the Hall of Fame said in its announcement.

Since the first ceremony in 1973, the National Women’s Hall of Fame has honored women who have made invaluable contributions to American society in a broad range of fields, including the arts, athletics, humanities, philanthropy, public service and STEM.

The Hall of Fame added Williams and civil rights icon Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to integrate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960, to the previously announced list of eight inductees, which includes:

• Peggy McIntosh, 88, an educator and race relations and feminist activist known for her seminal writings on privilege.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, 63, a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights who helped develop the academic concept of critical race theory.
• Judith Plaskow, 76, known as the first Jewish feminist theologian, whose writings on the absence of female perspectives in Jewish history became seminal 20th-century texts.
• Loretta Ross, 69, an activist for reproductive justice who has dedicated her extensive career in academia and activism to reframing reproductive rights within a broader context of human rights.
• Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone, 87, a transgender woman considered a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies.
• Dr. Patricia Bath (1942-2019), an American ophthalmologist, who was an early pioneer of laser cataract surgery and the first Black woman physician to receive a medical patent, which she received in 1986.
• Dr. Anna Wessels Williams (1863-1954), an American pathologist and pioneer in the study of immune responses to infectious diseases, who at the turn of the 20th century isolated a strain of rabies that helped in its treatment.
• Elouise Pepion Cobell, known as “Yellow Bird Woman” (1945-2011), who started the first bank established by a tribe on a reservation in Browning, Montana and fought tirelessly for government accountability and for Native Americans to have control over their own financial future.

Based in Seneca Falls, New York, the National Women’s Hall of Fame is the United States’ first and oldest non-profit dedicated to honoring distinguished American women. The hall’s mission is to elevate women’s voices, equip and empower changemakers, and advance gender equity. Next year, the induction ceremony will take place in New York City.