Women, Celebrity Deaths | featured news

Robert Edwards, a Nobel prizewinner from Britain whose pioneering in vitro fertilization research led to the first test tube baby and has since brought millions of people into the world, died Wednesday at age 87....

Helen Gurley Brown, who fed the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” and then turned around the failing Cosmopolitan magazine by injecting her philosophy that women could have it all -- “love, sex and money” -- has died. She was 90.

Space used to be a man's world. Then came Sally Ride, who blazed a cosmic trail into orbit for U.S. women. With a pitch perfect name out of a pop song refrain, she joined the select club of American space heroes the public knew by heart: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong and Aldrin....

A son dying young. A six-year battle with cancer. A humiliating betrayal. Americans knew Elizabeth Edwards in large part through her tragedies, but more importantly, they knew her for the vitality and determination she showed in dealing with them. Her cancer incurable and her former-presidential-candidate husband mired in a paternity scandal, she did not shrink from public life but shared her story and advocated for health care reform.

Though not as well known as her male peers, Height was a strong presence in the movement. She was president of the National Council of Negro Women and played an important role in integrating the YWCA.

Dorothy Height, who was called the queen mother of the civil rights movement through seven decades of advocacy for racial equality -- including 41 years as president of the National Council of Negro Women -- has died.