26 Times Glamour ’s Women of the Year Awards Put Women’s Health On Center Stage

Getty

Whenever we talk about our Women of the Year, you can be sure we’ll also be talking about women’s health. It makes sense that the conversations overlap: Women seem uniquely driven to turn their health struggles into action, and Glamour celebrates that. (Case in point: After Christy Turlington Burns hemorrhaged while giving birth, she decided to make motherhood safer for other women—and was named a 2013 Woman of the Year.)

Plus, successful women seem genuinely excited to make the world a better place for other women, which means many of our Women of the Year either partner with charities that improve the health outlooks of women, families, and girls—or start their own. (Alicia Keys had five Grammys under her belt when in 2003 she cofounded Keep a Child Alive, a nonprofit that supports families with HIV and AIDS; Keys was a 2004 Woman of the Year.)

And with the state of women’s health more volatile than ever, it’s not surprising when our guests lean into our Women of the Year Awards ceremony as an opportunity to advocate to our readers at every turn: On the 2022 Women of the Year red carpet, presenter Busy Phillips let her clutch reminded our audience—in the lead-up to the midterm elections—that abortion was on the ballot.

Below, 26 more ways women’s health has taken center stage (literally and figuratively) at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards since their 1990 inception.

AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser was among the inaugural class of Women of the Year in 1990. Glaser, who contracted HIV during a 1981 blood transfusion while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel, founded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, to raise funds for pediatric HIV/AIDS research in 1988, the same year Ariel died of AIDS-related complications.

Lilly Tartikoff, the driving force behind the Revlon/UCLA Women's Cancer Research Program, was a 1991 Woman of the Year. Created with Ronald O. Perelman, the chairman and CEO of Revlon, under the direction of Dr. Dennis Slamon, the program was funded, in part, by the annual Fire and Ice Ball in Hollywood. To ensure regular people could lend their support, too, Tartikoff cofounded the Revlon Run/Walk for Women. Funds raised by the program were used to advance clinical trials that led to the development of Herceptin, the first nontoxic, gene-based cancer treatment.

American cardiologist Bernadine Healy, MD, the first female director of the National Institutes of Health, was a 1992 Woman of the Year. During her tenure at the NIH, she established that only clinical trials that included both men and women (when the condition being studied affected both sexes) would receive NIH funding.

Geneticist Mary-Claire King, whose work showed that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1, was a 1993 Woman of the Year. During the ’70s and ’80s, while King had carried out her painstaking research, the predominant theory was that cancer was viral, and her ideas were disregarded by other scientists.

U.S. Surgeon General M. Joycelyn Elders, MD—the first Black person and the second woman to hold the position—who backed the distribution of contraceptives in schools, was also a 1993 Woman of the Year.

Tipper Gore’s work as a mental health advocate was just getting started when she was a 1994 Woman of the Year. As second lady, she served as the mental health policy advisor to the president, eventually hosting the first White House Conference on Mental Health in 1999. (She had spoken frequently about her own depression (and the subsequent treatment) after her 6-year-old son, Albert III, was involved in a near-fatal car accident in 1989.)

National Breast Cancer Coalition president Frances M. Visco was a 1996 Woman of the Year. Visco, a breast cancer survivor, co-founded the grassroots advocacy organization with fellow survivors five years earlier.

As a resident at at Brigham and Women's Hospital, cardiologist Paula Johnson, MD—a 1998 Woman of the Year—was the first Black person to hold the position of chief medical resident. She spent much of her career educating and empowering Black women, who are 50 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than white women, before becoming president of Wellesley College in 2016. (She’s the first Black woman to hold the role.)

Beauty industry leader Evelyn Lauder, a 1999 Woman of the Year, was honored for her work to raise breast cancer awareness. As the senior corporate vice president of Estee Lauder Companies, Lauder partnered with Self to launch the pink-ribbon campaign in 1992; the following year, she founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. “I figured I was good at selling makeup,” she told Glamour in 1999. “I should be good at selling this cause.” She was: When Glamour honored her in 1999, BCRF had in six years raised $18 million for breast cancer research. When we checked in with her in 2008, she and her team had raised $39.6 million that year alone.

Actor Julianne Moore was named a 2000 Woman of the Year for her work as a reproductive rights advocate. “In my career as an actress, I have spent an awful lot of time simply pretending to accomplish things,” she told Glamour. Her off-the-screen accomplishments are quite real though: In 2000, she had already spent the course of her decades-long career speaking up for causes she believed in—most vocally and repeatedly, women’s reproductive rights. “Reproductive rights are a really basic freedom,” she said. “And my God, not to have that choice is stifling.”

Jenifer Estess was an accomplished theater and film producer when she was named a 2001 Woman of the Year, but she was honored for the work she’d done tied to ALS research. Less than a year after her 1997 ALS diagnosis, Estess, along with friends and family members, launched Project ALS, calling on the experience and contacts she’d gained as a producer to help fund research treatments and an eventual cure for the condition, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The nonprofit had raised more than $17 million by the time of her death in 2003, and its work continues today.

Buoyed by her success as a musician, Alicia Keys was named a 2004 Woman of the Year as she directed her focus toward other outlets, including Keep a Child Alive, a nonprofit she cofounded in 2003, which provides support to families affected by HIV and AIDS in Africa and India. She credited the women in her life—her mother and grandmother—for showing her how to be strong. “They taught me that we can walk through the fires that burn us and really try to break us and survive and be stronger for it.”

The same year—five years after Breast Cancer Research Foundation founder Evelyn Lauder was a 1999 Woman of the Year—a group continuing her work also took the stage at WOTY: The founders of the Women’s Cancer Research Fund, a BCRF fundraising powerhouse program that helped move the needle by funding innovative breast cancer research, were 2004 Women of the Year.

Future senator Tammy Duckworth was named a 2006 Woman of the Year as her work as a disability rights advocate was just beginning. Glamour honored Duckworth as she was running for a seat in the House, representing Illinois. Though she lost that campaign, she won a national spotlight. She kept the momentum going by leading the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs, where she started a program that helped veterans and service members with post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries. When she ran again for the House—in 2012 and then in 2014—she won, both times, and continued advocating for disability rights, which she still does since leveling up to the Senate in 2016.

Also on the stage that year: Massively successful model and businesswoman Iman, a fellow 2006 Woman of the Year, called her work with Keep a Child Alive—to fund antiretroviral drugs for children amid the AIDS crisis in Africa, “the most important work I’ve ever done.”

Two decades after his mother was named a Woman of the Year, 26-year-old Jake Glaser celebrated AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser on the 2010 Women of the Year stage. “I am proud to live with her legacy,” Jake said of his mother, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.

Liya Kebede and Christy Turlington Burns shared, on the surface, a career as celebrated models. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art once called Turlington Burns the Face of the 20th Century; Kebede has graced the cover of American Vogue three times.) But they’re also mothers (each of a son and a daughter), advocates, and change agents, and in 2013, Kebede and Turlington Burns were named Women of the Year to honor the work they continue to do in tandem to make motherhood safer for women everywhere: Turlington Burns founded Every Mother Counts, which helps vulnerable women around the world have safer births. And Kebede, a former World Health Organization ambassador for maternal and child health, started the Liya Kebede Foundation to support maternal health care throughout Ethiopia.

Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts was named a 2014 Woman of the Year for her life-saving work raising awareness around bone marrow transplants. When Roberts returned to GMA after taking a six-month leave to undergo a bone marrow transplant, almost 6.1 million viewers tuned in to welcome her back. Her openness around her health challenges—she has survived breast cancer and myelodysplastic syndrome, a life-threatening bone marrow disease—led to more than just high ratings: Be the Match Registry, a nonprofit operated by the National Marrow Donor Program, saw an 1,800 percent boost in donors after Roberts encouraged viewers to sign up.

2015 Woman of the Year Cecile Richards, then the president of Planned Parenthood, told Glamour that her best day, professionally, had been two years prior, when President Obama called to say that her efforts around insurance reform had paid off: From that day forward, virtually every woman’s contraception would be covered by every health insurer. “Fifty million women, finally getting their family planning covered?” she said. “It was a revolution for women.”

Chrissy Teigen was named a 2018 Woman of the Year after sharing (in a Glamour cover story the year prior) her struggle with postpartum depression. “I have a great life,” she wrote. “But postpartum does not discriminate. I couldn’t control it.” The story struck a nerve, Teigen said. The year she was honored, she told guests at the Women of the Year Awards that her Glamour essay on postpartum depression was the thing women asked her about the most: “I get more comments [about that] than anything else. People come up to me and talk about that story.”

Four hospital employees who fought for their lives—and the lives of their patients—at the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, were 2020 Women of the Year. Veronica Henry, director of the department of pathology; Navdeep Kaur, a critical care nurse; Media Sanchez, a member of the housekeeping department; and chief medical officer Jasmin Moshirpur, MD—were honored for their heroic work caring for critically ill COVID-19 patients at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, N.Y. They stood for the almost 4,000 Elmhurst employees (3,000 of them women) who risked their lives to provide care. “What will stay with me for the rest of my life—and I don’t know how many more years that I have—is the teamwork,” Dr. Moshirpur said.

Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, PhD, who had been fixated on the possibilities of mRNA for decades, was a 2021 Woman of the Year after her research was used to create both Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines. A few weeks before she was interviewed by Glamour, she ran into her former boss, who said he was preparing to give a lecture about her. “You will talk about me?” she asked him. “What about?” The focus, he said, would be on how he’d missed it—one of the greatest scientific and humanitarian achievements in their lifetimes, and he’d let the woman responsible for it walk out the door.

Also honored in 2021: Robin Arzón, Peloton’s vice president of fitness programming, who took home the Daring to Disrupt Award, presented by Ally; Arzón, a head instructor, kept up her Peloton schedule during her pregnancy despite criticism. “I didn’t relinquish being an athlete when I became pregnant,” she said.

Even before the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, 2022 Woman of the Year Rebecca Gomperts, MD, was planning for a post-Roe future, building an organization that’s providing tens of thousands of women with access to medication abortion. “This award is for our children and especially for our daughters,” she told guests at the Women of the Year Awards. “Our daughters deserve to have full control over their lives and bodies. Our daughters have to be free to make the choices they want to make and to reach their dreams and achieve their potential.”

2023 Woman of the Year Brooke Shields told Glamour that women still approach her to talk about postpartum depression—almost two decades after she shared her own story in her memoir. “It’s a lot of ‘I spent all my babysitting money on getting Calvin Klein jeans’ and ‘I went to college because you went to college.’ And then there are the women that just cry and thank me. They go, ‘I had it so bad and I didn’t know. And I felt like I was so wrong and my husband didn’t understand and I felt so guilty.’ And the tears, and it’s like, God, I feel for you. Because they carry it with them, and you carry a lot of guilt about it.”

Selma Blair also graced the stage at the 2023 Women of the Year Awards, to accept the Daring to Disrupt Award, presented by Ally: Since going public with her multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2018, the actor and activist told Glamour she’d found purpose in advocacy.

Originally Appeared on Glamour