45 Women Buried at Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington National Cemetery opened in 1864 during the Civil War as the final resting place for American soldiers who died defending the union. Today, there are 400,000 military veterans and their eligible dependents at the cemetery. And while the overwhelming majority of those interred at Arlington are men who served in the military, there are also numerous notable women – some of them famous. (Arlington takes first place among America’s largest military cemeteries.)

To find the women who are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, 24/7 Tempo consulted the websites of Arlington National Cemetery and the National Women’s History Museum, as well as such media sources as the Washington Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.

The women whose final resting place is at Arlington include those who served in the military, as well as nurses, astronauts, codebreakers, suffragists, mathematicians, journalists, actresses, first ladies, and a Supreme Court justice.

Among those buried in the cemetery are military pioneers such as Jeanne M. Holm, the first woman to serve as a major general in the U.S. armed forces and Barbara Allen Rainey, the first woman pilot in the Navy. 

Ruby Bradley and Juanita Hipps were hero nurses who served the American military during World War II. Jane Delano, a relative of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a nurse and founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service.

Among the notable Black women interred at Arlington are Hazel W. Johnson-Brown, the first female African-American general in the U.S. Army, and Namahyoke Curtis, who recruited black nurses to serve the wounded during the Spanish-American War. (These are 36 Black women who changed American history.)

Other women of note at rest in Arlington include Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnick, who died in the Challenger tragedy; Vinne Ream, who designed a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda; Elizabeth Smith Friedman, a female codebreaker; Helen Hamilton Gardener, a civil service commissioner and suffragist; Grace Hopper, a rear admiral who was a pioneer in developing computer technology; Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins; famed actress Maureen O’Hara; iconic former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice and liberal hero.