1689
May 26, Mary Wortley Montagu, English essayist, feminist, eccentric, was born.

1867
May 26, Mary, queen of Great Britain-North Ireland, was born.

1951
May 26, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was born in LA, Calif. She flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger.

2006
May 26, Tiffany Marie Souers (b.1986), a Junior Civil Engineering major at Clemson University, was found dead in her apartment at The Reserve in Central, SC. In 2009 Jerry Buck Inman was sentenced to death for raping and strangling Souers.

2008
May 26, Dutch scientists claimed they have completed the first sequencing of an individual woman's DNA.