Overlooked No More: Meet five extraordinary women from history who are finally getting the recognition they deserve.

• Author: Wartik, Nancy
• Position: TIMES PAST - Elizabeth Keckly, Charlotte Bronte, Rose Zar and other historical women

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries, chronicling the lives of everyone from heads of state to rock stars and the namer of the Slinky. But the vast majority of these obituaries have been of men, mostly white ones. Even women who had achieved a measure of fame in their lifetime were overlooked.

The Times recently decided to make up for that. Each week for the past year, the paper has published an obituary of a woman from history who was left out of the obituary pages--and, in most cases, your history textbooks.

In honor of Women's History Month, here are the stories of five women--adapted from the Times's obituary pages--who are finally getting their due.

Elizabeth Keckly The Former Slave in Lincoln's White House

It was the morning of April 15, 1865, and President Abraham Lincoln had just died from an assassin's bullet. Mary Todd Lincoln, his widow, was cloistered in the White House, wailing in grief. There was only one person she desperately wanted to talk to: her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly.

The moment was indicative of how far Keckly had come--from surviving slavery, rape, and years of beatings to being the first lady's most trusted friend.

Keckly was born into slavery in 1818 in Dinwiddie, Virginia. In 1855, she bought freedom for herself and her son from their owners for $1,200, and settled in Washington, D.C., working as a seamstress.

One day in 1861, after Lincoln had taken office, a well-connected client introduced her to the new first lady, who was looking for a dressmaker. Keckly got the job, and in her new position became a celebrity of sorts; Lincoln addressed her as "Madam Elizabeth."

The first lady could be difficult and moody; Keckly was sometimes the only person who could manage her. In turn, Mary Lincoln confided in Keckly and sought counsel on such White House matters as planning state dinners and Lincoln's campaign for a second term.

"Lizabeth, you are my best and kindest friend, and I love you," Mary Lincoln once wrote to her.

In 1868, Keckly published her memoir, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, which is now considered one of the most important narratives of the Lincolns' domestic life.

"She was a historian, and that was really unusual--for a black woman to write as a historian of a time and a place and a White House," says Jennifer Fleischner, author of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly.

But Keckly suffered for it: Reviewers lambasted the book--and her--when it came out, and it soon disappeared from bookstores. "Readers in her day, white readers--they took it as an audacious tell-all," Fleischner says. "You know, 'How dare she?'"

Mary Lincoln was angered by the publication of Keckly's memoir. She never spoke to Keckly again.

Keckly died in her sleep in 1907, when she was 89. In his book, They Knew Lincoln, John E. Washington describes the final moments of Keckly's life, when she was ill: "All day long she looked at Mrs. Lincoln's picture above the dresser, and seldom left her room except for meals."--Nancy Wartik

Charlotte Bronte The Fearless Novelist

In 1836, when Charlotte Bronte was a 20-year-old schoolteacher and a budding novelist, she sent a sample of her writing to Robert Southey, one of England's most respected poets.

Southey replied in a letter: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life."

Bronte devoted much of her life to ignoring that message--and, as a result, she produced some of the most revolutionary novels of the 19th century, including Jane Eyre.

Bronte was born in 1816 and grew up in Haworth, England. Her younger sisters were also authors: Emily Bronte, who wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne Bronte, who wrote the lesser-known Agnes Grey.

The sisters' talents were evident from an early age. As kids, they created their own fictional worlds, produced magazines, and put on plays in their home.

But talent alone wouldn't get their novels published. To do so, they had to conceal their identities as women. Bronte published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. It was an instant hit and fueled interest in her sisters' novels, which were also published under pseudonyms with the last name Bell.

In Jane Eyre, Bronte wrote from the first-person perspective of a child, an innovation that gave voice and power even to the very young. The novel follows a heroine who was like Bronte herself when she was young--plain, pale, small, and shy. It tells of her...