Lists of "The Greatest Americans" may overlook important and valuable aspects of our history simply because they are not discrete events or the result of a single individual's work.
Two groups deserving credit, IMHO, are
The Pioneer Women and "domestic engineers".
That some men would want to move into the wilderness is one thing. That women would be willing to put up with the hardships, lack of amenities, danger, and loneliness is quite another. That so many were willing is amazing.
Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History of an Idea is one of my favorite books. In it he notes that a group of American women remade how our homes were organized and how domestic work was done. They were "domestic engineers" because they brought the methods of efficiency experts inside the home. Unlike male architects, they were less worried about style and visual appeal and more focused how the house functioned for the family. (Lillian Gilbreth, Catherine Beecher are two who did important work of this sort). As Rybczynski writes:
Anyone who works comfortably at the kitchen counter, or takes dishes out of a dishwasher and places them in a convenient overhead shelf, or dusts the house in an hour, not a day, owes something to the domestic engineer.
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