21st-century American women

Peggy Jane Rea (March 31, 1921 – February 5, 2011) was an American actress known for her many roles in television, often playing matronly characters.

Kate Murtagh (October 29, 1920 – September 10, 2017) was an American actress and singer-comedian, a native of Los Angeles, California.

Dorothy Green (born Dorothy Jeanette Hufford; January 12, 1920 – May 8, 2008) was an American stage, film, and television actress. Her career spanned more than four decades, with her work principally being in supporting roles on many popular television series from the early 1950s into the 1980s.

Evelyn Knight (born Evelyn Davis, December 31, 1917, Reedville, Virginia – September 28, 2007, San Jose, California) was an American singer of the 1940s and 1950s. Damon Runyon, in one of his newspaper columns, described Knight as "a lissome blonde lassie with a gentle little voice and a face mother would not mind having brought home to her."

Katherine Godwin (January 16, 1917 – March 5, 2015) was the First Lady of Virginia from 1966 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1978. She was born in Southampton County in 1917 and lost both parents to the 1918 flu epidemic. She graduated from Madison College in 1930 and taught elementary school in Chuckatuck, Virginia, before marrying Mills E. Godwin, Jr., in 1940. She died on March 5, 2015, in Williamsburg, Virginia, aged 98.

Gerry Day (January 27, 1922 – February 13, 2013) was an American screenwriter. She was also a newspaper reporter for the Hollywood Citizen News in the mid-1940s.

Caren Marsh Doll (née Morris; born April 6, 1919), also credited as Caren Marsh, is an American former stage and screen actress and dancer specializing in modern dance and tap. She is notable as Judy Garland's stand-in in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Ziegfeld Girl (1941). She is one of the last surviving actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
From 1937 until 1948, Marsh appeared in motion pictures with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including a small uncredited part in Gone with the Wind. She became a dance instructor in 1956.

Gertrude Augusta "Gussie" Moran (September 8, 1923 – January 16, 2013) was an American tennis player who was active in the late 1940s and 1950s. Her highest US national tennis ranking was 4th. She was born in Santa Monica, California and died in Los Angeles, California, aged 89.

Lori March (March 6, 1923 – March 19, 2013) was an American television actress. She was best known for her roles on daytime soap operas. Her obituary on the Television Academy's web site noted that she "was dubbed 'First Lady of Daytime Television.'"

Louise LaPlanche (September 6, 1919 – September 7, 2012) was an American actress most active during the Golden Age of Hollywood from the 1920s to 1940s. LaPlanche made her film debut as in the 1923 silent film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. LaPlanche was the sister of Rosemary LaPlanche, who was crowned Miss America in 1941.LaPlanche was born September 6, 1919. She moved from Kansas to California with her mother and sister, Rosemary. LaPlanche made her film debut at the age of three years, portraying a gypsy girl in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923. Both LaPlanche began competing in California beauty pageants. In 1939, Louise LaPlanche was crowned Miss Catalina. Her Miss Catalina win led to a film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). She appeared in the 1940 MGM musical film, Strike Up the Band, which starred Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.LaPlanche later left MGM and signed on to Paramount Studios. She was cast in several Paramount films, including 1942's Holiday Inn, which starred Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, and Road to Morocco, in which she appeared as a harem girl who painted the toenails of the film's star, Bob Hope.She modeled for her husband, Lester Freedman, a clothing manufacturer. The couple had two children, Phil Freedman and Pat Freedman Johnston. Her husband died in 1984, when LaPlanche was sixty-five years old. LaPlanche returned to acting following her husband's death, appearing in soap operas and other television series, such as The Golden Girls.LaPlanche moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late 1990s, and resided there for the last fifteen years of her life. She died on September 7, 2012, just one day after her ninety-third birthday. According to her daughter, LaPlanche had survived several serious illnesses, including a breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 30, a non-smokers lung cancer diagnosis at the age of 60, and colon cancer when she was 90 years old.