Glamour’s Women Of The Year: Caitlyn Jenner, Reese Witherspoon, Misty Copeland

Caitlyn Jenner, Reese
Witherspoon, Misty Copeland and five women touched by the South Carolina church
massacre and lauded in the aftermath as “The Peacemakers of
Charleston” are among this year’s honorees as Glamour magazine’s Women of
the Year.

Victoria Beckham,
billionaire entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, Planned Parenthoood’s Cecile
Richards and the women’s FIFA soccer Team USA round out the Class of 2015,
announced Thursday. They will be honored at a gala on Nov. 9 at Carnegie Hall.

Witherspoon was
selected for the magazine’s December cover, to hit newsstands Nov. 10, while
Jenner, Copeland and Holmes will be pictured on foldout covers.

PHOTOS: The Stylish Caitlyn Jenner

This year is the 25th
anniversary of the awards celebrating the achievements of diverse women in
entertainment, fashion, politics and business. Amy Schumer will open the
ceremony that draws a star-studded crowd each year. Former honorees Madeleine
Albright, Serena Williams and Billie Jean King will be among the guests to help
mark the awards’ quarter-century. Jennifer Hudson and Ellie Goulding will
perform.

The honorees
announcement came just a few days after word of Jenner’s inclusion leaked,
prompting a backlash on social media with criticism of her inclusion as a
transgender woman of wealth and privilege. Some apparently thought Jenner was
THE woman of the year, as opposed to one of many.

PHOTOS: Reese Witherspoon’s Stellar Street Style

“Where there is hateful
chatter on Twitter, there is just as much, if not more, love and support. We
prefer to focus on the positive,” Jenner said through a spokesman ahead of
the announcement.

Cindi Leive,
Glamour’s editor-in-chief, said in an interview that criticism of Jenner’s
inclusion “certainly gives you an appreciation for the hostility to the
trans community that still exists out there.” The awards, she said, are
intended to honor diversity among women leaders and trailblazers who are as
“diverse as the population of women in this world.”

“We’re proud
of that and we’re proud of what Caitlyn Jenner has done to illuminate what so
many in the trans community go through,” Leive added.

PHOTOS: Transgender Celebrities

Actress Laverne Cox, also a
trans woman, was among last year’s honorees.

To mark the 25th
anniversary, the Empire State Building will be lit in Glamour’s signature pink
the night of the awards, and Mayor Bill de Blasio will proclaim Nov. 9 the
Women of the Year Day, the magazine said.

Among the honorees’
achievements as noted in the Glamour spread:

– Witherspoon: She
co-founded a production company, Pacific Standard, and started buying up books
and scripts featuring female protagonists as a way to fight the gender gap in
Hollywood. By 2015, the company’s “Wild” and “Gone Girl”
earned Oscar nominations for Witherspoon, Laura Dern and Rosamund Pike.

– Copeland: She
became the first female African-American principal at the American Ballet
Theatre in June. It had been a long struggle. She began dancing relatively late
in childhood and had gotten used to being the only woman of color in the room.
Then late-onset puberty brought on curves and a more muscular build that took her
physique beyond the tiny ballet ideal. She fought back from injuries and
prevailed.

– Jenner: After
years of hiding her true self, the Olympic hero and Kardashian-Jenner family
reality TV parent has faced her share of critics since coming out as a trans woman
earlier this year, including some within the trans community who felt her
wealth and privilege made her an outsider in their world, too. Jenner, who
turned 66 on Wednesday, vowed to educate herself while educating others through
her docuseries, “I Am Cait,” which was just picked up by E! for a
second season.

READ: Caitlyn Jenner’s Daughters Celebrate Her Birthday

– Charleston Strong: The June
shooting at the black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston,
South Carolina, brought on mass protests over racial injustice. For these
Glamour’s honorees, it was personal. Alana Simmons, Nadine Collier, Bethane
Middleton-Brown, Felicia Sanders and Polly Sheppard lost loved ones and two
nearly their own lives, but all, one by one, stood up in a courtroom at the
bond hearing for the young, white defendant and declared their anger but not
their hate.

– Beckham: She came
to the fashion world as a Spice Girl celebrity but rolled up her sleeves to
make her own way as a designer as she balanced life as the wife of David
Beckham and mother of their four children, some of whom have followed her into
the industry. She has also helped raise several million dollars for AIDS
research.

– Team USA: Early
on, the U.S. national team had been written off as having no chance of taking
the FIFA Women’s World Cup. They dominated and became vocal advocates for women
in soccer.

– Holmes: She
founded her fledgling blood-testing company, now called Theranos, in her dorm
room after dropping out of Stanford as an undergraduate but convincing an
engineering professor to admit her into his graduate research lab. Her mission:
to democratize access to potentially lifesaving lab testing by making it
painless, accessible and affordable.

– Richards: The
president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America is the daughter of a
civil rights lawyer-dad and a politician woman, the late Texas Gov. Ann
Richards. She has been an organizer since her days at Brown, where she missed
graduation to protest South African apartheid. She admits she almost didn’t go
to her interview at Planned Parenthood, fearing she wouldn’t measure up. Today,
she is responsible for more than 10,000 employees at 700 Planned Parenthood
centers across the country.