147 Fun Facts About Women's History

Which country, in 1893, became the first self-governing nation to give women the vote in national elections?

New Zealand's governor signed the Electoral Act in September 1893 after suffragists led by Kate Sheppard presented a petition of nearly 32,000 signatures, almost a quarter of the colony's adult European women.

Which scientist was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie was added to the 1903 Physics prize only after a Swedish mathematician warned Pierre that the nomination named just him and Henri Becquerel, and Pierre insisted she be included.

Who, in 1960, became the first woman in the world to be elected head of government of a modern nation?

Sirimavo Bandaranaike entered politics after her husband, Ceylon's prime minister, was assassinated in 1959; she took over his party and led it to victory in the July 1960 election.

Which author wrote the influential feminist work 'A Room of One's Own'?

Virginia Woolf built the 1929 essay from two lectures she gave at Cambridge women's colleges; in it she imagines a gifted sister of Shakespeare who is never allowed to write.

In which modern Olympic Games did women first officially compete?

1900 Paris let in 22 women even though Games founder Pierre de Coubertin opposed their taking part; Britain's Charlotte Cooper won the tennis singles, the first individual title for a woman.

Which US constitutional amendment, adopted in August 1920, barred denying the vote on the basis of sex?

The Nineteenth Amendment won its final state, Tennessee, when 24-year-old legislator Harry Burn broke a tie after a letter from his mother urged him to vote for ratification.

Which English mathematician, who wrote about Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, is often called the first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes foresaw that such an engine might one day compose elaborate pieces of music, a leap beyond the number-crunching Babbage had in mind.

In which Alabama city did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955?

Montgomery's Black residents began boycotting the buses four days after Rosa Parks's arrest and stayed off them for over a year, until the Supreme Court struck down bus segregation.

Who became the first woman in space, flying a solo mission aboard Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963?

Valentina Tereshkova had no pilot training; her parachuting hobby won her a place, since Vostok cosmonauts ejected and landed under their own parachutes, and she then orbited Earth 48 times.

Who founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903, dedicated to 'deeds, not words'?

Emmeline Pankhurst's WSPU turned to window-smashing, arson and prison hunger strikes, which led the government to pass the 1913 'Cat and Mouse Act', freeing weakened strikers only to re-arrest them.

Who was the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, graduating in 1849?

Elizabeth Blackwell got into Geneva Medical College because the faculty put her application to the all-male students, who voted yes as a joke; she graduated in January 1849.

In 1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across which ocean?

The Atlantic crossing was meant to end in Paris, but icy conditions and mechanical trouble forced Earhart down in a pasture near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after about 15 hours.

Florence Nightingale rose to fame organising care for wounded soldiers during which war?

Florence Nightingale led 38 nurses to the British army hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War in 1854; her night rounds earned her the nickname 'the Lady with the Lamp'.

Harriet Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad earned her the nickname of which biblical figure?

Moses was the nickname Tubman earned over roughly 13 rescue trips into Maryland; in 1863 she guided a Union raid on the Combahee River that freed more than 700 people.

Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize at 17, grew up in the Swat Valley of which country?

Pakistan's Swat Valley was under Taliban control when Malala, aged 11, began an anonymous diary for the BBC's Urdu site; she survived a gunman's attack in 2012 and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

Which astronaut asked for Katherine Johnson to check the computer's orbital figures by hand before his 1962 flight?

John Glenn did not trust the new electronic computers alone, so he asked that Johnson rerun the numbers by hand; if she said they were good, he told engineers, he was ready to go.

Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai founded which tree-planting organisation in Kenya?

The Green Belt Movement began in 1977 after rural Kenyan women told Wangari Maathai they were short of firewood and clean water; planting trees answered both, and helped win her the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

The 1851 Akron speech later titled 'Ain't I a Woman?' was delivered by which formerly enslaved abolitionist?

Sojourner Truth spoke at a women's rights convention in May 1851; the famous refrain comes from Frances Gage's 1863 retelling, in a Southern dialect that Truth, a New Yorker raised speaking Dutch, never had.

Junko Tabei of Japan was the first woman to reach the summit of which mountain?

Junko Tabei reached the summit of Mount Everest on 16 May 1975, twelve days after an avalanche buried her team's camp; in 1992 she became the first woman to complete the Seven Summits.

Kathrine Switzer became the first registered woman to run which race in 1967?

Kathrine Switzer entered the 1967 Boston Marathon as 'K.V. Switzer'; race official Jock Semple tried to rip off her bib mid-race, and women were not officially admitted until 1972.

Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented what during World War II?

Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes in 1942; the idea foreshadowed spread-spectrum techniques used in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to Congress, was the only member to vote against what in 1941?

Jeannette Rankin's lone vote against declaring war on Japan, 388 to 1, drew such fury that she sheltered in a phone booth until police escorted her out; she had also voted against war in 1917.

What is Rosalind Franklin's famous X-ray image of DNA known as?

Photo 51, an X-ray diffraction image of DNA, was taken in May 1952 by Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling; she died of cancer at 37, four years before the Nobel Prize for the double helix.

A 1940 self-portrait by which artist sold for $54.7 million in November 2025, then a record for a woman artist at auction?

Frida Kahlo's The Dream (The Bed) shows her asleep beneath a papier-mâché skeleton, an image tied to the long bed rest that followed her near-fatal bus accident; it beat a record Georgia O'Keeffe had held since 2014.

Which group organised the first 'Woman's Day', forerunner of International Women's Day, in New York in 1909?

The Socialist Party of America held the first National Woman's Day in New York on 28 February 1909; Clara Zetkin then proposed an international day at the 1910 Copenhagen socialist women's conference.

The Seneca Falls Convention was organised by local Quaker women together with which non-Quaker activist?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the only non-Quaker among the five organisers, drafted the Declaration of Sentiments; they planned the July 1848 convention around Philadelphia Quaker Lucretia Mott's visit to the area.

Which element did Marie and Pierre Curie announce first, in July 1898?

Polonium was named for Marie's native Poland, then partitioned among three empires and absent from the map; the Curies announced it in July 1898, five months before radium.

In 1995 Marie and Pierre Curie were reburied in which Paris monument?

The Panthéon thereby honoured its first woman on her own merits: the only woman there before, Sophie Berthelot, was buried in 1907 beside her chemist husband.

Women in which European country could not vote at the federal level until 1971?

Switzerland's men voted to give women the federal ballot in February 1971, having rejected it in 1959; the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden held out on local votes until a 1990 court ruling.

Which US territory granted women the vote in 1869, long before women voted nationwide?

Wyoming's governor signed the law on 10 December 1869; lawmakers hoped the publicity would draw settlers, and above all women, to the young territory.

Which reporter circled the globe in 72 days in 1889-90, beating the fictional Phileas Fogg's 80?

Nellie Bly made the trip for the New York World; two years earlier she had feigned insanity to report from inside a New York asylum for more than a week.

At what age did Sally Ride become the first American woman in space in 1983?

She held a Stanford PhD in physics and was only the third woman in space overall.

Golda Meir, raised in Milwaukee, became prime minister of which country?

Israel made Golda Meir prime minister in 1969; born in Kyiv, she reached Milwaukee at eight and left in 1921 for Palestine, where she joined a kibbutz.

Who wrote the 1949 feminist landmark The Second Sex?

Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in two volumes in 1949; the Vatican found it scandalous enough to place it on its Index of prohibited books.

Which president nominated Sandra Day O'Connor as the first woman on the US Supreme Court in 1981?

Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign promise by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor in July 1981; the Senate confirmed her 99 to 0, and she had earlier led the Arizona state senate as majority leader.

Boudica led a failed uprising against Rome in AD 60 or 61 as queen of which British tribe?

Boudica was queen of the Iceni of modern Norfolk; her husband Prasutagus had left the kingdom jointly to their daughters and the emperor, a will Rome ignored before flogging her and assaulting her daughters.

Before politics, Margaret Thatcher studied which subject at Oxford and worked briefly as a researcher in it?

Margaret Thatcher read Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, then worked as a research chemist at BX Plastics and J. Lyons; a Soviet army newspaper coined the 'Iron Lady' nickname in 1976.

Which philosopher wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and was the mother of Frankenstein's author?

Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women seemed inferior only because they were denied education; she died eleven days after giving birth to her daughter, the future Mary Shelley.

The mathematician Hypatia, killed by a mob in AD 415, taught in which city?

Alexandria's Roman prefect Orestes took Hypatia's advice during his feud with Bishop Cyril, and she was blamed for keeping the two men apart; a Christian mob killed her in March 415.

Fossil hunter Mary Anning made her Jurassic discoveries in the sea cliffs of which Dorset town?

Lyme Regis's crumbling cliffs fed the Anning family's fossil trade; as a girl Mary dug out the ichthyosaur skeleton whose skull her brother had found, yet as a woman she could never join the Geological Society.

British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by the Germans in 1915 in which city?

Edith Cavell was court-martialled in Brussels for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape to the neutral Netherlands, and shot at dawn on 12 October 1915 at the Tir national rifle range in the city's Schaerbeek district.

Grace Hopper's A-0 System of 1952 is remembered as one of the first examples of what?

A compiler was a hard sell: when Hopper proposed writing programs in words she was told it would not work, yet her FLOW-MATIC language, written in English words, became a model for COBOL.

Who in 1988 became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim-majority country?

Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister of Pakistan in December 1988 and served two terms (1988–90 and 1993–96); she was assassinated in Rawalpindi in December 2007 while campaigning for a third.

Which female pharaoh built the terraced temple at Deir el-Bahari, with reliefs of her trading expedition to Punt?

Hatshepsut had herself shown with a king's kilt and false beard; near the end of her stepson Thutmose III's reign her statues were torn down and her name cut from the monuments.

Shut out of US flight schools, Bessie Coleman earned her 1921 pilot's licence where?

Bessie Coleman learned French at a Berlitz school in Chicago, then trained at the Caudron brothers' school in France and received her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale licence on 15 June 1921.

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first elected female president in the world, led which country?

Iceland elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, a divorced single mother and theatre director, in 1980, five years after 90% of the country's women stopped work for a day in the 'Women's Day Off'.

In 1926 Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across which body of water?

Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel from Cap Gris-Nez on 6 August 1926 in roughly fourteen and a half hours, nearly two hours faster than the men's record.

Tu Youyou won a 2015 Nobel Prize for discovering artemisinin, a treatment for which disease?

Malaria had grown resistant to existing drugs when Mao's secret Project 523 recruited Tu Youyou; a fourth-century text that steeped wormwood in cold water gave her the clue, and she tested the extract on herself first.

Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu's 1956 experiment famously showed that which quantity is not always conserved?

Wu's cobalt-60 experiment showed that parity is not conserved in beta decay, confirming Lee and Yang's proposal; they won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics while Wu was passed over.

Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of which dynasty of ancient Egypt?

The Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Alexander's general Ptolemy I in 305 BC, was Macedonian Greek; Plutarch says Cleopatra was the first of her line to learn the Egyptian language.

Joan of Arc, the 'Maid of Orléans', was tried and burned at the stake in 1431 in which other French city?

Joan was burned in the Vieux-Marché square at Rouen, the English-held capital of Normandy, on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen; a 1456 retrial annulled the verdict and she was canonised in 1920.

Who wrote the 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote it in answer to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required ordinary Northerners to help catch people escaping slavery; it sold 300,000 US copies in its first year.

Which Civil War nurse founded the American Red Cross?

Clara Barton ran an office after the war that traced more than 20,000 missing soldiers; she founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for 23 years.

Anne Frank died in early 1945 in which concentration camp?

Anne and her sister Margot were moved from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in November 1944; both died there of probable typhus in February or March 1945, weeks before British troops liberated the camp on 15 April.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring documented the harm caused by which pesticide?

Silent Spring's case against DDT prompted a US ban on its agricultural use in 1972, two years after the Environmental Protection Agency was created.

Billie Jean King beat which man in the 1973 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match?

Bobby Riggs, 55, had first challenged King, who declined, and then routed top-ranked Margaret Court; four months later King took him on and won in straight sets before more than 30,000 at the Houston Astrodome.

Nadia Comăneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics at which Games?

At the 1976 Montreal Games the scoreboard, built for three digits, could not show a 10, so Comăneci's uneven bars score flashed up as 1.00.

Which president nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the US Supreme Court in 1993?

Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 to succeed Byron White; in the 1970s she had led the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and argued sex-discrimination cases before the Court she was now joining.

Jane Goodall's decades-long chimpanzee study at Gombe Stream took place in which country?

Gombe Stream lies on Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania (then Tanganyika); Louis Leakey sent Goodall there in 1960 before she had any degree, the first of the so-called Trimates.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar for which film?

The Hurt Locker, a drama about a US bomb-disposal team in Iraq, won six Oscars in March 2010; Bigelow beat her ex-husband James Cameron, whose Avatar had taken the Golden Globe over her that season.

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, was born outside Albania in which Balkan capital?

Skopje was an Ottoman city when Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born there in 1910; at 18 she left to join the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish order that sent her on to India.

Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the UN committee that drafted which 1948 document?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed the General Assembly in December 1948 without a single vote against, and the delegates then rose to give Roosevelt a standing ovation.

Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 by whom?

Two of her own bodyguards, both Sikhs, shot Indira Gandhi in the garden of her residence in revenge for Operation Blue Star, the army's storming of the Golden Temple that June.

Which poet's ghost-story challenge at Lake Geneva prompted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

Byron set the challenge at the Villa Diodati in 1816, the cold, wet 'Year Without a Summer' that kept his guests indoors; Frankenstein appeared anonymously two years later.

Whose debut novel Sense and Sensibility was credited on its title page only to 'A Lady'?

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 credited to 'A Lady'; none of her novels carried her name in her lifetime, Pride and Prejudice being billed as 'by the author of Sense and Sensibility'.

Which suffragist was arrested for voting in the 1872 presidential election?

Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester, New York, and was tried in 1873 before a judge who told the jury to find her guilty; fined $100, she refused to pay and was never made to.

Which teacher spelled college lectures into Helen Keller's hand?

Anne Sullivan, whose own sight was limited, first reached the young Keller at a water pump, spelling 'water' into one hand while the water ran over the other.

Frances Perkins, the first woman in a US cabinet, held which post under FDR?

Frances Perkins was Secretary of Labor from March 1933 to June 1945, the longest tenure in the post, and a driving force behind the Social Security Act of 1935.

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers in which New York borough?

Manhattan's Asch Building had exit doors locked to prevent theft, trapping many workers; most of the dead were young immigrant women, and the outcry led to new laws on factory safety.

Suffragette Emily Davison was fatally injured by the King's horse at which 1913 race?

At the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913 Davison ducked under the rails at Tattenham Corner and was struck by George V's horse Anmer, ridden by Herbert Jones; she died four days later.

Whose 1972 presidential campaign used the slogan 'Unbought and Unbossed'?

Shirley Chisholm first ran on the slogan in 1968, when she beat civil rights leader James Farmer to become the first Black woman elected to Congress.

Wilma Rudolph won three sprint gold medals at which Olympic Games?

At the 1960 Rome Games Rudolph won the 100 m, 200 m and sprint relay; as a child she had polio and for years could not walk without a leg brace or special shoe.

Title IX of 1972 bans sex discrimination in what?

Federally funded education is all the law covers; its text never mentions sport, yet it went on to reshape school and college athletics for women.

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, co-founded which group in 1966?

The National Organization for Women was founded in June 1966 with Friedan as its first president; in 1970 she organised the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality.

Madam C. J. Walker made her fortune selling what to Black women?

Hair care products were her answer to a scalp ailment that cost her most of her own hair; born Sarah Breedlove to parents who had been enslaved, she built a national army of sales agents.

Journalist Ida B. Wells spent the 1890s campaigning against which practice?

Lynching became Wells's cause in 1892, when a Memphis mob killed a friend and two of his business partners; after her editorials, another mob wrecked her newspaper office.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first elected female head of state, led which country?

Liberia elected Sirleaf in a 2005 run-off against football star George Weah, who went on to succeed her in 2018; she shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Wu Zetian, China's only female emperor, proclaimed which dynasty in 690?

Wu Zetian proclaimed her own Zhou dynasty in 690, interrupting the Tang for fifteen years until the Shenlong Coup of February 705 forced her to abdicate and restored her son Zhongzong.

Who was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587?

Mary, Queen of Scots was convicted over the Babington Plot to kill Elizabeth I, who signed the death warrant after more than eighteen years of holding her prisoner.

Catherine the Great was born in Stettin, a city that today lies in which country?

Stettin is now Szczecin in north-western Poland; Catherine was born there as Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst on 2 May 1729 and seized the Russian throne from her husband Peter III in 1762.

Queen Nzinga fought Portuguese expansion in the 1600s in what is now which country?

Angola's Nzinga once met the Portuguese as her brother's envoy: in a popular story, offered only a mat to sit on, she had an attendant bend down to serve as her chair and talked as an equal.

Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explained and named which process in 1939?

Nuclear fission got its name from Meitner and Frisch months after she fled Nazi Germany for Sweden; her longtime partner Otto Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize for the discovery.

Dorothy Hodgkin's 1964 Nobel Prize recognised her mapping the structure of what?

Hodgkin began work on vitamin B12 in 1948 and had its structure within a decade; she had already solved penicillin in 1945, and in 1969 she completed a 35-year effort on insulin.

Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock discovered 'jumping genes' by studying which plant?

McClintock traced transposable elements through the colour patterns of maize kernels at Cold Spring Harbor; her unshared 1983 Nobel Prize came some thirty years after the discovery.

Constance Markievicz, first woman elected to the Commons in 1918, stood for which party?

Markievicz won Dublin St Patrick's for Sinn Féin in December 1918 while held in Holloway Prison; following the party's abstentionist policy she never took her Westminster seat, sitting instead in the First Dáil.

Who became the first woman to perform a spacewalk, in July 1984?

Svetlana Savitskaya spent 3 hours 35 minutes outside Salyut 7 cutting and welding metal; the flight also made her the first woman to go to space twice.

The 1888 London matchgirls' strike was against which match manufacturer?

About 1,400 women and girls walked out of Bryant & May's Bow factory in July 1888; they worked with white phosphorus, which caused the disfiguring bone disease known as phossy jaw.

The Soviet women's bomber regiment that glided silently onto German targets earned which nickname?

The Night Witches idled their engines and glided in to bomb; German troops are said to have likened the whoosh of the flimsy training biplanes to a witch's broomstick.

Marie Tharp's ocean-floor maps revealed a rift valley running along which feature?

Tharp plotted a rift valley down the centre of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from echo-sounder profiles with Bruce Heezen in the 1950s; their maps helped win acceptance for seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.

Which medieval writer defended women in The Book of the City of Ladies (1405)?

Christine de Pizan, widowed young with three children, supported her family by writing at the French court; The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) answers misogynist texts such as the Romance of the Rose.

Artemisia Gentileschi was the first woman admitted to the Accademia del Disegno in which city?

Florence took Artemisia in after the 1612 Rome trial of her rapist Agostino Tassi, at which she was tortured to test her evidence; she joined its Accademia in 1616 and painted for the Medici.

Razia Sultan, who reigned 1236–1240, was the only woman to rule which state?

Razia took the throne of the Delhi Sultanate after her half-brother was deposed; chroniclers say she first ruled from behind a screen, then discarded it and appeared in public in men's dress.

Sophie Germain used the alias 'Monsieur Le Blanc' to correspond with which German mathematician?

Carl Friedrich Gauss learned who 'Le Blanc' was only after Germain, fearing for him as French troops occupied his town, asked a general she knew to see that he was safe.

Mary Kies's 1809 US patent, signed by James Madison, covered weaving straw with silk to make what?

Hats woven her way were taken up across New England's hat trade while a trade embargo had cut off European imports; Kies is generally credited as the first woman granted a US patent in her own name.

Which Bryn Mawr mathematician did Einstein hail as a creative genius after her death in 1935?

Emmy Noether had worked for years without pay at Erlangen, as women were largely shut out of academic posts; her theorem tying symmetry to conservation laws became a pillar of modern physics.

In 1910 Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman licensed to fly what?

An aeroplane licence, number 36, went to de Laroche on 8 March 1910; an actress and no aristocrat, she was nonetheless billed as 'the Baroness'.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman to qualify in Britain as what?

A physician's licence came through the Society of Apothecaries, whose rules did not bar women; once she had passed, the society changed them to keep other women out.

Queen Victoria's 1840 marriage to Prince Albert is widely credited with popularising which bridal tradition?

The white wedding dress was already worn by some brides, but press coverage of Victoria's satin gown trimmed with Honiton lace made it the fashion to follow.

Lizzie Magie's 1904 patent for The Landlord's Game was the forerunner of which best-selling board game?

Monopoly reached Parker Brothers through Charles Darrow, who claimed he invented it in his basement. Magie had designed her game to illustrate the economics of Henry George.

A moth that Grace Hopper's team pulled from a Harvard computer relay in 1947 helped popularise which computing term?

Debugging got its best story when the moth was taped into the logbook as the first actual case of a bug being found. The page is now kept at the Smithsonian.

Before her television cooking fame, Julia Child spent World War II working for which American intelligence agency?

The OSS took Julia Child on as a typist, then had her help develop a shark repellent to stop curious sharks setting off underwater explosives.

Exotic dancer Mata Hari, shot in 1917 as an alleged German spy, was born in which country?

Netherlands-born Margaretha Zelle posed on stage as a Javanese princess, a story audiences believed because few Europeans knew the Dutch East Indies, where she had lived as an army wife.

Virginia Hall, reportedly rated the most dangerous Allied spy by the Gestapo, gave what the name Cuthbert?

Her wooden leg replaced the one Hall lost after a hunting accident. When she warned London that Cuthbert might trouble her escape over the Pyrenees, a baffled officer told her to eliminate him.

Until a royal decree took effect in June 2018, which was the only country that banned women from driving?

Saudi Arabia lifted the ban on 24 June 2018, yet several of the Women to Drive campaigners who had fought it for years were detained only weeks earlier.

Which crime writer, the best-selling novelist of all time, vanished in 1926 and turned up at a Harrogate hotel?

Agatha Christie had checked in under the surname of her husband's lover while her disappearance made international headlines. Her autobiography never mentions the episode.

Illinois inventor Josephine Cochrane patented which kitchen machine in 1886, selling it first to hotels and restaurants?

Dishwasher orders from restaurants and hotels poured in after Cochrane showed her machine at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, though homes did not take to it until the 1950s.

Which nickname did a Soviet army newspaper give Margaret Thatcher after she attacked the USSR in a speech?

The Iron Lady was Red Star's jab at a speech calling the Soviet Union bent on world dominance. Thatcher took up the name in a speech of her own, and it stuck for the rest of her career.

Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler named which doll, first shown at a New York toy fair in 1959, after her own daughter?

Barbie took her name from Barbara Handler, whose paper-doll games gave Ruth the idea. The boyfriend doll that followed was named Ken, after the Handlers' son.

Teacher Christa McAuliffe, chosen from more than 11,000 applicants, died in 1986 aboard which Space Shuttle?

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew. McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan, finally flew in 2007 on Endeavour, the orbiter built to replace it.

Mary Anderson patented which car feature in 1903, reportedly inspired by a New York streetcar driver struggling in snow?

Windshield wipers earned Anderson nothing: buyers told her the device had no commercial value, and her patent expired in 1920 without ever reaching mass production.

Margaret Hamilton led the MIT team that wrote the onboard flight software for which NASA programme?

Apollo 11 avoided an abort minutes before touchdown because her team's software coped with the computer's overload alarms. Hamilton is also credited with coining the term software engineering.

Reporter Nellie Bly went undercover for ten days in 1887 to expose brutality inside what kind of institution?

A mental asylum committed Bly after she feigned insanity, and she got out only when her newspaper stepped in. Her report caused a sensation and prompted reforms.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to serve the poor in the slums of which Indian city?

Calcutta's Missionaries of Charity wear the habit Teresa chose for them, a white sari edged in blue. The call to found the order came to her on a train to Darjeeling.

Eva Perón, the first lady who championed votes for women and inspired the musical Evita, came from which country?

Argentina passed its women's suffrage law in 1947, and the women's party Eva Perón then founded helped her husband win the 1951 election with 63 per cent of the vote.

In 1987 Diana, Princess of Wales, made headlines by holding hands with a patient who had which illness?

AIDS patients were widely shunned, and Diana was the first British royal to make physical contact with them. That year she also opened the UK's first hospital unit dedicated to the illness.

The painted bust of which Egyptian queen, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, is displayed in Berlin's Neues Museum?

Nefertiti's bust lay in the ruined workshop of the sculptor Thutmose until German archaeologists dug it up in 1912. Egypt has long demanded its return.

The Silent Sentinels, suffragists who began protesting in January 1917, were the first group to picket which building?

The White House pickets were tolerated at first, then arrested on charges of obstructing traffic. More than 2,000 women took a turn on the line over two and a half years.

Which Tudor queen, who never married, addressed her troops at Tilbury in 1588 as the Spanish Armada threatened invasion?

Elizabeth I rode out to her army in a breastplate over a white velvet dress. The Armada had in fact been driven off days before, and the troops were sent home soon after.

Marie Antoinette, guillotined in 1793, was born the fifteenth child of an empress in which country?

Austria's Empress Maria Theresa married her youngest daughter off at fourteen to strengthen an alliance. The famous remark about eating cake is pinned on Marie Antoinette with no evidence she said it.

Joan of Arc made her name in 1429 by helping to lift a months-long siege of which city on the Loire?

Orléans saw its besiegers retreat on 8 May 1429, little more than a week after Joan arrived. From the sixteenth century she was known as the Maid of Orléans.

Indira Gandhi, whose surname came from her husband Feroze, was the daughter of which Indian leader?

Jawaharlal Nehru was India's first prime minister, and Indira's son Rajiv later succeeded her, putting three generations of one family in the office.

The Radium Girls were American factory workers poisoned while painting what with glow-in-the-dark paint?

Watch dials needed a fine brush tip, so the women were told to point the bristles with their lips and swallowed deadly amounts of radium. Their lawsuits went on to reshape workplace safety law.

About three-quarters of the wartime staff at which British codebreaking centre, home of Colossus, were women?

Bletchley Park recruited many women with degrees in mathematics, physics and engineering, yet only a few, such as Joan Clarke, were employed as full cryptanalysts.

Which author of Beloved and Song of Solomon was the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Toni Morrison won in 1993. Years earlier she had broken another barrier as the first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department at Random House.

Under which male pen name did Mary Ann Evans publish Middlemarch, Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss?

George Eliot may have been a shield as well as a disguise: she lived with the married writer George Henry Lewes, and the name kept that scandal away from her novels.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Red Army soldier whom Eleanor Roosevelt invited to tour America in 1942, fought in which role?

Sniper Pavlichenko was credited with 309 kills, more than any other woman in history. On her American visit she became the first Soviet citizen received by a US president.

Which US president proclaimed the first National Women's History Week, set for the week of March 8, 1980?

Jimmy Carter's proclamation followed a local celebration begun in a California county two years earlier. Congress stretched the week to the whole of March in 1987.

Which American-born entertainer carried notes written in invisible ink on her sheet music as a wartime Resistance spy?

Josephine Baker counted on her celebrity to cross borders without raising suspicion, pinning other notes inside her clothing. In 2021 she became the first Black woman honoured in the Panthéon.

The Trưng sisters, honoured with a yearly holiday, led a revolt against Han dynasty rule around AD 40 in which country?

Vietnam counts the Trưng sisters as national heroines. They ruled for three years after rising up, and the elder, Trưng Trắc, is remembered as the country's first female monarch.

Which former concubine controlled the government of the late Qing dynasty as regent, on and off, from 1861 to 1908?

Empress Dowager Cixi ousted the regents named by the dying emperor in 1861, then tightened her grip by installing her nephew on the throne when her own son died.

Sophie Scholl was arrested in 1943 for distributing White Rose leaflets at the university in which German city?

Munich's university is where Scholl and her brother Hans were caught with the anti-Nazi leaflets. Four days later both were convicted of treason and guillotined.

Social worker Irena Sendler helped smuggle Jewish children to safety out of which city's wartime ghetto?

Warsaw's Gestapo sentenced Sendler to death, but the underground bribed officials and she escaped on the day set for her execution. Lists of the hidden children's names were buried in jars.

Which president's wife Edith decided what state business reached him after a stroke left him bedridden in 1919?

Woodrow Wilson served out his term to March 1921 while Edith chose which papers and visitors got through, a role she later described as her stewardship.

Which future First Lady urged her husband in a March 1776 letter to remember women when writing the new nation's laws?

Abigail Adams was writing to John Adams at the Continental Congress, and she remained his closest advisor. She was later also the mother of a president, John Quincy Adams.

Catherine the Great took the Russian throne in 1762 by overthrowing which emperor, her own husband, in a palace coup?

Peter III had reigned for only six months when the coup removed him. He was taken to the estate of Ropsha, where he died within days.

Which widow took over a confederation of some 400 pirate ships in 1807 and later negotiated her way out of prosecution?

Zheng Yi Sao took over a force of tens of thousands of pirates in the South China Sea. Her 1810 deal with the Qing authorities let her keep two dozen ships and walk free.

Amelia Earhart vanished in July 1937 while searching for which remote refuelling stop in the central Pacific?

Howland Island is a flat sliver of land about two kilometres long. A Coast Guard cutter waiting there heard Earhart's voice clearly, but she could not hear its replies.

Which country's 1907 election returned 19 women, the first female members of parliament anywhere in the world?

Finland was then a grand duchy under the Russian emperor, yet its women had just become the first in Europe able both to vote and to stand for election.

Which Wall Street stockbroker and newspaper publisher is widely seen as the first woman to run for US president?

Victoria Woodhull was too young under the Constitution to take office had she won. She and her sister had opened their Wall Street brokerage two years earlier and used the profits to start a newspaper.

Which suffragist, the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree, kept her birth name after marrying in 1855?

Lucy Stone's choice defied the custom of taking a husband's surname so memorably that American women who kept their own names were nicknamed Lucy Stoners.

Queen Zenobia, who annexed Egypt and defied the emperor Aurelian in the 270s, ruled from which city in modern Syria?

Palmyra fell in 272 after Zenobia slipped away to seek help from Persia and was captured before she could cross the Euphrates.

Empress Theodora, a former actress who helped face down the Nika riots of 532, ruled Byzantium beside which emperor?

Justinian I needed a change in the law before he could marry a former actress at all. As rioters closed in, Theodora is said to have talked him and his court out of fleeing the capital.

Yaa Asantewaa led the Ashanti against British rule in the War of the Golden Stool in which present-day country?

Ghana also knows the conflict as the Yaa Asantewaa War. It began when a British governor demanded the Golden Stool, the symbol of the Asante nation that she was charged with protecting.

The six women who first programmed ENIAC in the 1940s were chosen from about 200 women hired under which job title?

Computers were people before they were machines: the job meant working out the numeric results of formulas, in this case artillery firing tables for the US Army.

Which queen of Jhansi became a leading figure of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and died fighting British forces?

Lakshmibai made her last stand at Gwalior in June 1858. The East India Company had annexed her state after her husband died without a natural heir, ignoring her protests.

Gertrude Bell helped shape the borders of which new Arab state after World War I and ran its antiquities service?

Iraq owes its national museum to Bell, who lobbied for years before opening it in Baghdad in 1926, shortly before her death. She had argued for wide borders that took in Mosul.

Women's History Month falls in March in the United States, but in which month does Canada observe it?

October takes in Persons Day on the 18th, the anniversary of the ruling that Canadian women were eligible to be appointed senators.