Women's History
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147 free Women's History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
11 free Women's History trivia questions with answers. Women's History trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Womens History trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which country, in 1893, became the first self-governing nation to give women the vote in national elections?
New Zealand
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.
Q 02Which scientist was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
Marie Curie
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.
Q 03Who, in 1960, became the first woman in the world to be elected head of government of a modern nation?
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
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.
Q 04Which author wrote the influential feminist work 'A Room of One's Own'?
Virginia Woolf
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.
Q 05In which modern Olympic Games did women first officially compete?
1900 Paris
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.
Q 06Which US constitutional amendment, adopted in August 1920, barred denying the vote on the basis of sex?
The Nineteenth
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.
Q 07Which English mathematician, who wrote about Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, is often called the first computer programmer?
Ada Lovelace
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.
Q 08In which Alabama city did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955?
Montgomery
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.
Q 09Who became the first woman in space, flying a solo mission aboard Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
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.
Q 10Who founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903, dedicated to 'deeds, not words'?
Emmeline Pankhurst
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.
Q 11Who was the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, graduating in 1849?
Elizabeth Blackwell
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.
Q 12In 1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across which ocean?
The Atlantic
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.
Q 13Florence Nightingale rose to fame organising care for wounded soldiers during which war?
The Crimean War
Q 21Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented what during World War II?
A radio guidance system
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.
Q 22Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to Congress, was the only member to vote against what in 1941?
Declaring war on Japan
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.
Q 23What is Rosalind Franklin's famous X-ray image of DNA known as?
Photo 51
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'.
Q 14Harriet Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad earned her the nickname of which biblical figure?
Moses
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.
Q 15Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize at 17, grew up in the Swat Valley of which country?
Pakistan
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.
Q 16Which astronaut asked for Katherine Johnson to check the computer's orbital figures by hand before his 1962 flight?
John Glenn
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.
Q 17Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai founded which tree-planting organisation in Kenya?
The Green Belt Movement
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.
Q 18The 1851 Akron speech later titled 'Ain't I a Woman?' was delivered by which formerly enslaved abolitionist?
Sojourner Truth
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.
Q 19Junko Tabei of Japan was the first woman to reach the summit of which mountain?
Mount Everest
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.
Q 20Kathrine Switzer became the first registered woman to run which race in 1967?
The Boston Marathon
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.
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.
Q 24A 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
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.
Q 25Which group organised the first 'Woman's Day', forerunner of International Women's Day, in New York in 1909?
The Socialist Party of America
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.
Q 26The Seneca Falls Convention was organised by local Quaker women together with which non-Quaker activist?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.
Q 27Which element did Marie and Pierre Curie announce first, in July 1898?
Polonium
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.
Q 28In 1995 Marie and Pierre Curie were reburied in which Paris monument?
The Panthéon
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.
Q 29Women in which European country could not vote at the federal level until 1971?
Switzerland
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.
Q 30Which US territory granted women the vote in 1869, long before women voted nationwide?
Wyoming
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.