Every March is Women’s History Month, a celebration of the many achievements of women through the years. However, many people are still discovering the important contributions to our collected world history.
It’s not surprising that women’s names have been left out of significant world developments. In many cases women HAVE been supported by their fathers and partners, as women have not always had access to education, the vote, the same opportunities or attribution for their achievements as men.
Here’s an article from Bea, member of the Somerset Youth Parliament Advisory Group members about some of the women who have inspired her.
Women’s History Month celebrates the achievements of women past and present all over the world. It’ s so important to have days like these to help us remember all the contributions women have made to our society.
Many amazing women of the past were not recognised for their brilliance, so it is so important to recognise them now. Here are a few women who have inspired me:
Emily, Anne and Charlotte Bronte
These three sisters grew up with nothing in a parsonage in the Yorkshire Moores. They went on to be recognised as some of the best novelists and poets of all time. (Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s lesser known Agnes Grey) and yet used men’s names to avoid prejudice so their work would be published and they could sell copies, so that their work would be fully appreciated.
Malala Yonsafzai
Malala was born in Pakistan. She campaigned tirelessly for every girls’ right to education. This resulted in her getting shot by the Taliban at the age of 15. Miraculously she survived. She then went on to study at Oxford University and still she campaigns for everyone to be able to go to school.
So, I hope you enjoy Women’s History Month and continue to celebrate women however you choose, but remember these women and many others who have and are contributing so much to our world!
Beatrice
More inspiring women
There have been so many inspirational women throughout history, across every field of human achievement, here are just a few of them:
- Aspasia – a teacher in ancient Greece, she taught Socrates everything he knew!
- Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter) – a mathematician and the first person to recognise that machines had applications beyond pure calculations and was a pioneer as the world’s very first computer programmer
- Nettie Stevens – a geneticist who discovered the X and Y sex chromosomes
- Rosalind Franklin – a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, whose work with X-ray diffraction discovered DNA’s double helix structure.
- Hedy Lamar – a beautiful actress who was dismissed as just a pretty face, but she was in fact a genius inventor whose work on frequency hopping laid the groundwork for wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS.
- Vera Rubin – an astronomer whose research provided crucial evidence for the existence of dark matter, a theory hypothesized decades earlier.
- Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg – a microbiologist who spearheaded research into bacterial genetics. She discovered the lambda phage (a virus that attacks bacteria)
- Katherine Johnson – sent humanity to the stars, with her maths talents as part of NASA’s Apollo programme, though her achievements were overshadowed by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
- Millicent Patrick – a character and concept designer for movies, who designed iconic movie monsters like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Chernabog from the Night on Bald Mountain sequence of Fantasia in the 1940s and 1950s, but credit for her work was taken by men and it wasn’t until the past two decades that people recognised her achievements.
- Margaret Keane – a painter whose would paint characters with distinctively big eyes in the 1960s. Her husband, Walter Keane, took credit for her paintings in order to get them displayed. A fortune was made out of reproductions of her paintings, all of which went to Walter. But, in the years since, with legal battles and a public paint-off, Margaret has now been established as the rightful artist of the big eye paintings.
- Fatima Al-Fihri – a Muslim scholar and philanthropist who is credited with founding the world’s oldest, continuously running university during the 9th Century: The University of Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco.
- Harriet Tubman – an American abolitionist who escaped slavery and who led hundreds to freedom via the Underground Railroad
There are literally thousands of important women through human history who have shaped the world that we know today, far more than we could mention in this article, here are some links to more information about these vital pioneers:
17 Pioneering Women whose Accomplishments Were Stolen by Men – Partners in Fire
Who Are The Famous Women From History Who Changed The World? | HistoryExtra
Do you know these 15 famous women who made history? | Mused
