Women's History Month: 15 women from history, and how to teach them

When Women's History Month and International Women's Day are

In the United States, Women's History Month grew out of a week of school events in Sonoma County, California, in 1978. President Carter proclaimed a National Women's History Week in 1980, and in 1987 Congress designated March as Women's History Month. The UK and Australia also use March. Canada holds Women's History Month in October, to include 18 October, the anniversary of the 1929 Persons Case that ruled women were “persons” eligible for the Senate.

International Women's Day on 8 March is older. The first was held in 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, on 19 March. The date settled on 8 March after a strike by women textile workers in Petrograd on that day in 1917 helped start the Russian Revolution (it was 23 February by the Russian calendar). The United Nations began marking the day in 1975, International Women's Year. India also has a National Women's Day on 13 February, the birthday of the poet and politician Sarojini Naidu, who appears below.

How we chose these 15 women

Lists for March tend to repeat the same handful of names with the same facts. We picked women from different continents and centuries whose own words or work survive, so that students can read a primary source rather than only a summary. Each entry gives a detail that tends to get left out. Where the record is thin or a famous quote is doubtful, we say so.

Rulers and thinkers of the ancient and medieval world

Hatshepsut, daughter of Thutmose I, ruled Egypt first as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III and then as pharaoh in her own right for about twenty years. She sent a trading expedition to the land of Punt that brought back living myrrh trees, and built the terraced temple at Deir el-Bahri. The detail: about two decades after her death, many of her statues and images were smashed or erased, probably under Thutmose III late in his reign. Historians now think this was about the royal succession, not personal hatred.

Hypatia taught philosophy, mathematics and astronomy in Roman Alexandria to students of different faiths. The detail: the best evidence of her mathematical work is a single line by her father Theon, who says his commentary on Book III of Ptolemy's Almagest was an edition prepared by his daughter. She was murdered by a Christian mob in March 415 during a political feud. The film-style story that links her death to the burning of the Library of Alexandria is a myth.

Murasaki Shikibu was a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court in Kyoto who wrote The Tale of Genji, a long prose fiction often called the first novel, around 1000 to 1012. Her real name is not recorded. The detail: in her diary she says that after being mocked for her learning she pretended she could not even read the Chinese character for “one” written on a screen.

Queens, letter-writers and novelists

Elizabeth I ruled England from 1558 to 1603, settled the Church of England and survived plots and the Spanish Armada. Her most famous line, about having “the heart and stomach of a king”, from Tilbury in 1588, survives only in a version printed in 1654. Better attested is her answer to Parliament in 1566:

Abigail Adams ran the family farm through the American Revolution and wrote more than a thousand surviving letters. Her request that Congress “Remember the Ladies” (31 March 1776) is the subject of its own article. The detail: she invested in government bonds in her own name, quietly defying the law that gave a wife's property to her husband.

Jane Austen published four novels in her lifetime, all anonymously, the first “By a Lady”. The detail: she called her work a “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory” painted with a fine brush, in a letter to her nephew of 16 December 1816, which was a joke about modesty as much as a description.

Reformers and campaigners of the nineteenth century

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York, where her first language was Dutch. Freed in 1827, she went to court to recover her five-year-old son Peter, who had been illegally sold to Alabama, and won. The detail: the famous “Ain't I a Woman?” speech is a version written by Frances Gage in 1863, twelve years later and in an invented Southern dialect. The report printed in 1851 by Marius Robinson, who heard her, has her saying: “if woman have a pint and man a quart, why can't she have her little pint full?” (Anti-Slavery Bugle, 21 June 1851).

Susan B. Anthony campaigned for women's suffrage for more than fifty years. In November 1872 she voted in Rochester, New York, was arrested, and at her trial in 1873 was fined $100, which she never paid. The detail: in 1869 she refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave the vote to Black men but not to women, a split with her old ally Frederick Douglass that the Yuga debate on equal rights in 1869 puts side by side.

Florence Nightingale led nurses at the British army hospitals at Scutari in the Crimean War. The detail: her real weapon was statistics. Her polar-area diagrams showed that far more soldiers died of preventable disease than of wounds, and in 1858 she became the first woman elected to the Statistical Society of London. She opened her Notes on Hospitals with the remark that the first requirement of a hospital is that it “should do the sick no harm”.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849 and went back about thirteen times to bring out family and others. The detail: in the Civil War she helped plan and lead the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina in June 1863, which freed more than 700 enslaved people, and she spent decades fighting for the army pension she was owed.

Ada Lovelace published her Notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843. The detail: she saw that such a machine could handle music or any symbols, not just numbers. See our article on Ada Lovelace Day.

Savitribai Phule learned to read from her husband, Jotirao Phule, trained as a teacher and with him opened a school for girls at Bhide Wada in Pune in January 1848. The detail: she died on 10 March 1897 of plague caught while caring for patients during the epidemic in Pune. Her birthday, 3 January, is marked in Maharashtra as a day for girls' education.

Scientists, poets and writers of the modern age

Marie Curie coined the word “radioactivity”, discovered polonium and radium with Pierre Curie in 1898, and became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911). The detail: in the First World War she learned to drive and took mobile X-ray units to the front herself, with her daughter Irène, then seventeen.

Sarojini Naidu published three books of English poems, became in 1925 the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress, and in 1947 became the first woman governor of an Indian state. The detail: in 1917 she led a deputation of women to the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, asking for the vote, at a time when women in Britain itself could not yet vote.

Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The detail: A Room of One's Own (1929), based on talks at two Cambridge women's colleges, argues that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, and invents Shakespeare's sister to show why.

Classroom ideas for Women's History Month

• Source, not poster: each student picks one woman above and finds the primary source in the “Read” column. The display shows a quotation with its exact source, and one thing the source reveals that the summary did not.
• Test the famous quote: compare the 1851 and 1863 versions of Sojourner Truth's speech side by side. Who wrote each? Why do they differ? Our guide on checking whether a quote is real helps.
• Living history day: students present in role as one woman, in the first person, using our wax museum project guide.
• Connect the dates: put all fifteen on one timeline with what women could and could not do legally in each place and period.
• Interview by voice: students prepare five questions and practise them with an AI recreation of their figure on Yuga. The recreations are built from each woman's writings and the historical record, but they are not the real people and can make mistakes, so students cite the sources, not the app.

For more women in science, see women scientists in history; for queens and pharaohs, women rulers in history.