History is full of women who changed it, and many of their best stories go untold: the deposed queen whose songs found their way out of confinement, the astronomer whose Nobel letter arrived too late, the medical student whose admission began as a joke. These stories run from a priestess in ancient Ur to a tree planter in Kenya, keeping the famous names and hunting for the details most people never hear.
Every tile in a Women Who Changed History game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Leaders
nine stories
1She sank an ally and won the king's praise
On the tile: Artemisia I480 BC
Artemisia ruled Halicarnassus and brought five ships to Xerxes' invasion of Greece. Before Salamis, Herodotus says, she alone urged the king not to fight at sea. He fought anyway. In the battle an Athenian ship chased hers, and with allied ships in her way she rammed and sank one of them. The Athenian captain assumed she was on the Greek side and turned away. Xerxes, told she had sunk an enemy, reportedly said his men had become women and his women men. Athens had offered 10,000 drachmas for her capture.
Cleopatra ruled Egypt, but her family's roots lay elsewhere. Her dynasty descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian Greek general who served Alexander the Great, and its rulers spoke Greek and governed as Greek monarchs. Plutarch wrote that the kings of Egypt before her had not even tried to learn the native language. Cleopatra did, the first of her line known to have learned it. Plutarch adds that she very seldom needed an interpreter, speaking directly with Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. After her death in 30 BC, Egypt became a province of Rome.
The story goes, in a Korean text called the Samguk Yusa, that the Tang emperor Taizong sent Queen Seondeok a painting of peonies along with their seeds. She predicted the flowers would have no fragrance, since no butterflies or bees were painted beside them. When they bloomed without scent, she explained that he had been mocking her for having no husband. The tale cannot be checked. What is known is that she became Silla's first reigning queen in 632, and that Cheomseongdae, long renowned as the Far East's oldest observatory, was built during her reign.
History calls her Wu Zetian, but Zetian was a posthumous title. Her official name was Zhao, written with a character she created for herself, meaning the sun, moon and sky. In 690 she set aside the Tang dynasty, proclaimed her own Zhou dynasty, and ruled for fifteen years as the only woman emperor in Chinese history. She broadened how officials were recruited, and in 693 made her own two-volume Rules for Officials part of the examination curriculum. Her ruthlessness toward rivals is also well documented. A palace coup ended her rule in 705.
In 1768 Catherine the Great invited an English doctor, Thomas Dimsdale, to St. Petersburg to inoculate her against smallpox. The method of the day used live smallpox material and could kill. According to the auction house that later sold one of her letters, she ordered a carriage kept ready so he could flee Russia if she died. Instead she was miserable for a day or two and recovered within two weeks. Her son and some 140 courtiers followed. Dimsdale went home a baron, and Catherine promoted inoculation with printed material and even a ballet.
6Songs that found their way out of a palace prison
On the tile: Liliuokalani1895
After Hawaii's monarchy was overthrown and a rebellion to restore it failed in 1895, the former queen Liliuokalani was imprisoned in Iolani Palace. She was denied newspapers but allowed paper and pencils, so she drew her own musical staffs and, with no instrument at first, wrote down notes by voice alone. In her 1898 memoir she recalled that three of those songs found their way from her prison to Chicago, where they were printed. One was "Aloha Oe," a farewell song she had first written years earlier, now one of the best-known Hawaiian songs.
The Golden Stool is the sacred emblem of the Asante people of present-day Ghana, believed to hold the nation's soul, and no one may sit on it. By 1900 the British had exiled the Asante king, and Governor Frederick Hodgson turned his demands to the stool. The war that followed was led by Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, who declared that if the men would not defend their people, the women would. She was captured and exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921. The British never got the stool.
8In Congress before most American women could vote
On the tile: J. Rankin1916
In November 1916, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the vote, Montana elected Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress. On her first day in April 1917 she introduced a constitutional amendment for women's suffrage. Days later she voted against entering World War I. She left the House, won a seat again in 1940, and on December 8, 1941, cast the only vote against war with Japan. It passed 388 to 1. "As a woman I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."
In 1911 Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, where 146 people, mostly women, died, many trapped behind locked stairwell doors. She spent the following years pushing for safer factories, shorter hours and a minimum wage. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt made her Secretary of Labor, the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet. She was the principal architect of the Social Security Act and served 12 years and 3 months, longer than any other Secretary of Labor. The department's headquarters has carried her name since 1980.
Caroline Herschel started out as a singer, a soloist at her brother William's concerts in Bath. After William discovered Uranus in 1781 and gave up music, she followed him into astronomy. Sweeping the sky with a telescope he made for her, she found eight comets. In 1787 King George III granted her a salary of 50 pounds as William's assistant, which Royal Museums Greenwich says made her the first woman in Britain to earn a living from astronomy. After spotting her last comet in 1797, she rode nearly 30 miles to Greenwich to report it.
2A fossil so strange that an expert suspected a fake
On the tile: Mary Anning1823
In December 1823 Mary Anning of Lyme Regis found the first complete skeleton of a Plesiosaurus, a creature so strange that the French anatomist Georges Cuvier, reviewing sketches, thought it a fake, an error, or two animals joined together. The Geological Society of London scheduled a special meeting about it. Anning was not invited; the Society did not admit women as Fellows until 1919, when eight were elected at once. Cuvier, sent better illustrations, was assured the fossil was real. In 2022 a statue of Anning and her dog was unveiled in Lyme Regis after a campaign by 11-year-old Evie Swire.
3She imagined a calculating engine composing music
On the tile: Ada Lovelace1843
In 1843 Ada Lovelace published a translation of an Italian engineer's article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, with extensive notes of her own. They included the first published description of a step-by-step sequence of operations for solving mathematical problems, which is why she is often called the first programmer, though biographers debate how original her contribution was. Her boldest idea looked beyond numbers: the engine might act on other things, and even compose elaborate pieces of music. The Computer History Museum credits her as the first to express the potential of computers outside mathematics.
Florence Nightingale is remembered as a nurse, but she was also a pioneering statistician. After the Crimean War she built a diagram of how soldiers there had died over two years: each wedge a month, blue for preventable diseases, red for battlefield wounds, black for other causes. It showed that more soldiers died from preventable disease than from injuries, and she meant officials to grasp at a glance that unsanitary hospitals were the bigger killer. In 1858 she became the first female member of the Statistical Society, now the Royal Statistical Society.
Harvard College Observatory once offered Henrietta Swan Leavitt thirty cents an hour to study its photographic plates, five cents above its usual rate. Examining variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, she noticed that the brighter ones had longer periods, and in 1912 she showed the relation was simple and reliable. It became a way to measure distances to faraway galaxies. In 1925 the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler wrote to her about her "admirable discovery," saying he felt seriously inclined to nominate her for the Nobel Prize in Physics. She had died in 1921.
6She explained fission, and the prize went to Hahn
On the tile: Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner led the physics department at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for 21 years. Then, because she was Jewish, she had to flee Nazi Germany, with barely two hours to say goodbye and just a handbag. From exile in Sweden she kept writing to her longtime colleague Otto Hahn, suggesting experiments. When Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch supplied the physical explanation and named the process. The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Hahn alone. In 1997 element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor.
Rosalind Franklin is remembered for Photograph 51, the X-ray image of DNA that she and her research student Raymond Gosling captured at King's College London in May 1952. Her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson without her agreement or knowledge, and it helped Watson and Francis Crick build the first model of the molecule. Less often told is what came next. In 1953 Franklin moved to Birkbeck College and set up a team studying the structure of viruses. The papers they published before her death in 1958 laid the foundations of structural virology.
8The astronaut who wanted her to check the computer
On the tile: K. Johnson1962
Before John Glenn orbited Earth in 1962, the flight's equations were loaded into IBM computers, and the astronauts were wary of machines prone to hiccups and blackouts. As part of his preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl," Katherine Johnson, to run the same equations by hand on her desktop calculating machine. If she said the numbers were good, Johnson recalled him saying, he was ready to go. She had already broken ground at Langley: a 1960 report she coauthored was the first in her division to credit a woman as an author.
In 1969 Tu Youyou was put in charge of a research group searching traditional Chinese medicine for a malaria drug. Tests of more than a hundred herb extracts gave few promising results. Rereading Ge Hong's Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, she noticed it soaked the herb qinghao in water instead of boiling it. Perhaps heat destroyed the medicine. Extracted at lower temperature, sample number 191 stopped malaria parasites in rodents in 1971. To speed safety testing, Tu and two colleagues took the extract themselves. She shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
About 4,300 years ago, Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, served as high priestess of the moon god at Ur. She is celebrated as the earliest named author in world history: hymns and poems such as The Exaltation of Inanna carry her name, and one tablet closes by naming Enheduanna as the person who bound it together. Scholars still argue over how much of it she wrote, since every surviving copy was made by scribes hundreds of years later. An alabaster disk carved with her name, her title and her father's came out of the ruins of Ur in the 1920s.
For over a century a merry tavern scene of a couple with a violin hung under the name of Frans Hals. In 1892 it landed in court: the buyer, who had paid 4,500 pounds, sued the dealer, because beneath the Hals signature was another mark, a joined J and L with a star. It was Judith Leyster's. The next year the art historian Hofstede de Groot attributed seven paintings to her, six carrying that monogram. Leyster had joined the Haarlem painters' guild by 1633; when a student left her for Hals's studio, the guild made his mother pay her.
Felix Mendelssohn published six of his sister Fanny's songs under his own name. That led to an awkward moment in 1842, when Queen Victoria received him at Buckingham Palace and offered to sing her favorite of his songs, Italien, and he had to admit it was Fanny's. The confusion outlived them both. In 1972 the French pianist Eric Heidsieck recorded an Easter sonata as a work by Felix. In 2010 the musicologist Angela Mace Christian matched the manuscript's page numbers, 89 to 110, to pages missing from a bound volume of Fanny's music in Berlin. The sonata was hers.
The story goes that when Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the White House in 1862, Abraham Lincoln said to her, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Even the Stowe Center says only that he is reported to have said it. The book's impact is not in doubt. Uncle Tom's Cabin began as a newspaper serial Stowe expected to run three or four installments, and it grew to more than 40. As a book in 1852, it sold 10,000 copies in the United States in its first week.
Emily Dickinson published only a handful of poems in her lifetime, all anonymously, but in Amherst she was also known as an accomplished baker. Her round loaf of Indian and rye bread won second prize at the Amherst Cattle Show of 1856, though, as the Emily Dickinson Museum admits, her sister Lavinia was one of the judges. She lowered a basket of gingerbread to neighborhood children and drafted one poem on the back of a recipe for coconut cake. The first edition of her poems appeared in 1890, four years after her death.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit grew out of the picture letters Beatrix Potter wrote to her former governess's children, and several publishers turned the book down. So she privately printed 250 copies herself. In 1902 Frederick Warne and Co. published it, and the first 8,000 copies sold out. By 1905 Warne had published six of her books, and she used the profits to buy Hill Top Farm in the Lake District. Her Herdwick sheep won awards at local shows, and at her death in 1943 she left 4,000 acres to the National Trust.
Selma Lagerlöf trained as a teacher and taught at a girls' school in Landskrona. Later she wrote a book intended as a primer for elementary schools. Her Nobel biography calls the result one of the most charming children's books in any language: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, from 1906. In 1909 she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her family had lost Mårbacka in 1889, after her brother went bankrupt running it. She bought the house back in 1907, used the prize money to recover the land in 1910, and lived there until her death.
Frida Kahlo's 1938 solo show in New York drew admiring reviews. Her Paris exhibition the next March got far less attention and lost money, and she canceled a planned London show. Yet the Louvre bought one of her paintings, The Frame. Kahlo resisted the surrealist label. "They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn't," she said in Time in 1953. "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." In November 2025 her self-portrait The Dream (The Bed) sold at Sotheby's for 54.7 million dollars, a record at auction for a work by a woman.
For the 1939 New York World's Fair, Augusta Savage spent almost two years on The Harp, a sixteen-foot sculpture inspired by James Weldon Johnson's Lift Every Voice and Sing. Twelve singers of graduated heights formed the strings, and the hand and arm of God formed the sounding board. It drew acclaim, but it was plaster finished to look like black basalt. There were no funds to cast it and nowhere to store it, so after the fair it was demolished. Savage had said her true monument would be her students' work.
Women were prohibited from sailing aboard French ships, so when Louis de Bougainville's round-the-world expedition sailed in 1766, Jeanne Baret joined it disguised as a man, as assistant to the botanist Philibert Commerson. She carried heavy wooden plant presses and helped collect more than 6,000 specimens, though she went uncredited. Her identity was eventually discovered, and she and Commerson left the expedition on the French colony of Mauritius. She reached France years later, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. In 2012 a plant species, Solanum baretiae, was named for her.
Sacagawea is often remembered as the guide who led Lewis and Clark across the West, but the expedition's journals offer little evidence of that. A Lemhi Shoshone teenager, she set out in 1805 with a two-month-old son, probably because her husband had been hired as a translator. Her real contributions were different. William Clark wrote that a woman with a party of men was "a token of peace" to the nations they met. And in Shoshone country she recognized landmarks and helped translate when the expedition badly needed Shoshone horses.
Sojourner Truth's most famous words, "Ain't I a woman?", may not be words she said. She spoke at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. A month later the Anti-Slavery Bugle published a version by Marius Robinson that does not contain the phrase. The popular version, with its refrain, was published by Frances Gage in 1863, twelve years after the speech. Her courage is not in question. Born into slavery in New York, she left in 1827. As she later put it, "I did not run away, I walked away by daylight."
Turned away by the established medical schools, Elizabeth Blackwell applied to a dozen smaller colleges and got one acceptance, from Geneva Medical College in New York. A classmate later revealed that the faculty had passed the decision to the students, who took the request as a joke and voted unanimously to admit her. Then she arrived. Townspeople decided she must be either a bad woman or insane. On January 23, 1849, she received her diploma, graduating first in her class, the first woman to earn an MD from an American medical school.
5Dragged off a train, she took the railroad to court
On the tile: Ida B. Wells1884
In 1884 Ida B. Wells, a young Black schoolteacher in Tennessee, bought a first-class ticket and sat in the ladies' car of her train. The conductor ordered her to the smoking car, and she was forcibly dragged off while white passengers stood on their seats and applauded him. She sued the railroad and at first won compensation, though the Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the decision. Wells became a newspaper editor, and after a close friend was lynched in 1892 she began the investigations that made her a leading voice against lynching.
6No American school would teach her, so she went to France
On the tile: Bessie Coleman1921
No American flight school would accept Bessie Coleman, an African American woman working as a manicurist in Chicago, so she earned her flying certification in France. On June 15, 1921, she received her pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the first African American woman to earn one. Back home she became a barnstormer, and she would perform only for desegregated crowds. She was saving to open a flight school for African American students when she died in a crash in 1926. On the anniversary, African American pilots fly over her grave in Chicago.
Valentina Tereshkova followed her mother into work at a textile factory, and her path to space began with a hobby: skydiving at a local parachute club, which appealed to the Soviet space program. On June 16, 1963, she launched alone aboard Vostok 6, two days after Valeriy Bykovsky went up in Vostok 5. The two craft came within three miles of each other, and she answered his radio calls with her call sign, Seagull. She spent more than 70 hours in orbit and remains the only woman to have flown solo in space.
Wangari Maathai was the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate. In the 1970s she saw rural Kenyan women walking miles for firewood as forests vanished, and in 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement, helping establish thousands of village tree nurseries as women planted millions of trees. Kenya's government harassed and jailed her. In 1989 she stopped a skyscraper from being built in a Nairobi park. In 2004 she became the first African woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first laureate chosen mainly for environmental work.
Kathrine Switzer's 1967 Boston Marathon, run with a number she obtained by signing her entry form "K. V. Switzer," is famous. But she was not the first woman on the course. A year earlier, Roberta "Bobbi" Gibb jumped out of the bushes in Hopkinton just after the start, with no official entry, and finished in 3:21:40, 126th overall. She claimed the unofficial title again in 1967 and 1968. Switzer's first was being the first woman to receive a number. Women were not officially allowed to run the Boston Marathon until 1972.