Extraordinary women who changed history (but never made your textbooks)
While we are familiar with Marie Curie and Joan of Arc, countless other women have shaped our world in ways that textbooks often overlook or minimize, reflecting the systematic erasure of female contributions that characterized historical record-keeping dominated by male scholars and institutions. The omission isn’t accidental but results from deliberate choices about whose achievements deserved preservation and whose could be dismissed as domestic, auxiliary, or unremarkable. The pattern of forgetting women’s contributions spans all fields and eras, creating distorted historical narratives that present progress as primarily male achievement.
These remarkable women broke barriers, advanced science, led revolutions, and saved lives. Yet, their stories remain largely untold in mainstream education, which continues to privilege male historical figures even when acknowledging women’s history as a specialized subject. The erasure affects not just historical accuracy but contemporary possibilities by depriving girls and women of role models who demonstrated what women could achieve despite systemic obstacles. The recovery of these stories represents both historical correction and a political act that challenges assumptions about who makes history and whose contributions matter.
Honoring these forgotten pioneers who deserve their place in history alongside the men who’ve received all the credit for achievements that often depended on women’s uncredited labor, intellectual contributions, and leadership requires actively recovering and celebrating their stories.
Wiki Commons
Aspasia of Miletus
According to the World History Encyclopedia, Aspasia emerged as one of ancient Athens’s most influential intellectuals during the 5th century BCE despite being a foreign woman in a society that excluded women from public life and citizenship. The website claims that “her life story has always been in the shadow of Pericles’ fame, Athens’s leading statesman, who gave her access to power”. However, her own rhetorical skills, philosophical acumen, and political insight made her a force in her own right. Ancient sources, though written by men often hostile to powerful women, acknowledge that she taught rhetoric, engaged in philosophical debates with Socrates, and influenced Athenian policy through her counsel.
The historical record’s limitations regarding Aspasia demonstrate how women’s contributions were systematically minimized even when contemporaries acknowledged their significance. Later writers dismissed her importance or reduced her to a scandalous figure whose influence stemmed solely from sexual relationships rather than intellectual merit. The difficulty of reconstructing her actual contributions from sources that simultaneously acknowledged and denigrated her shows how patriarchal bias distorts historical understanding.
Her example demonstrates that even in societies claiming to exclude women entirely from intellectual and political life, exceptional women found ways to exercise influence and make contributions that their contemporaries recognized, even if subsequent history forgot. For people who assume that women’s historical exclusion was complete and unchallenged, Aspasia’s story reveals that women always resisted limitations even under the most restrictive circumstances.
Wiki Commons
Hypatia of Alexandria
In the words of the Smithsonian Magazine, Hypatia taught mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy in 4th-century Alexandria, becoming head of the Neoplatonist school and achieving recognition as one of the ancient world’s leading intellectuals regardless of gender. Her mathematical work on conic sections and her astronomical contributions advanced scientific knowledge, while her teaching attracted students from across the Mediterranean. Her murder by a Christian mob in 415 CE resulted from religious and political conflicts but also reflected hostility toward a woman who wielded intellectual authority that challenged emerging Christian restrictions on women’s public roles.
Her death marked a turning point in women’s intellectual participation as Christianity’s spread increasingly confined women to domestic roles and defined female learning as dangerous. The subsequent centuries saw women’s systematic exclusion from universities and formal education, which Hypatia’s example demonstrated women could master. Her murder wasn’t just a personal tragedy but a symbolic moment in the closure of opportunities that would not fully reopen for more than a millennium.
Modern efforts to reclaim Hypatia as a martyr for science and reason sometimes oversimplify complex religious conflicts surrounding her death. Yet, her significance as a female intellectual who achieved recognition on merit remains valid regardless of the specific political dynamics that led to her murder. Her story demonstrates both women’s intellectual capacities and the violent resistance that female authority and learning could provoke.
Amazon
Margery Kempe
Kempe, a 15th-century English mystic and merchant’s wife, dictated “The Book of Margery Kempe” around 1430, creating what’s recognized as the first autobiography in the English language. Her spiritual visions, pilgrimages, and unconventional religious practices created controversy during her lifetime as she challenged clerical authority and claimed direct access to divine revelation without institutional mediation. Her willingness to speak publicly about spiritual matters and her emotional, ecstatic spirituality violated expectations for female religious expression.
The book’s significance extends beyond literary innovation to document a medieval woman’s inner life, spiritual experiences, and navigation of social constraints with remarkable detail. Her account reveals medieval women’s religious agency, the tensions between institutional and experiential forms of religion, and how women utilized mystical authority to claim voices that conventional religious structures denied them. The text disappeared for centuries before its 20th-century rediscovery, demonstrating how women’s literary contributions were often forgotten from cultural memory.
Her story challenges the assumption that medieval women were uniformly oppressed and voiceless, showing how women created spaces for self-expression and authority even within restrictive systems. The combination of genuine piety and self-assertion in her narrative complicates simple narratives about whether religious contexts empowered or constrained women, showing how medieval women navigated complex negotiations between submission and agency.
Wiki Commons
Mary Shelley
Wikipedia states that Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” at eighteen while living in Switzerland with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, creating the science fiction genre through her novel about a scientist who creates artificial life with disastrous consequences. The book’s philosophical depth, which explores themes of creation, responsibility, and scientific hubris, demonstrates intellectual sophistication that many contemporaries couldn’t believe came from a teenage woman. Her achievement becomes even more remarkable considering the personal tragedies surrounding its composition, particularly her infant daughter’s death.
The novel’s initial anonymous publication and Percy Shelley’s introduction led many readers to assume he wrote it, a misattribution that persisted even after Mary’s authorship became known. The pattern of crediting male associates for women’s intellectual work appears repeatedly throughout history, reflecting assumptions that women couldn’t produce work of genuine originality or depth. The continued dismissal of the novel as gothic romance rather than serious literature partly reflects gender biases about which genres deserve scholarly attention.
Her broader literary career, spanning historical novels, biographies, and travel writing, has been overshadowed by the fame of “Frankenstein” and her role as the wife of Percy Shelley. The reduction of her multifaceted career to a single work and a biographical relationship demonstrates how women’s achievements can be contained and minimized, even when they achieve recognition. Her invention of science fiction established a genre that continues to flourish two centuries later, yet she rarely receives credit equivalent to that of male genre founders.
Illinois State Historical Library / National Archives
Civil War women
The National Archives informs us that women on both sides managed farms and factories, worked in hospitals and government offices, and kept the economy functioning while men served in the armies; yet, their contributions rarely appear in Civil War narratives focused on battles and generals. The transformation of gender roles during the war, as women assumed responsibilities previously closed to them, demonstrated women’s capabilities but failed to produce lasting changes in women’s legal and social status. The return to prewar gender norms after the conflict erased the evidence that women’s wartime performance provided about their capacities.
The approximately 400 documented women who disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers demonstrated that when women accessed opportunities typically reserved for men, they performed comparably to their male counterparts. Their stories remained largely unknown until recent scholarship recovered them from archives where they existed as anomalies rather than recognized historical actors. The erasure of women soldiers exemplifies how achievements that challenge gender assumptions get dismissed as exceptions rather than evidence for reconsidering limitations.
The industrial and agricultural management that women performed kept armies supplied and economies functioning, yet these contributions receive minimal attention in histories that focus on military campaigns and political leadership. The gendered assumptions about what constitutes historically significant activity exclude the labor that made dramatic events possible. Women’s Civil War contributions demonstrate that the language of the “home front” itself minimizes the essential work that women performed, as if it were peripheral to the “real” war.
Wiki Commons
Lady Jane Wilde
Oscar Wilde’s mother was an accomplished Irish nationalist, poet, folklorist, and women’s rights advocate who published under the pen name “Speranza” and actively participated in Ireland’s cultural and political movements during the 19th century. Her passionate nationalism and advocacy for Irish independence influenced her son’s political consciousness even as his fame overshadowed her literary achievements. Her salon in Dublin attracted the era’s leading literary and political figures, making her a central figure in Irish cultural life.
Her poetry, particularly her nationalist verse, reached a broad audience and contributed to Irish nationalist sentiment during the Famine and its aftermath. Her folklore collections helped preserve Irish cultural traditions that British rule threatened to erase. Her advocacy for women’s education and legal rights positioned her among the Victorian era’s feminist activists; yet, her contributions remain known mainly to specialists rather than a general audience.
The reduction of her legacy to her relationship with Oscar Wilde exemplifies how women’s achievements are often subsumed into the stories of their male relatives, regardless of their independent significance. Her influence on Oscar’s development as an artist and his aesthetic philosophy receives some recognition, yet this framing still centers male achievement rather than her own contributions. The pattern of remembering women primarily through their relationships to famous men erases their independent historical significance.
NASA
Katherine Johnson
Johnson’s mathematical calculations for NASA proved essential to early space missions, with John Glenn specifically requesting that she verify computer calculations before his orbital flight because he trusted her accuracy more than the machines. Her work in calculating trajectories for Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle demonstrated mathematical brilliance that made space exploration possible; yet, her contributions remained largely unknown until recent decades. Her career at NASA’s predecessor organization and then NASA itself spanned from the 1950s through the 1980s, making her integral to multiple generations of space program achievements.
The segregated “colored computers” section where Johnson initially worked demonstrates how racial and gender discrimination structured scientific workplaces even as America competed in the Space Race, claiming to represent freedom and equality. The “Hidden Figures” book and film brought belated recognition to Johnson and her colleagues, revealing stories that should have been celebrated all along. The delay in recognition demonstrates how default historical narratives exclude women and people of color unless specific efforts challenge the erasure.
Her insistence on attending meetings and being credited for her work rather than accepting invisibility shows how she actively fought to be recognized rather than passively accepting marginalization. Her agency in claiming recognition challenges narratives that present discrimination as unchallenged until recent decades. The courage required to insist on proper credit and inclusion while navigating segregated, male-dominated workplaces adds another dimension to her scientific achievements.
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History : Archives Center
Madam C.J. Walker
According to the Library of Congress Blogs, Walker built a haircare and cosmetics empire in the early 20th century, becoming America’s first female self-made millionaire through products designed specifically for the hair and beauty needs of Black women that mainstream companies had previously ignored. Her business success demonstrated the potential of Black entrepreneurship. It employed thousands of Black women as sales agents, providing economic opportunities during the Jim Crow era when employment options for Black women remained severely limited. Her philanthropy supported Black educational institutions, arts organizations, and anti-lynching campaigns, using her wealth for social progress.
Her rise from impoverished washerwoman and domestic worker to successful entrepreneur embodied the American dream while also revealing how that dream remained mostly unavailable to Black Americans facing systemic racism. Her insistence on dignified treatment for Black women and her advocacy for civil rights made her business success inseparable from social justice commitments. The combination of business acumen and political activism demonstrated that economic achievement and social change weren’t separate pursuits.
The dismissal of her products as mere beauty aids rather than recognizing them as empowering Black women to define their own beauty standards on their own terms reflects how women’s business sectors get trivialized regardless of their economic and social significance. Her creation of beauty standards by and for Black women challenged the white supremacist beauty norms that defined Black features as inherently inferior. Her business represented both economic empowerment and cultural affirmation.
NASA
Dorothy Vaughan
According to NASA’s records, Vaughan became NASA’s first Black supervisor, leading the segregated West Area Computing section before becoming an expert FORTRAN programmer when NASA acquired its first IBM computers. Her recognition that human computers would become obsolete, combined with her proactive learning of programming languages, demonstrated both technical adaptability and leadership in preparing her team for the changing technological landscape. Her career at NACA and NASA spanned the 1940s through the 1970s, making her witness to and participant in the complete transformation of computing from human calculation to digital automation.
Her leadership of Black women mathematicians during the segregated period and her advocacy for their advancement showed how she combined technical excellence with commitment to opening opportunities for those who followed. Her willingness to train her team in programming even before NASA formally recognized the need demonstrated initiative that benefited both her colleagues and the space program. The combination of technical skill and mentorship made her a vital asset to NASA’s transition to electronic computing.
The recent recognition of her contributions, as featured in “Hidden Figures,” came decades after her retirement and even after her death, meaning she never received adequate acknowledgment during her lifetime. The pattern of posthumous recognition for marginalized historical figures raises questions about why acknowledgment comes so late and what systems prevent contemporary recognition from occurring. Her story demonstrates both the contributions that Black women made to American technological achievement and the systematic erasure that kept those contributions invisible.
Image Credit: ChamilleWhite / iStock.
Conclusion
These women’s contributions were no less significant than those of their male counterparts. Still, they were simply less recognized due to systematic biases in historical record-keeping, education, and cultural memory that privileged male achievements while erasing or minimizing female contributions, regardless of their actual significance. The pattern of forgetting women’s accomplishments spans all fields, eras, and cultures, revealing that the erasure results from deliberate choices about whose stories matter rather than an accurate assessment of historical impact. The recovery of these stories requires active effort to challenge default narratives that center on male achievement.
Their courage and brilliance continue to inspire new generations of women to pursue their dreams, while also highlighting the obstacles that women have always faced and the resilience required to overcome them despite systemic barriers. The recognition that women throughout history accomplished remarkable things despite facing discrimination provides both inspiration and sobering acknowledgment of how much talent has been wasted through exclusion. Their stories validate contemporary women’s struggles by showing that obstacles to female achievement aren’t new and that resistance to those obstacles has always existed.
Which of these heroines most inspires you to learn more about women’s hidden contributions to history and to question what other stories remain untold in the narratives you’ve been taught? Explore our other history articles here at MediaFeed to discover additional insights into the forgotten figures whose contributions have shaped our world, but whose names and achievements have been overlooked in collective memory due to the systemic biases that continue to influence which stories are told and remembered.
Related:
Like MediaFeed’s content? Be sure to follow us.
This article was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
AlertMe
