50 Fun Facts About Famous Women

Which American pilot vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world?

Amelia Earhart had already become the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, in 1932. Neither she nor her navigator Fred Noonan was ever found.

Which Alabama seamstress's 1955 arrest for keeping her bus seat set off the Montgomery bus boycott?

Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse: nine months earlier, 15-year-old student Claudette Colvin had been arrested in the same city for doing the same thing.

Which woman escaped slavery and then guided about seventy others to freedom on the Underground Railroad?

Harriet Tubman made some 13 secret rescue missions and was nicknamed Moses. She later said she never lost a passenger.

Florence Nightingale became known as the Lady with the Lamp while nursing soldiers in which war?

The Crimean War made Florence Nightingale a national hero after The Times described her night rounds of the wards. She was also a pioneering statistician who turned her data into charts.

Which teenage peasant girl inspired the French army that broke the English siege of Orléans in 1429?

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake two years later, aged about nineteen. The Catholic Church made her a saint in 1920.

Cleopatra, Egypt's most famous queen, belonged to a ruling dynasty that originally came from which region?

Macedonia was home to Ptolemy I, the general of Alexander the Great who founded her dynasty. Cleopatra was the first of the line known to have learned the Egyptian language.

Marie Curie named which chemical element, the first she discovered, after her native country?

Polonium honours Poland, which at the time was partitioned among three empires. Curie later became the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Which teenager kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam?

Anne Frank named the diary Kitty and wrote it in rooms concealed behind a bookcase at her father's workplace. It has since been translated into more than 70 languages.

Which actress, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, famously sang Happy Birthday to President Kennedy in 1962?

Marilyn Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage, and first married at sixteen. She became one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1950s.

Which painter of vivid self-portraits took up art while confined to bed after a bus accident at eighteen?

Frida Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school before the crash left her in lifelong pain. Her small self-portraits drew on Mexican folk culture.

Queen Victoria is credited with popularising which wedding tradition when she married Prince Albert in 1840?

A white dress became the fashion after she chose white lace for the ceremony and wealthy brides copied her. Mary, Queen of Scots, had married in white almost three centuries earlier, but the tradition is credited to Victoria.

Which grocer's daughter from Grantham became Britain's first female prime minister in 1979?

Margaret Thatcher was dubbed the Iron Lady by a Soviet journalist, and the nickname stuck. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century.

Indira Gandhi, India's first female prime minister, was the daughter of which earlier Indian leader?

Jawaharlal Nehru was India's first prime minister. Her surname came from her husband Feroze Gandhi, who was no relation to Mahatma Gandhi.

Queen Elizabeth II trained for which wartime job as a teenage princess in the Auxiliary Territorial Service?

Vehicle mechanic and driver training made the future queen an honorary junior commander within five months. She joined up in February 1945, aged eighteen.

Diana, Princess of Wales, walked through a cleared minefield in 1997 in which African country?

Angola gave the campaign its defining image: Diana in a ballistic helmet and flak jacket, in pictures seen around the world. The visit came in the final year of her life.

Which talk show host launched a book club in 1996 that turned obscure novels into bestsellers?

Oprah Winfrey chose a new book each month for her viewers to read and discuss. Some little-known titles gained sales of several million copies.

Which Michigan-born singer moved to New York in 1978 to dance and became known as the Queen of Pop?

Madonna went to the city to pursue a career in dance before turning to music. She is known for continually reinventing her sound and her image.

Which tennis player won the 2017 Australian Open while in the early weeks of pregnancy?

Serena Williams revealed that April that she was 20 weeks pregnant, so she had been expecting throughout the tournament. The win was her 23rd major singles title.

J. K. Rowling writes the Cormoran Strike crime novels under which male pen name?

Robert Galbraith is the name on the covers of her detective stories about a private investigator. Her first Harry Potter manuscript had been rejected by twelve publishers.

Jane Goodall spent decades at Gombe in Tanzania studying which animals, which she saw making and using tools?

Chimpanzees were assumed to be vegetarians that could not make tools until her research showed otherwise. She began the work in 1960 under the palaeontologist Louis Leakey.

Which former textile factory worker and amateur skydiver became the first woman in space in 1963?

Valentina Tereshkova flew a solo mission aboard Vostok 6. Soviet space chiefs had been determined that the first woman in orbit would not be an American.

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace described how Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, a century before electronic computers. She was the poet's only legitimate child.

Which schoolgirl survived being shot by a Taliban gunman and became the youngest ever Nobel laureate?

Malala Yousafzai was 17 when she received the Peace Prize in 2014. She had been attacked two years earlier on a bus home from an exam, targeted for her activism.

Which French fashion designer is credited with the little black dress and launched the perfume No. 5?

Coco Chanel also designed her famous interlocked-CC monogram herself, and it has been in use since the 1920s.

Which crime novelist vanished in December 1926 and was found days later at a hotel in Harrogate?

Agatha Christie had checked in under the surname of her husband's lover. She is the best-selling novelist of all time, with more than two billion copies sold.

Which author conceived Frankenstein during a summer near Geneva with the poet Lord Byron?

Mary Shelley was still a teenager when Byron proposed that each guest write a ghost story, and her idea came in a waking dream after midnight.

Which novelist published Pride and Prejudice anonymously, as she did all her books?

Jane Austen signed her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, only By a Lady, and the next was credited to the author of that one. The books brought her no public fame in her lifetime.

Which 14-year-old Romanian gymnast scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history at Montreal in 1976?

Nadia Comăneci's score flashed up as 1.00 because the scoreboard had not been programmed to show a 10. She earned six more perfect scores at the same Games.

Which tennis champion beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in the 1973 match billed as the Battle of the Sexes?

Billie Jean King had seen nothing to gain from accepting his challenge until he defeated Margaret Court, a loss that changed her mind.

Catherine the Great, born a German princess, overthrew her own husband to rule which empire?

Russia became hers after a coup against Emperor Peter III, whom she had married at sixteen. She was born Princess Sophie in the Kingdom of Prussia.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to serve the poorest people of which Indian city?

Calcutta, now Kolkata, became so tied to her name that the Catholic Church honours her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. She was born into an Albanian family in Skopje.

Which former First Lady chaired the UN commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Eleanor Roosevelt, widowed in 1945, served as a US delegate to the United Nations until 1952 and was the first chair of its Commission on Human Rights.

Which deaf and blind girl first understood words when a teacher ran water over one hand?

Helen Keller went on to Radcliffe College, where she became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Which star of Roman Holiday received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work as a UNICEF ambassador?

Audrey Hepburn won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for that one film role, the first actress to manage all three for a single performance.

Which scientist's X-ray work, including the image called Photo 51, pointed the way to the double helix?

Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer at 37, four years before three men shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery. The image had been shown to James Watson without her permission.

Which NASA mathematician did John Glenn insist must check the computer's figures before his 1962 orbit?

Katherine Johnson was trusted over the agency's new electronic computers, and Glenn refused to fly until she had verified their numbers. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

Which suffragist was arrested in Rochester, New York, for voting in the 1872 presidential election?

Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 and told the judge she would never pay a dollar of it. She never did, and the authorities let the matter drop.

Which activist founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 to lead Britain's suffragettes?

Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers were jailed again and again, and staged hunger strikes in prison. British women first won the vote in 1918, ten years before her death.

Which Native American teenager travelled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition while carrying her infant son?

Sacagawea's presence with a baby showed the peoples they met that the expedition came in peace. Lewis himself recorded the birth of her son in February 1805.

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for wartime torpedoes?

Hedy Lamarr devised it with the composer George Antheil to defeat enemy radio jamming. Their idea became a foundation of later spread spectrum communications.

Beyoncé rose to fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of which Houston girl group?

Destiny's Child became one of the best-selling girl groups in history before its members parted for solo careers. Beyoncé had been born in the Texas city in 1981.

Which singer's Eras Tour became the first concert tour to earn more than one billion dollars?

Taylor Swift's tour went on to become the first to pass two billion dollars as well. Its film version also broke the box-office record for a concert film.

Elizabeth I, who never married and left no heir, was the last monarch of which English royal house?

Tudor rule ended with her death, and she was the dynasty's longest-reigning monarch. Her era is remembered for Shakespeare and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Which scientist raised in East Germany became the first woman elected chancellor of Germany?

Angela Merkel earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry and worked as a research scientist until 1989, when she entered politics.

Marie Antoinette, France's last queen before the Revolution, was born at the Hofburg palace in which city?

Vienna was the court of her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, whose fifteenth child she was. She married the heir to the French throne at fourteen.

Which female pharaoh ruled Egypt for about two decades and was often shown wearing a false beard?

Hatshepsut began as regent for her two-year-old stepson Thutmose III before taking the throne herself. Her statues show her in the full regalia of a male ruler.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world's first female prime minister in 1960, leading which island nation?

Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, elected her party a year after her husband, the prime minister, was assassinated. She had been persuaded to take his place as its leader.

Which ruler declared a new Zhou dynasty in 690, becoming China's only undisputed female sovereign?

Wu Zetian set aside the Tang dynasty and crowned herself emperor. Her own dynasty lasted only until 705, the year she died.

Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at Japan's imperial court, wrote which classic often called the world's first novel?

The Tale of Genji was written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012. Her personal name is unknown: Murasaki Shikibu is a descriptive name.

Which sprinter wore a leg brace as a child after polio, then won three golds at the 1960 Rome Olympics?

Wilma Rudolph caught polio at five and wore the brace until she was twelve. In Rome she won the 100 metres, the 200 metres and the sprint relay.