Famous Women
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
50 free Famous Women trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
History books long left women in the margins, yet some of the most remarkable lives ever lived belong to them: rulers who held empires together, scientists who changed what we know, writers whose books never go out of print, and campaigners who went to jail for rights we now take for granted. This quiz gives one question to each of fifty famous women, from the pharaohs and monarchs of the ancient world to the pop stars and athletes of today. Some questions ask you to name the woman from her story; others name her and ask what she did, where she ruled or what she discovered. It is written for quiz nights, classrooms, Women's History Month and anyone who simply likes a good story. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so even the ones you miss leave you with something worth retelling.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which American pilot vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world?
Amelia Earhart
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.
Q 02Which Alabama seamstress's 1955 arrest for keeping her bus seat set off the Montgomery bus boycott?
Rosa Parks
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.
Q 03Which woman escaped slavery and then guided about seventy others to freedom on the Underground Railroad?
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman made some 13 secret rescue missions and was nicknamed Moses. She later said she never lost a passenger.
Q 04Florence Nightingale became known as the Lady with the Lamp while nursing soldiers in which war?
Crimean 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.
Q 05Which teenage peasant girl inspired the French army that broke the English siege of Orléans in 1429?
Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc was burned at the stake two years later, aged about nineteen. The Catholic Church made her a saint in 1920.
Q 06Cleopatra, Egypt's most famous queen, belonged to a ruling dynasty that originally came from which region?
Macedonia
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.
Q 07Marie Curie named which chemical element, the first she discovered, after her native country?
Polonium
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.
Q 08Which teenager kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam?
Anne Frank
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.
Q 09Which actress, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, famously sang Happy Birthday to President Kennedy in 1962?
Marilyn Monroe
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.
Q 10Which painter of vivid self-portraits took up art while confined to bed after a bus accident at eighteen?
Frida Kahlo
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.
Q 11Queen Victoria is credited with popularising which wedding tradition when she married Prince Albert in 1840?
A white dress
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.
Q 12Which grocer's daughter from Grantham became Britain's first female prime minister in 1979?
Margaret Thatcher
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.
Q 13Indira Gandhi, India's first female prime minister, was the daughter of which earlier Indian leader?
Q 21Which former textile factory worker and amateur skydiver became the first woman in space in 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
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.
Q 22Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer?
Ada Lovelace
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.
Q 23Which schoolgirl survived being shot by a Taliban gunman and became the youngest ever Nobel laureate?
Malala Yousafzai
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was India's first prime minister. Her surname came from her husband Feroze Gandhi, who was no relation to Mahatma Gandhi.
Q 14Queen Elizabeth II trained for which wartime job as a teenage princess in the Auxiliary Territorial Service?
Vehicle mechanic
Vehicle mechanic and driver training made the future queen an honorary junior commander within five months. She joined up in February 1945, aged eighteen.
Q 15Diana, Princess of Wales, walked through a cleared minefield in 1997 in which African country?
Angola
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.
Q 16Which talk show host launched a book club in 1996 that turned obscure novels into bestsellers?
Oprah Winfrey
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.
Q 17Which Michigan-born singer moved to New York in 1978 to dance and became known as the Queen of Pop?
Madonna
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.
Q 18Which tennis player won the 2017 Australian Open while in the early weeks of pregnancy?
Serena Williams
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.
Q 19J. K. Rowling writes the Cormoran Strike crime novels under which male pen name?
Robert Galbraith
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.
Q 20Jane Goodall spent decades at Gombe in Tanzania studying which animals, which she saw making and using tools?
Chimpanzees
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.
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.
Q 24Which French fashion designer is credited with the little black dress and launched the perfume No. 5?
Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel also designed her famous interlocked-CC monogram herself, and it has been in use since the 1920s.
Q 25Which crime novelist vanished in December 1926 and was found days later at a hotel in Harrogate?
Agatha Christie
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.
Q 26Which author conceived Frankenstein during a summer near Geneva with the poet Lord Byron?
Mary Shelley
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.
Q 27Which novelist published Pride and Prejudice anonymously, as she did all her books?
Jane Austen
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.
Q 28Which 14-year-old Romanian gymnast scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history at Montreal in 1976?
Nadia Comăneci
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.
Q 29Which tennis champion beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in the 1973 match billed as the Battle of the Sexes?
Billie Jean King
Billie Jean King had seen nothing to gain from accepting his challenge until he defeated Margaret Court, a loss that changed her mind.
Q 30Catherine the Great, born a German princess, overthrew her own husband to rule which empire?
Russia
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.