Womens History
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8correct to beat the crowd
This women's history month trivia quiz has 149 free questions with answers and works two ways. The first block is about the observance itself: the Sonoma County school week in 1978, Jimmy Carter's 1980 proclamation, the 1987 act of Congress that made March official, why Canada marks it in October, and how International Women's Day grew out of a 1909 New York socialist rally and a 1917 strike in Petrograd. The rest is women in history from Hatshepsut to Kamala Harris: suffragists and abolitionists, scientists who cracked DNA and wrote the first compilers, athletes who beat polio and Bobby Riggs, authors who won Pulitzers and Nobels, and the first women in space, in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Questions run from easy to expert, so it suits a classroom activity in March, a workplace lunch-and-learn or a themed pub quiz round. Every answer has been checked against a primary source such as Wikipedia, the Nobel Prize archive or NASA records, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 149 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which amendment, ratified in 1920, gave American women the vote?
19th Amendment
The 19th Amendment. Tennessee became the decisive 36th state on 18 August 1920 when Harry Burn, its youngest legislator, voted yes after a letter from his mother urged him to.
Q 02Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie shared the 1903 physics prize only after her husband Pierre objected: the nomination had named just him and Henri Becquerel until a Swedish mathematician tipped him off.
Q 03Who was the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979. Three years earlier the Soviet army paper Red Star had dubbed her the 'Iron Lady' as a jibe, and within days she was using the name of herself.
Q 04Which American poet and author wrote the acclaimed autobiography 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'?
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou began the book while grieving Martin Luther King's assassination, urged on by her friend James Baldwin; its title comes from Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem 'Sympathy'.
Q 05Who co-founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, one of America's first settlement houses?
Jane Addams
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr modelled Hull House on London's Toynbee Hall, which they had visited, and opened it among Chicago's immigrant poor; Addams later shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 06Who was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with a numbered entry?
Kathrine Switzer
Kathrine Switzer ran the 1967 Boston Marathon as registered entrant number 261; official Jock Semple tried to pull her off the course, but she finished.
Q 07Which American aviation pioneer was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean?
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart set out for Paris in May 1932, but icy weather and mechanical trouble forced her down in a pasture near Derry, Northern Ireland, after about 15 hours in the air.
Q 08Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat in 1955 sparked a year-long boycott in which Alabama city?
Montgomery
Montgomery. Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955, and Black residents stayed off the city's buses for 381 days, until the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional.
Q 09Which author wrote 'Frankenstein', often considered one of the earliest works of science fiction?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley began it at 18, in the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva, when Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story; it was published anonymously in 1818.
Q 10Who was the last pharaoh of Egypt, famous for her ties to Julius Caesar and Mark Antony?
Cleopatra VII
Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, renowned for her political acumen and her alliances with Roman leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
Q 11Who is considered the first computer programmer for her work on Babbage's Analytical Engine?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace saw what Babbage himself had not: a machine that works on numbers could handle any symbols, even compose music. Her 1843 notes hold what is often called the first published program.
Q 12Who in 1988 became the first woman elected to head the government of a Muslim-majority country?
Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto won the election held after the military ruler Zia-ul-Haq died in a 1988 plane crash; his regime had overthrown and hanged her father, the former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Q 13Which Mexican painter is known for self-portraits steeped in Mexico's nature and artifacts?
Frida Kahlo
Q 21Which scientist's King's College London lab produced Photo 51, the X-ray image key to the DNA double helix?
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling produced Photo 51 in May 1952, and Maurice Wilkins later showed it to James Watson; she died in 1958, four years before Watson, Francis Crick and Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize.
Q 22Which NASA mathematician did John Glenn insist re-check the computer's numbers before his 1962 flight?
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson checked the new machine's orbital figures by hand; Glenn said that if she called them good, he was ready to go. She went on to work out rendezvous paths for the Apollo Moon landings.
Q 23Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system with George Antheil in WWII?
Frida Kahlo taught herself to paint while bedridden after a bus crash at 18, with a mirror set above her easel so that she could be her own model.
Q 14Which American nurse founded the American Red Cross in 1881, after her Civil War work?
Clara Barton
Clara Barton learned of the Geneva-based Red Cross, founded in 1863, while in Europe, and launched the American branch on May 21, 1881.
Q 15Who was the first American woman in space?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride flew on Challenger in June 1983 and worked the shuttle's robotic arm to release a satellite and catch it again, the first time a crew had done so.
Q 16Which author won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel 'The Color Purple'?
Alice Walker
Alice Walker was the first Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer, in 1983; two years later Steven Spielberg filmed the novel, giving Whoopi Goldberg her breakthrough role and an Oscar nomination.
Q 17Who in 1849 became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, graduating from Geneva Medical College?
Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell got in almost by accident: Geneva's faculty put her application to the all-male students, who voted yes as a joke. She graduated in January 1849.
Q 18Who was the first woman to serve as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives?
Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker in 2007, lost the gavel when Republicans took the House four years later, and won it back in 2019.
Q 19Which Nobel laureate survived a 2012 Taliban shooting after campaigning for girls' education?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai had blogged for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban from the age of 11; shot on her way home from school at 15, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize two years later.
Q 20Which singer had hits in 1967 with 'Respect' and '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman'?
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin, the 'Queen of Soul'. 'Respect' was written and first recorded by Otis Redding; her 1967 remake, with its spelled-out chorus, became an anthem and her signature song.
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented their frequency-hopping system in 1942; the idea underlies spread-spectrum communications, and both were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Q 24Which US Navy rear admiral devised machine-independent programming languages, leading to COBOL?
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper built one of the first compilers, A-0, in 1952. Told that programs written in words would never work, she produced FLOW-MATIC, the English-like language that helped shape COBOL.
Q 25Who in 1975 became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest?
Junko Tabei
Junko Tabei of Japan reached the summit on 16 May 1975, twelve days after surviving an avalanche at Camp II; in 1992 she became the first woman to complete the Seven Summits.
Q 26The female pharaoh Hatshepsut sent a celebrated trading expedition to which land?
Punt
Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt, recorded in reliefs at Deir el-Bahari, brought back living myrrh trees that were planted in front of her mortuary temple.
Q 27Elizabeth I was the only surviving child of Henry VIII and which of his wives?
Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn was beheaded when her daughter was two, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate; she still came to the throne in 1558 and reigned for 44 years as the last Tudor monarch.
Q 28Catherine the Great was born Princess Sophie in Stettin, then part of which kingdom?
Prussia
Prussia. Sophie was born in 1729 in Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland; married to the heir to the Russian throne, she seized it from her husband Peter III in a coup in 1762.
Q 29Wu Zetian, China's only female emperor, replaced which dynasty with her own in 690?
Tang
The Tang. Wu had been an emperor's consort and then regent for her sons before she took the throne in 690 and renamed the state Zhou; she was forced out in 705 and the Tang restored.
Q 30Queen Victoria's nine children married into royal houses across the continent, earning her which nickname?
Grandmother of Europe
Grandmother of Europe: her grandchildren included Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II and Britain's George V, first cousins whose countries fought each other in the First World War.