Women's history

A portrait of Princess Elizabeth

The birth of Elizabeth I: everything you need to know

Statue of Lady Godiva

Q&A Did Lady Godiva ride naked in Coventry?

Ladies-in-waiting

Q&A What did a lady-in-waiting actually do?

Mary, Queen of Scots and her ladies-in-waiting. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Mary, Queen of Scots: what happened to her ladies-in-waiting?

c50 BC, Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, the last and most famous of the Ptolemaic dynasty. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

6 things you (probably) didn’t know about Cleopatra

In 1358, women finally gained full knightly acceptance in England when they began to be admitted to chivalric orders. (Photo by Eugene Antonov/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Q&A Could a woman become a knight in medieval times?

Rosemary Kennedy (right), the eldest Kennedy daughter. Pictured here with her mother Rose (centre) and sister Kathleen, during the family's residency in Britain in the late 1930s. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

The lost Kennedy: the tragic life of JFK’s sister Rosemary

A portrait of Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland.

Your guide to Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa portrait

Q&A Who was the Mona Lisa?

A late 19th or early 20th-century painting entitled 'Mother and Child'. As fertility rates fell, sentimental idealisations of mothers and babies developed. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

The motherhood revolution: how the great fertility decline affected the lives of women

Queen Victoria of Great Britain with her husband, Prince Albert, and their nine children. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Queen Victoria’s children

Literary women through the ages: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë all enjoyed female friendships which enriched their writing, say Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. (Getty Images)

From Austen & Brontë to Woolf: literature’s forgotten female friendships

Margaret Hodge has been the MP for Barking since 1994. She held a number of ministerial positions during the 1997–2010 Labour administration, and was appointed DBE in 2015. (Photo by AP/REX/Shutterstock)

My history hero: Katharine Graham (1917–2001)

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen, who supplied the gun with which she shot David Blakely. (Photo by Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo)

Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

England Women's World Cup squad, Mexico, 1971

The 1971 Women’s World Cup: game changers?