Women's history

'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' (2020): Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. (Photo by David Lee/Netflix)

Who was Ma Rainey, “mother of the blues”?

The effigy of Eleanor of Castile on her tomb

The love lives of medieval queens

Fern Riddell explores some of the darker aspects of the campaign for votes for women, in this episode from our archive. (Image by Getty Images)

Editor’s pick: Were the suffragettes terrorists?

Fern Riddell.

Fern Riddell "Can we call the suffragettes terrorists? Absolutely"

Capture of Helen by Paris, causing the Trojan War, according to Homer. Hand-colored woodcut. (Photo by Alamy)

General ancient history

Women in Greek myths

A policewoman gives directions to tourists in London in the 1920s.

“Sherlock Holmes in skirts”: the world’s first policewomen

Positions of Allied transport ships, their escorts and enemy U-boats were marked on the floor by teams of Wrens (Scott McIntosh)

Second World War

‘Real life battleships’: the secret game that countered German U-boat attacks during WW2

(Images by Getty Images/Alamy)

The time travelling Tudor: Anne Boleyn’s most surprising representations in film, TV and literature

Anthonis Mor's portrait of Mary I from 1554

Mary Tudor: brutal but brilliant

Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attend a ball to celebrate the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, 1979 in Lusaka, Zambia. (Photo by Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)

Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II: what was their relationship like?

Nellie Bly

Around the world in 72 days: how journalist Nellie Bly became the real Phileas Fogg

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft: reclaiming the reputation of a feminist icon

English suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), who led the movement to win the vote for women in Britain. (Photo by Getty Images)

Women in black: the surprising history of widows

Elizabeth II

12 surprising facts about Queen Elizabeth II

Chemist Marie Curie (1867–1934) in her laboratory. She shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre for their work in radioactivity. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Marie Curie: the woman who stirred up science