Women in science

On International Women’s Day, science journalist Angela Saini profiles six tenacious women through history whose advocacy and research rocked the scientific establishment and transformed existing…

Marie Curie’s discoveries of strange, glowing radioactive elements rocked Victorian Europe. But, as Jheni Osman reveals, the ground-breaking work that made her famous also led to her demise

The image of Florence Nightingale floating angelically along hospital corridors bearing a beacon of light has gone down in history. But does this simplistic image obscure a much more impressively…

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Cathy Newman, journalist and broadcaster, chooses pioneering engineer and racer Beatrice Shilling as her history hero

Royal women

Everything you need to know about Queen Elizabeth II's life and reign – from facts about her coronation and jubilees to her reign in numbers...

As we navigate modern life, it is sometimes easy to forget there are many timeless tactics to be learned from past historical figures – even more so when these figures happen to be women, who are so…

For more than 100 years from the late 15th century, women came to hold positions of power in Europe. Sarah Gristwood traces the intricate network of interrelated queens and regents

The daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was England’s ‘Gloriana’ – a virgin queen who saw herself as wedded to her country and who brought almost half a…

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. It’s a mnemonic device many of us learned as children to remember the fates of the six women – Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour,…

Sara Cockerill explodes five of the myths that have grown up around one of medieval Europe's most remarkable women…

Pioneering and inspirational women

Your guide to English aviator Amy Johnson, who was the first woman to make a solo flight from England to Australia...

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Pamela Roberts discusses her research into three women activists of Washington’s ‘black elite’

Elizabeth Blackwell is perhaps best known as the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US, but her story is broader than that of a trailblazer. Janice P Nimura, author of The Doctors…

HistoryExtra's digital section editor Rachel Dinning rounds up 20 inspirational and motivational quotes from some of the most world-changing women in history – from pioneering women like…

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Author Ken Follett chooses civil rights activist Rosa Parks (1913-2005) as his history hero

Ada Lovelace (1815–52) is today regarded as one of the most important figures in the early history of the computer. Here, biographer James Essinger explores her life and legacy...

The first female editor of a black American newspaper was also a major civil rights activist. Kira Cochrane introduces a courageous woman who fought to end lynchings