I have a handful of Ladybird books still on my shelves (mine, rather than a child's) - the books which made some impression on me. Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale are both "Adventures in History" and Marie Curie is "Lives of the Great Scientists".
(These Ladybird books are among the reasons I'm a feminist, so I don't think they've had a bad gender record, unless it all went downhill after the 1970s.)