To ask for your inspirational historical women or

[Furbulousnous]

men at a push that a 9 year old girl might like to learn about/ be inspired by??
DD loves non/ fiction biogs and we’ve done the obvious ones like Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank etc and ALL the female pirates!
So looking for ideas for either books your child has read or a great role model type that we can Google and read about! She likes reading about women more than men, and the more adventurous the better!

@PerkingFaintly you beat me to it! Bess of Hardwick was absolute formidable! And what a house Hardwick Hall is- well worth a visit if you are anywhere near Derbyshire @Furbulousnous

@littleowls83

Not Nancy Astor - she was a big Nazi supporter. If you want to go for an early female MP Margaret Bondfield had an amazing story and was the first woman in the cabinet, but was working class and worked as a student teacher and then in a shop.

Similarly with Suffragettes, if you want to look at the Pankhursts go for Sylvia , who had a really interesting life, not Emmeline. Emmeline was interested in votes for her kind of women only (wealthy/middle class ones), and cut Syvia off completely when she had a child out of wedlock. Sylvia was a pacifist and a socialist who supported very unpopular things like family planning clinics for poor women as well as votes for women, then got more into international politics and ending colonialism and moved to Ethiopia.

Eleanor Rathbone is another suffragette and early MP, campaigned for what is now child benefit to help poor womena and children and was prepared to vote against it when it was suggested it should always be paid to the men.

My favourite is Margaret Haig Thomas, was a suffragette, survived the Lusitania, was a business woman who continued to campaign for votes for women post 1918 and also for women's work to be more valued, then for women to be allowed to take seats in the House of Lords. Her autobiography is funny, but not easy to get hold of.

Thank you for this - the other three are great heroes of mine, but I didn't know about Margaret Haig Thomas. I shall look her up.

Radio 4's Day of the Scientist includes a piece about Dorothy Hodgkin today: www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/the-exceptional-life-of-dorothy-crowfoot-hodgkin/p09x02lh?playlist=day-of-the-scientist

Lily Parr, footballer.

Marie Curie
Rosalind Franklin

Oops you said Marie Curie! Sorry

The History Chicks are great podcasts

Possibly the episodes are too long for a 9 year old but their website (just depend on her attention span) but they have covered loads of women.

All listed in the side bar of their (unfancy) website

thehistorychicks.com/

Also each episode has a page on the website which has book suggests on.

I've listened to a good few loads of informatio. (Just to note, the first ones are notably more amateur in sound and editing!!)

And of course you all left out Maggie!

@IrishMama2015

I think it pretty much goes without saying that Margaret Thatcher needs to join the ranks of the other women who have been deemed 'problematic' on this thread......

I think pretty much every person (man or woman) who achieved anything can be considered 'problematic' in some way. Marie Curie was an adulterer, which meant she was considered very 'problematic' in her own time even if we worry about it less now. Gertrude Bell actively opposed women's suffrage and was involved in the carve up of the Ottoman empire that arguably let to the current problems in the middle east. Every famous white European woman from before the mid 19th century will have benefitted from slavery. Never mind the pirates who have been recommended on here. Once you start cancelling historical figures based on our current values you'll be left with no-one. History is interesting because complex people full of shades of grey achieve incredible things.

Isabella Bird was a Scottish Victorian female explorer. She's cool.

Caroline Norton is the unsung heroine of all UK women, but I wouldn't teach such a young DD about her. She was violently abused by her husband who kept her children from her and tortured them too. She was never allowed to see them but campaigned tirelessly for the right of women to gain parental rights to children in the event of marital abuse. She changed women's familial rights in Britain.

Jane Haining. It's a sad story, but she was a missionary working in Budapest during the Second World War. She refused to go back to Scotland, wanting to stay to protect the Jewish girls at the school she worked in. She was arrested by the Nazis and died at Auschwitz.

So many fantastic suggestions! Though coming from a WC, N. Irish/Liverpudlian background I have to say that Margaret That her won’t be getting much of a look in as ‘inspirational’ !

@JaninaDuszejko Thatcher was considered problematic in her day by the values of those times too. As an Irish person I would hope that not many young females would be encouraged to look up to or be inspired by her when she incited hatred, instructed increased paramilitary activities in a war torn area, was elitist and classist to her own countrymen and brought families and communities to their knees.

womenyoushouldknow.net/

Also, IT:
Ada Lovelace
Grace Hopper
The Bletchley women (around 75% of Bletchley employees were women.)
The ENIAC women
Hedy Lamarr
Dorothy Vaughan
Margaret Hamilton
Radia Perlman
Stephanie Shirley
Wendy Hall
Dunno how IT ended up so male-dominated, really (well, I do, there's been loads written on it.) But there were loads of women at the start.

Also, new statue in Winchester for Licoricia who was featured on Woman's Hour last week - really interesting mediaeval financier.

[quote PerkingFaintly]Radio 4's Day of the Scientist includes a piece about Dorothy Hodgkin today: www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/the-exceptional-life-of-dorothy-crowfoot-hodgkin/p09x02lh?playlist=day-of-the-scientist[/quote]
She's my top pick too. A truly great scientist with a great legacy.

Radio 4's the Life Scientific has a good lot of women scientists and lots of them will be on Sounds. Probably not very interesting listening for a 9 year old (though I credit having grown up with R4 always on in the background for my good general knowledge and much of the more esoteric stuff in my head) - but looking through the list of who they've interviewed might give you some more ideas, once you've worked through the many excellent ones already in the thread!

@000YourMum000

Catherine of Aragon.

Such was Catherine's impression on people, that even her enemy, Thomas Cromwell, said of her "If not for her sex, she could have defied all the heroes of History."

I realised recently that Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII were both descended from Edward III, she via his son John of Gaunt, twice and Henry through the Beaufort Bastards, Gaunt's family via Katherine Swynford. Margaret Beaufort would make an interesting woman to study, a woman who laid the foundations for the modern monarchy by establishing the Tudor dynasty.

I recently learned that the places where she was active have a 'Boudican Destruction Horizon' - an archaeological feature demonstrating the sheer scale of what she achieved when razing Colchester, London and St Albans to the ground! thefreelancehistorywriter.com/tag/boudiccan-destruction-horizon/