History is usually written by the winners, and for a long time, the winners were the guys with the biggest pens. It’s annoying. You look back at your old school textbooks and it’s a parade of kings, generals, and male inventors, while the great females in history get relegated to a single sidebar or a "special interest" chapter at the back of the book. Honestly, it’s not just unfair—it’s bad history. When you actually dig into the primary sources, the letters, and the patent filings, you find out that women weren't just "supporting characters" in the background. They were the ones holding the world together or, in many cases, blowing the old world apart to build something better.
Some of these women are household names, but even then, we tend to get their stories wrong. We turn them into cardboard cutouts of "inspiration" instead of looking at the messy, brilliant, often frustrated people they actually were.
Take Cleopatra.
Everyone thinks of her as this seductive queen who used her looks to manipulate Roman leaders. That’s basically Roman propaganda that stuck for two thousand years. In reality, she was a massive nerd who spoke about nine languages and was the first of her dynasty to actually bother learning Egyptian. She was a naval commander and a shrewd economic strategist. If we’re talking about great females in history, we have to start by stripping away the myths and looking at the raw data of their lives.
The Scientists Who Redefined Reality
Let's talk about the stars. Specifically, how we even know what they’re made of. Most people know about Marie Curie—two Nobel Prizes, worked with radiation, died for her science—but fewer people talk about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
In the 1920s, the "common sense" in the scientific community was that the Sun had a similar composition to the Earth. It made sense, right? Rocks here, rocks there. But Cecilia, while writing her doctoral thesis at Radcliffe, realized the Sun was actually mostly hydrogen and helium. Her supervisors told her she was wrong. They pressured her to downplay her findings because it contradicted the established (male) consensus. Years later, they realized she was 100% right. She literally discovered what the universe is made of, yet her name doesn’t carry the same weight as Einstein or Hawking in casual conversation. It's wild.
Then there’s Lise Meitner.
She was a Jewish physicist in Nazi Germany who had to flee for her life. While in exile, she kept corresponding with her partner Otto Hahn. She was the one who actually figured out the physics of nuclear fission. She coined the term. She did the math. But when the Nobel Prize was handed out in 1944? Only Hahn got it. He barely mentioned her. Meitner stayed classy, though, refusing to work on the Manhattan Project because she didn't want her discovery used for a bomb. She’s a prime example of how great females in history often did the heavy lifting while others took the stage.
Power and Politics Without the Filter
Power isn't always about being a queen. Sometimes it’s about being so terrifying or so smart that the people in power have no choice but to listen to you.
Ever heard of Khutulun?
She was a Mongol noblewoman and the niece of Kublai Khan. She was basically a real-life action hero. She insisted that any man who wanted to marry her had to beat her in a wrestling match. If he lost, he had to give her a horse. She ended up with 10,000 horses and zero husbands. She wasn't just a gimmick, though; she was a key military advisor and a formidable warrior on the battlefield. Her story reminds us that the "damsel in distress" trope is a relatively modern invention that doesn't hold up when you look at the actual historical record.
Then we have the business side of things.
Madam C.J. Walker wasn't just a "woman who made hair products." She was a pioneer of modern marketing and the first self-made female millionaire in America. She built an empire from nothing in the Jim Crow era. Think about the sheer grit that takes. She didn't just sell tins of "Wonderful Hair Grower"; she created a franchise model that employed thousands of Black women, giving them economic independence at a time when they had almost no rights. She understood that business is a tool for social change.
The Technological Revolution Was Female
Computers.
We think of Silicon Valley as a "bro-culture" hub, but the foundational logic of computing came from women. Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm in the mid-1800s. She saw that Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine could do more than just crunch numbers; she realized it could manipulate symbols and create music or art. She saw the "digital" future before electricity was even a household thing.
During World War II, the "computers" were literally women.
- Hedy Lamarr: Yes, the Hollywood star. She co-invented a frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology to stop Nazis from jamming torpedoes. We use her tech every single day for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
- The ENIAC Six: These six women (Kathleen McNulty, Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Jennings, Ruth Lichterman, Elizabeth Snyder, and Marlyn Wescoff) programmed one of the first general-purpose electronic computers. At the time, they weren't even invited to the celebratory dinner because they were considered "sub-professionals."
- Grace Hopper: She invented the first compiler. She basically taught computers how to understand human language instead of just binary code. She’s the reason coding isn't just a series of 1s and 0s today.
Why We Still Get It Wrong
The problem is that we tend to romanticize great females in history or turn them into "firsts."
The "First Woman to X."
While being first is cool, it often overshadows the actual quality of their work. Rosalind Franklin shouldn't just be remembered as "the woman who didn't get credit for the DNA double helix." She should be remembered as one of the most brilliant X-ray crystallographers to ever live. Her work on the molecular structures of viruses helped lay the groundwork for modern structural virology. When we focus only on the "unfairness" of her story, we skip the part where she was a genius in her own right, regardless of what Watson and Crick were doing.
We also have a habit of sanitizing these women.
Florence Nightingale is often pictured as the "Lady with the Lamp," a soft, angelic nurse. In reality? She was a high-level data scientist. She pioneered the use of polar area diagrams (a type of pie chart) to prove to the British government that more soldiers were dying from poor sanitation than from actual wounds. She was cold, calculated, and used statistics like a weapon to force the military to change its ways. She wasn't an angel; she was a reformer who used math to save lives.
Actionable Ways to Engage with History
If you want to actually understand the impact of great females in history, you have to look beyond the surface level. It’s not about just adding a few names to a list; it’s about changing how you view the timeline of human progress.
- Check the Bibliographies: When you read a history book, look at who the author is citing. If it’s all men, find a different book to supplement your reading.
- Support Digital Archives: Projects like the "Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art" or the "National Women's History Museum" online exhibits provide access to primary documents that aren't in your old school books.
- Visit the Primary Sources: Use sites like Archive.org or the Library of Congress to read the actual letters of women like Abigail Adams or the journals of Ida B. Wells. Seeing their own handwriting and their unfiltered thoughts changes everything.
- Look at Local History: Every town has a woman who founded the library, led the strike at the textile mill, or kept the community alive during a crisis. Those stories are just as vital as the ones about queens.
History is a massive, tangled web. When you pull on the threads of these women’s lives, you realize the whole fabric would fall apart without them. They weren't just "great females"; they were the architects of the world we live in now.
To dive deeper into specific eras, look for biographies written by modern historians who focus on social history rather than just "great man" theory. Authors like Stacy Schiff or Margot Lee Shetterly are great places to start for narratives that feel real and grounded in hard evidence. For a more direct look at scientific contributions, the archives of the Royal Society now have dedicated sections highlighting the women who were previously overlooked in their own journals. Tracking these records down reveals a much more complex—and frankly, much more interesting—version of how we got here.