Diamonds of the Season
This Notorious Supreme Court justice spent decades dismantling gender discrimination laws and became a feminist cultural icon.
Hint: "The Notorious RBG"
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG)
In 1955, this woman refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the civil rights movement’s bus boycott.
Rosa Parks
Fluent in several languages and known for her political strategy, this Egyptian queen worked to stabilize her kingdom and strengthen its economy during a time of Roman expansion and famously allied with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony while fighting to maintain her kingdom’s independence.
Cleopatra
This American poet and memoirist wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the poem “Still I Rise,” becoming one of the most influential literary voices of the civil rights era.
Maya Angelou
This chemist and physicist became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Hint: She conducted pioneering research on radioactivity and discovered the elements polonium and radium with her husband Pierre.
Marie Curie
In 2021, this woman became the Vice President of the United States, making history as the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to hold the office.
Kamala Harris
In 1969, this activist helped lead the uprising against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn, which became a major turning point in the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
Hint: She was a Black and Latina transgender activist who later co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) to support homeless transgender youth.
Marsha P. Johnson
This queen ruled Britain from 1837 to 1901, giving her name to the era, a period known for industrial growth, cultural change, and a powerful British Empire.
Hint: There is an era named after her.
Queen Victoria
At just 18 years old, this author wrote Frankenstein, a groundbreaking Gothic novel often considered one of the first works of science fiction.
Hint: Her mother was the famous early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Mary Shelley
This mathematician and computer pioneer worked with Charles Babbage in the 1800s and is often considered the world’s first computer programmer.
Hint: She was the daughter of the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron and is honored today by having a programming language named after her.
Ada Lovelace
She became the first and youngest woman to travel into space in 1963 and is still the only woman to ever fly a solo mission.
Hint: She was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the spacecraft Vostok 6 during the height of the Space Race.
Valentina Tereshkova
This abolitionist escaped slavery and repeatedly returned to the South to guide enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad.
Harriet Tubman
This Russian empress ruled for over 30 years in the 1700s, expanding Russia’s territory and promoting education, art, and Enlightenment ideas.
Hint: She came to power after overthrowing her husband, Tsar Peter III, and is remembered as one of Russia’s most powerful rulers of the Enlightenment era.
Catherine The Great
The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature who wrote Beloved, Song of Solomon, and other novels exploring the history and legacy of slavery in America.
Hint: Also the author of The Bluest Eye.
Toni Morrison
This computer scientist and U.S. Navy admiral helped develop early programming languages and popularized the computer term “debugging.”
Hint: According to computing legend, she removed an actual moth from a computer, helping inspire the term “debugging.”
Grace Hopper
She was the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1968.
Hint: She was known for her famous motto “Unbought and Unbossed” and later became the first Black woman to run for a major party’s presidential nomination in 1972.
Shirley Chisholm
When she was only 15, this Swedish teenager began skipping school on Fridays to protest outside her country’s parliament, a protest that inspired millions of young people around the world to demand action on climate change.
Hint: Her protest started the “Fridays for Future” movement, where students around the world skip school to demand climate action.
Greta Thunberg
This beloved British princess became known as the “People’s Princess” for her humanitarian work and advocacy for AIDS awareness and landmine victims.
Princess Diana
Historically renowned as one of America's most influential, prolific, and original poets, celebrated for her unique, compact style, unconventional punctuation, and profound explorations of death, nature, and the soul despite publishing fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime.
Hint: She spent most of her life in seclusion in Amherst, Massachusetts, and many of her poems were discovered after her death, often written on small scraps of paper.
Emily Dickinson
This NASA engineer became the first Black woman engineer at NASA, helping improve aircraft aerodynamics and later advocating for women and minorities in science.
Hint: Before working at NASA, she began her career as a teacher and later spent decades improving aircraft and wind-tunnel research.
Mary Jackson
This Pakistani activist survived an assassination attempt and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating girl's education becoming the youngest to ever win one at age 17.
Hint: She was shot in the head in 2012 but survived and continued her activism worldwide.
Malala Yousafzai
This abolitionist and women’s rights activist delivered the famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” challenging both racism and sexism in 1851.
Hint: She was born into slavery in New York and escaped to freedom.
Sojourner Truth
When she married Prince Harry in 2018, this Duchess of Sussex became one of the first women of Black heritage to join the modern British royal family. She was an actress on the TV series Suits and later became known for her advocacy for women’s rights and humanitarian work.
Meghan Markle
This American poet wrote The Hill We Climb, which she delivered at the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration as the youngest inaugural poet in history.
Hint: She was 22 years old when she performed at the inauguration of Joe Biden and had already been named the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States.
Amanda Gorman
This British scientist’s X-ray crystallography images helped reveal the double-helix structure of DNA, one of the most important discoveries in biology.
Hint: One of her most famous images, known as “Photo 51,” provided critical evidence for understanding the shape of DNA.
Rosalind Franklin