Reels tagged #women

KnowledgeReels
Swipe up
Science

Marie Curie is the only person to win Nobels in two sciences

She won Physics in 1903 for radioactivity and Chemistry in 1911 for isolating radium and polonium. Her notebooks are still so radioactive that reading them requires protective clothing and a signed waiver.

#women#science#history
Science

One photograph revealed the shape of DNA

Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, known as Photo 51, showed the unmistakable X pattern of a double helix. It took a hundred hours of exposure and settled the structure of life itself.

#women#science#dna
Science

The first computer programmer wrote code before computers existed

In 1843 Ada Lovelace published an algorithm for a machine that was never built, and noted it could one day compose music as well as crunch numbers. She saw software a century early.

#women#science#technology
Science

Astronauts refused to fly until she checked the maths

When NASA switched to electronic computers, John Glenn asked for Katherine Johnson to verify the machine's orbital numbers by hand. She did, and only then did he agree to launch.

#women#science#space
Science

She proved chimpanzees make tools

Jane Goodall watched a chimp strip a twig to fish termites out of a mound in 1960. Until then toolmaking was the line that supposedly separated humans from animals.

#women#science#animals
Science

A 1,600-year-old recipe cured malaria

Tu Youyou found the key to artemisinin in a fourth-century Chinese text that said to soak sweet wormwood in cold water. Heat destroyed the compound; the ancient method saved it, and millions of lives.

#women#science#medicine
Science

She discovered that genes can move

Barbara McClintock's jumping genes in maize were dismissed for decades as impossible. She was proved right and won the Nobel alone, thirty years later, at the age of 81.

#women#science#dna
Science

A Hollywood star invented the basis of Wi-Fi

Hedy Lamarr co-patented a frequency-hopping system in 1942 to stop torpedo signals being jammed. The same idea underpins Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth today.

#women#science#inventions
Leaders

Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids

The Great Pyramid was already 2,500 years old when she was born, while only about 2,000 years separate her from Apollo 11. She also spoke around nine languages.

#women#history#egypt
Leaders

Egypt's female pharaoh was erased from history

Hatshepsut ruled for two decades and wore the ceremonial beard of kingship. Decades after her death her name was chiselled off monuments, and she was rediscovered only in the 19th century.

#women#history#egypt
Leaders

China had exactly one female emperor

Wu Zetian took the throne in her own name in 690 CE, the only woman in over two thousand years of Chinese history to do so. She ran the empire for nearly half a century.

#women#history#china
Leaders

Elizabeth I made not marrying a policy

Refusing every suitor kept England out of foreign entanglements and kept power in her own hands. She called herself married to her kingdom, and reigned 44 years.

#women#history#england
Leaders

A 22-year-old queen led her army in person

Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi fought in the 1857 uprising on horseback, reportedly with the reins in her teeth. British officers who fought her called her the most dangerous of all rebel leaders.

#women#history#india
Leaders

Queen Nzinga refused a chair, so she sat on a servant

Denied a seat in negotiations with the Portuguese governor of Angola, she had an attendant kneel as her throne to meet him as an equal. She fought Portugal for nearly thirty years.

#women#history#africa
Explorers

Amelia Earhart's last message was about running low on fuel

She had flown 22,000 of 29,000 miles around the world when she vanished near Howland Island in 1937. The search that followed was the most expensive in US history at the time.

#women#history#aviation
Explorers

The first woman in space flew solo

Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times in 1963 in a capsule she could not steer, spending more time in space than every American astronaut combined up to that date.

#women#space#history
Explorers

She had to move to France to learn to fly

No American flight school would accept Bessie Coleman, so she learned French and trained in Paris, becoming the first Black woman in the world to hold a pilot's licence in 1921.

#women#aviation#history
Explorers

She was buried by an avalanche and summited 12 days later

Junko Tabei's Everest team was hit at 6,300 metres and she was dug out unconscious. In 1975 she became the first woman on the summit, and later the first to climb the highest peak on every continent.

#women#adventure#mountains
Explorers

A reporter beat Jules Verne's fictional record

Nellie Bly circled the globe in 72 days in 1889 with one small bag, after already faking insanity to expose an asylum from the inside. She travelled by ship, train and rickshaw.

#women#history#adventure
Explorers

She skied to both poles

Ann Bancroft crossed the ice to the North Pole in 1986 and the South Pole in 1993, the first woman to reach both, hauling a sledge heavier than she was.

#women#adventure#antarctica
Sport

Serena Williams won a Grand Slam while pregnant

She took the 2017 Australian Open without dropping a set, and only later revealed she had been about eight weeks pregnant throughout the tournament.

#women#sports#tennis
Sport

The scoreboard could not show a perfect 10

When Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect ten in Olympic gymnastics in 1976, the display had only three digits and flashed 1.00. She was 14, and scored six more.

#women#sports#olympics
Sport

Four gymnastics moves are named after Simone Biles

A skill is named for the first gymnast to land it in competition. She has so many that judges have deliberately undervalued some to discourage others from attempting them.

#women#sports#gymnastics
Sport

She could not walk properly until she was 12

Wilma Rudolph had polio and wore a leg brace as a child. In 1960 she won three Olympic golds and was called the fastest woman in the world.

#women#sports#olympics
Sport

90 million people watched a single tennis match

Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the 1973 Battle of the Sexes before 30,000 in the stadium and a global TV audience. She had already threatened a boycott to win equal prize money.

#women#sports#tennis
Sport

She won a world boxing title as a mother of two

Mary Kom took six world championships from a village in Manipur with no boxing tradition, returning to the ring after twins and winning again.

#women#sports#india
Arts

A bus crash made Frida Kahlo a painter

Bedridden at 18 with a shattered spine, she had a mirror fixed above her bed and began painting herself. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.

#women#art#mexico
Arts

Women artists signed their work with men's names

Across Edo Japan and Renaissance Europe, women painted under fathers' or husbands' studio names, so much surviving art credited to men was partly or wholly made by women.

#women#art#history
Arts

Maya Angelou did not speak for almost five years

After a childhood trauma she went mute, and spent those silent years reading everything she could. She emerged to become a poet who read at a presidential inauguration.

#women#art#literature
Arts

Zaha Hadid built for years without a single completed building

Her curving designs were called unbuildable and won competitions that were never realised. She became the first woman to win architecture's Pritzker Prize.

#women#art#architecture
Arts

Coco Chanel made black the colour of style

Black was the colour of mourning until her 1926 little black dress. Vogue predicted it would become a uniform for women everywhere, and it did.

#women#art#fashion
Arts

Josephine Baker was a wartime spy

The Paris stage star smuggled secrets for the French Resistance written in invisible ink on her sheet music, using her fame to pass through checkpoints unsearched.

#women#art#history
Arts

Abstract art was invented by a woman nobody knew

Hilma af Klint painted vast abstract canvases from 1906, years before Kandinsky. She left instructions that they not be shown for 20 years after her death, so the world found out late.

#women#art#history
Activists

Malala went back to school 9 months after being shot

Attacked on her school bus at 15 for insisting girls should be educated, she survived, kept campaigning, and became the youngest Nobel laureate in history at 17.

#women#history#education
Activists

Rosa Parks was not simply tired

She was a trained secretary of her local NAACP chapter who had studied civil disobedience. Her refusal in 1955 launched a bus boycott that lasted 381 days.

#women#history#usa
Activists

One woman's movement planted 50 million trees

Wangari Maathai paid rural Kenyan women a few cents per surviving seedling. The Green Belt Movement reforested hillsides and won her the Nobel Peace Prize.

#women#history#nature
Activists

The world's first female prime minister was Sri Lankan

Sirimavo Bandaranaike took office in 1960, decades before most countries elected a woman leader, and served three separate terms.

#women#history#politics
Activists

She carried a Bhagavad Gita and a poem into orbit

Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian origin in space, flying more than 30 days in total. A satellite series and a Mars hill now carry her name.

#women#space#india
Activists

She walked untethered on the ocean floor

Sylvia Earle made a record dive to 381 metres in a pressurised suit in 1979, with no cable to the surface. She has spent over 7,000 hours underwater.

#women#science#ocean
Leaders

Catherine the Great was not Russian

Born a minor German princess, she took the Russian throne in a coup against her own husband and expanded the empire by around 200,000 square miles, founding the Hermitage collection.

#women#history#russia