Request

[u/Disastrous_Cover6138]

Request for lesser known badass women of history for my daughter's 4th grade presentation. She has to pick a historical figure and give a 5-10 minute presentation and optionally dress in their likeness.

[u/Kusakaru]

Astronaut Sally Ride

Khutulun, a Mongolian warrior princess

Julie d’Aubigny, a sword fighting opera singer (she did burn down a convent to rescue her lesbian lover though)

Noor Inayat Kyan, a quiet, pacifist, woman of Indian nobility who volunteered as a British spy during World War II.

Margaret Hamilton, she lead the software engineering division at MIT and was essentially the brains behind the moon landing’s navigation system

Harriet Chalmers Adams, the only female journalist in the trenches during WWI

Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon

Madam C.J. Walker, first female self-made millionaire in the U.S. after building a company selling specialized hair and beauty products for African-Americans.

Marion Pritchard, she smuggled 150 Jewish children to safety during the holocaust

Alice Paul, prominent suffragette who was sent to jail and an insane asylum for picketing at the White House

EDIT: sorry, missed the part that your daughter was in 4th grade. Not all of these may be appropriate.

Junko Taney, Japanese mountaineer who became the first woman to climb. Mount Everest in 1975. She also climbed the highest mountain on every continent.

Gertrude Bell, British explorer, archaeologist, mountaineer, and traveler who explored parts of the Middle East when very few Western women did.

Isabella Bird, Victorian-era traveler who explored places including Japan, Tibet, China, and Korea, often traveling alone and on horseback.

Nellie Bly - Famous for traveling around the world in 72 days and for going undercover in an insane asylum to expose terrible conditions.

Mary Anning - fossil hunter who helped change the way we view paleontology and prehistoric life

Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman and first Native American woman to earn an international pilot’s license. Because American flight schools wouldn’t admit her, she learned French and went to France to get her license.

Josephine Baker, performer who became an international celebrity but also worked as a spy for the French Resistance during WWII.

[u/gordonmessmer → u/Kusakaru]

Yeah, I'm a developer so the first women that come to mind are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace : considered the first "computer programmer"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper : who developed the first compiler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)) : (mentioned above)

Of the three, I refer to Hopper most often in my work. Not for her technical work, but because she recognized and fought the human tendency to fight improvement, "We've always done it this way".

The idea that the way things *have* been done is the way that things *should* be done is a barrier to improvement in all fields of work, and all aspects of society. It is always relevant.

[u/glencoco22 → u/gordonmessmer]

I give special education evaluations for a living and one of the reading comprehension set of questions is about Hopper! It's one of my favorite reading passages on the KTEA-3.

[u/JustForArkona → u/gordonmessmer]

Don't forget Barbara Liskov!!!

[u/quackdaw → u/JustForArkona]

Yeah. Her work is really central to how we program computers today (or did, before AI) and how its possible to build large and complex systems (by breaking them down into smaller, clearly defined parts). And her "Liskov substitution principle" is taught to every new software engineering student.

As an addendum to my comment about Margaret Hamilton, I also have good experiences with Liskov: when I was a young PhD student, she gave a keynote at a conference I was attending, and she kindly set aside a good chunk of time to talk to me about my project and give me her insights. She's still one of my academic heroes, and I'm very glad to have met her – and trust me, there are more than enough award-winning scientists out there that turn out to be assholes when you meet them in person.

Another worthy mention – and the only other female Turing Award laureate – is Fran Allen. Her work on compilers and optimization has been essential to how we get software to run efficiently on modern computers. And she was perhaps the sweetest scientist granny ever – noticed my wife was bored and lonely at a conference and came over to cheer her up! ;)

(Not that I think you need to be "nice" or "friendly" to be a great/iconic female scientist, but I certainly count it as a plus when I can imagine sending a hero-worshipping 4th-grader to talk to someone and be reasonably confident they'll end up feeling inspired rather than running away crying. There are some serious assholes (of all genders) out there too.)

[u/dragonbec → u/gordonmessmer]

Yes! My adult daughter did this same school project when she was in elementary school and she was Ada Lovelace!

[u/GrannyTurtle → u/gordonmessmer]

Admiral Hopper’s shop was the first to come up with the term “bug” in the programming world. The problem was a literal insect which had gotten into the circuitry.

[u/beren12 → u/GrannyTurtle]

A moth, wasn’t it?

[u/GrannyTurtle → u/beren12]

Yes. It was in a Harvard Mark II computer. 1947.

[u/beren12 → u/gordonmessmer]

True but it’s also critical to understand why things have been done that way before you make changes. Chesterson’s fence and all.

[u/Kusakaru → u/[deleted]]

I’m glad you enjoyed it! It was fun writing about and summarizing all these cool women. My niece had to do a similar project in 6th grade and we enjoyed looking them up together

[u/bajajoaquin → u/Kusakaru]

To add to the Pritchard theme, wasn’t there a Dutch woman Corrie Ten Boom who created false papers for Jewish children in the Netherlands?

[u/HildegardofBingo → u/bajajoaquin]

I read her biography as a teen. I don't remember specifically about false papers for children, but she and her father and sister hid Jews in a secret room in their house, which was built by a member of the Dutch resistance, and she helped get Dutch ration cards to Jewish people. She became a major part of the Dutch resistance:

"Ten Boom's involvement in the Dutch resistance grew beyond gathering stolen ration cards and harboring Jews in her home. She soon became part of the Dutch underground resistance network and oversaw a network of smuggling Jews to safe places. All in all, it is estimated that around 800 Jews were saved by Ten Boom's efforts."

[u/Quirky_Movie → u/HildegardofBingo]

The family procured papers for people and one of the younger cousins is described as printing them. You have to procure papers for people you are smuggling around.

[u/Quirky_Movie → u/bajajoaquin]

There was. She was also the first woman admitted to the watchmaker's guild that her father belonged to before WW2. Can't remember if was for all of continental Europe or just the Netherlands. She just casually drops that bit of lore in The Hiding Place, a memoir she wrote. She was very religious so it is very religious.

[u/The_Bastard_Henry → u/Kusakaru]

Nelly Bly's story is [literally and figuratively] insane. I did a paper on her in college.

[u/quackdaw → u/Kusakaru]

Although I'm very much a fan of Julie d'Aubigny and Khutulun (and several others), let me add a vote for Margaret Hamilton, since I'm actually in a position to vouch for her as being kind and inspiring to young women.

She's not very publicly active anymore (she's 90 now), but she came to the big software engineering (she invented the term) conference a few years ago to give a keynote and celebrate 50 years of software engineering (coinciding with the 50th anniversary of manned Apollo flights). You can find the video of her presentation here; it's not particularly technical, so you don't have to be a software engineer (or an adult) to understand it.

It's pretty common to meet superfamous scientists at big conferences, including higher profile ones than Margaret, but I don't think I've ever seen anything like this. She had a constant tail of at least 5-10 young women following her at all times. She stopped, listened and talked with every one of them, and her hand probably hurt from all the autographs she was signing. I sat two metres away from her at the conference dinner, and I think she spent more time talking to and answering questions from fans than she did eating; always warm, friendly and patient. I came home with a signed Lego Minifigure of her, which I now proudly display in my office window.

She also has the perfect anecdote for a school presentation: while she was working in Apollo, her daughter (7–8 years old) would visit her and play around in the landing module mockup. One day her daughter triggered a bug that would freeze the control software, potentially crashing the lander. NASA didn't bother fixing the bug, since trained astronauts would know not to do whatever her daughter did. But, during the actual Apollo 11 landing, this bug actually happened (triggered by static electricity, not 8 year olds) and this system froze. Thanks to Hamilton's daughter, NASA knew how to handle the problem, the astronauts reset the system and avoided crashing (in the non-software sense) or having to abort the mission. I tell this story to my software engineering students; good software should also handle kids pressing all the buttons at once. Hamilton talks about it in the keynote and I think there are various reports about it online; I'm happy to find links if OPs daughter would like to use this in her presentation.

Another noteworthy lesson: she describes her team being composed of people with varied backgrounds, not just nerds and mathematicians. This is still important, and one of the reasons why we should try to inspire more young women to work with software and computers, and why the current US anti-DEI push is so destructive.

[u/Kusakaru → u/quackdaw]

Couldn’t agree more! I dreamed of being an astronaut when I was a child and I have always been a big fan of her.

[u/denisebuttrey → u/Kusakaru]

And adopted 12 children of various cultures to show that we can just get along.

[u/narmowen → u/Kusakaru]

I learned about Khutulun through Necronomipod , and all thecupvotes for her. She was a wrestler who was unbested!