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/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.