Statistics for Influential Women Throughout History

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General Stats

This quiz has been taken 375 times
The average score is 32 of 96

Answer Stats

Answer	Hint	% Correct
Marie Curie	Single-handedly discovered two elements and theorised radioactivity	87%
Queen Elizabeth I	Her reign is famous above all for the flourishing of English drama and for the seafaring prowess of English adventurers such as Francis Drake	86%
Cleopatra	The last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt	85%
Joan of Arc	Led the French army to victories against England during Hundred Years' War	83%
Margaret Thatcher	The longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century and so far the only woman to have held the office	79%
Anne Frank	Her world-famous diary documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II	77%
Amelia Earhart	The first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean	76%
Jane Austen	Wrote Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816)	76%
Emily Brontë	Writer of Wuthering Heights, a classic of English literature	75%
Hillary Clinton	As a presidential candidate in 2008, she won more primaries and gathered more delegates than any woman in US history	75%
Catherine the Great	Under her reign, Russia became one of the great powers of Europe	73%
Queen Victoria	Her reign was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire	73%
Princess Diana	Princess of Wales and the president of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children	71%
Marilyn Monroe	She has often been cited as both a pop and a cultural icon, as well as the quintessential American sex symbol	70%
Oprah Winfrey	Currently North America's only black billionaire; she is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world	62%
Agatha Christie	Best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections; also wrote the world's longest-running play	61%
Helen Keller	The first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree	61%
Eva Perón	Argentine first lady; founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party	60%
JK Rowling	Writer of the best-selling book series in history	60%
Madonna	The bestselling female recording artist of all time	60%
Mary Shelley	Best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), published when she was twenty-one	59%
Indira Gandhi	The third Prime Minister of India and a central figure of the Indian National Congress party	55%
Florence Nightingale	A celebrated British social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing	54%
Harriet Beecher Stowe	Wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery	52%
Condoleezza Rice	The first female African-American secretary of US state	51%
Eleanor Roosevelt	President Harry S. Truman called her the "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements	51%
Frida Kahlo	Her art has been celebrated as emblematic of Mexican indigenous tradition, and for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience	51%
Harriet Tubman	Born into slavery, she escaped and subsequently made nineteen-plus missions to rescue more than 300 slaves using the network known as the Underground Railroad	51%
Katharine Hepburn	Came to epitomise the "modern woman" in 20th-century America with her lifestyle and the characters she played	51%
Maya Angelou	Author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	51%
Twiggy	Widely regarded as the first supermodel; one of the cultural faces of 1960s Britain	51%
Boudicca	Queen of the British Iceni tribe; led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire	50%
Jane Goodall	The world's foremost expert on chimpanzees	45%
Rosalind Franklin	Discovered proof of the double-helix structure of DNA before the men credited with doing so, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins; their work was based in part on her data	45%
Benazir Bhutto	11th Prime Minister of Pakistan	44%
Coco Chanel	Liberated women from the constraints of the "corseted silhouette" and arguably created modern high fashion	44%
Rosa Parks	An African-American civil rights activist, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement"	42%
Ella Fitzgerald	Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus jazz albums	41%
Mother Teresa	Founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation, which in 2012 consisted of over 4,500 sisters and was active in 133 countries	41%
Mary Magdalene	Within the four Gospels, the oldest historical record mentioning her name, she is named at least 12 times, more than most of the apostles	39%
Beatrix Potter	Wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit	38%
Billie Jean King	Won 39 Grand Slam titles, including 12 singles, 16 women's doubles and 11 mixed doubles titles	37%
Simone de Beauvoir	Writer of The Second Sex (1949), a founding tract of contemporary feminism	33%
Meryl Streep	She is widely regarded as one of the greatest film actresses of all time	32%
Emily Dickinson	The most important American poet of the nineteenth century and the pioneer of slant rhyme	30%
Susan B. Anthony	Co-founder of the first Women's Temperance Movement	30%
Sappho	The Alexandrians included her as the only female in the list of nine lyric poets	29%
Sally Ride	The first American woman in space	27%
George Eliot	Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language	26%
Gertrude Stein	An avant-garde pioneer of postmodernism in literature and a central figure of the modernist movement	25%
Lucille Ball	One of the most popular and influential stars in the United States during her lifetime; also the first woman to own and run an American TV studio	25%
Clara Barton	Founded the American Red Cross	24%
Margaret Sanger	Coined the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organisations that became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America	24%
Sylvia Plath	In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems	23%
Germaine Greer	Her book The Female Eunuch became an international bestseller in 1970	21%
Toni Morrison	The first African-American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; also winner of the Pulitzer Prize	20%
Virginia Woolf	An English writer; one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century	20%
Ada Lovelace	Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine	18%
Hatshepsut	Regarded by Egyptologists as one of the most successful pharaohs	18%
Billie Holiday	Her vocal style "changed the art of American pop vocals forever"	17%
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis	Remembered for her contributions to the arts and preservation of historic architecture, her style, elegance and grace	17%
Sojourner Truth	A former slave, prominent abolitionist and women's rights activist whose legacy of feminism and racial equality still resonates today	17%
Aung San Suu Kyi	Initiated a nonviolent movement towards democracy and human rights in Burma; placed under house arrest in 1989; in 1991, her ongoing efforts won her the Nobel Prize for Peace	16%
Eleanor of Aquitaine	One of the most powerful women in western Europe during High Middle Ages	15%
Gloria Steinem	Cofounder of Ms. magazine, who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s	15%
Emmeline Pankhurst	"She shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back"	12%
Mary Wollstonecraft	Regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers; feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences	12%
Rosa Luxemburg	Marxist theorist and political activist; successfully a founding member of SDKPiL, SPD, USPD and KPD	12%
Margaret Mead	American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s	9%
St. Teresa of Ávila	Major writer of Spanish Renaissance literature, as well as works on Christian mysticism	9%
Catherine de Medici	Arguably the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe	8%
Jane Addams	Founder of the social work profession in the US	8%
Shirley Chisholm	The first African-American woman elected to Congress	8%
Elizabeth Fry	A major driving force behind new legislation to make the treatment of prisoners more humane	7%
Hildegard of Bingen	Writer of the Ordo Virtutum, the oldest surviving morality play	7%
Hypatia	The first well-documented woman in mathematics	7%
Stevie Nicks	In the course of her work with her band and her extensive solo career, she has produced over forty Top 50 hits and sold over 140 million albums	7%
Mary Cassatt	The most influential female Impressionist artist of all time	6%
Wu Zetian	The only woman to have ever ruled China in her own right	5%
Ching Shih	Undefeated, she is one of world history's most powerful pirates	3%
Georgia O'Keeffe	Has been recognised as the mother of American modernism	3%
Grace Hopper	Developed the first compiler for a computer programming language	3%
Mary Seacole	Posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991; in 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton	3%
Shirin Ebadi	Iranian lawyer, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts in women's, children's and refugee rights	3%
Wangari Maathai	The first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize	3%
Aphra Behn	The first English professional female literary writer	2%
Emily Murphy	Best known for her contributions to Canadian feminism, specifically to the question of whether women were "persons" under Canadian law	2%
Alice Hamilton	The first female professor at Harvard; the founder of industrial toxicology	1%
Dorothy Hodgkin	Confirmed the structure of penicillin and discovered the structure of Vitamin B12, for which she won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry	1%
Edith Wharton	Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist; nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930	1%
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson	The first Englishwoman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain	1%
Gertrude B. Elion	Developed the first immunosuppressant agent	1%
Lillian Vernon	Started a mail-order business in 1951 out of her apartment, which became the first female-founded company to be publicly traded on the American Stock Exchange	1%
Maria Gaetana Agnesi	Wrote first book discussing both differential and integral calculus	1%
Meerabai	Some 1,300 pads (poems) commonly known as bhajans (sacred songs) are attributed to her	1%
Muriel Siebert	The first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of the NYSE's member firms	0%