A gifted mathematician, Ada Lovelace is considered to be the first computer programmer, an industry that has since transformed business, our lives and the world. In an industry still dominated by men, it’s particularly striking that the first programmer was a woman

When the double helix structure of DNA was discovered, scientists claimed that they had unravelled the secret of life itself. The crucial piece of evidence was provided by the expert crystallographer Rosalind Franklin – the famous photograph 51, an X-ray picture showing a dark cross of dots, the signature image of a concealed molecular spiral. The life-changing innovations that followed – mapping the human genome, test-tube babies, genetic engineering – all depend on understanding the chemical foundations of heredity.

Britain’s first female prime minister came to power at an unsettled time in the country’s history, as it faced political disharmony and economic recession. Further trials, including the 1982 Falklands War and the conflict in Northern Ireland, helped to define her influential career.

The first woman to have been made a peer, Burdett-Coutts was made a baroness by Queen Victoria for her work on behalf of the poor. Prevented from working at Coutts Bank despite inheriting her grandfather Thomas Coutts’ shares and fortune, Burdett-Couttsinstead devoted her time – working with a Coutts client Charles Dickens – to philanthropy. She was a pioneer in social housing, building homes for the poor, and financed numerous projects, including the redevelopment of East London.

An English writer and philosopher Wollstonecraft championed education and liberation for women. Her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was published in 1792 and is seen as one of the foundational texts of modern feminism. Written against the backdrop of the French Revolution, it argued for the equality of women to men.

Florence Nightingale led the first official team of British military nurses to Turkey during the Crimean War, fought between Britain and Russia (1853-56). More soldiers died from disease than wounds in this conflict and Nightingale – as well as tending the sick – reported back to the army medical services on how to reduce avoidable deaths. Nicknamed ‘the Lady with the Lamp’ for the night rounds she made tending to the wounded and sick, Nightingale continued in her work after the war and was instrumental in establishing a permanent military nursing service and implementing improvements to the army medical services.

10 Marie Stopes, 1880–1958

Marie Stopes, advocate of birth control and sex educator, was born in Edinburgh but studied for a science degree at University College, London.  In 1918, she published the highly popular Married Love, a second book titled Wise Parenthood – which dealt explicitly with contraception – appearing shortly after. A controversial figure, especially for her views on eugenics, Stopes nonetheless was a key figure in publicising her cause (a first birth control clinic was set up in a poor working-class area of north London in 1921) and in bringing to women worldwide the opportunity of planned pregnancies.

Born to political philosopher William Godwin and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft, and husband of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley managed – through her 1818 work Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus – to make a name for herself, even in such high-achieving company. Blending the horrific with the sympathetic, the Gothic with the Romantic, the novel has gone on to become a literary classic.

Russia’s longest-ruling female leader, Catherine was head of the country as it modernised, expanded, and strengthened. A patron of arts and a supporter of education, her reforms led her to become one of the most influential rulers in Russian history.

In the 1930s, Atkins and her Jewish mother emigrated to Britain from Bucharest to escape the rise of Fascism. A talented linguist, Atkins joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a branch of British Military Intelligence responsible for training and sending agents overseas. She rose from administrative roles to become an intelligence officer in the French Section of the SOE. At the end of the Second World War, as a member of the British War Crimes Commission, Atkins set out to find out what had become of the 118 SOE agents who had not made it home, establishing how and when they had died – she was able to trace all but one. Atkins was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1948 and appointed a Commandant of the Legion of Honor in 1987.

Final ruler of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra was more than the famous beauty her subsequent, simplistic portrayals often depict. A formidable, politically shrewd monarch, she was directly involved in the running of a kingdom that faced challenges on many fronts.

The so-called ‘Angel of Prisons’, Fry was an English Quaker who led the campaign in the Victorian period to make conditions for prisoners more humane. She also helped to improve the British hospital system and treatment of the insane.

Fossils were crucial for convincing Victorian scientists that evolution had taken place over countless millennia – and dinosaurs provided particularly compelling evidence of the earth’s long past. The seashore collector Mary Anning was scarcely educated, yet she became one of Britain’s leading experts on prehistoric life, scouring the cliffs of Lyme Regis to dig out large skeletons that she sold to eminent London specialists. Her unique palaeontological specimens helped transform beliefs about the origins of life.

Joan was born in 1412, nearly 80 years into the Hundred Years’ War, which had seen the English take control of a large portion of France. She convinced the future French King Charles VII that religious visions had instructed her to support him. Aged just 17 she was sent to the Siege of Orléans. When the siege was lifted shortly afterwards, Joan became a religious figurehead for a renewed French offensive, helping to achieve further French victories and advising on military strategy. Joan was eventually captured by the Burgundians and put into English custody. In 1431, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake. She became a French martyr and was canonised in 1909.

Queen of Castile, political unifier, economic reformer: Isabella I was a hugely important figure in 15th-century Spain. Together with her husband she was responsible for less savoury episodes, including the forced expulsion of Muslim and Jewish subjects, yet she remains a key figure in the nation’s rise to become an early global superpower.

A mystic and ascetic who in the aftermath of the Black Death played a key role in the campaign to reform the Catholic Church, and return the papacy from Avignon to Rome. She was canonised by Pope Pius II in 1461.

Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan environmental activist who founded the Green Belt Movement which campaigned for the planting of trees, environmental conversation and women’s rights.  The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, Maathai was elected to parliament and appointed assistant minister for Environment and Natural Resources from 2003– 2005.  Her work was internationally recognised when, in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, peace and democracy.

De Beauvoir’s publication, in 1949, of The Second Sex had a decisive influence on the evolution of post-war feminism. Her declaration that “one is not born but becomes a woman” continues to reverberate in contemporary discussions of gender.

When electronic computers began to revolutionise society, Grace Hopper was one of the leading players, having already become the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1934. First at Harvard, and then in the US Navy, Hopper worked on the very earliest computers and later developed COBOL, the commercial programming language that enabled a military innovation to transform the business world.

A Mexican artist whose striking, distinctive works combine an exploration of gender, class and identity with symbols from the nation’s cultural history, Kahlo has gone on to become an important figure for social causes including feminism and LGBTQ rights.

Theodora exercised considerable influence as wife of the emperor Justinian I, handling political affairs and corresponding with foreign rulers. She is remembered as one of the first rulers to recognise the rights of women, altering divorce laws to give greater benefits to women and prohibiting the traffic in young girls.

An Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher whose murder in AD 415 led to her being enshrined during the Enlightenment as a martyr for philosophy. She is the first female mathematician of whose life and work we have reasonably detailed knowledge.

A humanitarian and suffragist, member of the law-abiding National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship from 1919), Rathbone was returned to the British Parliament in 1929 as the Independent Member for the Combined British Universities.  She was a key figure in getting through parliament a family allowances bill that paid the allowance to the mother, not the father. During later years she was actively involved in refugee relief work, trying to rescue Spanish republicans and Jews threatened by Hitler’s rise to power.

As a female Native American, Sacagawea’s story could easily have been lost to history. But her role as a vital member of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, helping them forge relationships with Native Americans all while carrying her newborn baby on her back, ensured this wasn’t the case. Sacagawea travelled thousands of miles with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-6 – from the Mandan-Hidatsa villages in the Dakotas to the Pacific Northwest – acting as an interpreter and allaying the suspicions of the tribes they encountered.

At a time when women journalists tended to write about domestic topics such as gardening or fashion, Bly wrote hard-hitting stories about the poor and oppressed. In 1886-87 she travelled for several months in Mexico, reporting on official corruption and the condition of the poor, while another investigation saw her feign insanity in order to expose conditions inside asylums. Bly’s journalistic fame led her to travel the globe, unchaperoned, in her own Jules Verne inspired 80 Days Around the World. She completed the challenge in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, setting a new world record.

As a Jewish woman, the Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner was doubly disadvantaged during her scientific career in Nazi Germany. After fleeing to Sweden in 1938, she received a plea for help from her research collaborator when the experiments they had planned together produced some unexpected results. A couple of days later, she had solved the problem – they had unwittingly initiated the break-up of a uranium atom. By 1945, her theoretical conclusions had been realised practically in the atomic bomb.

Queen of France and mother of three kings, Catherine de’ Medici held a hugely influential position in the nation’s politics throughout the 16th century. Civil war and religious tensions often led her to take drastic measures, yet she is also remembered for her tenacious nature and artistic patronage.

An intrepid 19th-century explorer who defied Victorian conventions of where a lady should go and what a lady should do. After catching the travel bug while on a sea voyage, taken on the orders of doctors to improve her ill health, Bird went on to explore America, Hawaii, Tibet, Malaysia, Japan, India, China, Iran and many more countries. Her journeys were often fraught with danger; she rode thousands of miles on horseback and climbed mountains and volcanoes. The books Bird wrote, and the photographs she took, on the places she visited helped earn her a place as one of the first women to be made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

In 1921, Coleman became the first American woman to earn an international pilot’s license, despite racial discrimination preventing her entry to American flying schools. After travelling to France to earn her licence, Coleman returned to America where racial and gender bias prevented her from becoming a commercial pilot. Stunt flying was her only option and she staged the first public flight by an African-American woman in the US, on 3 September 1922. Coleman drew huge crowds to her shows, refusing to perform before segregated audiences and raising money to found a school to train black aviators.

Chanel emerged from a difficult, nomadic childhood in France to become an internationally famous designer, whose eponymous brand spans fashion, jewellery and perfume. Her importance and contributions to female fashion is complicated by her suspected collaboration with German intelligence operations during the Second World War.

An accomplished painter in a period of Italy’s history when women weren’t always welcomed by patrons or fellow artists, Gentileschi generated both critical praise and international success. Her portraits of strong, suffering women represent, for some, the trials she faced in her personal and professional life.

Hurston’s work chronicles life in the American South, particularly the racial and gender struggles she witnessed and experienced during the first half of the 20th century. Her career as an anthropologist also saw her make key contributions to the study of North American folklore and ritual activity in the Caribbean.

Publisher of the Washington Post from 1969–79, Graham was the first female publisher of a major American newspaper after she took the helm of the Washington Post Company in 1963 after the death of her husband. Graham was also the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company after taking the company public in 1972. In 1971, she oversaw the publication of the Pentagon Papers and coverage of the Watergate scandal that toppled President Nixon.

India’s first and only female prime minister to date is remembered for her political steel and often controversial legacy. She ruled the country on two occasions, from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 until 1984 when she was assassinated by her own bodyguards.

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known pseudonymously as Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet and diplomat whose works often explore morality and motherhood. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945, becoming the first Latin American author to receive the honour.

A nurse during the American Civil War (1861-65) Clara distributed medical supplies, worked near the front lines and treated both Union and Confederate men. Her work earned her the nickname ‘Angel of the Battlefield’. After the war she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, helping thousands of families locate missing relatives and rebury the dead in marked graves. In 1881 Clara established the American Red Cross, serving as its president until 1904.

Akhmatova’s career as a poet, which spanned a period of war, totalitarianism and revolution, saw her mix the personal with the political to chronicle a tumultuous chapter in Russian history. Her work and sympathies were often met with official opprobrium, and many of those around her were executed, detained or deported.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike, a socialist, became the first female head of government in the world when she became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, in 1960.  She served three terms in this capacity: 1960–65, 1970–77 and 1994–2000.  Bandaranaikewas an important role model for many political female activists, showing that the glass ceiling which prevented women from reaching the highest political office could be broken.  

Maryam Mirzakhani was only 40 when she died, but she had already transcended gender and ethnicity norms by becoming the first woman, and the first Iranian, to win the coveted Fields medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Mirzakhani changed the world in her geometrical imagination, calculating the characteristics of countless billiard-table universes, each constantly morphing into different shapes.

The Big Brother technology of Closed Circuit Television is now a ubiquitous public presence, but African-American nurse Marie van Brittan Brown invented it to protect her friends and family at home. Disillusioned by police negligence, in 1966 she filed a patent for a movable camera that could display images on a TV screen monitor of whoever was at the front door.

Almost three centuries ago, Laura Bassi smashed conventions and became Europe’s first female professor. An Italian physicist who specialised in the new and exciting field of electricity, Bassi skilfully negotiated a top salary to compensate for her frequent public appearances as Bologna University’s ‘token woman’.

In 1975, Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a place she described as being “smaller than a tatami mat”. It wasn’t an easy climb in many respects – Junko faced criticism for leaving her young daughter at home as she set off for Nepal, as part of the first all-female climbing team to be awarded a permit to climb the world’s highest peak. News of her astounding feat of human endurance made headlines around the world and Tabei came to stand as a symbol for women’s empowerment and challenging female stereotypes.

In 1926, Gertrude became the first woman to swim across the icy waters of the English Channel, having already broken seven records in a single afternoon at Brighton Beach, New York, four years earlier. Ederle trained daily in freezing water, pushing her body to new limits. The time she set for her cross-channel swim – 14 hours, 31 minutes – was faster by nearly two hours than the time set by any previous male swimmers who had completed the epic swim. Ederle proved that female sportswomen were more than capable of taking on the same challenges as men.

An English author, composer and campaigner for women’s rights, Smyth composed the song that was to become the anthem of the suffrage movement. She was awarded a damehood in 1922 for her work in the fields of music and literature.

Emily Hobhouse was a British welfare campaigner during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa. She raised funds for the many Boer women and children who were displaced by the war and housed by the British in overcrowded camps. After visiting the camps she submitted a report to British government highlighting the terrible conditions, which resulted in an official inquiry. Emily was one of the first women in history to successfully challenge the British government and raise social awareness for the plight of civilian populations caught up in conflict.

A French tennis player who won 21 Grand Slam titles and two Olympic gold medals between 1919 and 1926. In 1920, she became the first person to win three Wimbledon championships – in singles and doubles events – in a single year. Lenglen popularised the sport with her style and flamboyance and became a fashion icon for her style of dress. She was also outspoken against tennis’s amateur restrictions and how these kept working-class people out of the sport.

The first self-made female millionaire in America, Breedlove developed a line of beauty and hair products for African-Americans. Her Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company made her one of the most successful African-American business owners in history.

A leading light in women’s cricket from the 1960s to the 1980s, Heyhoe Flint played in 22 test matches and 23 one-day internationals for England and helped to develop the World Cup in the women’s game, captaining England to victory in the inaugural 1973 tournament. As one of the first women to join the traditionalist Marylebone Cricket Club, she helped to change the gender balance of the game.

Commemorated in the Book of Judges as a prophet of Yahweh, god of the Israelites, the song attributed to her is widely considered to be one of the oldest passages in the Bible, thought to date to the 12^th century BC.

In Victorian Britain, Mary Somerville was celebrated as ‘The Queen of the Sciences.’  Her research was published in the Royal Society’s prestigious journal, her interpretation of complex French astronomy became a standard textbook, and her syntheses of scientific knowledge communicated the latest discoveries to public audiences. Although unable to go to university herself, the Oxford college named after her opened the doors to women’s education. In 2017, Somerville’s contribution to science was recognised by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which featured her on its new plastic £10 note.

A Swedish-born educationalist who revolutionised the teaching of gymnastics and physical education, Bergman-Österberg founded England’s first college for physical education instructors, which opened as a women-only institution. She also encouraged rational dress for women’s sport and helped to develop the sport of netball.

A world class sportswoman and qualified pilot, Marie worked as a Red Cross nurse during the First World War. At one point she joined the French infantry posing as a man and later joined an Italian alpine regiment. In 1915 she piloted a bombing raid over Germany and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Before the war, Marvingt had begun developing plans for an air ambulance and in the 1930s she devised training for in-flight nurses, vital work that led to a female air ambulance service in the Second World War.

A German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator, Merian defied expectations of the time by leaving an unhappy marriage and running her own business selling her beautiful artwork depicting the life cycles of plants and insects. At a time when women had few opportunities to study science or to travel, Merian made the journey to Surinam in South America to record the exotic wildlife there. Her stunning full colour prints of tropical plants and animals, including bird-eating spiders, vibrantly coloured butterflies and a snake-wrestling caiman were studied by generations of scientists after her.

An accomplished English all-rounder who won numerous titles in lawn tennis and golf, an Olympic silver medal in archery, played hockey for England, and took part in skating, tobogganing and mountaineering. From her first Wimbledon title – at the age of 15 – onwards, Dod proved that women could compete to high standards in a range of sports.

One of the most influential female economists of the 20th century, Joan changed our understanding of labour markets showing that by recognising imperfections in markets, we can address hidden unemployment and low wages. In 1979 she became the first woman to be made an honorary fellow of King’s College.

The 19th-century novelist and poet Mary Anne Evans, born in Warwickshire, took the pen name George Eliot in a bid to have her work taken seriously. Her subsequent novels, including Middlemarch and Slias Marner, tackle weighty themes including religion, marriage and industrialisation.

One of the most powerful women in Chinese history, Empress Cixi rose from low-ranking concubine of the Xianfeng emperor to regent of China for nearly 50 years. During her regency, Cixi oversaw a number of economic and military reforms which helped transform China into a more modern world power, although the political murders carried out during her reign and her role in the Boxer Rebellion have cast a shadow over her reputation.

One of the most controversial of modern feminist thinkers, the very radicalism of Dworkin’s writings on heterosexuality and pornography (the latter she believed to be a weapon used by men to control women) has ensured that her influence on contemporary debates on gender – while massive – has tended to be occluded.

A Frenchwoman who organised, at a time when the Olympic Games had very few events for women, a multi-sport international women’s event in 1921, held in Monaco. This event, which evolved into the Women’s World Games (held four times between 1922 and 1934)  attracted female competitors from France, England, Italy, Norway and Sweden, and put pressure on the International Olympic Committee, who introduced women’s athletics to the Olympics in 1928.

An American athlete who was the first black woman to make a major impact on international track and field. She recovered from childhood polio, pneumonia and scarlet fever to win three gold medals at the 1960 Olympic Games, the first American woman to ever do so. Her post-Olympic career included goodwill ambassadorial work for the American government in Africa, as well as campaigning work for the Civil Rights movement.

A Norwegian figure skater who dominated her sport and then moved into a successful acting career in Hollywood. At age 10 she won the Norwegian national figure-skating championship and went on to win Olympic gold medals in her sport in 1928, 1932, and 1936, along with 10 World and six European championships. The first woman figure skater to wear skirts above the knee, Henie could spin nearly 80 revolutions. After retiring in 1936, she moved to the US and combined her professional ice show with starring roles in a number of films.

Sarojini Naidu, a freedom fighter and poet, was the first Indian woman to be president of the Indian National Congress and to be appointed an Indian state governor. A close friend of Mohandas Gandhi, in 1917 Naidu helped found the Women’s India Association and later played a leading role in the civil disobedience movement in colonial India. Two years before her death, India gained its independence as a sovereign nation, becoming the largest democracy in the world.

President of Mattel, a company she co-founded with her husband in 1945 and which was originally based out of their garage in California. In 1959, the company launched the Barbie doll, the brainchild of Ruth Handler and one of the first dolls made that looked like a grown up. Within six years of Barbie’s launch, Mattel had become a Fortune 500 company.

An 11th-century Japanese writer and lady-in-waiting, Shikibu’s early talent for Chinese allowed her to become fluent in the language to an extent unusual for women of the period. Her novel The Tale of Genji is widely regarded as a masterpiece.

Maria was one of approximately 1,000 women who joined the Russian army in the First World War. The majority pretended to be male but Bochkareva was one of the few who didn’t hide her gender. In 1917, following the first Russian revolution, she was made commander of Russia’s first all-female Battalion of Death, at a time when no other countries permitted women in combat roles. Engineered to reinvigorate military morale, the battalion succeeded in taking German trenches on the Eastern front.

One of the first English women to play football professionally, and a key figure in the development of the women’s game, Parr emerged through the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team, playing exhibition matches in Lancashire during and after the First World War. Parr played in a number of representative international matches and continued to play despite the Football Association’s ban on women’s football being played on affiliated grounds in England, in 1921. She has posthumously become an LGBT sporting icon.

A widowed university academic, Gwynne-Vaughan was appointed overseas Commander of the new Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in 1917. She successfully oversaw the expansion of the WAAC, arguing for better pay and living conditions. In 1918 she left to become commander of the fledgling Women’s Royal Air Force. Both auxiliary services were disbanded after the war, but both were brought back in 1938/1939 as the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Gwynne-Vaughan was commander of the ATS from 1939-41. The first woman to be awarded a military DBE, in January 1918, Dame Gwynne-Vaughan oversaw the formation of Britain’s first female auxiliary services.

Born in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire, John’s quiet, understated demeanour and style of painting were often overshadowed by that of her brother, Augustus. Subsequent reappraisals of her life and career have instead revealed a talented artist whose work is increasingly influential

A Dutch track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1948 Olympic Games in London, along with five European Championship golds between 1946 and 1950. While the press dubbed her ‘the flying housewife’, the fact that she had two children before her 1948 triumphs helped to undermine the popular notion that being a mother and being an elite athlete were mutually exclusive.

Founder of a global cosmetics company, Lauder started her eponymous business with her husband in 1946. Known for her marketing acumen, she built a beauty empire – including brands such as Bobbi Brown and Clinique – which eventually made her one of the richest self-made women in the world.

The only woman to have won the top prize in Economics, Ostrom trained as a political scientist after she was rejected for an Economics PhD because she lacked maths training. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009, shared with Oliver Williamson, for her work that showed how commonly owned property such as forests can be used cooperatively and not over-used as economists assumed.

One of the foremost pianists of the Romantic period, Schumann’s career began as a child prodigy and spanned more than six decades. Her works include concertos, quartets and songs, and she also taught generations of piano students in Frankfurt.

Known as Lady Edison for her prolific inventions (after the famous inventor Thomas Edison), Henry is credited with more than 100 inventions including the vacuum ice cream freezer and a bobbin-free sewing machine. She founded two of her own companies and served as a consultant to several others.

Co-author of the seminal book that changed our understanding of the Great Depression and how to prevent it from happening again. A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960, written with Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman, showed that it was monetary policy that caused the Great Crash of 1929 and the subsequent drastic depression.

The third wife of the Prophet Muhammad and daughter of Abu Bakr, the first caliph, Aisha is commemorated by Sunni Muslims as the “Mother of the Believers”.

A Tibetan princess who in the 8^th century had a defining influence on the development of Buddhism. She is commemorated by her followers as a female Buddha, and named the Victorious Ocean of Wisdom.

Famous for a string of influential essays including 1964’s Notes on ‘Camp’, Sontag’s work embraced such diverse interests as sexuality, art and philosophy. Her decades-spanning career also saw her work as a teacher, political activist and filmmaker.

After the death of her professional balloonist husband, Sophie was forced to take over his business to pay off his debts, making her the first female professional balloonist. Crowds flocked to see her and on a number of occasions she was official aviator to both Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XVIII. Her adventures came to an explosive end in 1819 when she became the first woman to die in an aviation accident.

French volcanologist Katia Krafft travelled the world to the edges of human survival, devoting her life to documenting volcanoes and volcanic eruptions in photos and film. Her work was instrumental in gaining the cooperation of local authorities and encouraging them to evacuate the areas surrounding active volcanos. Krafft and her volcanologist husband were both killed while filming the eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan, in 1991.

A superb mathematician, Emilie du Châtelet did much to convince sceptical Europeans that Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was right. But this mother of three also loved to dance, wear fashionable clothes and host dinner parties. Her main aim in life, she maintained, was to enjoy herself – and pleasure included the hard grind of intellectual work.

A Nigerian-born novelist who moved to London in 1962, Emecheta’s books include 1979’s The Joys of Motherhood. Concerned with both the black and female experience, she was awarded an OBE in 2005 for her services to literature.

An Australian swimmer who combined competitive racing and distance feats with aquatic exhibitions, the forerunner of modern synchronised swimming. Kellermann successfully campaigned for rational dress in the sport, facing arrest for indecency in the US for wearing a revolutionary one-piece swimsuit. As well as popularising the modern swimming costume, Kellermann also appeared in films and wrote books and articles on swimming and health.

An Indian writer and essayist and a leading 20th-century poet in the Punjabi language. Recognised with a string of awards throughout her lifetime, her work is by turns feminist, inclusive and deeply humanist.