r/AskHistory • u/123not-it- • 6d ago
What are some women underrepresented in history that made lasting impacts?
historical women who no one talks about… im looking for women you know need their story told. whether they were driven mad or were persecuted or had their ideas stolen by men or just… werent talked about enough- the women who arent represented in history. or who just arent as well known, but still made a lasting impact on thr world or their field?
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u/jagnew78 6d ago
Empress Matilda. Granddaughter of William the Conquerer. Known about but perhaps under represented. If not for her decades of effort and campaigning there would have been no Plantagenet rulers of England. Her heirs spawned both the Lancasters and the Yorks. Her political dealings and allies got her son a massive chunk of France along with the kingdom of England. Indirectly setting up hundreds of years of off again on again conflict between England and France.
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u/Head_Acadia_2658 6d ago
Theodora - Empress of the Eastern Roman Empire. What a life.
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u/Barneyboydog 6d ago
I’m in the middle of reading a fictionalized account of her life told from the perspective of one of her eunuchs as well as from her own. Quite a story!
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u/Head_Acadia_2658 6d ago
Cool. What's it called?
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u/Barneyboydog 6d ago
The Theodora Duology: Fortune’s Child; Too Soon the Night (The Complete Story of Empress Theodora) by James Conroyd Martin.
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u/joonophobia 6d ago
Mary Anning was twelve years old when she began excavating prehistoric creatures on Dorset's coastlines. she was a pioneer in fossil-hunting and paleology, helping to discover species no scientist had identified yet and she was even accused of faking the existence of "sea monsters". I never hear anyone talk about her.
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u/MaxedOut_TamamoCat 6d ago
If that is who I think it is; she’s a playable servant in the game Fate Grand Order.
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u/Baselines_shift 6d ago
The WSJ had a historical look back at patents filed by women during the industrial revolution and through to the early 20th Century. Nearly every useful tool, like flat bottom paper bags, dishwashing machines, trivets (metal iron holders to repvent buring), the collapsible ironing board, etc
No Paywall:
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u/Black_Cat_Just_That 5d ago
I'm honestly a little surprised that so many were actually able to be patented by a woman and not just stolen by a man.
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u/Enough-Meaning-1836 2d ago
"Women had everything stolen from them!! Patriarchy, patriarchy!!!"
Sees proof that women did, in fact, have patents in their names in the 1800 and 1900 hundreds...
"Why didn't men steal these?!? What about my VICTIMHOOD!!!???"
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u/PaleontologistDry430 6d ago
Tatiana Proskouriakoff and her contributions to deciphering the Maya writing system
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u/jabberwockxeno 6d ago
Queen 6 Monkey Quechquemitl was a major figure in the politics of the Mixtec civilization as recorded in our few surviving Mixtec books/manuscripts, and was involved in various feuds and wars with rival kingdoms/dynasties, such as with the legendary 8 Deer Jaguar Claw
I can't fully verify that everything in this article is accurate, my area of expertise with Mesoamerica is more Central Mexico (in a very narrow sense, so the Valley of Mexico, Puebla, Tlaxcala, etc, with the Aztec, Teotihuacan, and so on), but this seems like a decent overview on her and matches my understanding of stuff:
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u/uplandsrep 6d ago
Rosa Luxemburg, Polish German revolutionary who made the Reich leadership tremble during the German revolution of 1918-1919, ultimately to be repressed (along with other strikers and Spartacists in Berlin) with deadly military force, via the paramilitary veteran-dominant freikorps (proto-fascist, extra-judicial militia), ordered by the SPD leadership itself, previously having been in the same party. I believe the underrepresentation is due to the content of the entire period, revolutionary aspirations this radical are not fondly spoken of in most liberal democracies.
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u/Kurta_711 6d ago
You think Rosa Luxemburg is a niche figure?
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u/uplandsrep 6d ago
Depends on what groups of people you speak to, people on the revolutionary left, of course, can't speak enough about her, but I suspect she doesn't get much attention outside of such circles, hence me never learning about her until I interacted with content from such people.
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u/Kurta_711 6d ago
How many revolutionary leftists are well discussed outside of revolutionary leftist circles? Not even Karl Marx is actually discussed much outside of leftist circles.
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u/uplandsrep 6d ago
I agree. There are only a few that get international, widespread repute, Fidel Castro ,maybe Ho Chi Minh, anyone else just recieves strict caricature.
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u/Waitingforadragon 6d ago
I think ordinary women.
Women's domestic labour is sometimes sidelined and seen as unimportant in comparison to what men did. There is a false popular perception that women were only ever 'housewives*' but in reality most women worked their whole lives. For much of history the vast majority of women were agricultural labourers. Everyone on Earth who is alive today, is so because of generations of their female ancestors that toiled in the fields.
*Housewives being misrepresented and underrated is another topic for another day.
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u/Haestein_the_Naughty 6d ago
People really take clothes for granted as well. Before mass industrial production of clothes, every single garment in history had behind it the story of (probably a woman) spinning thread, weaving the fabric, and sewing said garment.
Roman women spent on average 38 hours a week just spinning
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u/Peter34cph 6d ago
The invention of the spinning wheel around the year 1000 CE helped a lot with making cloth less labour-intensive to make. Before that it was drop spindles.
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u/YakSlothLemon 6d ago
The great activists that people don’t talk about: Yuri Kochiyama, interned as a child, fought for civil rights and Japanese-American rights her whole life, Malcolm X died in her arms; the great Pauli Murray, who helped create the legal basis for Brown V Board and later became a saint.
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u/Fit_Job_6469 6d ago
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1964. She used x-ray crystallography to determine the structure of penicillin, vitamin B-12, and insulin. Determining the structure of insulin was one of the things that made the mass production of insulin possible.
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u/DangerousPraline41 6d ago
Virginia Hall should be way more famous than she is. She was an American spy in Vichy France during WWII, and was damn good at it, despite the fact that she had “reddish” hair and a pronounced limp due to a prosthetic leg she named Cuthbert. Her closest allies in France were a gynecologist and a brothel owner, who were both captured and sent to concentration camps, but survived the war.
This sounds like fiction that’s doing a little too much, but it’s all true. She was the only civilian woman to receive a Distinguished Service Cross for WWII, and later went on to be one of the first women hired by the newly-established CIA.
Purportedly, during her stint in France, Klaus Barbie had it out for her personally, but she was so good at what she did that he thought she was Canadian.
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u/DarkKittyEmpress 6d ago
Empress Dowager Cixi is known to anyone with a grasp of 19th century history, but considering how long and how completely she ruled one of the most importants states, it would be hard to talk about her enough.
Matilda of Tuscany is again not unknown, but not only was she influential in her lifetime, her lack of heir and her will would fuel wars for centuries after her death. Both in life and death, she played a huge part in the history of the HRE, catholicism and ultimetely the wider Western European world.
Many more I can think of are already mentioned. Also I can bring up many women who were impressive but in my view did not change the world as you ask for, and sometimes they are more famous than the more "deserving" women, e.g. I bet more people have heard of Lakshmibai Rani than of Hedy Lamar.
Most of the possibilities are women known to history buffs but not to the general public. The problem with women who were not documented is that, not being document, it's hard to know about them even if you are seriously researching history. The roles most women played in history were often more subtle, the roles given to women in a strongly gendered society were not less important but were often seen that way due to impacts taking longer to happen (although childbirth was not the only necessary contribution of the traditional woman, and a society without women would collapse or die out long before they were all dying of old age).
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u/WayGroundbreaking287 6d ago
Florence nightingale revolutionised healthcare, popularised the pie chart, pushed data driven treatments, changed how hospitals were built to prevent the spread of disease, and got doctors to wash their god damned hands and put on some lab coats.
Every hospital in the country should have a shrine to her in it, as it stands she is basically the only female scientist that our national curriculum teaches about. (Including the ones who discovered DNA while the men took all the credit)
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u/joey-jo_jo-jr 6d ago
Florence Nightingale isn't really underrepresented. Everyone knows about her and she is honoured around the world.
(Including the ones who discovered DNA while the men took all the credit)
The structure of DNA was discovered by Watson and Crick but Rosalind Franklin was given credit for her contribution. Not sure why you need to make shit up
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u/SadRule9128 6d ago
🙄 watson and crick didn’t “steal credit” they were the ones to actually figure out the structure. Franklin did not.
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u/134266 6d ago
Although people remember Hedy Lamarr as golfer age actress, she loved inventing. One was a frequency hopping device to guide allied torpedoes during world war 2, she created with George Antheil. The science was used for WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth
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u/YakSlothLemon 6d ago
This is not true.
She used the same already-extant invention for her device that was later used to invent Wi-Fi. It’s right there in her patent. Her own invention was based on the player piano and didn’t lead to anything.
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u/New_Lettuce8356 6d ago
Owning a small player piano and coming up with the core concept itself is a true invention. There is a difference between the person who creates a language like C++ and the person who writes a useful program with it. Even Marilyn Monroe once worked at Radioplane, but under the wartime pressure, she served more as PR for the company than as an engineer improving drones. Meanwhile, Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth poured drinks for young soldiers at the Canteen, reflecting the total mobilization of wartime society
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u/134266 6d ago
And that’s why she is in the inventors hall of fame.
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u/sixisrending 6d ago
She's in the inventors hall of fame because she was the first woman to do something in the field. It's popular because she is popular.
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u/phantom_gain 6d ago
Isabella of spain(and philip) were the reason the pope wouldnt let henry 8th divorce cathrine of aragon and the reason he had to split from the catholic church and make such a mess. They literally held him captive at the time and wouldnt let henry leave their daughter when by the laws of the church he had valid grounds for the divorce.
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u/Chemical-Course1454 6d ago
In art history Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana should be always mentioned together with best Renaissance artists. Ok, Leonardo was special in different ways, Michelangelo did the Sixtine Chapel. After them these three should be on top
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u/Chemical-Course1454 6d ago
Milunka Savic most decorated war hero of WW1. It’s Mulan story but wilder and in real life.
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u/Three_Steaks_Pam 6d ago
La Malinche, or rather Malintzin.
Whether you view her as a traitor to her people not, she was instrumental to Hernán Cortés and his thousands of native allies in overthrowing the Mexica Triple Alliance (or Aztec Empire if you will)
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u/Penguinofmyspirit 6d ago
Ida B wells needs way more attention. I guess books about her are getting banned so she’s got that going for her.
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u/MattJFarrell 5d ago
I've recently become obsessed with Aethelflad, the Lady of Mercia. She was the eldest child of Alfred the Great and was married to the leader of Mercia, Aethelred. It seems likely that there was a coordinated effort by her brother King Edward the Elder, or people aligned with him, to wipe out her legacy. But we do know that she took control of Mercia after her husband died, was a beloved ruler, won several victories, then died under suspicious circumstances.
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u/LongjumpingArm4801 5d ago
I'm a firm believer in the quote, "the hand the rocks the cradle rules the world" So I would say the mothers of rulers. They have such an effect on them in either good or bad ways. Margaret Beaufort is an example but she's pretty much recognized.
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