In nineteenth century America, young women took to studying botany—a conjoining of interest, social acceptance, and readily available schooling.

Medieval convents were better funded than many scholars assume, thanks in part to royal patrons sympathetic to the holy women’s mission.

Public option held that too much exercise could lead to women who were too “masculine.” One of the early players in the British Ladies’ Football Club, a Miss Gilbert, was called “Tommy” or “Little Tommy” by the crowd and press because of her gender ambiguity—many were sure she must be a boy because she played too well for a female.

A scholar, poet, playwright, philosopher, and composer, in her lifetime Sor Juana (1648-1695) was known as the Tenth Muse and the Phoenix of America. She used humor call attention to the inequality of male-female relationships in a non-confrontational manner and make women aware of the masculine images of femininity imposed upon them. Her satires also took on the double standard of men who solicit sex outside marriage while insisting on marrying virgins.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Irish women, who had traditionally only spun flax into thread, took over the traditionally male job of weaving linen as well.

The famous activist Emma Goldman called de Cleyre “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” In her short life, she would publish “hundreds of works—poems, sketches, essays, lectures, pamphlets, translations, and short stories,” writes scholar Eugenia DeLamotte. And yet de Cleyre would be largely excluded from history for the next century because of her radical stance.

“Bluestocking” is a name, often used in a derogatory way, for an intellectual or literary woman. But this was not the word’s original connotation. The story of the first Bluestockings began in mid-1700’s Britain, when groups of women came together to discuss social and educational matters with men. They were mostly well-off and conservative, but their gatherings were fairly radical for the time and place, which belittled female intellect and made little allowance for education for girls and women.

Titles of her poems—”A World Made By Atoms,” “All Things Are Governed By Atoms,” “Of Vacuum,” “The Motion of the Blood,” “Of Stars,” “The Circle of the Brain Cannot Be Squared”—attest to her fascination with the science of the day. But she wasn’t simply a science communicator: she is said to be the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society in 1667.

From World War I to the 1950s, American women who had, or were suspected of having, venereal diseases, or who were merely considered “promiscuous,” were put into detention centers, reformatories, and quarantine in an effort to keep soldiers from contracting V.D. Both federal and state authorities implemented this “American Plan.”

Mitchell became the first librarian on an island where women took charge of both civic and economic matters because men were away at sea for years at a time. She kept her eye on the skies, thought, and in 1847, she noticed something that wasn’t on any sky chart. It was a comet, soon to be known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” The discovery made her internationally famous. She won a gold medal from the King of Denmark and was granted membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—”in spite of being a woman,” according to the Academy’s own Report for 1848.

For their part, suffragists realized early on the power of the newsreel, pioneered in the U.S. in 1911 by Pathé. Filmed marches and demonstrations spread the word about women’s suffrage much better than suffragists “giving speeches to each other in public.” But newsreels were double-edged: the same footage of a huge 1912 suffrage parade in New York found its way into an anti-suffrage film and the movement’s own Votes for Women (1912).