Mamie had begun the research, and had carried it through in spite of great domestic and professional responsibilities, and yet in the few later publications that mentioned this contribution at all, credit was unilaterally given to Kenneth for submitting the results to the NAACP rather than to Mamie for having originated them.

She honed in on what would make women useful and intellectually fulfilled, rather than what would make them pliant and pleasant companions. She declared that, yes, a woman should know all the arts of household maintenance, so that she could do anything that life required in terms of her own self-preservation without idly relying upon others. But practical household skills were not to be the extent of her kingdom – that knowledge must be supplemented by regular reading, directed with passion and sympathy from an early age, in history and, most importantly, in science. She recommended several periodicals containing detailed science articles that should be included in the reading regimen of girls, and advocated also for the inculcating of a love of nature through first gardening, and then botany more generally.

Worrying that they wouldn’t take a woman correspondent seriously, Germain pretended to be a Monsieur Leblanc and wrote to both Lagrange and Gauss, asking questions and forwarding mathematical proposals that favorably impressed them both. Her mind stood out even amongst her generation of mathematical geniuses, and when they eventually found out her secret, that she was a self-taught woman, their admiration only increased.

At the core of the Benchley approach was the motto of putting animal care at the head of the zoo’s list of priorities. Animals were to be given as much space as possible, with terrain features that matched the animals’ natural behaviors. Against much professional advice, she spear-headed an initiative to develop a cage-less enclosure, creating large open air grottos surrounded by moats in place of the de rigeur steel cages of the past. She also ensured that each animal had a separate private area which they always had access to, a place they could go when they felt stressed or anxious, even if it meant their public exhibit remained empty. The zoo, at last, was about the animals, not the audience.

“I was either going to be a forest ranger or do some sort of research in science. That’s what interested me,” says Karen in a chapter about her work featured in Women in Mathematics. “I did not want to teach. I regarded anything to do with people as being sort of a horrible profession.”

produced and copyrighted in 1915, when she was just 21 years old. It highlighted the hypocrisy of opposition to voting rights for women, and illustrated the struggle young women faced in a world that offered few professional opportunities.

“Right now, there are 10,000 women fighting life-or-death battles against ISIS for the liberation of women in the Middle East.” Among them is Hanna Bohman, a Canadian civilian who put her life on hold to join the fight. Her powerful story is being told in Fear Us Women, a new short documentary that offers “a most intimate look inside the brave female soldiers fighting one of the most dangerous wars on the planet”, and is now at the top of our must-see streaming list.

Women were not allowed to attend meetings of any scientific society in Great Britain at the time, and none of the men who made their fame on thrilling the public with tales of the new find felt it necessary to mention Mary Anning in their discourses, a pattern of opportunistic neglect that would plague Anning’s work the rest of her life.