Great Readaloud Biographies for Women’s History Month
For Women’s History Month, take a homeschool road trip to some woman-powered regions of history that don’t always show up in traditional textbooks.
A note about reading levels: People ask me about reading levels a lot, and the truth is that I don’t think about reading levels a lot. I have had my most advanced high school students write dense academic papers about children’s and middle grades books, and I read Finnegan’s Wake to my daughter when she was in the NICU. In other words, I think if the book and the reader match, the reading level doesn’t really matter that much. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I would absolutely read all of these books with my tween and teen homeschooler and feel like we were doing solid academic work together.
Margaret Knight
With her father’s toolbox and her sketchbook of inventions, Mattie Knight could — and did — make almost anything, including flat-bottomed paper bags (which we still use today), a metal guard that protected textile factory workers from flying shuttles, and a numbering machine. In fact, she held 87 U.S. patents, earning her the nickname the “Lady Edison.”
Read more about her in:
Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully
Bessie Coleman
Growing up in rural Texas, Coleman yearned to get out of the cotton fields and into school, so she made learning part of her life, checking the foreman’s numbers every day to practice her math. In her 20s, she moved to Chicago, where she learned French in order to study flying in France, where she became the first African-American pilot.
Read more about her in:
Fly High!: The Story of Bessie Coleman by Louise Borden
Elizabeth Blackwell
There weren’t any women doctors when Elizabeth Blackwell was growing up in the 1830s — so it’s not very surprising that the plucky girl met plenty of resistance (including 28 medical school rejections — ouch!) when she decided she wanted to be a doctor. Blackwell’s determination and hard work carried the day, however, and Dr. Blackwell became the first female doctor in the United States.
Read more about her in:
Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors?: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell by Tanya Lee Stone
Caitlin O’Connell
Scientist Caitlin O’Connell made an amazing discovery while studying elephants at Erosha National Park in Namibia: The elephants communicated with each other by “hearing” vibrations through special sensory cells in their feet.
Read more about her in:
The Elephant Scientist by Caitlin O’Connell
Ada Lovelace
Sorry, Steve Jobs, but Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace may just be the pioneering genius behind modern day computer science. Lady Byron steered her daughter toward science and mathematics, which inspired her to work wit Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor whose Difference Engine is often considered the first proto-computer.
Read more about her in:
Emmy Noether
Albert Einstein called Noether the most important woman in the history of mathematics, and even if you’ve never heard her name before, you’re familiar with her work if you’ve ever studied abstract algebra or theoretical physics.
Read more about her in:
Emmy Noether: The Mother of Modern Algebra by M.B.W. Tent
Queen Emma of Normandy
The grandmother of William the Conqueror, Emma of Normandy deserves her own spot in history. Emma, who married two kings and gave birth to two kings, helped shape French and English history during the tumultuous 11th century.
Read more about her in:
Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love, and Greed in 11th Century England by Harriet O’Brien
Anne Carroll Moore
Kids owe more than they know to Moore, who helped create the young reader-friendly libraries we know today. Moore shook things up at the New York Public Library during her tenure there from 1906 to 1941, creating the first children’s reading room, extending library checkout privileges to children, and arguably helping to launch the children’s literature boom of the 20th century.
Read more about her in:
Maria Anna Mozart
Maria Anna was Mozart’s sister — and history suggests that she may have been just as talented as her younger brother, though after a few years as a child prodigy pianist, Maria Anna was forced to give up music for more ladylike pursuits and a suitable marriage.
Read more about her in:
Mozart’s Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music by Jane Glover
Josephine Baker
Born into poverty in turn-of-the-century St. Louis, Josephine Baker would become one of the icons of the Jazz Age, a dazzling performer whose singing and dancing earned her international acclaim. Baker’s professional triumphs are especially notable considering the racist climate of the United States in the early 1900s.
Read more about her in:
Jazz Age Josephine by Jonah Winter
Mary Shelley
Though best-known for her famous relations (she was the daughter of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and radical philosopher William Godwin, as well as the wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelly) and for her “monster novel” Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was one of the pioneers in the field of short stories, a critic, editor, literary travel journalist, poet, and devoted mother.
Read more about her in:
Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour
Beverly Cleary
The writer who brought us Ralph S. Mouse, Ramona Quimby, and Henry Huggins always had an empathy for children trying to navigate the complicated rules of the adult world.
Read more about her in:
A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
Henrietta Leavitt
Leavitt’s work at the Harvard Observatory in the early 1900s was supposed to be methodical and uncreative, but Leavitt was too intelligent to record without analyzing. Using blinking stars to determine brightness and distance from the Earth, Leavitt helped astronomers understand that the universe was much larger than anyone had previously suspected.
Read more about her in:
Look Up!: Henrietta Leavitt, Pioneering Woman Astronomer by Robert Burleigh
Amelia Earhart
Everyone knows Earhart’s story: An intrepid pilot , she vanished with her plane without trace on her last daredevil flight. But there’s a lot more to her story than many people know, from her carefully maintained image (she curled her straight hair every single day to give it that “carefree and easy” look) to her surprising business savvy.
Read more about her in:
Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming
Patience Wright
One of colonial America’s most celebrated artists, Wright worked as a spy for the the United States during the Revolutionary War, smuggling information from England in her artwork.
Read more about her in:
Patience Wright: American Sculptor and Revolutionary Spy by Pegi Deitz Shea
Zora Neale Hurston
Dramatic, talented, and more complicated than you might have realized, Zora Neale Hurston lived a life as fascinating as her novels. Her struggle to balance her own literary ambitions with the pressure from her peers to communicate “the Black Experience” may fascinate older readers and trigger engaging conversations.
Read more about her in:
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd
Sarah Edmonds
Nineteen-year-old Sarah Edmonds was one of many women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War, but that was just the beginning. Edmonds also disguised herself as a black slave to spy for the Union Army and helped tend wounded soldiers on and off the battlefield.
Read more about her in:
Irena Sendler
During World War II, Sendler helped rescue some 2,500 Jewish children in German-occupied Poland by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto with false papers and placing them with sympathetic Polish families. She was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo but survived the war, after which she tried to reunite the children she had saved with their families.
Read more about her in:
Irena’s Jars of Secrets by Marcia Vaughan
Marie Curie
Marie Curie may be one of the best-known women in science, but you probably don’t know her as well as you think you do. The first person to win two Nobel Prizes (in two different sciences, no less), Curie lived a fascinating life in turn-of-the-20th-century Paris and started research that would literally change the world in the century to come.
Read more about her in:
Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss
Alice Coachman
Coachman, who grew up in segregated Georgia during the 1930s, became the first black woman to win an Olympic medal (in 1948). Coachman’s story is inspiring not just because of her talent (she was named one of the top 100 Olympic athletes of all time in 1996) but because of how much she overcame to achieve her dream.
Read more about her in:
Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper by Ann Malaspina
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