Celebrating Women's Innovation and Free Thought Quiz

Answer: Beverages

Marie Brizard and Nicole Clicquot stood out as successful entrepreneurs in the beverage industry.

Frenchwoman Marie Brizard (1714-1801), founder of the Marie Brizard Beverage Company, was the third of fifteen children of Pierre Brizard, a barrel carpenter, and his wife Jeanne Laborde. According to the company's website, now called "Marie Brizard Wine and Spirits", in 1755 Marie met an Antilian sailor, named Thomas, who was very ill; she provided the necessary care and in return he gave her an anisette recipe. Marie, at the time 41 years old, and her nephew, Jean-Baptiste Roger, founded the company Marie Brizard & Roger in the same year. The company grew after the launch of other liqueurs and gained fame in the court of Louis XV. Today, Marie Brizard products are available in more than 120 countries and are considered to be of excellent quality.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin (1777-1866) born in Reims, France, was the daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer. At the age of 21, Nicole married François Clicquot, who was also from a wealthy family, in banking, wool trading, and champagne. In 1805, the death of François Clicquot devastated the family, but the young widow (veuve in French) decided to continue the business, becoming one of the first female entrepreneurs in the early 1800s to run an international business. Under Madame Clicquot the house turned fully to champagne production. She also expanded the company and adopted new production techniques. The company was purchased in 1986 by Louis Vuitton, and is now part of the LVMH group, a conglomerate of companies specializing in luxury goods.

Answer: Mathematics

Hypatia of Alexandria and Ada Lovelace stood out in the field of mathematics.

Hypatia (born c. 355 CE - March 415, Alexandria), the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, was a mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, who worked to preserve Greek mathematical and astronomical heritage. Hypatia followed in her father's footsteps, continuing his work. She was also a popular teacher and lecturer, attracting large audiences, and was considered the world's leading mathematician and astronomer in her time. For defending scientific rationalism, she was accused of blasphemy, and was brutally murdered by Christian fanatics.

Augusta Ada Byron King, known as Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), was the daughter of Lord Byron and was married to William King Noel, 1st Count of Lovelace, hence her name. Her penchant for mathematics came early, which brought her closer to Charles Babbage, known as the "father of computers". The notes that accompanied her translation of the Italian Luigi Menabrea article on the Analytical Engine proposed by Babbage were very important in the early history of computers. She is considered the first programmer in history for having developed the algorithms that allowed the machine to compute values of mathematical functions.

Answer: Disobedience

Disobedience and non-submission to orders received made these figures famous.

Lilith is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud as Adam's first wife. She would have been created at the same time and of the same material as Adam. According to legend, she rejected Adam when he tried to force her to be subservient, which is why she had to leave paradise.

Eve was created by God from Adam's rib to keep him company. To remain in the Garden of Eden, they could not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; Eve, convinced by the serpent, not only ate the fruit but induced Adam to eat it, which is why they were expelled from paradise.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Louise McCauley, known as Rosa Parks (1913-2005), refused to give up her bus seat to a white person. This fact precipitated the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and started the civil rights movement in United States.

Answer: Space Travel

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was born in Russia in 1937. She is an engineer and cosmonaut, and was the first woman to go into space, as well as the first woman to take a solo flight. She traveled on the Vostok 6 spacecraft on June 16, 1963, and spent nearly three days in space orbiting the Earth 48 times.

Peggy Annette Whitson was born in Iowa, USA, 1960, and is a biochemistry researcher, retired NASA astronaut, and former NASA Chief Astronaut. Her first mission to space was in 2002 when she spent a period aboard the International Space Station - ISS. In mission 16, which was carried out in 2007, she became the first woman to command the ISS. Her final mission was in 2017 when she became the first woman to command the ISS twice. Altogether she spent 665 days in the space, with a cumulative total of 60 hours and 21 minutes in extravehicular activities (EVA).

Answer: False

Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler (1879-1964), known as Alma Mahler, was born in Vienna and was the daughter of painter Emil Schindler and his wife Anna Sofie. Always living in an artistic environment, early in her life, she showed an interest in music and composition.

When she married composer Gustav Mahler, who was 19 years her senior, she was discouraged from composing. In a prenuptial letter, Mahler made it clear that the role of composer and provider was his. It would be up to her to be a loving and understanding companion.

She accepted the situation but little by little this situation depressed her. It was only when the marriage was already in ruins and Alma was involved in an affair with the architect Walter Gropius, that Mahler decided to support Alma, encouraging her to compose and editing her compositions.

However, the change of heart came too late, because soon after Gustav Mahler passed away.

Answer: They were women

These two writers named George were in fact women who wrote under a male pseudonym. It was their way of entering in the closed world of men, a way to circumvent prejudice towards women writers.

George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), a French novelist, journalist and memorialist, who had immense success in the 1830s and 1840s, being considered a notable writer of the European Romantic era. She began to publish with the writer Jules Sand, and in 1832 began her career as an independent writer, using the male name George Sand. Not only did she use a male name, but she also wore men's clothing and with that she had access to male-exclusive locations. She is considered to be the first professional female fiction writer.

George Eliot is the pseudonym of the Englishwoman Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), who was a translator, poet, journalist and novelist. As she was known as a translator, she decided to publish novels under a male pseudonym so that there were no other considerations about her work. There was great curiosity about the author, whose identity was finally discovered. She wrote seven novels that were very successful.

Answer: True

Marriage with younger partners has always drawn the attention of society. However, in our society the marriage of women to younger men is more criticized than when men marry younger women.

Agatha Christie (1890-1976), after separating from her husband, married in 1930 the prominent English archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. She accompanied him on his expeditions which ended up being the background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. The successful marriage lasted until the writer's death in 1976.

In 2017, when Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France, the most talked about subject was the age difference between he and his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years older. It should be noted that during Donald Trump's election campaign in 2016, the age difference between he and Melania, which is also 24 years, was not the subject of discussion.

Answer: She decline the prize and not go to Stockholm

Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish, naturalized French chemist and physicist, who led pioneering work on radioactivity, together with her husband, Pierre Curie. They and the physicist Henri Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.

After Pierre Curie died in an accident in 1906, Marie continued to work, but her life was not easy. In addition to the professional difficulties she had other problems when her involvement with the physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre Curie's, a married man, became public. On this occasion, she had been informed that she would receive the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium. Under pressure from some members of the Swedish Academy, the Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius sent her a cable advising her to decline the prize until her name was clear. She replied that the prize she would receive was for her discoveries and that she could not accept the principle that the appreciation of scientific work was influenced by considerations about the researcher's private life. She went to Stockholm to receive the award and became the first person to receive two awards and the first to receive awards in two different areas.

Answer: Biochemistry

Katalin Karikó (1955) is a Hungarian biochemist who since 1978 has focused her research on messenger ribonucleic acid - mRNA, first discovered in 1961 at Caltech. Her idea was simple: use mRNA molecules in the immunizer to teach cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune system response. In 1985, she immigrated to the United States, struggled to find support for her research until 1998 when she started working with immunologist Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania.

Traditional vaccines involve injecting dead viral remnants into the body. New vaccines use modified mRNA in the immunizer to teach cells to produce proteins that stimulate the production of antibodies to fight off disease. However, this provoked an inflammatory process that made its use unfeasible. Katalin Karikó, with the help of Drew Weissman, developed a method to prevent the inflammatory response to synthetic mRNA. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.

Derrick Rossi, a Canadian biologist and entrepreneur realized the potential of Karikó's findings and co-founded Moderna Therapeutics in 2010, which works on the development of medicine and mRNA vaccines. According to Rossi, the work developed by Katalin Karikó paved the way for the development of vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech to combat COVID 19.

Answer: Filmmaking

Alice Ida A. Guy-Blanché (née Guy, 1873-1968) was a French and American pioneer filmmaker, active in the late 19th century. In 1894, she started to work for the camera manufacturing and photography supply Léon Gaumont company. In 1895, Alice observed that films were used only for promotional and scientific purposes and realized the possibilities of other uses. She asked Gaumont permission to make her own film with the incorporation of fictional stories. Guy-Blanché's film is the first narrative film in the world, entitled "The Cabbage Fairy" in 1896. From 1906 to 1907 she directed about 100 short "sound" pictures.

In 1907 she married Herbert Blaché and moved to the USA where they founded The Solax Company. As president of Solax, she directed 40 to 50 films and supervised nearly 300 other productions. In 1922, when Alice and Herbert were officially divorced, she returned to France where she had practically been forgotten. Over time she discovered that many of her accomplishments had been forgotten and had been credited to her male colleagues. Only in 1953, the French government awarded her the Legion of Honor, followed by other awards. Today she is recognized as the first woman director and generally recognized as being the first director to film a narrative history.