World HERstory Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alabama

On 2 March 1955, Claudette Colvin was on the way home on the bus from school in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver ordered her to leave her seat to let a white woman sit. After a long standoff, she was arrested, assaulted and verbally abused by the police, then charged with and convicted of resisting arrest and violating the city segregation laws which had been in place since 1900.

The NAACP, looking for a test case to challenge the bus policy in the courts, felt Colvin would not fit the bill since she was young, pregnant, working class and feisty.

The arrest on 1 December 1955 of Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, was somewhat of a planned event, as Parks was much more of a "respectable" figure.

Answer: Germany

"The Adventures of Prince Achmed", based on stories from "One Thousand and One Nights", is the oldest surviving feature length animation. Reiniger employed an original and laborious silhouette-based animation technique. Her subsequent movies included "Doctor Dolittle and his Animals" and "Papageno".

Incidentally, there were two earlier full-length animations, by the Argentinian, Quirino Cristiani, "The Apostle"(1917) and "Leaving No Trace"(1918), but they have been lost to fire.

Answer: uranium

Ida Noddack (nee Tacke) (1896-1978) was a German physicist and chemist who was one of the discoverers of rhenium (one of the then gaps in the Periodic Table) in 1925. In 1934, Enrico Fermi was studying the results of bombarding uranium with neutrons.

He felt that larger atomic number elements were formed. Noddack contradicted the great man and posited "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbours of the irradiated element." She worked with her husband Walter, and was nominated for a Nobel Prize on three occasions.

Answer: Iceland

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Iceland's first female prime minister on 1 February 2009. She had served in the Althing since 1978. She entered into a civil union with the writer Jónína Leósdóttir in 2002, and they were one of the first Icelandic same-sex couples to marry when that became legal in 2010.

She served as prime minister from 2009-2013, and her government stood up for women's rights, including making Iceland the first western democracy to ban strip clubs.

Answer: Voyager

Laurie Spiegel (born Chicago, 1945) was a composer and pioneer in electronic music who developed a software tool called "Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument" in 1986. Her realisation of the book "Harmonices Mundi" ("Harmony of The Worlds") by the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler was chosen as the start of the "sounds of earth" section of the Voyager Golden Record, which also featured recordings of volcanoes, dogs, a tractor and a kiss. The Golden Record was developed by NASA to communicate something of the earth and its inhabitants to extra-terrestrial civilisations.

Two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977. Voyager 1, the furthest spacecraft from earth, entered interstellar space in 2012 while continuing to return data to earth.

Answer: New Zealand

Probably the finest New Zealand pilot, and finest female pilot of the golden age of aviation, Jean Batten (1909-1982) decided to become a pilot when, aged 18, she was taken for a flight by the famous Australian aviator, Charles Kingsford Smith. She made many record breaking solo flights including one from England to Brazil for which she became the first non-royal recipient of the Order of the Southern Cross, which was one of many awards and honours bestowed on "the Greta Garbo of the skies".

Answer: The Holy Land

An English adventurer, Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope (1776-1839) had an eventful life. Disowned by her father, she moved in with her uncle, the British statesman William Pitt the Younger and acted as hostess for him when he returned to being Prime Minister in 1804.

When he died in 1806 she fell on hard times and became ill, leaving England in 1810 to travel to warmer climes around the Mediterranean for the sake of her health. She learned Arabic and Turkish. When a boat she was travelling on got shipwrecked on Rhodes, she was given Turkish clothes in place of her wet outfit and she adopted them for the rest of her life.

In 1813 she travelled to Palmyra with Bedouins, who treated her as royalty. In 1815 she persuaded the Ottoman authorities that a manuscript she had found would enable her to locate millions of gold coins for them at the ancient site of the ruined Ashkelon mosque (now in Israel).

The excavation unearthed evidence of previous use as a church and a pagan temple. A marble statue was discovered, which, controversially, Stanhope ordered to be smashed and thrown into the sea, reasoning that she did not want anyone to assume her motives were to take ancient artefacts.

She died a recluse, never returning to England.

Answer: Margaret Sanger

Inspired by advances in Europe, Mindell, Byrne, and Sanger opened their clinic in October 1916. Cue for celebration and praise? Not quite. An undercover police operation discovered that they were dispensing contraceptives, which was in contravention of the Comstock laws that banned "Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use", which included pornography as well as contraceptives and literature about birth control.

The women were arrested on multiple occasions. Sanger and Byrne were both sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse, and Byrne was force-fed when she went on hunger strike.

At Sanger's trial the presiding judge said that women should not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception". Eventually they won a victory in 1918 at the New York Court of Appeals that determined that doctors were allowed to prescribe contraception. Sanger went on to establish the American Birth Control League and International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Answer: Emmy

Shirley Dinsdale (1926-1999) was given a ventriloquist dummy when she was five years old to help her convalescence after an accident. She named the dummy Judy Splinters and started working on local radio in San Francisco in 1941. She moved on to bigger shows with the Nelson Eddy and Eddie Cantor.

She went on to do over 500 performances for the United Services Organizations during WWII. Post-war she got to work in TV, winning the inaugural Emmy award, for Outstanding Television Personality, in 1949. In 1953 she retired from show business and she went on to have a successful second career as a cardiopulmonary therapist.

Answer: Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) volunteered for the United States Navy Reserve during WWII, working on the Harvard Mark I computer in the Bureau of Ships Computation Project. When she was working on a Harvard Mark II computer in 1947, a moth was found to have stopped the computer working properly, which led to the use of the term "bug". Hopper worked on the team developing the UNIVAC I, the USA's first commercial computer.

While there, she developed the world's first compiler - a program that translates source code into code executable by a computer. Hopper developed languages, such as FLOW-MATIC that made programming more "English-like", and led to the development in 1959 of COBOL (Common business-oriented language), which became the dominant computer language in business data processing for decades.

She retired from the US Navy at 79, and worked as a consultant for DEC until her death aged 85.