Some Eminent Women of Our Times (which has been renamed Some Eminent Women of the 19th century) was written by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett in 1889.

It is available in the public domain and contains short biographies of various women who achieved great things both socially and in the literary field.

The women Dame Millicent includes were singled out by her because of their unstinting dedication, selflessness, and in many cases bravery to do what they thought was right. This was at a time at a time when women were afforded very few rights, education, or appreciation of any kind beyond that which was expected of a woman and her duty as mother, career, and wife.

I will add that when the book was written, the work reflected the values and social norms of that time, and some terminology that we may find unacceptable today was still used. I have left this as the author intended because it is relevant for the writing and for the time.

The author was a brilliant, courageous, and hard-working woman of her time, instrumental in obtaining votes for women in Britain, she was also a loving wife and mother. She is worthy of her own place in this book and a short biography has been included by the editor, Lianne Walker.

The list (23 in total) includes the likes of Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Queen Louisa of Prussia, and The American Abolitionists to name a few.

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Mary Somerville née  Fairfax (1780-1872), was a self-taught mathematician and polymath from Jedburgh in Scotland.

She is the person for whom the word scientist was invented. She studied mathematics and astronomy and was admitted as one of the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society, together with Caroline Herschel. She was also a tutor and friend to Ada Lovelace.

Her acclaimed translation, “The Mechanisms of the Heavens”, from French to English of Pierre Laplace’s ground-breaking book on celestial mechanics, with her own additions, became a standard university textbook. Her book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences became one of the best-selling science books of the nineteenth century, highlighting the underlying unity of scientific disciplines.

She campaigned for votes and education for women and said “Age has not abated my zeal for the emancipation of my sex from the unreasonable prejudice too prevalent in Great Britain against a literary and scientific education for women.”

The word scientist was first used in 1834 in a review of Mary’s work by William Whewell (1794-1866), Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and her personal friend. He was conscious that people working in scientific disciplines needed a more specific word than ‘philosopher’ to describe them: he coined ‘scientist’ by analogy with ‘artist’ and ‘economist.’

When Mary Somerville died in 1872 at the age of 92, still working on her latest dissertation on the day before she died, it was written: “Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science.”

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