An inspirational woman a day keeps the doom scrolling away

The culmination of a global social media campaign highlighting history's lesser-known female figures, a new non-fiction book from the bestselling Labyrinth author aims to help youngsters celebrate greatness and turn back the rise on online hate

- By Kate Mosse

DURING those dark days of Covid when we were all confined to our homes and missing the joy of the wider community, I wanted to do something positive to cheer myself and others up. So in January 2021, I asked strangers on social media to nominate a woman from history they thought should be better known and celebrated.

It turned into a unique and quite special piece of social history research. Within days, I had literally thousands of responses: some from boys and girls wanting to nominate their mum or the auntie who'd brought them up, but many others were incredible lesser-known women from the pages of history. One Italian boy suggested the extraordinary Jewish-Italian scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini, a chemistry professor who had been forced from her post by the racist policies of Mussolini's government in the 1930s before managing to escape to America where she became a leading light in the treatment of cerebral palsy. The oldest living Nobel Laureate, she was still lecturing when she died in January 2012 at the age of 103.

Another suggestion came from a young girl in China, who wanted to mark the Chinese poet Ding Ling, who had been purged from the Communist Party in the mid-20th century and seen her work banned. A teenager in Cardiff nominated the courageous German campaigner Sophie Scholl, who co-founded the anti-Nazi White Rose group with her brother to stand up against hate and antisemitism and was caught and brutally executed before she turned 21.

Those were the tip of a very large iceberg. Indeed, by the late spring, more than 10,000 people from all over the world had joined the #WomanInHistory campaign and shared the stories of so many incredible women from all eras of history, doing every kind of thing under the sun. It reinforced my belief that most people want to celebrate the best, the bravest, the most astonishing and most selfless of humanity rather than spend their days trolling those with whom they don't agree.