My Top Ten Women in History Movies:

30 March, 2026 Siobhan Marie Day 0 Comments 1 category

March, designated as Women’s History Month, offers an opportunity not just to celebrate the achievements of women across history, but to interrogate how those stories are told — and who gets to tell them. At MoviesToHistory.com, that mission sits at the core of everything we do: examining the intersection of cinema and historical truth. This month, with Hidden Figures as our Featured Film Blog of the Month, the spotlight turns toward narratives that reclaim, reframe, and, in many cases, rescue women’s contributions from the margins of both history books and Hollywood scripts.

Women's History Month. Women of different ages, nationalities and religions come together. Vector.

Directed by Theodore Melfi, Screenplay by Allison Schroeder, and Theodore Melfi, Based on "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race" by Margot Lee Shetterly, Produced by Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Pharrell Williams, and Theodore Melfi, Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge, and Glen Powell, with Cinematography by Mandy Walker, Edited by Peter Teschner, with Music by Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams, and Benjamin Wallfisch, Production companies: Fox 2000 Pictures, Chernin Entertainment, Levantine Films, and Distributed by 20th Century Fox (2016)

Directed by Theodore Melfi and based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s groundbreaking research, Hidden Figures exemplifies a corrective cinematic force — one that challenges historical erasure by foregrounding the indispensable work of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson during the Space Race. It is not merely a story of scientific triumph, but of systemic barriers — racial, institutional, and gendered — that these women navigated with extraordinary resilience.

NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 10: Director Theodore Melfi attends the "Hidden Figures" New York special screening on December 10, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage)

The #1 New York Times bestseller The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space—a powerful, revelatory history essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America. The basis for the smash Academy Award-nominated film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future. -WINNER OF ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD FOR NONFICTION -WINNER BLACK CAUCUS OF AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NAACP IMAGE AWARD BEST NONFICTION BOOK

Born: Aug. 26, 1918 Died: Feb. 24, 2020 Hometown: White Sulphur Springs, WV Education: B.S., Mathematics and French, West Virginia State College, 1937 Hired by NACA: June 1953 Retired from NASA: 1986 Actress Playing Role in Hidden Figures: Taraji P. Henson Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918, her intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By 13, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At 18, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. She graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia. More stories on Katherine Johnson When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president, Dr. John W. Davis, selected her and two men to be the first black students offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. She left her teaching job and enrolled in the graduate math program. At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her first husband, James Goble. She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine and her husband decided to move the family to Newport News, Virginia, to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into her tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956. The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Johnson’s life. In 1957, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel. Johnson, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report. In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission from liftoff to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space. When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Johnson would talk about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS, later renamed Landsat) and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after 33 years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she said. In 2015, at age 97, Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. She died on Feb. 24, 2020. NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said, “Our NASA family is sad to learn the news that Katherine Johnson passed away this morning at 101 years old. She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten.”

Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was a teacher who became a leading mathematical engineer in the first aerospace program with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the first African American woman promoted to supervisor in the program. Vaughan was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on September 20, 1910, to Leonard and Anne Johnson. Her family moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1917. In 1925, she graduated from Beechhurst High School with a full academic scholarship to Wilberforce University in Ohio. She joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority (Zeta Chapter) and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and French in 1929. After college, Vaughan accepted a position as a math teacher at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. In 1932, she married Howard Vaughan and moved to Newport News, Virginia. The couple had six children: Ann, Maida, Leonard, Kenneth, Michael, and Donald. In 1943, Vaughan took what she thought would be a temporary position with NACA (now NASA) at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. She was assigned to West Area Computers, a segregated group that consisted of all African American women mathematicians. These women provided critical information to the engineers conducting aeronautical experiments by testing the performance and durability of new space equipment. Noted mathematician Katherine Johnson was temporarily assigned to Vaughan’s group while stationed at Langley. Despite working among white counterparts, the women were required to use segregated dining, bathrooms, and living quarters. Vaughan traveled back and forth daily to work, using public transportation. Vaughan was appointed acting supervisor of the program in 1949, after the death of her manager, and thus became the first African American woman to be promoted in the agency. It took two years, however, for her to achieve permanent status in that position. Vaughan remained with NASA for the next twenty-eight years in various positions until her retirement in 1971. St. Paul’s AME Church in Newport News, Virginia, honored Vaughan for being a member for over fifty years, where she was involved in missionary work and the church’s music ministry. She was also a benefactor to the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, D.C., and a member of their Silver Bells organization. Vaughan died of natural causes at the age of ninety-eight on November 10, 2008, in her hometown of Hampton, Virginia. She is survived by four children, ten grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren. In 2016, Vaughan was featured in the film Hidden Figures, which stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae. The film focused on three African Americans at NASA who calculated flight trajectories for Project Mercury and Apollo 11 in the 1960s. In doing so, it documented the careers and contributions of Katherine Johnson, Mary Winston Jackson, and Vaughan, who is portrayed by Octavia Spencer in the film.

The Space Race began as an arms race between the respective militaries of the United States and the Soviet Union. World War II had demonstrated to the world that rocket technology would drive modern warfare, and as such the U.S. and Russia locked themselves in a race to have the most superior technology. As technology advanced and powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were developed by both countries, the arms race gave way to another race—the Space Race. At the start, there were no set rules for the Space Race. What was the goal? What would count as winning? For Americans, President Kennedy's declaration focused the Space Race on a clear goal: landing a man on the Moon before the Soviets. The Space Race became a race to the Moon. Both countries made announcements to launch the first artificial satellite into space, but it was the Soviet Union that brought humanity into the Space Age with their Sputnik satellite, which was successfully launched on October 4, 1957.

Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe in "Hidden Figures" (2016) Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox

This ethos — of excavation and reevaluation — extends beyond a single film. The cinematic landscape, though often uneven in its representation of women’s histories, has produced a number of works that attempt to grapple with the complexity of female experience across cultures, eras, and political contexts. From the intergenerational memory and diaspora identity explored in The Joy Luck Club, to the legal and ideological battles waged by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex, these films interrogate not just individual biographies, but the structures that shaped — and often constrained — them.

Tamlyn Tomita, Rosalind Chao, Ming-Na Wen, Tsai Chin, Kieu Chinh, Lisa Lu, France Nuyen, and Lauren Tom in 'The Joy Luck Club' (1993) Photo Credit: Buena Vista Pictures

Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 'On the Basis of Sex' (2018) Photo Credit: Focus Features

Similarly, films like Harriet and Elizabeth situate their protagonists within moments of profound historical upheaval — whether it be the abolitionist struggle embodied by Harriet Tubman or the volatile political and religious landscape navigated by Elizabeth I. These portrayals raise critical questions central to MoviesToHistory.com’s analytical lens: Where does dramatization enhance understanding, and where does it distort? What is gained — and lost — when filmmakers condense, composite, or fictionalize real lives?

Cynthia Erivo as Araminta "Minty" Ross / Harriet Tubman in 'Harriet' (2019) Photo Credit: Focus Features/ Universal Pictures

Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth I in 'Elizabeth' (1998) Photo Credit: Polygram FIlmed Entertainment

This curated list of my Top Ten Women in History Movies is not simply a ranking — it is an editorial framework. Each film included serves as a case study in how cinema constructs historical memory around women: sometimes faithfully, sometimes problematically, but always revealingly. As we move through this list, the goal is not only to celebrate these stories, but to critically engage with them — measuring their historical accuracy, unpacking their narrative choices, and ultimately asking the question that defines this platform:

How does Hollywood shape our understanding of the women who shaped history?

Let’s begin.