27 Historical Fiction Books About Women in STEM

Book Summary

Civil is fresh out of nursing school and has dreams of making a big difference in her post-segregation African American community. She works for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, and she’s sent to a rural cabin during her first week on the job. When she arrives, Civil is shocked to find that her patients are children, only 11 and 13 years old.

The girls, Erica and India, are innocent and not even thinking of boys. However, because they are poor and Black, those handling their benefits have requested that the children be on birth control. Civil struggles with this unexpected aspect of her new career. Despite the shocking reason for meeting the sisters, Civil is endeared to them and their family. However, when she arrives for one visit, something unthinkable has happened, and Civil soon finds herself involved in a legal case.

You’ll also see Civil years later, at the end of her career, with a daughter of her own, as she tries to find peace without forgetting those she encountered along the way.

Book Summary

Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant scientist who always felt more comfortable with the consistent laws of chemistry and physics than with people. Her colleagues complain about her and avoid working alongside her.

When she is assigned to work on DNA, Rosalind believes she can finally be the one to figure out the building blocks of life. And then it finally happens. She made a groundbreaking discovery about DNA’s structure, but she could never have predicted what would happen next.

Book Summary

In 1822, Edinburgh was focused on interrelated events. First, the old Botanical Garden moved to a new home on the slopes below Inverleith House. It’s quite a spectacle, with full-grown trees being transported on horse-drawn carts. The opening of the new Royal Botanic Garden coincides with the rumored upcoming visit of King George IV. Additionally, the Agave Americana plant looks set to flower—an event that only occurs once every several decades.

Amid the excitement, an unlikely friendship forms. Newly widowed Elizabeth arrives from London to live with her late husband’s aunt, Clementina. Her new grand home borders the new Botanic Garden, and Elizabeth volunteers as an artist to document the impending bloom of the Agave Americana. In the garden, Elizabeth meets Belle, who has a passion for botany and the lucrative, dark art of perfume creation. But Belle isn’t telling the truth about her true identity.

Book Summary

Joan is content with her quiet life as a physics and astronomy professor at Rice University in Houston. Then, she sees an ad that changes her life. NASA is looking for the first women scientists to join the Space Shuttle program. After being selected from a pool of thousands of worthy applicants, Joan began training in the summer of 1980.

As she trains with her new team, they become unlikely friends, and Joan finds a new passion for life. She also begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Book Summary

When Nora’s parents die during a pandemic, she’s left in the care of eccentric surgeon Dr. Horace Croft. Most of the girls in her time spend days learning needlepoint or watercolors, but Nora is learning about suturing and anatomical illustrations. This is risky because, at the time, it was forbidden for women to practice medicine.

When a new surgical resident, Dr. Daniel Gibson, arrives, he has no idea that Nora is actually a better surgeon than he is. To protect herself and Dr. Croft, Nora must pretend to be a proper lady instead of a skilled medical practitioner. However, it becomes harder to stay quiet when patients are at risk. Then, she makes a discovery that could change the field forever. Can she take credit, or must she let the men in her life take credit for her genius?

Book Summary

Emily was determined to make changes in the world and was an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement. But when her husband, Washington Roebling, was injured on the job as the Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Emily put her own work on hold to take over for her husband. As the bridge rises, Emily wonders if she’s building her own legacy or that of her husband.

This novel is based on the true story of how Emily Roebling transformed this project of monumental scale. Her work took her into the bowels of the East River, to suffragette riots, and into the halls of Manhattan’s elite.

Book Summary

Bea Abramovitz is not your average young woman in 1920s Manhattan. She lives in a Lower East Side tenement with her twin brother and parents, who escaped pogroms in Russia in search of a safer life.

Bea has an incredible aptitude for math and loves studying the stock market in the papers. She dreams of using her skills as a stockbroker, but that’s unheard of for a woman in the 1920s. To complicate matters, she’s Jewish and not wealthy, which are both strikes against her on 1920s Wall Street. However, Bea’s perseverance is as strong as her aptitude for numbers, and she finds a creative way to be involved. But Wall Street is on a collision course with the Great Depression.

Book Summary

Elizabeth Zott is a quirky and brilliant female chemist working with an all-male team at the Hastings Research Institute. But her scientific qualifications don’t stop the “good old boys” from being frustrated that she won’t get coffee or make copies for them. When Elizabeth meets Calvin Evans, another scientist at the Institute, another type of chemistry results.

Fast forward a few years. It’s 1961, and Elizabeth is a 30-year-old single mother, and her career has been detoured. Instead of working for Hastings, she’s now (somewhat reluctantly) the star of a much-loved cooking show called Supper at Six. Her cooking methods are unusual (“combine one tablespoon of acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”). As her popularity grows, it turns out she’s not just teaching women to cook, she’s also daring them to change the status quo.

Book Summary

Judy Morgan is a shy and reserved physics student at Cambridge University when her quiet, studious life takes an unexpected turn. She forms an unlikely but powerful friendship with the beautiful and brilliant Hedy Lamarr, a Jewish woman who has courageously fled the rising terror of the Nazi regime in Europe.

Hedy is not only a celebrated actress but a gifted inventor, and together she and Judy believe their combined knowledge and ingenuity can be used to protect the people they love from the horrors of war. As the conflict deepens and the stakes grow ever higher, their work begins to take on a far greater significance than either of them could have imagined. Soon, the fate of the world itself rests in their hands.

Book Summary

In 1808, Rose loves working with her naturalist father on his groundbreaking study of the platypus. When he is unable to travel to present his findings to the Royal Society in England, Rose goes in his place. What she discovers will change generations.

In 1908, Tamsin travels to the Hunter Valley to pick up an old sketchbook, which was donated to the public library. When she arrives, she discovers that there is more to the sketchbook than she expected. Shaw, a young bookseller and lawyer, has his own ideas about the book, and Tamsin partners with him to try to uncover the book’s true provenance.

Book Summary

Meridian is smart and ambitious, which isn’t the expectation of young women in her time. She’s obsessed with birds and is pursuing her PhD to become an ornithologist. However, her brilliant physics professor, Allen, becomes quite a distraction from her plans when they fall in love.

When Allen is recruited to Los Alamos for a secret wartime project, Meridian reluctantly gives up her goals to join him. Before long, she’s unwillingly taken on the role of traditional housewife. Years later, Meridian meets a Vietnam Vet who opens her eyes to how much she has given up. But is it too late to pursue her dreams now?

Book Summary

Frances “Frankie” McGrath is a 21-year-old nursing student who has been raised by her conservative parents to always do “the right thing.” But when her brother ships out for Vietnam in 1965, she begins to change her views of right and wrong. Frankie impulsively joins the Army Nurses Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam. As she tends to the green and inexperienced young men who have been sent to fight the war, she is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction. Returning home to a changed America doesn’t prove to be any easier.

While The Women is the story of Frankie going to war, it also shines a light on the story of all women who risk everything to help others. The publisher describes this book as “a novel of searing insight and lyrical beauty” that is “profoundly emotional” and “richly drawn.”

Book Summary

This fascinating historical fiction explores Marie Curie’s real path in life alongside an alternate timeline that examines how science might have changed for all of us if she had made a different choice.

In 1891, Marie was engaged to a promising mathematician, but his mother insisted that Marie was too poor for him to wed. After he broke her heart, Marie left Poland to study chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne. She eventually became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

But what if she had stayed in Russian Poland, where women’s education was restricted, rather than studying science in Paris and meeting Pierre Curie? Through the parallel stories, we see what could have happened if a great scientific mind had been denied opportunity and access to education.

Book Summary

We all know the names Wilbur and Orville Wright, but what about Katharine? She may just be one of the most important and overlooked women in history, and this historical fiction novel finally gives voice to her story.

Before becoming obsessed with flying, the Wright brothers jumped on the popular new fad of bicycle riding, opening a bike shop in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Repairing bikes led to tinkering and building, and eventually a new dream took shape. But their younger sister knew they couldn’t do it without her.

As the brothers began obsessing over blueprints and testing models on the beaches of North Carolina, Katharine became the mastermind behind the scenes. She sourced materials, managed communications, and kept the brothers focused on their goal even when it seemed that hope was lost.

When they finally achieved the first controlled, sustained flight, it resulted in both fame and fortune. The siblings traveled the world demonstrating their invention, training pilots, and building new models that could fly higher and further. But then, a tragedy tore the family apart and forced Katharine to make an impossible choice that would haunt her for the rest of her days.

Book Summary

This dual-timeline novel opens in 2019 at the funeral for BettyKay in a small town in Iowa. BettyKay’s daughters are shocked when Hollywood movie star Kitty Devereaux walks in and places something into their mother’s casket. Over the course of the weekend, BettyKay’s daughters discover a whole other side to their mother as Kitty shares stories of their lifelong friendship, which all began in 1967 at St. Luke’s Nursing School in the fictional town of Greensboro, Iowa. 

BettyKay grew up on a farm in the Midwest and risked everything to attend nursing school against her parents’ wishes. Her assigned roommate, Kitty, came to Iowa to escape her past in Atlanta but already had her sights set on Hollywood. The two, having little in common, became unlikely friends. Another new student, Jenny, completed their trio. Jenny had aspirations of becoming a doctor, but she knew that the combination of being a woman and being Black meant that the odds were stacked against her in the late 60s. 

The bond these three women formed at their Iowa nursing school would carry them through the years as their lives led them in different directions – from the jungles of Vietnam to the movie sets of Hollywood.

Book Summary

Groundbreaking physicist, Dr. Hannah Weiss, is on the verge of splitting the atom for the first time in 1938 Berlin. However, she’s also a Jewish woman living under the Third Reich. She knows that the energy created by her discovery has the power to change the world, for the good through energy creation or for the bad through mass destruction. While her research is originally belittled, it’s eventually stolen by German colleagues.

Seven years later, in New Mexico, Major Jack Delaney arrives in town to catch a spy. Someone at Los Alamos has been leaking secrets to Hitler’s scientists. Jack’s top suspect is Hannah, an exiled physicist working on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mission.

Book Summary

Kate fell in love with science in 1920 after convincing her mother to send her to college. When the girl of her dreams rebuffs her, she finds solace in biology. She’s most interested in the new field of genetics, which hopes to explain why people become who they are.

However, as a woman in an emerging scientific field, she faces discrimination, competition, and scientific theft. Will Kate have what it takes and be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to succeed in genetics?

Book Summary

This novel opens in 1930s Austria, where Hedwig Kiesler’s beauty saves her from the rising Nazi party and leads her to marry an Austrian arms dealer. Always underestimated, she overhears the Third Reich’s plans and understands more than anyone would have guessed.

After devising a plan to flee her husband’s castle in disguise, she escapes. The book then jumps forward to her arrival in Hollywood, where she changes her name to Hedy Lamarr, signs with MGM, and becomes a major film star of the 1940s. 

Beyond being a bombshell, Hedy was also a scientist whose groundbreaking invention revolutionized modern communication.

Book Summary

In 1918, Ireland was ravaged by both war and disease. Julia is a nurse working in an understaffed hospital caring for pregnant women who have been quarantined after contracting a terrible new flu that would come to be known as the Spanish Flu.

Two newcomers to the hospital ward will change everything over the course of three days. One is Doctor Kathleen Lynn, who is rumored to be a Rebel on the run from the police. The other is Bridie, a young volunteer.

Book Summary

In the 1940s, polio became a feared pandemic across the world. The disease was cruel, killing or paralyzing those contracting it, with children particularly impacted. This historical fiction tells the story of a real scientist, Dorothy Horstmann, who worked desperately for a cure.

While many male scientists raced to beat each other to a polio vaccine so they could achieve notoriety, Dorothy’s eye remained on the goal of saving lives. Her name was often left off the scientific discoveries she made, in favor of her male co-workers, but she still forged ahead diligently.

Book Summary

Hedy Kiesler first rose to prominence as an Austrian Jewish actress known for her scandalous nude role in the film Ecstasy. Her husband is known for something more sinister: supplying Hitler’s regime with weapons.

When she’s able to flee her husband’s tight control, she lands in Hollywood and is rebranded as Hedy Lamarr. While she has personal success, her private life remains difficult. However, she has a secret. External beauty aside, Hedy is a brilliant inventor, and she’s come up with a new technology that will change not only war defense but also the way the world communicates.

Book Summary

This historical fiction novel is based on the little-known story of America’s first nursing school. While nurses had historically been viewed as unskilled, New York’s Bellevue Hospital training school for nurses is the first of its kind. It’s formed around Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles of discipline, intellect, and moral character. Only young women of good breeding are accepted in Bellevue’s nurse training program.

Una is a young female grifter who evades the police by conning her way into the nurse training program. She struggles to fit in with her prim classmates and balks at the doctors’ endless commands. On the other hand, life on the streets prepared her for the horrors of injury and disease, allowing her to slowly find her footing in the program. When Una becomes suspicious about a patient’s death, she risks exposing the truth about her background.

Book Summary

It was not easy to be a female scientist in 1914. Violet Schuyler Grant endures her much older, philandering husband because he makes her role as a physicist in prewar Germany possible. When Lionel, a captain in the British Army, meets Violet, he encourages her to escape her husband’s hold. However, with WW1 on the horizon, Lionel’s motives are suspect.

Fifty years later, Vivian Schuyler is a recent Bryn Mawr graduate in New York City, but is not content to be a socialite. Instead, she’s trying to break into the glamorous world of magazine publishing. She uses her investigative skills when she receives a package of information about a mysterious aunt she never knew.

Book Summary

This historical novel is based on the real memoir of a 15th-century female physician in China. Tan Yunxian was raised in the Ming Dynasty era by her grandmother, also a physician, who taught her the art of Chinese medicine. Additionally, she learned about female conditions from her best friend, Meiling, who was training to be a midwife. While Yunxian was on the path to success in her own right, she was still sent into an arranged marriage.

Her new mother-in-law was a traditionalist who forbade her from seeing Meiling and stopped her from helping the girls and women in their household. Instead, she is supposed to be a “proper wife,” learning poetry, embroidering foot-binding slippers, and staying within the walls of their compound.

How did Yunxian break free and go on to treat women from all classes of society and create remedies that are still used over 500 years later? Lisa See tells her compelling life story in this novel.

Book Summary

Spanning much of the 18th & 19th centuries, this book tells the story of the fictional Whittaker family. The patriarch, Henry, begins life as a poor Englishman before making his fortune in South America. He rises to be the wealthiest man in Philadelphia.

His daughter, Alma, gets his money and his great mind. She becomes a botanist who studies the mysteries of evolution while falling in love with a man obsessed with the spiritual realm. She is scientific, while he’s an artist. Follow this unlikely couple as their story soars around the globe.

Book Summary

Miri, a doctor, and her brother Vanya, a physicist, were raised by their babushka, a famous matchmaker who has taught the siblings to protect themselves at all costs. It’s the summer of 1914, and war with Germany is looming. As Miri and Vanya race against Einstein to solve one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, they are also trying to escape the anti-Semitism and violence overtaking their country.

When Vanya and Miri’s fiancé both go missing, Miri braves the firing squad to go looking for them. With an eclipse darkening the skies, the safety of Miri’s family and the future of science hang in the balance.