Journalist Rachel Swaby’s Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World is the source of one of my favorite descriptions of the work I do as a writer of women’s history: “revealing a hidden history of the world.”

Swaby was inspired to write her collective biography of groundbreaking women scientists by an obituary which appeared in the New York Times in March, 2013. The obituary began by reporting that Yvonne Brill made a mean beef stroganoff, that she followed her husband from job to job, and took eight years off to raise three children. Only then did the Times mention the reason she had earned an obituary: she was a brilliant rocket scientist who won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for her development of a propulsion system that keeps satellites in their orbits, a system which became the international standard. As someone who also makes a mean beef stroganoff, I can assure you that the two accomplishments are not equivalent.

The Times quickly amended its article to begin with the rocket science after a loud public outcry, but the original obituary led Swaby to consider the way women’s careers and accomplishments in science have been, and unhappily continue to be, underreported. The result is Headstrong, a collection of brief biographies of women who have made lasting contributions to science. At the time the book came out in 2015, I had only heard of a handful of the women whose stories she tells: Rachel Carson, Rosalind Franklin, Irène Joliot-Curie,* Sally Ride, and Ada Lovelace. In the intervening years a number of others that Swaby introduced me to have become well-known, at least in those circles interested in women’s history. Others I know only from the pages of Headstrong.

The book is structured as a series of essays, perfect for dipping into when you need a bit of women’s history to remind you that we were there. (Swaby suggests that you read one a week over the course of a year. I was not that disciplined.)

If you know a girl who is interested in STEM and would like to know where she fits in a world that is still heavily male, Headstrong would be a nice place to start the search for role models.

*Who I knew only because she was the daughter of Marie Curie and, like her mother, won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. Swaby chose not to include Marie Curie because she is the woman “we talk about when we talk about women in science.”