If I was marking it I'd only give a B to even the most perfect essay on hitler, so predictable. most teachers give credit for not boring them to death while they are marking ...
Marie Curie was a Polish-French chemist who did very important work involving radiation around the turn of the century. Beside her research (obviously radioactive materials became pretty important over the course of the rest of the century), the fact that she was a woman in a traditionally very male field was a pretty big thing.
Rosalind Franklin was another important European (British) female chemist who put a lot of work into discovering the structure of DNA in the 50s.