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Julie Hemming Savage ran into a problem while developing a women's studies class for her students at a Kansas high school. Despite finding a wealth of textbooks for adults, none were geared toward younger readers.

Ten years later, she and her sister Heidi Hemming are preparing for the release of their self-published book "Women Making America" on March 30, the end of Women's History Month.

The colorful and comprehensive 378-page text is about the well-known and more obscure women who make up America's history, from Sybil Luddington, a 16-year-old who alerted her neighbors to an impending British attack and gathered a militia in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, to Nancy Pelosi, who became the first female Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007.

"I didn't have an introduction to this stuff until college, and that's a travesty. In history books, it's still really tokenism. You get one woman per period, maybe two, tops," said Savage, 41, of Silver Spring.

"I have to find ways to introduce women in a curriculum that doesn't really include women at all," added Hemming, 45, who teaches history at Rockville High School.

The sisters did a lot of traveling growing up due to their father's job in the Air Force, and the family of six made their last move to Montgomery Village in time for Savage to start her senior year at Seneca Valley High School in Germantown. They went on to college — Hemming majored in history, Savage in American studies — and lived throughout the country before both coming to Silver Spring about eight years ago. Hemming has two children, and Savage has three.

They came back to Savage's idea of writing about women's history for a young audience about six years ago and spent three years writing and another three years editing, tracking down images and finding a distributor. As they squeezed in research between PTA meetings and piano lessons, they saw pieces of themselves in the women they were writing about.

"It's one of the things that really made us identify with the women in this book, women who were doing whatever they could during their domestic lives. There was a kinship there," Savage said. "… All of the women in this book are making choices. Some of them are making big choices, but many are smaller, ordinary. We're on the inside of conventional history."

The two formed a formidable team. They dove into the project, sometimes reading multiple books to write just a few paragraphs. They have sold about 300 copies of "Women Making America."

"The fun thing is that it's turned out better than we could even imagine," Savage said. "…You tell somebody you wrote a survey of women's history and their eyes just glaze over and they say, ‘Oh, that's nice.' But then they say, ‘Oh, this is different from other history books.'"

Heidi Hemming and Julie Hemming Savage, authors of "Women Making America," say these are two of their favorite historical women.

Mary Harris Jones, an Irish immigrant also known as Mother Jones, dedicated her life to advocating for laborers after her husband and children died of yellow fever and her dressmaking business was lost to the Chicago fire of 1871. Jones advocated for workers until she was nearly 100 years old and was once ejected from Colorado by the governor for helping organize a strike.

"She wasn't scared to get in anyone's face," Hemming said. "She was a tough woman."

Mary Fields, a freed slave, moved to Montana after the Civil War to help protect a group of nuns running a missionary school. She became the first black woman to work for the United States Postal Service when she was 60 and earned the name Stagecoach Mary for her work delivering mail in the Wild West. The avid baseball fan also gave flowers to her town's athletes whenever they hit a home run.

"Her giving flowers to these guys, it would somewhat change race relations in her small community," Savage said. "What she did mattered."

Sources: "Women Making America," the National Cowboys of Color Museum and Hall of Fame.