Women's Day is over, but our appreciation for Women doesn't end. There are so many women that deserve recognition, that have done so much for our world to be a better place. That's why Time magazine decided to honor all females from 1920 to the present. They took the most influential and powerful women from the past century and made "Person of the Year" covers with them, explaining why they deserve to be there.

Over the past 100 years, only five women have been named "Person of the Year"—Wallis Simpson (1936), Elizabeth II (1952), Corazon Aquino (1986), Angela Merkel (2015), and Greta Thunberg (2019). So here are 100 women that have shined with their skills and ambition. Read about their achievements and vote for your favorite one.

Are there more women you wish were on the cover of Time magazine? Which one inspired you the most? Tell us in the comments!

More info: time.com

#1 1997: Ellen DeGeneres

"Comedian and actor Ellen DeGeneres appeared on the cover of TIME in 1997 along with three seismic words: 'Yep, I’m gay.' The lead character on her sitcom, Ellen, came out at the same time, making DeGeneres the first to play a gay lead on American network TV. It was an enormous risk. At the time, polls showed that more than half of Americans believed same-sex relations were 'always wrong.' There was blowback.

However, ultimately the risk paid off, and not just for Ellen, who described the decision as 'the most freeing experience.' As she persisted and then thrived in show business, generations of LGBTQ people felt a new sense of possibility. 'If I hadn’t seen her on TV,' comedian Kate McKinnon, an openly lesbian cast member on Saturday Night Live, said in a tribute this year, 'I would’ve thought I could never be on TV.' – Katy Steinmetz"

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#2 1998: J.K. Rowling

"In the fall of 1998, Harry Potter crossed the Atlantic. The wizarding world imagined by author J.K. Rowling already had a foothold in Europe: the release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in the U.K. that July made it the first children’s book to top the British hardback best-seller list. Buoyed by the series’ success and critical acclaim across the pond, the first Harry Potter book debuted stateside in September to enthusiastic reviews.

Before year’s end, Warner Bros. had secured the film rights, and the boy wizard was on his way to becoming a globally recognized brand. Two decades later, authors who cite Rowling as a creative influence—from Rick Riordan to Tomi Adeyemi—are power players in their own right, and the publishing industry has been transformed by Rowling’s unlikely rise. The billions of dollars Harry Potter made in bookstores and at the box office resulted in a surge in similar fare, from Twilight to The Hunger Games.

Melissa Anelli, author of Harry, a History, says the series proved to publishers that young audiences are 'not just willing to read a book, but would follow the stories they loved to the end of the earth'—and thus, that young-adult literature is worth serious investment. — Cate Matthews"

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#3 1935: Amelia Earhart

"When Amelia Earhart settled into her airplane on Jan. 11, 1935, ready to set off on an unprecedented solo flight across the Pacific Ocean, the aviator wasn’t just thrilling her fans. She was defying those who continued to believe that a woman’s place was in the home – not the office, not the factory, not the pilot’s seat. In the days before she planned to fly 2,400 miles from Hawaii to California, an open letter urged her to stand down, noting that ten others had died trying.

Despite poor weather in Honolulu, she pressed on, and about 18 hours later she was landing in Oakland, becoming the first person, woman or man, to perform the feat. Two years later, Earhart would fail to complete an even more dangerous attempt to fly around the world. But her grit and derring-do, on full display as thousands of cheering supporters swarmed her plane that day in Oakland, forever expanded expectations for just how far the fairer sex could go. 'Women must try to do things as men have tried,' Earhart once said. 'When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.' – Katy Steinmetz."

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#4 1938: Frida Kahlo

"Frida Kahlo was often seen through the lens of her more famous husband. In 1938, a press release for her first solo exhibit initially described her as the 'wife of Diego Rivera' before conceding that 'she proves herself a significant and intriguing painter in her own right.' These days, it’s more common for Rivera to be viewed in her shadow. And Kahlo’s work in 1938 turned out to be instrumental in building her legacy, as she came to prominence around the world for her vivid and surreal self-portraits: in New York City, where that solo show was met with excitement and curiosity; in her hometown of Mexico City, where she sold her first major painting; and in Paris, where a work she painted that year would soon make her the first 20th-century Mexican artist to have a painting, The Frame, bought by the Louvre, beating even her husband to that milestone. But the struggle was far from over for Kahlo, who lived a tumultuous life beset by hardship and heartbreak.

She contracted polio as a child. At 18, she was the victim of a horrific bus accident that left her in debilitating pain. She miscarried several times; her relationship with Rivera was vexed by infidelity. Kahlo channeled this turmoil into breathtaking, iconoclastic art.

She depicted taboo topics like abortion, miscarriage, and breastfeeding; she accentuated her unibrow and mustache in defiance of gender norms. At a time when indigenous art wasn’t taken seriously, she incorporated Mexican folkloric touchstones into both her paintings and her unique fashion sensibility. She railed against capitalism and imperialism. Through her deconstruction of long-held beliefs about artistry—and her ability to express both torturous pain and unfettered joy in her art—she remains one of the most enduring artists of the 20th century. — Andrew R. Chow"

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#5 2009: Malala Yousafzai

"When BBC Urdu asked Malala Yousafzai’s father if one of his students would blog about life under the local Taliban, his daughter took on the task. Her first post was published under the pen name Gul Makai (“cornflower”) on Jan. 3, 2009. She was 11 years old.

Over the next three years, Yousafzai wrote about her life and her desire to get an education, in a region where girls’ schools were being shuttered and bombed. As her renown grew, so did the threats against her life. On Oct. 9, 2012, a gunman from the Pakistani Taliban boarded a school bus, called her out by name, then shot her in the face. When I heard the news, I was shaken to the core—here was a girl, just a year or two older than my own children. But Yousafzai not only survived but thrived, as an author, activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and role model for anyone who wants to make the world a better place.

I often think about Yousafzai’s bravery in daring to raise her voice on behalf of others and our obligation to follow her example—to be vigilant in the protection of basic human rights, whatever our age, whatever our circumstance. We can start by heeding her words: 'Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons.' — Jennifer Salke"

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#6 1987: Diana, Princess Of Wales

"It’s easy to forget today what pariahs people with AIDS were in the year 1987. Ignorance, superstition and an aura of sexual seediness swirled around those afflicted, their cause of death noted in obituary columns with a vague lack of specifics that protected their relatives from opprobrium. The 26-year-old Princess of Wales lived with the specter of AIDS every day. In the loneliness of her failing marriage to Prince Charles, gay men were the bedrock of her private world: fashion designers, ballet dancers, art dealers and numerous members of the palace staff. They sympathized with her, escorted her, lightened her load. It pained her to watch them sicken and die. In April 1987, Middlesex Hospital invited her to open the first ward in the U.K. dedicated to the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Accepting the invitation was the kind of socially progressive statement that private secretaries usually steered their principals to avoid. Diana was intensely nervous, even though she unhesitatingly agreed to do it. She knew it was the chance to dispel the stigma surrounding the disease. With her instinctive understanding of the power of gesture, she resolved not only to open the new ward but to shake the hands of 12 male patients without gloves.

Diana, Princess of Wales, shakes hands with an unidentified 32-year-old AIDS patient in his private room at Middlesex Hospital, London, April 19, 1987. Diana, Princess of Wales, shakes hands with an unidentified 32-year-old AIDS patient in his private room at Middlesex Hospital, London, April 19, 1987. AP Such was the fear of ignominy that only one patient, a 32-year-old named Ivan Cohen, agreed to be photographed with Diana, and only on condition that the picture be taken from behind. She extended her hand. The cameras rolled. A broken taboo ricocheted round the world: Diana, exuding compassion and confidence, clasping the terminally ill AIDS patient’s hand in hers. For the next decade, she continued her visits to hospitals and bedsides. A nurse present at Diana’s historic original visit told the BBC, 'If a royal was allowed to go in and shake a patient’s hands, somebody at the bus stop or the supermarket could do the same. That really educated people.' That iconic moment also had a profound impact on Diana.

It clarified what her royal status meant—a new kind of global power. Whatever its frustrations, being the Princess of Wales gave her the ability to change lives and to expand tolerance. She saw what could happen when humanitarian concern is connected with the global media. Celebrities have tried to emulate her ever since. — Tina Brown"

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#7 1953: Rosalind Franklin

"Without Rosalind Franklin, there may have been no James Watson and Francis Crick—or, more specifically, no global fame and Nobel prize. Trained as a chemist, Franklin created an X-ray photograph that provided evidence of the double-helix structure of DNA molecules. In 1953, Watson, who had been investigating the structure of DNA as well, was shown the image and immediately knew its significance. 'The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,' he wrote in his 1968 book, The Double Helix. 'The black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could only arise from a helical structure.'

The image was not proof, but critical evidence, as was the data Franklin had derived when she analyzed the image. Watson, Crick and their colleague Maurice Wilkins came by the image and data legitimately in the course of their work, and no one ever seriously alleged intellectual theft. But no one pretends either that they could have achieved their later breakthrough, proving the double-helical structure of DNA, without Franklin’s work. Yet when Watson and Crick published their findings in 1953, and when they and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for the same findings in 1962, Franklin was forgotten. In 1958, at age 37, Franklin died of cancer.

Only now is she being appreciated. In my cancer advocacy work, I’ve met female scientists who are welcomed and respected by their male colleagues. I’m sorry Rosalind Franklin wasn’t. But from now on, whenever you hear the names of the two men who discovered DNA, make it a troika: Franklin, Watson, and Crick—in that order. — Katie Couric"

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#8 1929: Virginia Woolf

"In 1928, addressing distinguished female students at the University of Cambridge, novelist and critic Virginia Woolf declared, 'A woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.' Replace 'write fiction' with any creative, intellectual or political pursuit, and in a sentence, Woolf had summed up millennia of inequality. In her 1929 extended essay 'A Room of One’s Own,' Woolf played with both fiction and nonfiction, building on the themes of her lectures.

She invented the indelible figure of Judith Shakespeare, sister of William, who had equal talent but would never become a world-famous playwright because she was barred from education and relegated to the home. Suddenly, readers imagined a world history filled with the ghosts of gifted women and the works they never had the opportunity to create.

Before 1929, Woolf had established herself with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse as one of the boldest novelists of the 20th century, and then when 'A Room of One’s Own' was published to both celebration and outrage, she became a political visionary too. Her essays were—and still are—a rallying call to women around the world. — Lucas Wittmann"

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#9 1920: The Suffragists

"It was the culmination of generations of activism, and Carrie Chapman Catt, who had devoted three decades to the suffrage struggle, was among the crowds that celebrated the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. 'Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom,' Catt told a victorious throng. 'Prize it!'

Among those agonies was an ongoing debate about how women should go about securing those rights—and the ongoing disenfranchisement of women of color. Catt opted for pragmatism and politics, lobbying on a state level and in the halls of Congress. Along the way, she tussled with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, militant suffragists who preferred a more dramatic approach. Paul and Burns organized public parades and staged a groundbreaking, years-long White House picket with banners that implored President Woodrow Wilson to act. The 'Silent Sentinels' endured arrests and imprisonment in a squalid workhouse where they were brutalized and force-fed. Which approach was more effective?

'Every movement for social change needs both,' says suffrage historian Johanna Neuman. For women of color, though, the 1920 victory did not guarantee voting rights. Despite their fervent participation in the suffrage struggle, their voting rights were secured only with the 1965 Voting Rights Act."

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#10 1949: Simone De Beauvoir

"Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into an upper-class Catholic family. While studying for the competitive agrégation exam in philosophy, which she passed in 1929, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, the great love of her life. In 1949, she published The Second Sex and revolutionized feminist thought. She won France’s highest literary prize in 1954 for her novel The Mandarins and, in 1971, wrote the text of the Manifesto of the 343, a French petition to legalize abortion.

At 16, I stumbled upon an image of de Beauvoir sitting in Café de Flore in Paris with a stack of books. 'She’s a famous author,' my mother told me. I went to the library and borrowed The Second Sex, expecting an erotic book that would answer my burning questions. The first few pages were a disappointment. This wasn’t a book about love or sex, nor a treatise on pleasure. But I kept going. It was a revelation. De Beauvoir exposed a long-hidden truth: that there is no female nature.

She consulted biology, history, mythology, literature, ethnology, medicine and psychoanalysis to question the roles assigned to women. The book told me that I control my destiny. If there is no fixed female essence, then we too are only what we do. The Second Sex provided me with weapons to understand, to defend, to respond and to persuade. It gave me the desire to write, an exercise in reclaiming the self. De Beauvoir knew: 'Freedom is an inexhaustible source of discovery, and every time we give it a chance to develop, we enrich the world.' — Leïla Slimani, translated from French by Gretchen Schmid."

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#11 1945: Chien-Shiung Wu

"Few people, when asked about the Manhattan Project and the weapons it created, call to mind the name Chien-Shiung Wu. But without the physicist, the project might have failed, perhaps prolonging World War II into 1946 and beyond. Wu was born in China in a town north of Shanghai in 1912, to parents who not only believed in educating girls but also founded a school that took care to include them.

Wu emigrated to the U.S. in 1936, where she ultimately taught physics at Princeton University, and where she made two key contributions to building the bombs that ended the war. The first came in 1942 when Enrico Fermi was having trouble keeping his plutonium chain reaction running at a government research complex. As the tale is told, he was advised to 'ask Miss Wu.' She correctly diagnosed the problem as xenon contamination.

The second was after Wu formally joined the Manhattan Project when she helped develop the method for separating nonfissionable uranium 238 from fissionable U-235—the bomb’s key fuel. When the weapons were used in 1945 and the war was won, names like Fermi and Oppenheimer would be recalled best. But all owe some of their notoriety to the wisdom of Miss Wu. — Jeffrey Kluger"

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#12 1954: Marilyn Monroe

"In 1954, Marilyn Monroe—already a sex symbol and a movie star—posed on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in New York City, for a scene intended to appear in her 1955 film The Seven Year Itch. The breeze blowing up through a subway grate sent her white dress billowing around her, an image that lingers today like a joyful, animated ghost.

Monroe was a stunner, but she was also a brilliant actor and comedian who strove to be taken seriously in a world of men who wanted to see her only as an object of desire. Today, especially in a world after Harvey Weinstein’s downfall, she stands as a woman who fought a system that was rigged against her from the start. She brought us such pleasure, even as our hearts broke for her. — Stephanie Zacharek."

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#13 1952: Queen Elizabeth II

"When TIME named Queen Elizabeth II the Woman of the Year in 1952, it was not for her gender but for what she symbolized. The 26-year-old acceding to the throne, editors wrote, was a 'fresh young blossom' whose citizens hoped she would be an 'omen of a great future.'

In fact, Elizabeth became Queen just as the dissolution of the British Empire sped up, with the loss of Egypt, Sudan and Ghana in the early years of her reign. Almost seven decades later, she oversees an island nation reduced to a bit player on the world stage. Yet at the age of 93, her soft power is undimmed; she draws both great leaders and throngs of tourists to her state and personifies British endurance untainted by politics. She has steered her family through scandal successfully enough that the next generation is poised to carry the crown forward.

Unlike her heirs, however, she remains virtually unknowable, having never allowed the media access to her private thoughts or opinions. In her utter rejection of a public persona, she is best understood, still, as a symbol: no longer the potent fluorescence of youth, but a hard-worn tree in whose limbs and roots can be traced the archaeology of an era. — Dan Stewart."

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#14 1934: Mary McLeod Bethune

"Mary McLeod Bethune’s résumé was already peppered with superlatives and onlys, but in 1934 the civil rights activist was a woman on the brink of the most political power wielded by an African-American woman to date. By continually lobbying the federal government to tend to the needs of African Americans, she had already gained the ear of Presidents Coolidge and Hoover.

As the nation reeled during the Great Depression, she pushed Roosevelt to pay attention to black Americans too. Soon, the former teacher and women’s group organizer would step into an official New Deal role as head of the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs and head of what would be known as FDR’s “Black Cabinet,” becoming the highest-ranking African-American woman in government and the first ever to head a federal department.

During her government tenure, she fought for integration and against segregation, discrimination and lynching. As a colleague once said, “No one can do what Mrs. Bethune could do.” — Erin Blakemore."

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#15 1948: Eleanor Roosevelt

"Having held the title from 1933 to 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was the longest-serving First Lady in U.S. history. What she did with the office was impressive: by crisscrossing the country to promote President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agenda, and by producing a radio show and newspaper column, she showed that First Ladies could play an active part in Executive Branch affairs.

And yet she left an even greater legacy after her time in the White House ended. When FDR died in 1945, his successor, Harry S. Truman, appointed the erstwhile FLOTUS to be America’s first delegate to the newly created United Nations. As chair of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, she worked in the years after the Holocaust to prevent future world wars and spearheaded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the General Assembly adopted on Dec. 10, 1948.

Its statement that 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” is still considered a foundation of international human rights law. It’s no wonder she called that work her “most important task.' — Olivia B. Waxman."

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#16 1942: The Resisters

"Historians who hail the heroes of World War II typically focus on soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy or Allied troops liberating concentration camps. Rarely remembered are the networks of quiet, effective resisters who also risked their lives to thwart Nazi atrocities while the war raged on. These resisters are exemplified by women like Miep Gies, who in 1942 decided without hesitation to hide Anne Frank and her family along with others in Amsterdam.

She later preserved the teen’s diary, which allowed future generations to learn about life during the Holocaust and hear Anne’s unique voice. That same year, 28-year-old Haviva Reik enlisted with the pre-state of Israel’s elite Palmach fighting force and later joined a unit of paratroopers, hoping to be sent to her native Slovakia to rescue Jews trapped under Nazi occupation. The British refused to transport a woman for a military mission, so Reik secured a ride from American pilots and met her colleagues behind enemy lines, in the middle of the Slovakian national uprising.

After arriving, she fed starving Jewish residents, helped some escape and eventually rallied Jewish partisan fighters. In 1944, she was captured and killed by Nazi collaborators. Hannie Schaft, another young dissenter, went from law student to legendary fighter when she and two friends seduced and killed Nazis as part of their work with the Dutch resistance. Her tactics were so infamous that Germans referred to her simply as “the girl with the red hair.” And Hannah Szenes, who grew up experiencing anti-Semitism in Hungary, joined the British army in Palestine, parachuted into Yugoslavia and was captured trying to save Jews at the height of their deportation from her home country.

Despite being tortured and put on trial, Szenes refused to betray her mission and was also executed in 1944. In her diary, Anne Frank wondered, “How many people look upon women too as soldiers?” They may not have fought on the front lines, but underground fighters and everyday objectors saved Jews and helped preserve the memory of the horrors that took place and the millions of lives that were lost. — Abigail Abrams"

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#17 1951: Lucille Ball

"Lucille Ball spent decades drifting between stage, screen and radio before she found her niche. But TV made her a star, perhaps because she so passionately defended her vision for the first great sitcom, I Love Lucy. CBS initially declined to cast Ball’s husband Desi Arnaz as the foil to her daffy housewife, fearing the marriage of a white woman and a Cuban-born man would alienate viewers.

So the couple self-financed a pilot too good to refuse. In the second season, an expecting Ball helped destroy a taboo that framed pregnancy as salacious proof that a woman had been sexually active, with a story line about the birth of Little Ricky. Working in a medium that reflected and helped shape the postwar U.S. family, the show offered an image of domestic life that was more progressive, but also just funnier, than the sanitized world of Ozzie and Harriet. Ball wielded even more power behind the camera.

After splitting with Arnaz, she took over Desilu, the production company that launched Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. Three decades after her death, Hollywood’s most powerful women—from Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Reese Witherspoon—walk a path she cleared. — Judy Berman."

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#18 1968: Aretha Franklin

"R&B may be the secular child of gospel music, but in Aretha Franklin’s voice the two styles entwined in heavenly perfection: every note she sang felt sacred and sublime. Franklin, born in 1942, began singing gospel as a child in her father’s Detroit church and, at 18, signed with Columbia Records.

But it was her move to Atlantic Records, in 1967, that ignited her career. Franklin released three albums in 1968: Lady Soul, appearing in January, included “Chain of Fools,” a dis aimed at an ex-lover that could also be read as an excoriation of people who would follow blindly rather than lead.

Summer saw the release of Aretha Now; on that album’s “Think,” Franklin turned the words “Freedom, oh freedom!” into a defiant chant, an insistence on forward movement at all costs. That song—that whole album—was a salve for a torn nation: between the release of Lady Soul and Aretha Now, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. opened up a wound in the country that has never fully healed. Franklin capped off the year with a live album, and her career continued to climb. But 1968 was when we needed her most. She more than delivered. — Stephanie Zacharek"

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#19 1931: Maria Montessori

"In thousands of classrooms around the world, as children work independently to solve math problems with beads and learn the alphabet with sandpaper letters, their activities can be traced back a century to Maria Montessori’s radical educational philosophy.

One of the first female physicians in Italy, Montessori developed early-childhood teaching methods that made the student a respected collaborator and independent thinker, rather than the submissive pupils of yore. In 1931, she trained teachers through her Association Montessori Internationale and hosted Mahatma Gandhi, who supported the use of her methods in India. Her approach has educated generations. — Katie Reilly"

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#20 1959: Grace Hopper

"Grace Hopper graduated from Yale in 1934 with a mathematics Ph.D., and her service in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War II put her on the front lines of computer science in the 1940s. By 1959, she had helped to create and popularize COBOL, one of the first standardized computer languages.

As a pioneer in programming, Hopper shaped the world of software as we know it today—and paved the way for women everywhere to thrive in math, computer science and service to their countries. In 2016, President Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, 'If Wright is flight and Edison is light, then Hopper is code.' — Susan Fowler."

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#21 1943: Virginia Hall

"She was known as the Limping Lady, because of a prosthetic leg, but secretly, she was a hero. During tours in occupied France with the British Special Operations Executive and CIA predecessor Office of Strategic Services, American spy Virginia Hall was an intelligence-industry innovator.

She used makeup and savvy subterfuge to escape capture by the Gestapo, who unsuccessfully hunted her for assisting the French Resistance. Hall trained resistance cells that performed guerrilla sabotage like blowing up bridges and even derailing a freight train and set the stage for the Allies to invade Normandy and Provence. At the end of the war, she reported that her team had captured 500 Germans and killed 150. The Nazis called her 'the enemy’s most dangerous spy.'

Her work is credited with convincing British and American military officials to deploy other women as spies during a major moment for women in war. In 1942 and 1943, the U.S. Armed Forces finally allowed women to enlist. But female war veterans still struggled for recognition and benefits. Though never publicly lauded during her lifetime—she received awards, but didn’t want to blow her cover—Hall was the U.S.’s most decorated WW II woman civilian. She is credited with developing spy tactics that are still used by the CIA today. — Erin Blakemore"

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#22 1956: Golda Meir

"Israel had had only one foreign minister by the time Golda Meir was named to the post in 1956, but there was a logic to making hers the public face of what at the time was an eight-year-old state for a 2,000-year-old nation. Born in Kyiv and raised in Milwaukee, Golda Meir embraced the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland and proved effective at promoting it.

After she raised $50 million for Israel’s war of independence, founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote that Meir was the 'Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.' Her legacy also included a dismissive approach to Palestinian national identity and the trauma of the Yom Kippur War. But in a newly minted society where female military service was the norm, Meir’s 1969 election to prime minister made her not only the first woman to lead Israel but also a role model in another liberation movement, farther west. – Karl Vick"

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#23 1960: The Mirabal Sisters

"Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal—three sisters from a middle-class family, all married with children—may not have seemed the most likely revolutionaries. But living under the Dominican Republic’s brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo in the late 1950s, the Mirabal sisters risked their lives to work in the resistance. During Trujillo’s 31 years in power, the regime violently repressed civil liberties and dissent. The Mirabal sisters helped to organize and grow the underground movement challenging the regime and were repeatedly arrested for their activities. Minerva once dismissed her allies’ fears for her life, saying 'If they kill me, I’ll reach my arms out from the tomb and I’ll be stronger.'

She fulfilled the promise. The state’s murder of the three sisters, aged 36, 34 and 25 on Nov. 25, 1960, outraged the public and was a key trigger for Trujillo’s own assassination by a group of dissidents and former allies six months later. After the transition to democracy in the late 1970s, the Butterflies, as Dominicans call the sisters, became symbols of both democratic and feminist resistance. A fourth Mirabal sister, Dede, who was less actively involved in the resistance, survived the regime and helped continue her sisters’ legacy until her death in 2014, setting up a foundation and a museum in their name. The U.N. made the date of their death the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. —Ciara Nugent"

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#24 1982: Margaret Thatcher

"The decades after the Second World War were a chastening time for the U.K. The once-mighty British Empire lost most of its colonies, and despite steadily rising living standards, the British economy was no longer the global steam engine it had once been. So in 1982, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led a successful military campaign to defend one of the last of Britain’s overseas outposts, the Falkland Islands, from an Argentine attack, it stirred a swell of patriotism, reigniting the wartime spirit, especially for her Conservative Party’s elderly voters.

The following year those voters rewarded Thatcher with a massive parliamentary majority, which she used to unleash a free-market revolution. She slashed the size of the British state, deregulated the economy, sold off dozens of state-owned industries and cut taxes with the proceeds. Many became rich as a result of her reforms, but inequality increased substantially too. The rift she created in British society still cuts deep. But nobody disputes her position as one of Britain’s most influential Prime Ministers of the 20th century. — Billy Perrigo"

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#25 1996: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"It’s hard to believe now that there was ever a time when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not known for her dissents. But for a stretch of 1996, the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court could imagine a triumphant future building on her work as visionary advocate in the 1970s—not just for women’s liberation, as she often said, but for women’s and men’s liberation.

The prestigious Virginia Military Institute (VMI) still barred women, but when the case went to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg argued that everyone was harmed, and all stood to benefit. 'If women are to be leaders in life and in the military, then men have got to become accustomed to taking commands from women,' she said at oral argument, 'and men will not become accustomed if women are not let in.' Back in her ACLU days, on a quest to prove that gender discrimination violated the Constitution, she had represented not only women who broke glass ceilings but also men who were caregivers, each limited by the law as it stood.

She had rarely convinced Justice William- Rehnquist. In 1996, though, the conservative Justice joined a 7-1 decision requiring that women be admitted to VMI, helping Justice Ginsburg finish what attorney Ginsburg had started and establishing a major precedent. The paradox of Ginsburg—reserved institutionalist arguing for radical constitutional change—seemed to resolve itself in the VMI victory. But as politics left her outnumbered on much that mattered to her, the Justice stiffened the resolve she had from the days she was blocked for being, as she put it, a 'woman, a Jew and a mother.' By age 80, in 2013, her righteous dissents would earn her fans around the world.

Today, Ginsburg is surprisingly optimistic. Her work has been at the pinnacle of the law, but she recognizes that, as she puts it, 'change comes from a groundswell of ordinary people … And men have to be part of the effort.' — Irin Carmon"

Image credits: Time

#26 1955: The Bus Riders

"In the hours after Rosa Parks’ arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, Women’s Political Council president and Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson used the school’s mimeograph machine to run off a set of flyers. “Another Negro Woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down,” they read. “Don’t ride the buses.”

At the time, 75% of the people who rode the bus in Montgomery, Ala., were African American—and they knew there was strength in numbers. The boycott announced in that flyer lasted more than a year, and its seeds had been sown long before. Claudette Colvin, 15, had refused to give up her seat that March. So had Aurelia Browder, 36, in April and Mary Louise Smith, 18, in October. Black Montgomery residents were aghast when two policemen dragged Colvin off the bus on March 2. Martin Luther King Jr., an activist minister who had just moved to the area six months prior, helped fight Colvin’s arrest—knowing that, with Brown v. Board of Education having struck down school segregation in 1954, the door was open for other legal challenges to segregation, says historian Jeanne Theoharis.

But while Colvin was charged with violating the city bus segregation law, she was only convicted of assaulting a police officer, so a direct legal challenge to that specific law couldn’t be made. Parks was well aware of Colvin’s case, having invited her to the local NAACP chapter’s youth meetings. So Parks didn’t resist when she was arrested, making sure she could be charged only with violating segregation law.

Years of involvement in the civil rights movement factored into this act of defiance; she has said she felt “pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed.” In theory, this opened up a path to challenge the law, but civil rights leaders worried that Parks’ case could get stuck in state courts—an appeal by 1944 bus resister Viola White had been tied up in the Alabama courts—and that her NAACP activism could doom its chances. So in February 1956, lawyer Fred Gray filed a separate federal suit with Colvin, Browder, Smith and longtime bus rider Susie McDonald, 77, as the named plaintiffs. “No man is willing to be on the case,” says Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. But four women, including two teenagers, were.

A federal district court ruled intrastate segregated buses unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle in June; the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision that November. The boycott ended Dec. 20, 1956, having cost the city over $750,000 (about $7 million today). Facing death threats and unemployment, Parks and Colvin decided to move north, but their actions had already helped inform a new phase of the civil rights movement, and had catapulted King into a new leadership position.

The plaintiffs never received the recognition many male activists did, but their resistance informed both Parks’ decision to stay seated and the important legal fight that followed. With their victory, these women paved the way for the desegregation of public places, central to the civil rights movement. — Olivia B. Waxman"

Image credits: Time

#27 1979: Tu Youyou

"Tu Youyou’s first triumph over an infectious disease was her recovery from tuberculosis as a teenager, an experience that inspired her to pursue a career in medicine.

History will remember her for her role in discovering artemisinin, a drug that has prevented millions of deaths from malaria. Artemisinin is derived from sweet wormwood, a plant used in traditional Chinese remedies.

Tu has described her team’s findings, published in English in 1979, as 'a gift from traditional Chinese medicine to the world.' The discovery earned her a Nobel Prize and won humanity important ground in the battle against one of history’s deadliest diseases. — Melinda Gates"

Image credits: Time

#28 1971: Angela Davis

"An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend, as revered by my generation of millennials as she is her own. She is Angela Y. Davis. Davis opened 1971 with an American declaration of innocence heard around the country: 'I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the state of California.' The state, governed by Ronald Reagan, had charged Davis with capital crimes in connection with an armed courtroom takeover in August 1970 that left her friend Jonathan Jackson, two inmates and a judge dead in Marin County.

Responding officers had shot these four people. But investigators accused Davis when they traced a gun used in the takeover to her. Davis smelled a setup and fled. She eluded would-be captors for two months before President Richard Nixon congratulated the FBI on its 'capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis' in October 1970. In 1971, Davis became America’s most famous “political prisoner” as she awaited trial. Defense committees in the U.S. and abroad shouted at demonstrations the chant of 1971, 'Free Angela,' about the woman John Lennon and Yoko Ono immortalized in song.

The defense committees formed a broad interracial coalition of supporters who believed Nixon’s America, not Davis, was America’s Most Wanted. Her supporters charged that Nixon’s America was terrorizing, imprisoning and trying to kill the movement, the organizations of antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist and antiwar activists. Their freedom struggle in 1971 became the struggle for freedom of Angela Y. Davis, an incarcerated body Nixon’s and Reagan’s law-and-order America wanted dead. She was on trial for her life. Millions of progressive Americans defended her like they were on trial for theirs.

After being acquitted of all charges in 1972, Davis moved from defended to defender, consistently resisting the structural causes of inequity and injustice as others took the bigoted way out and victim-blamed. For decades, she has unflinchingly defended black women, black prisoners, the black poor—and all women, all prisoners, all poor people—when few Americans would.

She has defended America from the clutches of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism, poverty, and incarceration when few Americans would. In the final analysis, Davis managed to transform America’s yearlong shouts of 'Free Angela' in 1971 into Angela’s lifetime of shouts of “Free America.” — Ibram X. Kendi"

Image credits: Time

#29 2008: Michelle Obama

"Michelle Obama spent 2008 campaigning for her husband Barack, experiencing a level of scrutiny that was undeniably linked to her race and would persist for years to come. That August, she delivered a stirring address at the Democratic National Convention in which she talked about the 'improbable journey' from her working-class Chicago upbringing to that very stage. Speaking of her young daughters, she shared that 'their future—and all our children’s future—is my stake in this election.'

After her husband won, she gracefully stepped into the role of First Lady as the first black woman to do so. Focused on social issues like education and healthy living, she was deeply committed to the well-being of our nation and to the future of its people, especially its children.

Her charisma, confidence, and openness created an approachable air to the White House. Though her days as First Lady are over, her influence hasn’t waned. Her lived experience sends the message that through kindness, diligence, intelligence, and honesty, you can effectively change the world. If she can do it, you can do it too. — Zazie Beetz"

Image credits: Time

#30 2004: Oprah Winfrey

"By the time Oprah Winfrey became the first black woman to make it onto the Forbes billionaire list, in 2003, she was already the most successful talk-show host in TV history and a producer, media mogul, actor, author and philanthropist of unparalleled cultural clout.

But it wasn’t until the following year, when she gave away Pontiacs to her entire studio audience, that she ascended to something like secular-saint status—despite facing some backlash over the hefty gift taxes recipients had to pay. 'You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!' became shorthand for any modern miracle. That Oprah magic has only grown since 2004.

A recipient of accolades, from a Peabody to a Kennedy Center Honor, she gave a crucial early endorsement to Barack Obama. In 2011, she wrapped her 26-year-old talk show and launched cable network OWN; last fall saw the revival of her powerhouse book club as part of a multiyear Apple TV+ deal. She may never heed the call of pundits who wish she’d run for President. Yet when political discourse and pop culture so often cater to the lowest common denominator, Oprah’s signature fusion of entertainment, education and social conscience remains a vital appeal to our best selves. — Judy Berman"

Image credits: Time

#31 2003: Serena Williams

"After winning the 2003 Australian Open, Serena Williams became just the fifth woman in tennis history to hold the titles of all four Grand Slam tournaments—the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open—at the same time. She gave her feat an alliterative flourish that neatly spoke truth to her power: the Serena Slam.

Williams even bested her closest confidante, older sister Venus, in the final of all four of those major championships. 'I’d kind of like to be just like her,' said Venus, at the time a four-time Grand Slam winner, after that Aussie Open final. Williams was just 21 years old. If she’d peaked then, she would have earned accolades as an all-time great. But nearly two decades and 23 major titles—a record for the Open era—later, she has more clout than ever. Her influence extends far beyond the baseline. Critics have called her racist names and tried to shame her for her muscular frame. But Williams has embraced her body, and her blackness, with the same force as one of her two-handed backhands: even her occasional outbursts at umpires spark national debates about decorum and double standards. She’s battled injuries and life-threatening illnesses, including a complicated delivery of her daughter Olympia in 2017.

Months later, however, Williams returned to the women’s tour, at 36, as the world’s most famous working mom. She’s since reached the finals of four major events, showing that women can embrace motherhood and a job as time-consuming and physically grueling as professional tennis. In her decades of greatness, Williams has inspired a new generation of tennis talent, young women of color who, like her, dared to take up what’s long been a lily-white sport. Rising stars Naomi Osaka, 22, and Coco Gauff, 15, idolized Williams. Gauff grew up in Florida with her poster on her wall. Williams has not only taken women’s tennis to new heights. She has secured her legacy in the generations that will follow her. — Sean Gregory"

Image credits: Time

#32 2012: Pussy Riot

"With colorful ski masks, explicit lyrics and mosh pit–ready dance moves, the feminist collective known as Pussy Riot grew out of the protest movement that peaked in Moscow in early 2012, the first street-level challenge to the reign of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The group’s viral videos mixed punk rock and performance art into a powerful form of rebellion, and it became an icon of the anti-Putin movement when three of its members were put on trial that summer. The charges against them were 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility.' Their crime was a performance, which they called a 'punk prayer,' near the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Its title was 'Virgin Mary, chase Putin away!' Two of them—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Maria Alyokhina, 24—were sentenced to three years in prison for the stunt. (Yekaterina Samutsevich received a suspended sentence.)

Their public show trial forced a reckoning in Russia, an era-defining clash between Putin and a new generation of his subjects, who were rising up against his version of autocracy and demanding democratic change. That moment hasn’t arrived yet, but Pussy Riot’s message of defiance still inspires young women in Russia and far beyond. — Simon Shuster"

Image credits: Time

#33 1924: Coco Chanel

"Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel, born in 1883, lived several lives before her death in 1971. She was the shrewd businesswoman who developed one of the world’s most famous perfumes, only to lose control of the company that produced it.

She presaged the era of logomania with her own symbol, two linked C’s. Opportunistically, she got through World War II by consorting with Nazis. But any woman today who loves elegant yet comfortable clothes owes her a debt. Chanel was one of the first designers to use jersey fabric in fashionable day wear—dresses and suits and pleated skirts—that moved the dial away from restrictive corsets and useless frills.

And because Chanel herself loved to borrow men’s clothes, in 1924, she designed a woman’s suit made of supple Scottish tweed, so softly and ingeniously tailored that it was a joy to wear. To this day, the Chanel suit is a model marriage of practicality and beauty. The woman who brought it into the world knew that to move forward, you first had to be able to move. —Stephanie Zacharek"

Image credits: Time

#34 1921: Emmy Noether

"'Smart' didn’t do Emmy Noether justice: Albert Einstein called her a “creative mathematical genius.” The German-born Noether altered algebra—notably with her 1921 paper Theory of Ideals in Ring Domains—and her proofs about conservation of energy-resolved a quirk in Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Even so, as a woman, Noether had to fight for a professorship. When she did get one, at the University of Göttingen, she was paid minimally, and in 1933, with Germany under Nazi rule, she and other Jewish professors were dismissed. Exiled to the U.S., she kept teaching until her death in 1935. Even now, the world still learns from Noether, whose abstract principles are fundamental to modern particle physics. — Emily Barone"

Image credits: Time

#35 1941: Jane Fawcett And The Codebreakers

"Even for the most public figures, it can take years for influence to be recognized. When the Official Secrets Act—British legislation criminalizing unauthorized disclosure of state secrets—is involved, it can take decades.

So it wasn’t until the 1990s that Jane Fawcett’s work during World War II became widely known. In 1940, the 18-year-old debutante joined a covert project at Bletchley Park, headquarters for Allied military codebreaking. The 8,000 women there were underrepresented at the highest tiers of the operation but played a key role in shortening the war.

In 1941, Fawcett was sitting in a cramped, dark decoding room when a message came in that revealed the location of the Bismarck, Ge