"There was a time in the U.S. when employers could pay workers as little as they wanted, kids toiled in sweatshops, and bosses could lock in employees to prevent them from taking breaks. Frances Perkins halted these practices, defending workers whose lives had become dangerous during the nation’s rapid industrialization. Perkins was having tea one afternoon in New York in 1911 when she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where 146 workers died after being trapped in the burning building.
Horrified, she pushed New York to pass early worker health and safety laws, first as an advocate and later as the state’s industrial commissioner. Her work made Perkins such a prominent voice for the working class that Franklin D. Roosevelt asked her in 1933 to serve as his Secretary of Labor. She accepted on the condition that he’d support her in establishing a safety net for workers. “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before,” she told him, according to Kirstin Downey, author of a Perkins biography. “You know that, don’t you?” Perkins was the driving force behind the New Deal, the package of laws that protected average Americans during the Great Depression, and she implemented relief programs that paid unemployed men to work on public projects.
She secured unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly and financial assistance for the infirm in the Social Security Act of 1935; and established a minimum wage, maximum work hours and the eradication of child labor in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Perkins served as Labor Secretary until Roosevelt’s death in 1945. “I came to Washington,” she once said, “to work for God; FDR; and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.” — Alana Semuels"

"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, Germany’s most fearsome battleship. Fawcett translated the message and, immediately recognizing its importance, relayed the intel to the navy—which, two days later, found and sank the ship. This marked the first significant victory by the Bletchley Park Codebreakers but, Fawcett later said, she “never told a soul, not even my husband.” — Billy Perrigo"

"Rita Moreno’s 1961 breakout role in West Side Story almost led her to quit acting. Make-up artists colored her skin darker and Moreno, a native Puerto Rican, felt her accent “didn’t make any sense.” She resented being asked to sing “America,” which had lines like “Puerto Rico, you ugly island, island of tropic diseases.” She spoke up, and the lyrics were changed. In her nearly 70-year career, Moreno has never stopped fighting against typecasting and for fair representation of Latinos.
The daughter of a seamstress and a farmer, Moreno grew up in poverty and faced discrimination, especially in her early Hollywood roles. She persevered, and after West Side Story was a hit, she went on to appear in the Electric Company, Oz, and as the voice of Carmen Sandiego. At 88, her career continues to flourish, with TV roles on Bless This Mess and One Day at a Time. In 1962, she became the first Latina to win an Oscar, going on to take home an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony—a feat only 15 entertainers have ever accomplished. She’s one of 24 to win what’s called the Triple Crown of Acting, snagging competitive Academy, Emmy and Tony Awards.
In 2020, she’ll serve as an executive producer on a remake of the film that launched her to fame nearly 60 years ago. — Soledad O’Brien"

"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"

"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"

"The daughter of a liberal Afghan intellectual, Queen Soraya Tarzi was fond of breaking with tradition. As the first Queen Consort of Afghanistan and wife of King Amanullah Khan, she became one of the most powerful figures in the Middle East in the 1920s and was known throughout the world for her progressive ideas.
Tarzi and Khan worked closely together; in 1926 he declared, “I am your King, but the Minister of Education is my wife, your Queen.” In the face of opposition, the couple campaigned against polygamy and the veil, and practiced what they preached; Tarzi was known for tearing off her veil in public and instead wearing wide-brimmed hats with an attached veil. A fierce believer in women’s rights and education, she opened the country’s first school for girls, and along with her mother founded the country’s first women’s magazine in 1927, called Ershad-I-Niswan, or 'Guidance for Women.' Saying that independence “belongs to all of us,” Tarzi forcefully called for women to “take their part” in nation-building.
A second wave of reform in Afghanistan in the 1970s would echo Tarzi’s ideas from 50 years before, with a rise in women’s education and representation in political life, and the raising of the marriage age. — Suyin Haynes"

"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"

"Organizations dedicated to helping people with disabilities have existed since at least the 1800s, but as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, disability activists demanded equal treatment for their communities too. Judith Heumann, who had polio as a baby and uses a wheelchair, started her activism early.
After graduating from college, she applied for a teaching license but was rejected by the New York City board of education, which called her a fire hazard. Heumann sued for discrimination and won in a landmark case, becoming the first wheelchair user to teach in the city’s schools. That victory put Heumann in the spotlight. She founded her own disability-rights group in 1970 and became an advocate for the independent-living movement. She successfully pushed Richard Nixon to sign the first federal civil rights legislation for disabled people. But when regulations for the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 were stalled, Heumann helped organize more than 100 disabled activists to stage a sit-in, named for the law’s section on disabilities, at a San Francisco federal building in 1977.
The 504 Sit-in, which lasted 28 days, challenged the perception of people with disabilities as helpless or objects of pity. In Heumann’s words: “We demonstrated to the entire nation that disabled people could take control over our own lives and take leadership in the struggle for equality.” The 504 Sit-in accomplished its goal, and those protections laid the groundwork for the Americans with Disabilities Act. Heumann, who served in the Education and State departments of the Clinton and Obama administrations, has continued to advance the rights of disabled people around the world. — Abigail Abrams"

"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"

"Armed with only an academic’s intellect and a diplomat’s toolbox, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright outmaneuvered the post–Cold War Russians, members of NATO and even some in her own government to lead the effort to bring an end to a ghastly campaign against ethnic Albanians in Slobodan Milosevic’s Kosovo.
Her critics and boosters alike had a name for it: Madeleine’s War. The episode marked the high-water mark of American humanitarian intervention in the post-Soviet world. Albright worked the phones and her Air Force jet to hold together the NATO alliance to build pressure on Moscow and to avoid even the slightest of differences among allies. When possible, she employed her counterpart’s native tongue because, after all, she speaks six languages. In the end, Moscow acquiesced to NATO’s stepping in to launch a “humanitarian war,” and Milosevic backed down.
For Albright, the mission had an added personal element: as a child, she fled the regimes of Adolf Hitler and, later, Joseph Stalin. She already had seen what unchecked regimes could accomplish—and also what Americans at their best could. — Philip Elliott"

"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"

"Twice in chemist Stephanie Kwolek’s life, she refused to take no for an answer, and both times it paid off. The first was in 1946 when, just out of Carnegie Mellon University, she applied for a job at DuPont and was told that it’d take two weeks for an answer. That timing was a problem, she told her interviewer since she had another offer to consider. So on the spot, she was offered the job.
The second occurred in 1964. Kwolek, still at DuPont, had been assigned to develop long-chain polymers that could be manufactured at temperatures below 200°C (392°F); lower-temperature polymers meant stronger polymers.
Kwolek came up with a thick, cloudy fluid with the opalescence of spoiled meat. She took it to the lab to be spun down into whatever fibers it might produce, and the operator of the device refused, worrying that the stuff would clog the equipment. She insisted. The result: Kevlar, which she patented in 1966. Today, Kevlar is used in more than 200 products including spacecraft, cell phones and, of course, bulletproof vests that have saved the lives of countless police officers and soldiers around the world. — Jeffrey Kluger"

"There was a time when a book could change the world. Biologist and writer Rachel Carson’s early works about the ocean were besotted with life. But her fourth book, Silent Spring, was a searing indictment of synthetic ­pesticides—grim nerve agents for insects like DDT that she called “elixirs of death.” Published in September 1962, it likened the danger from pesticides to the threat from nuclear-weapons testing. Chemicals “are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life,” Carson told the nation in April 1963, in a CBS Reports television documentary.
An investigation President Kennedy had ordered soon confirmed Carson’s claims. As an editor for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had lived a quiet life with her adopted son, her mother and a few cats. By the time of her death from breast cancer in 1964, at 56, she had set in motion a movement that produced Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, a domestic ban on DDT and a transformation of how Americans see the world they inhabit. — William Souder"

"Françoise Barré-Sinoussi didn’t plan on becoming a scientist; she fell into her career as a virologist only after volunteering at the Pasteur Institute in her hometown of Paris. She ended up earning a Ph.D. there and went on to play a pivotal role in identifying the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, responsible for AIDS. In 1983, with Luc Montagnier, she extracted the virus from the swollen lymph nodes of patients suffering from the then mysterious illness and discovered it was a previously unknown retrovirus that attacked human immune cells.
She shared the Nobel Prize in 2008 for her work, which led to the development of life-changing anti-HIV drugs that have saved millions of lives. But Barré-Sinoussi knows her work isn’t done. Nearly 40 years after her discovery, 38 million people around the world are still living with HIV. Not all of them have access to medications, and even if they do, they need to take them for life.
So she continues to search for new ways to prevent and control HIV. 'We cannot cure HIV yet,' she told TIME in 2014. 'The epidemic is not over, and the treatments are not perfect. There has been a lot of progress, but it’s not enough.' — Alice Park"

"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"

"Poland’s escape from Soviet rule began with Solidarity, a movement for the rights of workers that Anna Walentynowicz, a welder and crane operator, helped create in 1980. In retaliation for her activism, she was fired that year from the Lenin Shipyard.
Her colleagues went on strike to get her job back, sparking a mass resistance that culminated in the Gdansk Agreement, which allowed the first free-trade union in communist Eastern Europe. Within a year, the Solidarity union had nearly 10 million members, with Walentynowicz as one of its leaders. The triumph in Gdansk precipitated the fall of communism, a decade later. It also led generations of Poles to see Walentynowicz as the mother of their independence. — Simon Shuster"

"On Oct. 3, 1992, Sinead O’Connor turned her Saturday Night Live performance into a fierce political statement. Eyes ablaze, voice quaking with rage, O’Connor ripped apart a photograph of Pope John Paul II, after replacing a lyric from Bob Marley’s 'War' with the words child abuse.
A few weeks later, she revealed that as a teen she had suffered abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church. She was still widely condemned—and her career took a significant blow. In 2010, O’Connor offered an explanation: 'I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one; that is part of being an artist.' Today, entertainers often speak out about their personal experiences; back then, it was less common. As an Irishwoman, O’Connor was aware of the danger of criticizing a powerful entity like the church. She took that risk in order to publicly demand justice for children who were sexually abused by members of the clergy.
Nine years after her performance, Pope John Paul II acknowledged and apologized for the church’s long history of sexual abuse. In recent years, O’Connor has been vocal about her mental health struggles, once again laying herself bare for the world. She remains an example of the power of provoking necessary, if unpopular, conversations—and the courage it takes to do so. — Olivia Wilde"

"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"

"Against the big personalities of politics and business, workaday people can seem inconsequential. But by 2002, three women made it clear that when dedicated to doing the right thing, anyone can make a difference. Cynthia Cooper alerted the audit committee of telecom giant WorldCom to one of the largest accounting frauds in history; Sherron Watkins warned then Enron CEO Kenneth Lay of an accounting hoax that concealed hundreds of millions of dollars in debt; Coleen Rowley detailed the FBI’s failure to respond to warnings from her field office about a conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks.
For their actions, the three whistle-blowers were named TIME’s Persons of the Year in 2002. “We don’t feel like we are heroes,” Cooper said then. Though the women told TIME that they were just doing their jobs, their actions had huge repercussions. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 to establish more robust financial regulations for public companies as a reaction to the accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom. The FBI embarked on a yearslong reorganization. And at places like Cambridge Analytica and Uber, employees knew that speaking out against wrongs at giant organizations could have enormous impact. — Alana Semuels"

"In March 1925, one of America’s most famous women took the stage at an international birth control conference to argue for “the health and happiness of the Unborn Child.” Though she joked about a civil service exam for would-be parents, Margaret Sanger made a case for birth control as an alternative to both abortion and “enforced, enslaved maternity.”
Already, Sanger had defied laws that rendered both contraception and talking about birth control, crimes. She became a subject of gossip and outrage for her public clinic and campaign to make birth control a topic of conversation. Sanger’s association with the eugenics movement would ultimately compromise her reputation. She argued that birth control could be used to weed out “defective” babies. It was part of an ongoing alignment with those who thought birth control could be used to breed more desirable traits into the population—a move possibly informed by her desperation to popularize contraception.
Historians still tussle over Sanger’s complicated legacy. What isn’t at issue is her influence: Sanger founded the predecessor to Planned Parenthood, and by helping legalize birth control, she helped women gain control over their bodies and futures. — Erin Blakemore"

"Named the greatest female athlete of the 20th century by the Associated Press, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson, a tough-talking Texan, excelled in a stunning number of sports: track, golf, basketball, baseball, tennis, swimming, bowling, and billiards among them. She was once asked if there was any sport she didn’t play. 'Yeah, dolls,' she replied. Born into a Norwegian immigrant family in 1911, Didrikson caught the eye of a Dallas insurance company with her basketball skills when she was 18; she quit school to join the firm’s Amateur Athletic Union hoops team. She was named an All-American from 1930 to 1932.
In ’32, she was the sole representative of the Employers Casualty team at the U.S. amateur track-and-field championships; over the course of three hours, she finished first in five different events—broad jump shot put, javelin, 80-m hurdles and baseball throw—and tied for first in the high jump, single-handedly outscoring every other team at the event. 'Implausible is the adjective which best befits the Babe,' the New York Times later declared. At the Olympics in Los Angeles a few weeks later, she became the only female Olympian ever to collect individual medals in a running, throwing and jumping event (the 80-m hurdles, javelin, and high jump).
That record still holds. Almost overnight, Didrikson shot to global fame. By refusing to conform to early–20th century expectations of femininity, Didrikson showed that women more than belonged on the playing field. They too could break athletic barriers, just like the men. And yet, her athletic opportunities proved sparse. “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring,” one sports columnist wrote. Didrikson turned to vaudeville to make money. But even as she sang and played harmonica, she couldn’t be kept from the competition. In 1934, Didrikson took her talents to the golf course. Over the next two decades, she won 82 tournaments—-including an incredible 14 consecutive events in one stretch—and became a founding member of the LPGA. A year after being diagnosed with colon cancer in 1953, she won the U.S. Women’s Open by a record 12 strokes.
A proud pioneer of what’s now known as trash talk, she was unafraid to inform her competitors they were playing for second place. And how exactly did she launch those booming tee shots? 'I just loosen my girdle,' Didrikson said, 'and let the ball have it.' — Sean Gregory"

"All justice movements are intertwined with one another. They are threads that make up the fabric of the American story. Progress today is possible because of the groundwork laid by trailblazers who stood up for what was right, even when it was dangerous. Each trailblazer has had other formidable women who shaped her career. For Rosa Parks, it was Recy Taylor. In 1944, Taylor, a 24-year-old African-American mother from Alabama, was walking home from church when six white men kidnapped and gang-raped her at gunpoint. In Taylor’s time, women—and people of color—were seen as neither reliable narrators of their own stories nor humans with equal worth and dignity.
But Taylor refused to stay silent. Despite death threats and her family’s home being firebombed by white supremacists, Taylor channeled her painful truths into a search for justice, speaking out and insisting on prosecution. The NAACP sent Parks—already a member of the group—to investigate, and other activists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes joined to form the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, garnering national press coverage. Taylor never received justice, but her case kindled the civil rights movement and inspired other black women to speak out about their assaults in a time of overwhelming discrimination. In 2011, the Alabama legislature officially apologized to Taylor for failing to prosecute her attackers. — Amanda Nguyen"

"Dorothea Lange was eager to go home. After a month in the field in central California in March 1936, the photographer drove 20 miles past a sign that read PEA-PICKERS CAMP before a nagging feeling caused her to turn back. The decision resulted in a picture of 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson and three of her children, which came to be known as Migrant Mother. It remains the most indelible image of the Great Depression, and is now one of the most famous photographs ever made.
The photo prompted the government to respond to prevent starvation at the camp, and it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s first photography exhibition, in 1940. 1940, incidentally, was also the year Lange was fired from her position with the Farm Security Administration for being 'uncooperative.' (For one thing, she refused to follow orders to train her lens primarily on white Americans, whose suffering, it was assumed, would engender more support.)
She proved incorrigible: two years later, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority to photograph Japanese-American internment camps, she made images that were searingly critical of the policy, which were suppressed until after the war. Lange was uniquely suited to wield her camera as a tool to inspire social change by putting a human face on suffering—work she carried on for three decades following the creation of her best-known image. Contracting polio as a child had left her with a limp that helped her relate to outsiders; early work as a portrait photographer trained her to capture subjects’ dignity.
Since her death in 1965, her work has been appreciated as much for its value as art as for its documentation of history, though Lange disapproved of her photos’ being divorced from context, preferring captions that captured her subjects’ voices. As she put it in an interview not long before her death, 'My powers of observation are fairly good, and I have used them.' — Eliza Berman"

"On June 1, 1950, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith—then the only woman in the U.S. Senate—stood before the world’s greatest deliberative body and confronted a fellow Republican, Senator Joseph McCarthy, over his destructive witch hunt for American communists.
Her “Declaration of Conscience” should be remembered as one of the seminal addresses in the history of the Senate. Americans, she said, possess “the right to hold unpopular beliefs.” They also have a “right to protest” and a “right of independent thought.” Moreover, “The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.”
This is a statement of true tolerance and resonates with core American principles. Although Smith was hailed in some quarters, McCarthy responded with an insult fit for Twitter, calling Smith and her six Republican co-signers “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” Ultimately, Smith prevailed. Smith did more than merely confront McCarthy. She also defined the GOP as the “champion of unity and prudence.” She placed the party in the lineage of Abraham Lincoln.
She was a strong Republican, but, she said, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party rise to victory on the four horses of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.” There are times when victory is not worth the cost. — David French"

"Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationally, profoundly altered American law, life, and politics. It is in many ways ground zero for the tremendous gains women have made in the decades since. It also created a legal framework that would later be used to extend rights to LGBTQ people.
Known by the pseudonym Jane Roe, the plaintiff grew up poor, abused by those who were supposed to care for her. After she became pregnant with her third child, she connected with Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, lawyers looking to challenge abortion restrictions (she at one point fabricated a gang rape, believing that might legally entitle her to an abortion, but the allegation was not in the lawsuit). In the three years, it took the case to reach the Supreme Court, she gave birth to a child she placed for adoption. Roe built on earlier decisions legalizing contraception based on a right to privacy that the justices determined derived from several different amendments to the constitution.
These newfound rights to plan wanted pregnancies and end unintended ones upended traditional gender roles as Americans knew them. We know now that being able to choose when and whether to have children makes women more likely to finish their education, more financially stable and less likely to stay in abusive relationships. States with fewer abortion restrictions have lower rates of maternal and infant mortality. The case galvanized the pro-life movement. When Jane Roe revealed herself to be Norma McCorvey in 1984, she was harassed and threatened; someone shot through her windows and she replaced her front door with one made of steel.
McCorvey was an abortion-­rights advocate for years before becoming “100% pro-life” in the ’90s. She died in 2017. Today, while women continue to reap Roe‘s benefits, the question of abortion’s legality remains at least politically unsettled. Every Supreme Court nominee encounters the same litmus test: Will you uphold Roe v. Wade? With a historically conservative court, the right to safe abortion seems less secure than ever. —Jill Filipovic"

"Known by a single name—Flo-Jo—Florence Griffith Joyner remains the fastest woman in history. At the 1988 U.S. Olympic trials in Indianapolis, Griffith Joyner ran the 100 m in 10.49 sec., a world record that still stands. 'Cannot be,' an announcer said after the race.
“No one can run that fast.” At the Seoul Olympics that September, Griffith Joyner won gold in the 100 m, 200 m and 4 x 100 relay, and set a 200-m world record of 21.34 sec. that’s yet to be broken. Her fashion also drew attention: she wore one-legged racing suits and long, brightly painted fingernails, flouting the idea that feminine fashion and sports don’t mix. 'Conventional is not for me,' she once said. In the track world, where the use of performance-enhancing drugs is prevalent, Griffith Joyner’s records will forever be viewed by some with suspicion.
One track runner publicly declared that he sold Griffith Joyner human growth hormone. She vehemently denied it. But Flo-Jo died—young, at 38, after an epileptic seizure in 1998—an unforgettable icon. 'We were dazzled by her speed,' President Bill Clinton said, 'humbled by her talent and captivated by her style.' — Sean Gregory"

"Long before Lucy Liu or Awkwafina spoke up about the lack of Asian representation in Hollywood, Anna May Wong was fighting the same unjust structures. The native Angeleno, born to second-­generation Chinese-American parents, became a silent-film star in the 1920s on the strength of her expressiveness. But because of miscegenation laws that prevented interracial couples onscreen—and rampant yellowface practices—her opportunities were mostly limited to stereotypes like the rejected other woman or the villainous dragon lady.
After years of speaking up against racism, Wong moved in 1928 to Europe, where she found audiences were more receptive to her talent, regardless of her race. She starred in films, plays, and operettas, and became a global fashion icon.
She later returned to the U.S., where she continued to fight discrimination and, in the 1950s, became the first Asian American to land a leading role in a U.S. TV series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong. With her ingenuity and resilience, she set a template for generations of Asian Americans to pursue their own artistry and stardom. — Andrew R. Chow"

"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"

"Before Noelie “China” Machado started modeling, she said, she never thought she was beautiful; there were “no images” of people like her. (Machado had Portuguese, Chinese and Indian roots.)
But in 1958, she was photographed by Richard Avedon, becoming one of the first known women of color featured in a major U.S. magazine. Machado said Avedon threatened to sever ties with Harper’s Bazaar when the publisher balked at her appearance. The final images paved the way for other women of color in the industry. Time and again, Machado was a pioneer.
She became an editor at Harper’s in 1962 and signed with IMG Models at the age of 81—proving that a more inclusive view of beauty was not just possible, but necessary. — Cady Lang"

"By 1970, Gloria Steinem was already becoming a key voice in the women’s movement through her reporting for New York magazine. But that year, her activism left the page in a momentous way. Though she was afraid of public speaking, Steinem did it anyway. That May, she testified at Senate hearings for the Equal Rights Amendment.
“I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals,” she told her almost all-male audience. “All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.” At the Women’s Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, the 50th anniversary of U.S. women’s suffrage, Steinem spoke to some 20,000 in New York City. Her increasing dedication sparked her to launch a feminist platform: in 1971, she co-founded Ms. magazine.
With a remarkable ability to communicate the agenda she helped set, Steinem quickly evolved from journalist to the face of the women’s movement—the headline speaker at countless protests; the messenger of a more equal, feminist future; and an indispensable force in reimagining the fate of American women for decades to come. — Eliana Dockterman"

"Sadako Ogata was settling in as the head of UNHCR in 1991 when more than a million Iraqi Kurds fled the fallout of the Gulf War. She jumped onto a helicopter to the Iraq-Turkey border to hear firsthand accounts and promised rapid aid. Nicknamed “the diminutive giant,” Ogata—who stood under 5 ft. tall—gained a reputation as a formidable negotiator.
The only Japanese citizen and the first woman to lead the UNHCR, she was re-elected three times and boldly expanded the agency’s mandate to include internally displaced persons. Throughout the 1990s, which she called the “turbulent decade” of her tenure, she navigated crises in places from Afghanistan to the Balkans to Rwanda, helping to protect some of the world’s most vulnerable. — Laignee Barron"

"For her first 10 years as Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel proceeded with the cautious deliberation of the young scientist she had been in communist East Germany. That temperament, combined with Germany’s economic might, made Merkel the most consequential leader in a European Union that shared her devotion to human rights, free markets and open borders.
Then, in the summer of 2015, as desperate Syrian refugees poured into Europe, Merkel made an uncharacteristically quick decision. Letting into Germany some 1 million refugees was an audacious act of generosity that lifted hearts, confounded ISIS and made Merkel the TIME Person of the Year. But it also triggered an anti-immigrant backlash that nourished right-wing nativism.
Five years on, the refugees that Mutti ('Mommy') welcomed are still being absorbed into Germany. But reaction to the influx fractured her party and cost her the leadership both of her country—she has vowed to step down by 2021—and of a European project now less open, less united and less certain of itself. — Karl Vick"

"Soong Mei-ling is as much an architect of modern China as any communist revolutionary. The Wellesley-educated wife of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was instrumental in winning U.S. support for China’s war against Japan (1937–1945), becoming the first Chinese national to address both houses of Congress.
At home, she was seen as power-hungry but, through her New Life Movement, helped foster an upright Chinese identity in opposition to supposed Western decadence, prefiguring some of the ideological zealotry of the Cultural Revolution. In 1937, TIME named her Person of the Year alongside her husband, declaring, 'No woman in the West holds so great a position as Mme Chiang Kai-shek holds in China.' — Charlie Campbell"

"In 1918, a young princess returned to India from studying at Oxford and became fascinated by Mohandas Gandhi’s teachings. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, born into the royal family of Kapurthala and educated in Edwardian England, decided her life’s mission was to help India break free from its colonial ties and oppressive societal norms.
Before long, she was tackling social issues, pushing for women’s education and the right to vote and to divorce, and speaking out against child marriage. She became a secretary to Gandhi in 1930. When India finally won independence from British rule in 1947, Kaur became the first woman to join the Cabinet, serving as Health Minister for 10 years. In that position, she founded the Indian Council for Child Welfare; helped establish the country’s top hospital and medical college; and campaigned to prevent malaria, likely saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
Awarded an honorary degree from Princeton in 1956, Kaur was praised for offering “substantial and highly effective programs of action” to mothers and children, to the sick and starving. In leaving her life of luxury, Kaur not only helped build lasting democratic institutions, she also inspired generations to fight for the marginalized. — Naina Bajekal"

"Evita, as Argentines call their most famous First Lady, was in showbiz long before the Broadway musical about her life. In the 1930s, 15-year-old Eva Duarte moved from her impoverished family’s home to Buenos Aires to become an actor. But parts in radio plays gave way to a more pivotal role: shaping Argentina’s political future. In 1946, shortly after marrying General Juan Domingo Perón, Eva began campaigning for her husband in presidential elections.
After she became First Lady that year, her speeches championing “the shirtless”—as she called the working class­became foundational to Peronism, the controversial populist movement that still divides Argentine politics today. Eva used her influence to divert money to massive social programs, funding schools, orphanages, and hospitals. Her support was also crucial to the passage of women’s suffrage in 1947. Seven decades after Evita died from cancer in 1952, she still looms large—sometimes literally.
When Peronists won the presidential election in October, they relit a monumental portrait of her that rivals had blacked out on Buenos Aires’ biggest avenue, returning her to the forefront of the national narrative. The truth is, she never left. — Ciara Nugent."

"The 1967 global hit “Pata Pata,” sung by Johannesburg-born Zenzile Miriam Makeba, wasn’t South Africa’s freedom anthem—apartheid wouldn’t end for another 27 years—but it provided the opening riff for a revolution.
A musician forced into exile in the U.S. in 1960 by a regime weary of her vocal opposition, Makeba, known by then as Mama Africa, salted her international concerts with harrowing accounts of growing up black under white-minority rule. Wherever she toured, condemnation of her government followed. “People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa,” she once told an interviewer.
“No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa, we always sang about what was happening to us—especially the things that hurt us.” The opening chords of “Pata Pata” were an irresistible earworm; by the time Makeba hit the refrain, audiences were already moving, both with the music and against the apartheid regime.
Makeba returned to South Africa once apartheid began to crumble in 1990, picking up almost exactly where she had left off 31 years prior: using her music as a balm for her country’s wounded soul. — Aryn Baker"

"In 1976, the “Empress of India” had become India’s great authoritarian. She was the daughter of the nation’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the constitutional democrat who strained every sinew after independence from Britain to establish liberal democracy. But his only child was different. She started off as an ingenue, jeered at as a “dumb doll.”
Party bosses propped up Nehru’s daughter because they thought she would be their puppet. Instead, she split her party, yoking a tide of pro-poor populism to storm to a massive election victory in 1971. She became the first Prime Minister to win a decisive victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War. But in her mammoth victory lay the seeds of paranoid insecurity, and she proved to be as ruthless as she was charismatic. By 1975, as a result of economic instability, her government was swamped by an avalanche of street protests, and after her election was deemed invalid, she declared an emergency.
On the night of June 25, 1975, the electricity was suddenly shut off in Delhi’s newspaper offices. She quickly ripped apart her father’s democracy and amended India’s constitution to give herself enormous powers. She jailed political opponents, muzzled the press and extinguished fundamental rights across the country. By 1976, she would scorn democratic processes to stamp out rivals, dismissing party colleagues and state leaders at will.
That year, her government rammed through the 42nd Amendment arrogating supreme powers to Parliament. She instituted “family rule” in her party with the ascendance of her son Sanjay. She also oversaw a remorseless slum-clearance drive in Delhi and forcible-sterilization campaigns across India. — Sagarika Ghose"

"Title IX, the civil rights law passed in 1972 that prevents sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, owes its existence largely to the efforts of Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink of Hawaii. Mink, who was rejected from more than a dozen medical schools because she was a woman and then faced discrimination as a practicing lawyer, devoted her life to advocating for gender equality and educational reform.
The first woman of color and the first Asian-American woman elected to the House of Representatives, Mink served 12 terms in Congress and said she felt a responsibility not just to her constituents but also to women across the country. In the nearly 50 years since its passage, Title IX has been used both to ensure that female athletes are given equal opportunities in sports and to protect students and staff from sexual assault and harassment. It also shields from retaliation those who report violations of the law.
Mink was honored after her death in 2002 when Title IX was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. —Cady Lang"

"For Egyptian psychiatrist, feminist and novelist Nawal El Saadawi, prison was a rebirth. The 1972 publication of her fundamental work of feminist criticism, Women and Sex, had cemented her reputation as a fearless commentator on women’s rights in Egypt. In 1981, she was jailed for “crimes against the state” for her outspoken views, including her criticism of female circumcision.
For El Saadawi, the sentence was a clear demonstration of the link between political power and patriarchy. With eyebrow pencil and a roll of toilet paper, she wrote of her experience: Memoirs From the Women’s Prison, published in 1983, became the basis of a continued body of work that has shaped the discourse on women’s liberation in the Arab world. — Aryn Baker"

"Raised in a poor Arkansas farming family, Joycelyn Elders didn’t visit a doctor until she was 16 years old. But she went to medical school and, in 1993, became the first African American and the second woman to be named U.S. Surgeon General. Elders kept pushing boundaries while in office, advocating for robust sex education and studies on drug legalization—and drawing critics.
Not even then-President Bill Clinton was ready for her progressive views on sexuality—he asked her to resign in 1994 after she argued masturbation should be discussed in school sex ed. Today, many of her views are more mainstream. Recently, the now 86-year-old doctor has adopted a new cause: advocating for more black physicians in the medical field. — Jamie Ducharme"

"Like millions of women, Lilly Ledbetter worked a demanding job to support her family. And, like millions of women, she was underpaid for it. In 1979, a Goodyear tire factory in Alabama hired her as an overnight supervisor, making her one of the first female managers at the plant. But after 19 years with the company, she received an anonymous tip: while she was earning $3,727 per month, men with her same title were making thousands more.
After filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1998, Ledbetter was awarded more than $3.5 million in damages. But the tire giant appealed, and the verdict was reversed. In a 2007 decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Ledbetter had to report discrimination within 180 days of when the prejudiced salary decision was made—impossible to do if you’re unaware of the discrepancy.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a strongly worded dissent, and Congress listened, passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. Now, the 180-day statute of limitations resets with each new paycheck an employee claim reflects discrimination—essential in a society where women are paid an average of 82¢ for every dollar earned by men. — Abby Vesoulis"

"The hashtag #MeToo went viral in October 2017 after Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women. But the movement had been brewing all year. That February, Susan Fowler blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at Uber and inspired hundreds of women in Silicon Valley to share their own stories. In August, Taylor Swift testified in court about being groped by a Denver DJ. That same month, seven female employees sued the Plaza Hotel in New York City alleging sexual harassment by co-workers.
In October, a woman using the pseudonym Isabel Pascual helped plan a rally for agricultural workers who were being harassed and threatened. A few weeks later, Adama Iwu organized an open letter signed by 150 women about harassment in the California state capitol, leading to an investigation. In a matter of months, the #MeToo movement felled hundreds of men accused of harassment or assault, from Matt Lauer to Kevin Spacey, and spurred the launch of organizations like Time’s Up that aim to create lasting change in workplaces.
Progress has been neither quick nor linear. The Plaza suit is ongoing. Survivors and activists expressed righteous indignation when Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed despite allegations of assault. Still, the ripples of #MeToo have not dissipated. Weinstein was found guilty of rape in February 2020 and ordered to await sentencing from jail, a signal to women that their stories can be believed and that even the most powerful men can face consequences. Using the name coined by TIME in its 2017 Person of the Year issue, a group of Weinstein accusers now call themselves the Silence Breakers. “What I wanted to do was cause a massive cultural reset,” Rose McGowan, one of the accusers, said on the day of the verdict. “We achieved that today.” — Eliana Dockterman"

"'We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.' Toni Morrison spoke these words when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, becoming the first black woman so honored.
Not many people can squeeze so much meaning into just a few sentences, but Morrison, an icon of storytelling, did it all the time. In books like The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), she used magical realism and poetic language to interrogate and explore the black experience and the aftershocks of generational trauma. In both fiction and nonfiction, Morrison wasn’t afraid to hold a mirror up to our society—even if we didn’t like the reflection staring back at us.
She wrote from varying perspectives, employing nonlinear structures and stream-of-consciousness monologues that relayed her tremendous capacity for empathy. Morrison’s words force us to re-examine what we think to be true about ourselves. When reading them, I feel shaken one moment and completely seen the next.
Her work makes me think of my grandmother. It makes me want to know more about my grandmother’s grandmother. Morrison has always made me proud to be a black woman. She was a superhero who looked like the women who guided and nurtured our families for generations. She was one of us. I’m glad we weren’t afraid to worship at her feet while she was still here. My only wish is that we could’ve kneeled down at them for a little bit longer. — Lena Waithe"

"'Sí, se puede.' We hear it at protests and see it written on signs at marches, and it became the rallying cry of Obama supporters during his 2008 presidential campaign. A chant of unity and strength, it has been embraced by many social movements that have brought American democracy closer to its promise.
It signifies the movement for economic justice and farmworker dignity that Dolores Huerta began in the 1960s, before many who chant her words today were even alive. Born in New Mexico in 1930, Huerta was raised by a farmworker and union-activist father, and a mother who welcomed farmworkers into her hotel at reduced rates. Her parents’ values seeded Huerta’s career in activism: as a young elementary school teacher, she saw her students come to class hungry and in need of shoes and decided she could help them best by organizing their farmworker families.
By age 32, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez. And in 1965, she led a grape workers’ strike in California that turned into a successful nationwide consumer boycott of grapes and resulted in better pay, benefits, and protections for thousands of workers. Huerta launched the slogan “Sí, se puede” (“Yes, we can”) amid farmworker protests in Arizona in 1972 as a demonstration of her belief in the individual and collective power of workers. For female workers, in particular, her role was transformative. At a time when less than 40% of women were in the workforce, Huerta insisted that they have an equal voice at work and in unions, elevated low-wage workers in the women’s movement and mentored young female activists across the country.
To Huerta, women are never powerless victims, only leaders and authors of their own stories. We have been learning from Huerta for decades. She saw a need to address working poverty at its root, and remains one of our nation’s greatest labor leaders. When we see injustice, may we all seek to organize power, as Huerta did, and may we do so with her unstoppable strength and determination.— Ai-jen Poo"

"The youngest First Lady in nearly 80 years, Jacqueline Kennedy was unlike any before or since. What had been criticized about her during her husband’s campaign for President—her style, her hair, her elite education, and upbringing—she recognized as assets once she was in the White House.
She was savvy at leveraging her public persona, quickly becoming a fashion icon and a leading proponent of prioritizing history and the arts for everyday Americans. After her husband took office, she turned her attention to the refurbishment of the White House. She took care to solicit artifacts from previous Presidents, as well as redesigning rooms to reflect different eras of American history. The First Lady’s nationally televised tour of the renovated White House in 1962 drew a record 56 million viewers from around the world. (She later won an honorary Emmy.) Having studied art history, she understood the power of cultural monuments to create national and historical identity. This understanding, combined with her trendsetting style and appearances, helped her become so popular that President Kennedy famously described himself as 'the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.'
After a little less than three years in the White House, at the age of 34, she was made the world’s most famous widow. She had the unimaginable composure to understand the historical and public importance of her reaction to her husband’s assassination, even amid her personal grief and trauma. She made several swift and crucial choices that helped keep the nation together: she wore the now-iconic pink suit with bloodstains during Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in, to remind the country of what had just happened hours earlier. She orchestrated a funeral based on Lincoln’s that gave a ritual and pageantry, cementing her husband’s legend. And she crafted her family’s Camelot story into a carefully controlled narrative, to allow the nation to have the sort of royalty they desired. Following her husband’s passing, Jackie worked to create a safe and nurturing environment for her children, eventually marrying Aristotle Onassis. She later became an editor at Doubleday and a vibrant part of New York City life—particularly with her advocacy for preserving Grand Central Terminal and her support of the American Ballet Theatre.
For a woman so aware of her public narrative, she surprisingly said, 'I want to live my life, not record it.' In our current age of obsession over how we present ourselves to the world, she is a model of one who found beauty amid tragedy to truly appreciate her precious, only life.—Natalie Portman"

"The cover of TIME’s Jan. 5, 1976, issue was unprecedented. It featured a dozen “Women of the Year” who symbolized the ascending power and status of women in myriad realms: literature, the military, religion, education, the White House, the statehouse, the Cabinet, Congress, sports, law, journalism, and labor.
Yet the “Person of the Year” TIME was recognizing was less any of them than The American Woman writ large. She was the subject of an 11-page spread that chronicled the average woman’s pursuit of equality at home, at the office, in society. “Enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives,” the cover story read, “that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent.”
Looking back, the strides that justified the selection may seem small, like the fact that 7% of lawyers were women (today it’s 36%) or that there were 18 women in Congress (now 126). But early representation is usually the hardest won. And progress often comes with caveats. In a special section of the historic issue, TIME’s publisher highlighted the work of more than a dozen women who had conducted interviews and research for the project. In the fine print, however, was a fact he did not tout: the ultimate job of writing the cover story had still gone to a man. –Katy Steinmetz"

"As the chorus of the #MeToo movement reached a crescendo, with women everywhere speaking out about the abuse they had endured at the hands of powerful men, one voice from the past seemed to echo into the present. When Anita Hill testified before Congress in 1991 and accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, she did so nearly three decades before the start of the movement that might have supported her and spoke alone as a black woman in front of an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee.
Poised in her delivery, the attorney detailed ways she said Thomas had harassed her when he was her supervisor at two government agencies. But with a cynical reception from the committee and a forceful denial from Thomas, he was confirmed. Even so, Hill’s impact was profound: the month after her testimony, Congress passed a law extending the rights of sexual harassment victims. And the following year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received a 50% increase in sexual-harassment complaints than it had the year before. Hill continued her career as an author, commentator, and professor, focusing on equality.
Her story was drawn back into the debate in 2018 when Christine Blasey Ford accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teens. Like Thomas, Kavanaugh denied it and was confirmed, stirring up the same lasting questions about gender and power. But as more women come forward and push for change, Hill’s courageous voice resounds. — Tessa Berenson"

"Bessie Smith was born into tragedy. Her parents died by the time she was 9, leaving her in the care of older siblings. A gifted singer, Smith was forever changed—perhaps even saved—by her rare talent on the stage and insatiable drive off it.
Years of busking and performing in traveling vaudeville shows led to a deal with Columbia Records in 1923 and a signature recording, “Downhearted Blues,” which sold nearly 800,000 copies. Smith’s song became an instant classic, beloved by contemporary audiences and revered by the generations that followed. It helped make Smith the highest-paid black entertainer of the time and earned her the moniker Empress of the Blues.
But Smith was set apart by more than her success. Often called “rough,” she was not only African American and curvy, but also an openly bisexual artist who channeled her early struggles into her music. Her lyrics—defined by her sass and biting wit—addressed poverty and conflict, imploring working-class women to be up-front about their sexual desires. For me, as an African-American woman who is trans—part of two communities that are most marginalized—Smith’s life shows the importance of staying true to yourself, even when the hardest of obstacles are in your way. — MJ Rodriguez"

"When Lesley Brown gave birth to her daughter Louise in 1978, they called her a “test-tube baby.” Today, we know the technique Brown pioneered—one that has helped millions of couples have children despite fertility struggles—as in vitro fertilization or IVF.
Brown and her husband volunteered to try the experimental procedure after a nearly decade-long effort to conceive. Experts did not know if the method would work, and the American public was wary, but Brown had a healthy pregnancy on her first try. When she died 34 years later, the executive director of the clinic where she was treated praised her “incredible leap into the unknown”—which would, over time, reshape our notions of who gets to have a baby, and when. —Jamie Ducharme"

"Lindy Boggs came to Washington as a wife. She left it half a century later with a legacy all her own, as an influential Congresswoman who had championed women’s economic freedom—and who had another round yet to go, becoming ambassador to the Vatican at age 81. Boggs, born on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, moved to the nation’s capital in 1941 after her husband Hale Boggs was elected to Congress; when he disappeared in a plane crash in 1972, she won his seat in a special election.
Two years later, when the House banking committee was considering an amendment to a bill that would have banned discrimination in lending on the basis of race, age or veteran status, Boggs noted that sex and marital status weren’t included. At the time, it was legal in the U.S.—and not uncommon—for banks to refuse to issue credit cards to women on their own economic merit; a husband’s signature was what mattered. Boggs tweaked the bill, made new copies of it herself and handed it out to her colleagues.
In its final form, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 ensured that women would be able to get loans and credit cards and at the same interest rates given to men of similar financial status. From her seat on the House Appropriations Committee, Boggs also pushed for equal pay for government jobs and access to government business contracts. Boggs helped win American women new economic independence: power not as wives, but as people. —Alana Semuels"

"There was a mythic quality to Corazon Aquino’s ascent. Well-born and a devout Catholic, she was a supportive wife to the Philippines’ most prominent critic of kleptocratic dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and seemingly harbored no political ambitions until her husband’s murder in 1983.
She took over as leader of the opposition and won the presidency in 1986 after ordinary people gathered to protect soldiers who refused to stuff ballot boxes. TIME named her Woman of the Year. Filipinos went with “Mother of Democracy.” That democracy has endured on the archipelago.
So have its power structures: a tradition of elite rule helped her son Benigno Aquino III to a widely admired term as President. And his coarse, swaggering successor, Rodrigo Duterte, daily demonstrates both the machismo Corazon Aquino overcame and the value of the principled civility she modeled. — Karl Vick"

"After 14 years of civil war, Liberia was in shambles. Hospitals, schools and major infrastructure were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced and at least 200,000 killed. Corruption was rife in the postwar transitional government. Into the breach stepped Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who campaigned for President on a platform of fixing the mess that the men before her had created. At her 2006 inauguration, she was lauded as the first woman to be elected head of state in a modern African country, engendering hopes not only for Liberia but also for a new generation of female leaders on the continent.
As a woman in a traditionally male environment, Sirleaf embraced her contradictory nicknames—that of Ma Ellen healing her damaged nation, and Liberia’s Iron Lady. With an initial budget of only $80 million, Sirleaf rebuilt key infrastructure and ushered in an economic revival, helped by her savvy negotiation of nearly $5 billion in foreign debt relief. She maintained Liberia’s peace, helped ease its pain and became a Nobel laureate in 2011. But for all the international accolades, Sirleaf’s presidency, which ended in 2018, is regarded with disappointment at home, where allegations of corruption and cronyism have tarnished her record.
She appointed close family members to top government posts. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, she sent military troops to quarantine a poor and heavily infected neighborhood in the capital, with bloody results. And she did not focus on empowering women or other female leaders; of the 19 candidates who ran to replace her, only one was a woman. For all the expectations, and inevitable failures, she did achieve something unprecedented in 70 years of leadership by Liberian men: she stepped aside for someone else when her time in power was up. — Aryn Baker"

"Wangari Maathai was the first woman in Central and East Africa to earn a Ph.D., but she learned the ways of the world by planting trees. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement to teach peasant women livelihoods while reforesting urban areas.
That wholesome pursuit was seen as a threat by Kenya’s land-grabbing politicians, and in 2001, Maathai spent International Women’s Day in jail, where she often found herself. But having found organic links between environmentalism, poverty reduction and democratic rights, she a year later won a Parliament seat with 98% of the vote.
The Nobel Peace Prize followed in 2004. By the time of her death in 2011, Maathai had taken on palm-oil plantations in Southeast Asia, and her movement, with branches in 30 countries, had planted 50 million trees. — Karl Vick"

"The first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor was known for a centrist pragmatism even as she often voted with the conservative bloc and waded into some of the most contentious issues during 25 years on the bench.
The most politically provocative case of her tenure came in 2000 when the Supreme Court determined the presidential election. In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, with O’Connor joining the conservative majority, the court ruling resulted in George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore.
The divisive decision tainted the Justices with accusations of partisanship and tested Americans’ faith in their electoral system. — Tessa Berenson"