“If one is looking for a list of inspirational and significant women, this is a good place to start”
Seeing that history polls can often be male-dominated, giving women a list of their own highlights those who usually get left off or forgotten.
In some ways, the category is an odd one – changing the world does not require intention, benevolence or even existence (as some of the more legendary additions to this list demonstrate). What does it mean to ‘change the world’ and how do we measure it?
The majority of the women in the top 20 made their marks in the last 300 years. It is more difficult to recover the influence of women the further back in history one goes, as it was often necessar- ily informal and unrecorded. The more successful the influence, the less it appears in our sources.
Perhaps to recover more of women’s presence in history, it would be helpful to distance ourselves from the ‘great (wo)man’ view of history. Nevertheless, if one is looking for a list of inspirational and significant women, this is a good place to start.