In our world, it is generally accepted that all great discoveries were made by men, they also invented everything, created innovative technologies and, in general, drove progress. But it’s not. In our selection, we have collected interesting female personalities who changed world history.
The legendary women from our selection became famous all over the world primarily because they believed in themselves and their ideas. They were not afraid of stereotypes and took confident steps where no woman’s foot had yet set foot. They achieved a lot, made revolutionary discoveries in the field of science and fought for their rights. It will take more than one life to write a story about everyone. But we’ll at least start with these thirty famous names. If you also want to change the world – try to play blackjack online. You have every chance to win a large amount and become famous all over the world.
Malala Yousafzai
Perhaps if there were only 10 women who changed the world on our list, this young Pakistani would still be on it. The girl became famous all over the planet at the age of 11 thanks to her blog. In it, she spoke about the atrocities of the Taliban, who captured the village where Malala lived. The girl wrote about how the Taliban forbid women to receive education, do not recognize their universal human rights and freedoms. A year later, the militants figured out the author of the blog and shot Malala in a city bus, seriously injuring her and several other people in the head. The girl miraculously survived, was transported to the UK and was awarded the National Pakistani Youth Peace Prize.
At the age of 16, Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, making her the youngest winner in history. And this is not her only award for social activities. In 2021, she celebrated her 24th birthday with significant success, speaking at the UN headquarters in New York and opening schools for girls in Lebanon. And we understand why Malala has already gone down in history as a great woman who changed the world.
Irena Sendler
A doctor from Warsaw became not only a national heroine of Poland, but also a woman who changed the very history of the world. During World War II, she worked in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she cared for sick children. With the help of various tricks, forgeries, substitution of documents, Irena took 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto. The babies were given sleeping pills, placed in small boxes with holes to prevent them from suffocating, and taken out in trucks that delivered disinfectants to the camp. Some children were taken out through the cellars of houses directly adjacent to the ghetto. Was used for escapes and drain hatches. Other children were taken out in bags, baskets, cardboard boxes.
Risking her life, she kept lists of the saved, and after the victory over fascism, she tracked down almost everyone to make sure that their life went well. In 1965, the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena Sendler the title of Righteous Among the Nations. Often, the stories of women who changed the world become plots for films. In 2009, the film “The Braveheart of Irena Sendler” was released about the feat of one of the key figures of the Resistance.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie
Not a single woman in the entire existence of mankind has become famous in science like Mary, so she became one of the heroines of the book “50 Women Who Changed the World” by Katherine Halligan. A great physicist and chemist, she became the only lady to be twice awarded the Nobel Prize (for the discovery of radioactivity and the discovery of the elements polonium and radium). During the First World War, Marie Sklodowska-Curie, already a recognized scientist and Nobel laureate, as director of the Red Cross Radiology Service, took up the equipment and maintenance of portable x-ray machines for examining the wounded. Marie Curie invested in the creation of these devices almost all the funds from both Nobel Prizes.
Interestingly, Marie Sklodowska-Curie is also the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes, whose daughter also received the Nobel Prize and also in chemistry, like her mother. It is worth adding that in 2018 BBC History Magazine asked its experts to compile a list of 100 women who had the greatest impact on the course of world history and changed the world. Readers voted to determine the place of each of them on the virtual podium. In the first place was Marie Curie.
Margaret Hamilton
In the early 1960s, such a specialty as programming was only gaining momentum, and those who mastered it were self-taught. Hamilton was fond of mathematics and turned her attention to programming. So, she was accepted into the NASA Apollo program, which deals with manned flights to the moon. She later led a team of software engineers for the space project. With her invention, Margaret entered the history of the 20th century as a woman who changed the world. It was she who saved Apollo 11 from death when the on-board computer was overloaded. The most famous was a photo of Margaret next to a printout of the program code she wrote.
Anne Frank
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is considered the most tragic and most reliable evidence of the horrors of Nazism. During the Second World War, the female part of Anna’s family hid in the basement, and the Jewish girl almost daily wrote in her notebook about everything she saw around. The diary survived miraculously: Anna, her mother and sisters were found and deported to Auschwitz. None of them survived. The diary was found by a random girl who was impressed by what she read, managed to find the girl’s relatives and handed the diary over to them. Anne Frank’s diary has become one of 35 sites inscribed on the Memory of the World Register of the UNESCO World Heritage List. Also, the name of its author is immortalized in the book Fantastic Women Who Changed the World by Keith Pankhurst. Among other women, she was not afraid to follow the dictates of her heart and change our understanding of the world.
