14 Thoughts to “Women and influence”

  1. AndyH
    September 21, 2014 at 12:08 pm

    My Mother. 🙂

    1. Moon-howler
      September 21, 2014 at 8:54 pm

      I hope you let her know.

      I just finished the Ken Burns Roosevelt series. Thinking it might be Eleanor. I vacillated between thinking she was silly and naïve to thinking she was a real reformer.

  2. BSinVA
    September 22, 2014 at 8:00 pm

    Carol Doda and Ru Paul.

    1. Moon-howler
      September 23, 2014 at 9:32 am

      Please expound. Not to be a dumb ass but I don’t know anything about either of them.

  3. BSinVA
    September 23, 2014 at 10:42 am

    I’m afraid to expound. Google ’em.

  4. Cargosquid
    September 23, 2014 at 7:38 pm

    Taking this question seriously…..

    per the number of people affected by her actions.

    Indira Gandhi. Hand’s down.

    Unless you count Mao’s evil wife who operated through her husband.

    2nd most influential. Margaret Thatcher.

  5. Pat.Herve
    September 25, 2014 at 7:48 am

    Cannot really pick one. Not that there is not one, there are many for various reasons.
    in no particular order –
    Rosa Parks, Elanor Roosevelt, Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey, Golda Meir….. the list goes on.

    1. Moon-howler
      September 25, 2014 at 8:09 am

      I hadnt thought about Oprah but she has definitely been extremely influential. Many of her contributions haven’t really even been highly publicized. Just what she has done for literacy is breathtaking when you think about it.

  6. Wolve
    September 25, 2014 at 7:46 pm

    Marie Curie (1867-1934). Her brilliant work on radioactivity, radium, and polonium led to the pioneering efforts to treat malignant tumors with radiation. Ergo, her work has touched or has the potential for touching the life of every person who has ever lived since that time. She is the only person in history to win a Nobel Prize in both chemistry and physics.

  7. Moon-howler
    September 26, 2014 at 6:17 am

    She is definitely deserving of mention. Interesting that nearly all of us know her name but few of us can really tell much about her.

    How did she get into the position to do all of her scientific work when so few opportunities were open to women during her lifetime?

  8. Moon-howler
    September 26, 2014 at 6:24 am

    I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Margaret Sanger who, for the record, was not an advocate of abortion.

    I am about halfway through her autobiography. Her pioneer work to make birth control available to all people cannot go without mention. After reading up to the half way point, I am dumbfounded (even though I really knew) the lengths government would go to, probably at the insistence of churches, to keep women from knowing about their own reproductive systems.

    Sanger’s work has probably saved millions of lives in the long run. Far too many women died from frequent child birth. It doesn’t stop there. Women needed to control their own reproduction to ever gain any power. I cannot stress this enough.

    Maybe we can’t have just one influential woman. Perhaps we should have categories.

  9. Wolve
    September 27, 2014 at 12:27 am

    Marie Curie was born in Poland. From what I have read recently, her parents were both teachers and encouraged her to study. The family, however, had no money for further education, which was almost impossible for girls in Tsarist Poland in any case. She worked to support her sister and studied science in an illegal “free university.” She earned enough to send her sister to Paris to earn a medical degree at the Sorbonne. Then Marie moved to Paris herself and, after learning French rapidly, she took all her undergrad and grad scientific studies at the Sorbonne up to the Ph.D. She married Pierre Curie, also a scientist. After she started to make some astounding research strides on the issue of radiation, her husband got so excited about her work that he reportedly asked her if he could work with her. They then became a team. No husband’s coattails with that woman. She was a genius.

    1. Moon-howler
      September 27, 2014 at 10:58 am

      Thanks! I will try to learn more about her. I read the bio as a kid but it was a kid version.

  10. middleman
    October 1, 2014 at 6:43 am

    I’m late to the party again!

    Helen Keller and of course, Rachael Carson, arguably the founder of the modern environmental movement.

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