History is embedded with great influential women who have made revolutionary contributions to how we see the world today. They have shaped our perspectives and paved our ways to greatness. These are the women who we should always remember:
- Mother Teresa: Mother Teresa was a nun who dedicated her life to serving the poor and diseased. She is the founder of Missionaries of Charity which runs across 133 countries. This foundation homes and hospitals for people with tuberculosis, leprosy and other such diseases. This organisation also runs schools, orphanages, mobile clinics, dispensaries, etc. She won a number of honors, including the Nobel Prize in 1979.
- Begum Rokeya: Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, popularly known as Begum Rokeya. She is known for her contribution to establish the first school for mainly Muslim girls. She was also a leading social activist in the pre-partition period and had worked tirelessly to maintain equal rights for women. She also wrote a number of short stories, including Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag.
- Sufia Kamal: This woman is widely known for her poetry and her political and social activism. Begum Sufia Kamal was also a freedom fighter who came to be known as an influential personality in the Bengali nationalist movement of the 1950s and 60s. She has created the pathway for the next generation female leaders of Bangladesh.
- Marie Curie: Marie Curie is perhaps the most achieved woman, not only in her profession, but also as a woman of her time. She was a chemist and a physicist who pioneered groundbreaking research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Noble Prize 1903 and also the first person and the only woman to win in different fields of science. Curie also discovered two elements polonium and radium and also came up with a theory of radioactivity.
- Amelia Earhart: Not a lot of people know this woman, but she basically shows that women too are capable of great manual work like being a pilot. Earhart was the first woman pilot to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean. She received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross, a very prestigious award for setting this record among a number of other awards. She was also very significant in forming an all female pilots association called The Ninety-Nines. She also wrote a number of bestseller novels about her experiences of flying.
- Queen Elizabeth I: Queen Elizabeth I, also known as The Iron Lady, single-handedly ruled the entire of England and had a huge role to play in how great the country is today. She commanded armies and great fleets of ship into the hands of victory and achieved the title of Great Britain for the country. Under her rule, England prospered and rose to greatness over a very short period of time.
- Florence Nightingale: This is such a lady who basically pioneered modern nursing. Florence Nightingale came to be known as the Lady with the Lamp during the Crimean War in England, where she would tend to wounded soldiers all night and day long. She also wrote books explaining in explaining in simple language on medical knowledge where the not so educated individuals were also able to read and take advantage of the knowledge.
- Maya Angelou: Known for many things such as being a poet, writer, actor, social activist and so on, Maya Angelou’s contribution to bring the African-Americans their rights are undeniable. She became among the first female writers who was voiced against the oppression against her race and became iconic for poems such as Still, I Rise.
- Jhumpa Lahiri: Winner of the esteemed Pulitzer Prize award for fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri became the voice of simple women of Southeast Asia. Her writing style and themes brought about massive changes in the world of literature because these things no one ever really wrote about before. She gave the simple rural girls of countries like Bangladesh a voice and finally aspirations.
- Indira Gandhi: Indira Gandhi was the fourth prime minister of India and a central figure in the Indian National Congress party, a political party of India. In 2001, Gandhi was voted the greatest Indian Prime Minister in a poll organised by India Today and was also named "Woman of the Millennium" in a poll organized by the BBC in 1999.