“You will find it hard to forget this material of human erosion,”
one reviewer wrote of her incomparable curation of calamity.Many of the woMen on this list exercised their influence
at the margins, in defense of the marginalized. Recy Taylor,
victim of a brutal rape by a gang of white men in 1944, defied
intimidation and insisted the attackers be prosecuted. Her ex-
ample emboldened civil rights leaders who followed, including
fearless bus riders like Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin. The
Mirabal sisters were assassinated in 1960 for their protests
against Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo. Dolores Huerta
co-founded the United Farm Workers union and conceived
the boycott that became the model for a movement. Marsha
P. Johnson helped lead the fight for LGBT rights, Judith Heu-
mann for disability rights. As individuals, as activists, they
took substantial personal risks; as models, they showed peo-
ple whose stories weren’t being told and whose lives weren’t
being valued that dignity is not the monopoly of the dominant.
Among these women are those whose contributions are in-
finitely more recognizable than they themselves ever were.
To this day, educators struggle to close the confidence gap
that discourages girls from going into science; Melinda Gates
has made this a core of her mission. Would it be any easier if
more people knew the stories, grasped the possibilities rep-
resented by women like Rosalind Franklin, whose role in the
identification of the DNA double helix was eclipsed
by Watson and Crick; or Grace Hopper, the mathe-matician/Navy admiral/computer wizard; or Tu Youyou, who
worked on a cure for malaria; or Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who
helped discover the retrovirus that came to be known as AIDS?
Holly wood has started to color in some of those empty spaces,
greenlighting movies about women like American spy Virginia
Hall. But particularly in science, “if you can’t see it, you can’t
be it,” so these are stories whose illumination is long overdue.
Finally, there are women who exercised moral leadership,
doing hard things against all self-interest. Margaret Chase
Smith staring down Joe McCarthy; or Anna Walentynowicz
organizing her fellow shipyard workers in communist Poland;
Wangari Maathai, fighting for both Kenya’s land and its de-
mocracy, reminding people everywhere that invisible people
who do the right thing can change... everything.
If power is a muscle, driving progress through strength, in-
fluence is a magnet, drawing people toward possibilities they
might otherwise never have imagined. The women profiled
here enlarged their world and explored new ones, broke free
of convention and constraint, welcomed into community the
lost and left behind. They were the different drummers, to
whose beat a century marched without always even knowing
it. So this special project is an act of discovery, and rediscov-
ery, of the possibilities that come when we look and listen dif-
ferently to the world these women made.Gibbs, a former editor-in-chief at TIME, is the directorPR of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center
EVI
OU
S^ P
AG
E^ (
FRO
M^ L
EF
T):^
TO
PFO
TO;
GE
TTY
IM
AG
ES
(^2 )
;^ A
RC
HIV
IO^
GB
B/C
ON
TR
AST
O/R
EDU
X;^
GE
TTY
IM
AGE
S^ (
6 );
AL
AM
Y;^ G
ET
TY^
IMA
GE
S;^
TH
ESE
PA
GES
(F
RO
M^
LEFT):GETTYIMAGES^ (7 );©NYPL/ART^ RESOURCE,^NY;GETTYIMAGES^(^8 );^ REPORT^DIGITAL-REA/REDUX;^GETTYIMAGES^(^3 );^ REUTERS;^GETTYIMAGES^(^5 )25