The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Political Science,
#851
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman , also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
Go to Profile#852
Josephine Butler
1828 - 1906 (78 years)
Josephine Elizabeth Butler was an English feminist and social reformer in the Victorian era. She campaigned for women's suffrage, the right of women to better education, the end of coverture in British law, the abolition of child prostitution, and an end to human trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution.
Go to Profile#853
Lucy Burns
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Lucy Burns was an American suffragist and women's rights advocate. She was a passionate activist in the United States and the United Kingdom, who joined the militant suffragettes. Burns was a close friend of Alice Paul, and together they ultimately formed the National Woman's Party.
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Victoria Woodhull
1838 - 1927 (89 years)
Victoria Claflin Woodhull , later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35.
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Charlotte Despard
1844 - 1939 (95 years)
Charlotte Despard was an Anglo-Irish suffragist, socialist, pacifist, Sinn Féin activist, and novelist. She was a founding member of the Women's Freedom League, Women's Peace Crusade, and the Irish Women's Franchise League, and an activist in a wide range of political organizations over the course of her life, including among others the Women's Social and Political Union, Humanitarian League, Labour Party, Cumann na mBan, and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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Frances Perkins
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Frances Perkins was an American workers-rights advocate who served as the fourth United States Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position. A member of the Democratic Party, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped make labor issues important in the emerging New Deal coalition. She was one of two Roosevelt cabinet members to remain in office for his entire presidency .
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M. Carey Thomas
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Martha Carey Thomas was an American educator, suffragist, and linguist. She was the second president of Bryn Mawr College, a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Early life and education Thomas was born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 2, 1857. She was the daughter of James Carey Thomas and Mary Thomas. She was conceived "in full daylight", because her father, a doctor, thought this would diminish the chance of his wife miscarrying.
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Claudia Jones
1915 - 1964 (49 years)
Claudia Vera Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major Black newspape...
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Mary Burnett Talbert
1866 - 1923 (57 years)
Mary Burnett Talbert was an American orator, activist, suffragist and reformer. In 2005, Talbert was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Career Mary Morris Burnett was born in Oberlin, Ohio in 1866. As the only African-American woman in her graduating class from Oberlin College in 1886, Burnett received a Bachelor of Arts degree. She entered the field of education, first as a teacher in 1886 at Bethel University in Little Rock, then as an assistant principal of the Union High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, the highest position held by an African-American woman in the state.
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Clara Bewick Colby
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby was a British-American lecturer, newspaper publisher and correspondent, women's rights activist, and suffragist leader. Born in England, she immigrated to the US, where she attended university and married the former American Civil War general, later Assistant United States Attorney General, Leonard Wright Colby. In 1883, she founded The Woman's Tribune in Beatrice, Nebraska, moving it three years later to Washington, D.C.; it became the country's leading women's suffrage publication. She was an advocate of peace and took part in the great peace conference at San Francisco during the exposition.
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Camila Henríquez Ureña
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Camila Henríquez Ureña , was a writer, essayist, educator and literary critic from the Dominican Republic who became a naturalized Cuban citizen. She descended from a family of writers, thinkers and educators; both her parents, Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and Salomé Ureña, as well as her brothers Pedro and Max, were literary luminaries. Her essays have been published in Instrucción Pública, Ultra, Archipiélago , Casa de las Américas, La Gaceta de Cuba, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, Revista de la Universidad de La Habana, and Revista Lyceum. A feminist and a humanist, she lectured durin...
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Elizabeth Haldane
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane was a Scottish author, biographer, philosopher, suffragist, nursing administrator, and social welfare worker. She was the sister of Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane and John Scott Haldane, and became the first female Justice of the Peace in Scotland in 1920. She was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1918.
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Florence Ayscough
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Florence Ayscough MacNair was a sinologist, writer and translator of Chinese literature. Early life and education Florence Ayscough, née Wheelock, was born in Shanghai, China, to Canadian father Thomas Reed Wheelock and American mother Edith H. Clarke.
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Hazel Hunkins Hallinan
1890 - 1982 (92 years)
Hazel Hunkins Hallinan was an American women's rights activist, journalist, and suffragist. Early life and education Hunkins Hallinan was born on June 6, 1890, in Aspen, Colorado, and grew up in Billings, Montana. She was the only daughter of Lewis Hunkins, a jeweller, watchmaker, and civil war veteran, and an Englishwoman, Ann Whittingham.
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Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau was a French pacifist, feminist and journal editor. In 1900, she went to Canada where she became a lecturer at McGill University until 1908 when she returned to France. In 1911, she subscribed to the newspaper La Française, the source of her appetite for feminism. After the end of the First World War, she became Secretary of the Union pour le Suffrage des Femmes and President of the Union Féminine pour la Société des Nations. She is also remembered for the extensive correspondence she maintained with family members, former students and war veterans.
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Ruth E. Bacon
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Ruth Elizabeth Bacon was an American foreign service officer, a Far East specialist. She was one of the first six annual recipients of the Federal Woman's Award, in 1961. In 1968, she retired as director of the Office of Regional Affairs in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at the United States Department of State.
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Vera Micheles Dean
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Vera Micheles Dean was a Russian American political scientist. She was the head of research for the Foreign Policy Association, one of the leading think tanks of the 1940s and 1950s, where she became one of the leading authorities in international affairs during that period.
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Helen Brewster Owens
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Helen Brewster Owens was an American suffragist and mathematician. Early life and education Helen Brewster Owens was born April 2, 1881, in Pleasanton, Kansas, to Clara and Robert Edward Brewster. Her mother, who was a teacher and president of the Lincoln County Women's Suffrage Association, prompted Brewster's interest in the movement from a young age. As a girl, she attended the 1893 County Fair with her mother where she helped distribute flyers of Frances Willard.
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Eleanor Lansing Dulles
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Eleanor Lansing Dulles was an American writer, professor, and United States government employee. Her background in economics and her familiarity with European affairs enabled her to fill a number of important State Department positions.
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Louise Overacker
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Louise Overacker was an American political scientist. She specialized in the study of money in politics, United States presidential primaries, and comparative party systems, particularly those of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She was one of the first professors to teach government at Wellesley College, where she was a faculty member from 1925 until 1957, and helped to establish the Wellesley Department of Political Science in 1940.
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Jacqui True
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jacqui True is a political scientist and expert in gender studies. She is a professor of international relations at Monash University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Gender, Peace and Security. She studies international relations, gender mainstreaming, violence against women and its connections to political economy, and the methodology of feminist social science.
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Gabriela Mistral
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga , known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral , was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and Catholic. She was a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order.She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.
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Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Lucy Stone
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Lucy Stone was an American orator, abolitionist and suffragist who was a vocal advocate for and organizer promoting rights for women. In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and against slavery. Stone was known for using her birth name after marriage, contrary to the custom of women taking their husband's surname.
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