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 Sociology,
#901
Annie Marion MacLean
1869 - 1934 (65 years)
Annie Marion MacLean was a pioneering American sociologist of the women's Chicago School, and is sometimes referred to as the "mother of contemporary ethnography". She was one of the first women to pursue a professional career in sociology.
Go to Profile#902
Rose Hum Lee
1904 - 1964 (60 years)
Rose Hum Lee was a first generation Chinese-American who became the first woman and the first Chinese-American to head a United States university sociology department. Biography Daughter of Hum Wong Long and Lin Fong, Hum was born the second of seven children and raised in Butte, Montana. She attended Butte High School and trained to become a secretary.
Go to Profile#903
Clara Zetkin
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, communist activist, and advocate for women's rights. Until 1917, she was active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She then joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and its far-left wing, the Spartacist League, which later became the Communist Party of Germany . She represented that party in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933.
Go to Profile#904
Olive Stone
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Olive "Polly" Matthews Stone was a sociologist whose interests focused on human welfare, race relations, and southern American farmers. Throughout her life, she was actively involved in several Marxist reading groups and financially contributed to union organizing in the black belt region.
Go to Profile#905
Anna Howard Shaw
1847 - 1919 (72 years)
Anna Howard Shaw was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the United States. Early life
Go to Profile#906
Barbara Bodichon
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an English educationalist and artist, and a leading mid-19th-century feminist and women's rights activist. She published her influential Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women in 1854 and the English Woman's Journal in 1858. Bodichon co-founded Girton College, Cambridge . Her brother was the Arctic explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith.
Go to Profile#907
Eleanor Roosevelt
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role of First Lady. Roosevelt then served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and in 1948 she was given a standing ovation by the assembly upon their adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Go to Profile#908
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
1890 - 1998 (108 years)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass , which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring .
Go to Profile#909
Frances Willard
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted. Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education. During her lifetime, Willard su...
Go to Profile#910
Marion Talbot
1858 - 1948 (90 years)
Marion Talbot was an American educator who served as Dean of Women at the University of Chicago from 1895 to 1925, and an influential leader in the higher education of women in the United States during the early 20th century. In 1882, while still a student, she co-founded the American Association of University Women with her mentor Ellen Swallow Richards. During her long career at the University of Chicago, Talbot fought tenaciously and often successfully to improve support for women students and faculty, and against efforts to restrict equal access to educational opportunities.
Go to Profile#911
Jean Martin
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
Jean Isobel Martin FASSA was an Australian sociologist who was a pioneer of the discipline in Australia. Many of her works examined the role of immigrants in Australian society. Her academic career "spanned teaching and research appointments in seven Australian universities".
Go to Profile#912
Margaret Hodgen
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Margaret Trabue Hodgen was an American sociologist and author. Hodgen was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hodgen wrote the highly influential Doctrine of the Survivals, first published as a book in 1936, but originally launched in the journal American Anthropology in 1931.
Go to Profile#913
Maud Gonne
1866 - 1953 (87 years)
Maud Gonne MacBride was an Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. She was of Anglo-Irish descent and was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of people evicted in the Land Wars. She actively agitated for Home Rule and then for the republic declared in 1916. During the 1930s, as a founding member of the Social Credit Party, she promoted the distributive programme of C. H. Douglas. Gonne was well known for being the muse and long-time love interest of Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
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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.
Go to Profile#915
Margaret Jarman Hagood
1907 - 1963 (56 years)
Margaret Loyd Jarman "Marney" Hagood was an American sociologist and demographer who "helped steer sociology away from the armchair and toward the calculator". She wrote the books Mothers of the South and Statistics for Sociologists , and later became president of the Population Association of America and of the Rural Sociological Society.
Go to Profile#916
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 - 1797 (38 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
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Jacqueline Burgoyne
1944 - 1988 (44 years)
Jacqueline Lesley Burgoyne was a British sociologist and academic who specialised in family life. Career Jacqueline Burgoyne was born in Worcester on 10 September 1944 and schooled at Bristol. She enrolled at the University of Sheffield in 1963 and completed a sociology degree, before qualifying as a teacher in Bath and then returning to Sheffield to work on a project which would lead to her first book, Books and Reading , the result of a collaboration with Peter H. Mann; after its completion, she worked as a teacher and then in 1971 joined Sheffield City College of Education as a lecturer. ...
Go to Profile#918
Mary Frank Fox
Mary Frank Fox is Dean's Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a pioneer and leader in the study of women and men in academic and scientific occupations and organizations. Her work has introduced and established the ways that participation and performance in science reflect and are affected by complex social-organizational processes. Fox's research is published in over 60 different scholarly and scientific journals, books, and collections, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Sociology of Edu...
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