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
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. ...
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Mildred Parten Newhall
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Mildred Bernice Parten Newhall was an American sociologist, a researcher at University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. In it she developed the theory of six stages of child's play, which led to a series of influential publications.
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Rosemary Seymour
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Rosemary Yolande Levinge Seymour was a New Zealand feminist academic. She was instrumental in establishing New Zealand's first women's studies course at the University of Waikato in 1974, the Women's Studies Journal, and the Women's Studies Association of New Zealand.
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Irene Barnes Taeuber
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.
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Ruth Peterson
1900 - Present (125 years)
Ruth Delois Peterson is an American sociologist and criminologist known for her work on racial and ethnic inequality and crime. She earned her PhD in sociology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983. Peterson is emerita professor of sociology at the Ohio State University, former director of the Criminal Justice Research Center , and former president of the American Society of Criminology . She is the namesake of the American Society of Criminology's Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity.
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Carey D. Miller
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Carey Dunlap Miller was an American food scientist and a University of Hawaii at Manoa food and nutrition professor and department chair from 1922-1958. Early life and education Miller was born to immigrant parents that owned a ranch in Idaho. She graduated from Boise High School in 1912. She received her bachelor's degree with honors from the University of California, Berkeley and later her master's degree at Columbia University.
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Ruth Glass
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Ruth Glass was a German-born British sociologist, urban planner and founder of the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London . Life She was born in Berlin on 30 June 1912, the daughter of Eli Lazarus, who was Jewish, and Lilly Leszczynska. She left Germany in 1932, studying at the London School of Economics. After spending two years from 1941 at the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, she returned to the United Kingdom in 1943. She concentrated on town planning and social planning.
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Minnie Louise Haskins
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Minnie Louise Haskins was a British poet and an academic in the field of sociology, best known for being quoted by King George VI in his Royal Christmas Message of 1939. Early life Haskins was born at 2 Kingswood Hill, Oldland, South Gloucestershire, six miles east of Bristol, and she grew up in the neighbouring village of Warmley. Her father was Joseph Haskins, a grocer, and her mother was Louisa Bridges. Her father acquired a pottery at Warmley making drain pipes, which was continued after his death by her mother. The family lived at Warmley House.
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Muriel Rukeyser
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
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Viola Klein
1908 - 1973 (65 years)
Viola Klein was a sociologist in Great Britain. Her work demonstrated that objective ideas about women's attributes are socially constructed. Although her early training was in psychology and philosophy, her most prolific research engagements concerned women's social roles and how these changed after the Industrial Revolution. She was one of the first scholars to bring quantitative evidence to bear on this socio-economic topic. Her research not only illuminated the changing roles of women in society, but she also wrote and lectured on concrete social and political changes that would help faci...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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