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,
#1
Patricia Hill Collins
#794
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#2
Theda Skocpol
#2253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
Go to Profile#3
Dorothy E. Smith
#2270
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
Go to Profile#4
Audre Lorde
#522
Overall Influence
1934 - 1992 (58 years)
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions".
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Chizuko Ueno
#7710
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist". Her work covers sociological issues including semiotics, capitalism, and feminism in Japan. Ueno is known for the quality, polarizing nature, and accessibility of her work. She was married to historian Daikichi Irokawa.
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Chandra Talpade Mohanty
#5733
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity , and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures , Feminism and War: Confronting U.S.
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Sara Ahmed
#4780
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory.
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Peggy McIntosh
#3306
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Peggy McIntosh is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and senior research scientist of the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is the founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum . She and Emily Style co-directed SEED for its first twenty-five years. She has written on curricular revision, feelings of fraudulence, hierarchies in education and society, and professional development of teachers.
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Nancy Chodorow
#2194
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
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Saskia Sassen
#2604
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#11
Jane Jacobs
#383
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
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Carol Gilligan
#560
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
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Margaret Archer
#3840
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Margaret Scotford Archer was an English sociologist, who spent most of her academic career at the University of Warwick where she was for many years Professor of Sociology. She was also a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is best known for coining the term elisionism in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. On 14 April 2014, Archer was named by Pope Francis to succeed former Harvard law professor and US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and served in this p...
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#4391
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008-2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of the "50 most powerful women in Boston" by Boston Magazine and one of the "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.
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Annette Lareau
#7643
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Annette Patricia Lareau is a sociologist working at the University of Pennsylvania. She has completed extensive field work studying the daily lives of African-Americans and European-Americans. She is also credited with the creation of the term concerted cultivation. This concept refers to middle class child rearing practices. She says that this differs from the parents of children in working-class families, who attribute much of their child raising tactics to the accomplishment of natural growth.
Go to Profile#16
Eileen Barker
#2268
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Eileen Vartan Barker is a professor in sociology, an emeritus member of the London School of Economics , and a consultant to that institution's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. She is the chairperson and founder of the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements and has written studies about cults and new religious movements.
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Ann Oakley
#6954
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ann Rosamund Oakley is a British sociologist, feminist, and writer. She is professor and founder-director of the Social Science Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education of the University College London, and in 2005 partially retired from full-time academic work to concentrate on her writing, especially on new novels.
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Gloria Steinem
#118
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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Arlie Russell Hochschild
#1855
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#20
Andrea Dworkin
#838
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
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Deena Weinstein
#7572
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Deena Weinstein is a professor of sociology at DePaul University whose research focuses on popular culture. She is particularly well known for her research on heavy metal culture, on which subject she wrote a ground-breaking book, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology , later published in a revised and updated version as Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture .
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Gail Dines
#5004
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Gail Dines is professor emerita of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. A radical feminist, Dines specializes in the study of pornography. Described in 2010 as the world's leading anti-pornography campaigner, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. Dines is co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality .
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Frances Fox Piven
#3338
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Frances Fox Piven is an American professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. Piven is known equally for her contributions to social theory and for her social activism. A public advocate of the war on poverty and subsequent welfare-rights protests both in New York City and on the national stage, she has been instrumental in formulating the theoretical underpinnings of those movements. Over the course of her career, she has served on the boards of the ACLU and the Democratic Socialists of America, and has als...
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Susan Carland
#18492
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Susan Janet Carland is an Australian academic, author and television presenter best known for her ongoing media presence speaking on her academic speciality of women in Islam. Early life and education Carland grew up in Forest Hill in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. She attended public schools. She has stated that one of her favourite recreational pursuits in childhood was ballet, which she pursued from the age of seven.
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Barrie Thorne
#15692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Barrie Thorne is a professor of sociology and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the sociology of gender, feminist theory, the sociology of age relations, childhood, and families, and ethnographic methods. She is perhaps best known as author of the widely read book Play: Girls and Boys in School which has been cited in over 170 books and over 500 publications.
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Tatyana Zaslavskaya
#5563
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was a Russian economic sociologist and a theoretician of perestroika. She was the prime author of the Novosibirsk Report and several books on the economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside. She was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992 and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zaslavskaya was the founder of RPORC and also its director in the years from 1987 to 1992. In 2000 she was the Laureate of the Demidov Prize and the honorary president of the Levada Center.
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Harriet Zuckerman
#5559
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Harriet Anne Zuckerman is an American sociologist and professor emerita of Columbia University. Zuckerman specializes in the sociology of science. She is known for her work on the social organization of science, scientific elites, the accumulation of advantage, the Matthew effect, and the phenomenon of multiple discovery.
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Angela McRobbie
#6263
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Angela McRobbie is a British cultural theorist, feminist, and commentator whose work combines the study of popular culture, contemporary media practices and feminism through conceptions of a third-person reflexive gaze. She is a professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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Karin Knorr Cetina
#8187
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Karin Knorr Cetina is an Austrian sociologist well known for her work on epistemology and social constructionism, summarized in the books The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science and Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge . Currently, she focuses on the study of global microstructures and Social studies of finance. Knorr Cetina is the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
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Fatema Mernissi
#3966
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Fatema Mernissi was a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist. Biography Fatema Mernissi was born on 27 September 1940 in Fez, Morocco. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. In 1957, she studied political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Brandeis University in the US, where she gained her doctorate in 1974.
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Leila Ahmed
#3725
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a pioneering historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
#278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
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Sylvia Walby
#14957
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Sociology, Director of the Violence and Society Centre at the City University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.
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Karen Barad
#3285
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karen Michelle Barad is an American feminist theorist and physicist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism. Biography They are currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Their research topics include feminist theory, physics, twentieth-century continental philosophy, epistemology, ontology, philosophy of physics, cultural studies of science, and feminist science studies.
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Jutta Allmendinger
#11319
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jutta Allmendinger is a German sociologist who has been serving as the president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a professor of educational sociology and labor market research at Humboldt University since 2007. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#36
Jessie Bernard
#7307
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Jessie Shirley Bernard was an American sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras. Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award.
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Joan Acker
#18217
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Joan Elise Robinson Acker was an American sociologist, researcher, writer and educator. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1967. Acker is considered one of the leading analysts regarding gender and class within the second wave of feminism.
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Teresa de Lauretis
#5390
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.
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Shelley Correll
#18479
Overall Influence
Shelley Joyce Correll is an American sociologist. She is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women’s Leadership Director at Stanford University. Early life and education Correll was born and raised in Houston, Texas, to a police officer father and stay-at-home mother, neither of whom went to college. Growing up, her family was big fans of the Houston Astros and she saw games played in the Astrodome. Upon earning her Bachelor of Arts degree from Texas A&M University, Correll became a high school chemistry teacher while also interning at Dow Chemical Company and taking master’s levels classes in sociology at the University of Houston.
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Eva Illouz
#10438
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. She was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
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Michèle Lamont
#25587
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#42
Nandini Sundar
#4325
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nandini Sundar is an Indian professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics whose research interests include political sociology, law, and inequality. She is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2010. She was also awarded the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research in 2016 and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies in 2017.
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Guillermina Jasso
#18092
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Guillermina Jasso is a sociologist who has significantly contributed to the demography of immigration to America. Jasso is currently the Silver professor of Sociology at New York University where she was formerly Chair of the Department of Sociology. Jasso's research addresses distributive justice, inequality and stratification, mathematical methods for theoretical analysis, and survey methods for empirical analysis.
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Martina Löw
#23953
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Martina Löw is a German sociologist. Vita Martina Löw, former president of the German Sociological Association; Professor of sociology/sociology of architecture and planning at Technical University Berlin; Director of Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” in Berlin. In January 2023 the ranking website Academic Influence ranked her #3 of "Influential Women in Sociology from the Last 10 Years."
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Martha Beck
#11974
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Martha Nibley Beck is an American author, life coach, speaker, and sociologist who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She holds three degrees, a BA, MA and PhD from Harvard University. Beck is the daughter of deceased LDS Church scholar and apologist Hugh Nibley. She received national attention after publication in 2005 of her best-seller, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith in which she recounts her experiences of surviving sexual abuse. In addition to authoring several books, Beck is a columnis...
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Valentine Moghadam
#18309
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Valentine Moghadam is a feminist scholar, sociologist, activist, and author whose work focuses on women in development, globalization, feminist networks, and female employment in the Middle East. She has taught and performed research at various institutions of higher education, most recently as professor of sociology and director of international affairs at Northeastern University. Previously she held the position of director of the Women's Studies Program at Purdue University, where she was also a professor of sociology. Prior to that appointment, Moghadam worked for the United Nations Educa...
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Gloria E. Anzaldúa
#4377
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Call...
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Janja Lalich
#5718
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Janja Lalich is an American sociologist and writer. Lalich is best known as a foremost expert on cults and coercion, charismatic authority, power relations, ideology and social control. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the California State University, Chico.
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Zeynep Tufekci
#3644
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist, and the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is also a columnist for The New York Times. Her work focuses on social media, media ethics, the social implications of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, as well as societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic using complex and systems-based thinking. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, she is one of the most prominent academic voices on social media and the new public sphere. In 2022, Tufekci was a Pulitzer Prize finalis...
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Maria Mies
#4841
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Maria Mies was a German professor of sociology, a Marxist feminist, an activist for women's rights, and an author. She came from a rural background in the Volcanic Eifel, and initially trained to be a teacher. After working for several years as a primary school teacher and qualifying as a high school instructor, she applied to the Goethe Institute, hoping to work in Africa or Asia. Assigned to a school in Pune, India, she discovered that while her male students took German courses to further their education, women for the most part took her classes to avoid marriage. Returning to study at the...
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