The Most Famous Women in History

1. How the list is chosen

Fame among women is judged on the same four tests as fame among men: recognition, influence, range and endurance. But the women's list has a feature that no other list has. For most of history, women were excluded from the institutions that make fame possible — universities, armies, parliaments, academies, publishing houses — and the women who became famous did so by breaking into those institutions or by working outside them. Their fame is therefore a measure of achievement and of resistance at once.

This article does not declare a single most famous woman as a fact. It names the women most often cited, in each field, and gives the reasons. The list is organised by what the women did — ruling, discovering, resisting, writing, performing, playing — because the fields themselves show how wide the achievement is.

One more point matters. The record is incomplete, and not by accident. For every woman on this list, there are others whose work was credited to a husband, a brother or a colleague, or whose names were simply never written down. The final section of this article is about them.

2. Rulers: Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great and Victoria

Hatshepsut (reigned about 1479–1458 BCE) was one of the few women to rule Egypt as pharaoh in her own right, and one of the most successful: she built temples, reopened trade with the land of Punt, and ruled for more than twenty years. After her death, her successor tried to erase her from history, chiselling her name from monuments — an early example of the erasure that this article is about. She was rediscovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

Cleopatra (69–30 BCE), the last active ruler of ancient Egypt, is the most famous woman of the ancient world. She spoke many languages, allied with Julius Caesar and then with Mark Antony, and lost her kingdom to Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, dying by her own hand — by tradition, from the bite of an asp — at thirty-nine. Shakespeare and Hollywood made her a figure of romance; the historical record shows a capable administrator and diplomat who held her kingdom together for twenty-one years against the power of Rome.

Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) never married, defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, and presided over the flowering of English literature. Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–1796) made Russia a great European power, expanded its borders, and corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot while ruling as an absolute monarch. Victoria (reigned 1837–1901) reigned for sixty-three years over the largest empire in history and gave her name to an age. Queen Elizabeth II (reigned 1952–2022) reigned for seventy years and two hundred and fourteen days, longer than any other British monarch, and was the most famous woman in the world for most of her reign.

3. Science: Curie, Lovelace, Franklin and the pioneers of space

Marie Curie (1867–1934) is the most famous woman in the history of science. Born in Poland, she worked in Paris, discovered the elements polonium and radium, coined the term radioactivity, and won two Nobel Prizes — in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and the only woman to have won two. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by her long exposure to radiation, and her notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without protection.

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine and wrote what is now recognised as the first computer program — an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers — a century before the first computer was built. She also saw what Babbage did not: that such a machine could do more than calculate, and could create music and art. Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) produced the X-ray photograph, known as Photo 51, that revealed the structure of DNA, and her work was essential to the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick in 1953. She died in 1958 at thirty-seven, four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery, and her contribution was not fully recognised until decades later.

Other women pioneers broke barriers that still stand. Hypatia of Alexandria (about 360–415) was a mathematician and philosopher, and one of the last scholars of the ancient Library of Alexandria; she was murdered by a mob in 415. Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) founded modern nursing during the Crimean War and used statistics to prove that clean hospitals save lives. Valentina Tereshkova, born in 1937, was the first woman in space, flying solo in Vostok 6 in 1963 at the age of twenty-six. Sally Ride (1951–2012) was the first American woman in space, in 1983. Katherine Johnson (1918–2020), the NASA mathematician whose calculations put the first Americans into orbit, was not widely known until the book and film Hidden Figures in 2016, when she was ninety-eight.

4. Rights and politics: Tubman, Pankhurst, Parks, Thatcher, Merkel and Malala

Harriet Tubman (about 1822–1913) escaped from slavery in Maryland and returned to the South at least thirteen times to lead about seventy enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad, never losing a single passenger. She served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War and lived to see the world change around her. Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) spent fifty years campaigning for women's right to vote in the United States and was arrested for voting in 1872; the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the vote, was ratified in 1920, fourteen years after her death. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) led the suffragette movement in Britain, and British women over thirty won the vote in 1918.

Rosa Parks (1913–2005) is known as the mother of the civil rights movement. On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, and her arrest led to the Montgomery bus boycott, a year-long protest that ended segregation on the city's buses and launched the career of Martin Luther King Jr. She was not, as the simple version of the story says, a tired seamstress who acted on impulse: she was a trained activist and the secretary of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and her act was a deliberate one.

In government, Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) was the first woman to become Prime Minister of Britain, serving from 1979 to 1990, and the longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century. Angela Merkel, born in 1954, was Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021, the first woman to hold the office, and the de facto leader of Europe through the financial crisis, the refugee crisis and the pandemic. Indira Gandhi (1917–1984) was the first and only woman to become Prime Minister of India. Golda Meir (1898–1978) was the first and only woman to become Prime Minister of Israel. Malala Yousafzai, born in 1997, was shot by the Taliban in 2012 for campaigning for girls' education in Pakistan, and in 2014, at seventeen, became the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Jacinda Ardern, born in 1980, was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023 and became the second elected head of government in history to give birth while in office.

5. Arts: Austen, Dickinson, Kahlo, Woolf and Morrison

Jane Austen (1775–1817) wrote six novels that are among the most read and most adapted books in the English language, and she published them anonymously in her lifetime. Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems in her house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published almost none of them in her lifetime; they were discovered after her death and she is now regarded as one of the greatest American poets. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) remade the novel with Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and her essay A Room of One's Own (1929) is the founding text of feminist literary criticism.

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) is the most famous woman painter in history. Her self-portraits — painted after a bus accident at eighteen left her in pain for the rest of her life — are among the most reproduced images in the world, and her face, with its unibrow and flowers, has become a global symbol. She was little known outside Mexico in her lifetime; her fame came after her death, above all in the 1980s, when feminist art historians rediscovered her. Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is one of the most read books in American literature, and who read a poem at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to do so, for novels including Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977). Her work gave voice to the African American experience with a power that changed American literature. Coco Chanel (1883–1971) remade women's fashion, freeing women from the corset and creating the little black dress and the suit that still define elegant dress. Mother Teresa (1910–1997), born in Skopje, founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and worked with the poorest people of the city for nearly fifty years; she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was canonised as a saint by the Catholic Church in 2016.

6. Sport and screen: Serena Williams, Simone Biles and the great actresses

Serena Williams, born in 1981, won twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles, more than any other player in the Open Era, and held the world number one ranking for three hundred and nineteen weeks. Her career, alongside her sister Venus, transformed women's tennis — in power, in athleticism, in prize money, and in who the sport belonged to. Billie Jean King, born in 1943, won thirty-nine Grand Slam titles and defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes in 1973, in front of a television audience of ninety million people, a match that became a symbol of the fight for equality in sport. Simone Biles, born in 1997, is the most decorated gymnast in history, with more world championship medals than any gymnast, male or female, and four Olympic gold medals; at the Paris Olympics in 2024 she won three gold medals and a silver, after withdrawing from the Tokyo Games in 2021 to protect her mental health — a decision that changed how the sporting world talks about athletes' wellbeing.

On screen, Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) won four Best Actress Oscars, more than any other actor in any category. Meryl Streep, born in 1949, holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations, with twenty-one, and has won three; in 2026 she returned as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada 2, released on 1 May 2026. Beyonce, born in 1981, is the most awarded artist in Grammy history, with thirty-two wins, and her Cowboy Carter tour of 2025 was one of the most successful of the year. Taylor Swift, born in 1989, is the most successful recording artist of her generation, and her Eras Tour of 2023–2024 became the highest-grossing concert tour in history.

These women are famous in a new way. They are not only performers. They are public figures who use their fame — for equality in sport, for mental health, for political causes — and who are followed daily by millions of people. Their fame is measured not only in awards but in the conversations they start.

7. What history left out

The most important fact about this list is what is missing from it. For centuries, women's work was credited to men. The astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) discovered eight comets and was the first woman paid for scientific work, but her brother William is the famous Herschel. The physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1968) explained nuclear fission, but the Nobel Prize went to her collaborator Otto Hahn. The programmer Margaret Hamilton, born in 1936, led the team that wrote the software for the Apollo Moon landings, and her work was not widely known until decades later. The list of such women is long, and it grows every time historians look again.

The record is also missing the women whose names were never written down at all: the women who built the houses, grew the food, raised the children and kept the communities alive while the famous men made history. No list can name them, because history did not record them. But their absence is part of the story, and any honest account of famous women must say so.

The women on this list are famous because they did extraordinary things in a world that did not expect them to. The next generation of famous women will be famous for different reasons — in science, in politics, in sport, in fields that do not yet exist — and they will stand on the work of the women in this article. The list is not finished. It never was.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Marie Curie
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cleopatra
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Rosa Parks
• Nobel Prize organisation — Marie Curie
• Nobel Prize organisation — Malala Yousafzai
• Wikipedia — Rosalind Franklin
• Wikipedia — Serena Williams

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• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.