Are women influential? I mean, influential enough to count on a list of history’s most influential characters? Maybe it depends on who’s keeping count.
Blogger Sampson T. Buckburn recently began compiling such a list, an admittedly subjective, if not impossible, exercise. But I couldn’t help but notice at 21 influential characters and counting, from Tecumseh to Vlad the Impaler, there are so far no ovarian-assisted agents of history among the lot.
Here’s a few influential women I’d offer as candidates for the list.
1. Mary, Jesus’s Mom. Venerated, popular, and a case can be made for her divinity (at least, according to something I read in The Economist a couple of years ago. Apparently it’s all been hushed up over the centuries.) Also: the immaculate conception and resulting miraculous “virgin” birth. Best. Morning. After. Excuse. Ever.
2. Jane Goodall. Ground-breaking study of chimpanzees lasted 45 years. Inspired a brilliant Far Side cartoon. Her discovery that chimps can make and use tools (twigs down holes = ants, yum) turned the Man-the-Toolmaker superiority thing on its ear.
3. Queen Elizabeth I. Women rule! No, seriously. Also a “virgin”. Most popular British monarch in a recent poll of UKers. Take THAT Liz II.
4. Rosa Parks. The light that sparked the Civil Rights movement in the States. Way to stick it to the Man!
5. Rachel Carson. Widely credited with inspiring the environmental movement.
7. Cleopatra. Would Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s sizzling off-screen romance have reached such glamourous heights without this Queen of De Nile, and her affair with her hottie he-man co-star, for inspiration?
8. Anne Frank. Her diary, first published in 1947, just a few years after her death in Bergen-Belsen, endures as one of the most widely-read books of the 20th Century. An individual whose eloquent description of war and its effects on one life helps the world understand the immense loss of so many millions. Quotable, too: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Nazis suck!
Just my two cents!
–October 2006.
