Inspirational women in history - who's yours?

I rather like the ab fab lady- Joanna Lumley, partly because I used to laugh and laugh at her tv programmes and then she turned out to be not just a joker.

Mother Teresa was bound to have enemies. (Hitchin) She made it OK and important to be charitable in a country which at the time was teaming with very very poor disregarded people. She inspired others to do their bit.

Just read about Sophie Scholl. What an inspiring story. Passive resistance to the Nazi regime in her own country and guillotined at 22.

I really think more should be taught in school about such inspirational people. History is too focussed on events and I think the people get forgotten about.

Gandhi and the Dalai Llama have inspired me (but I know they don't count)

Anyone who stands up and is prepared to be counted inspires me. That is why Rosa Parks is up there right at the top.

As Gandhi said:

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

(Now this could lead to a thread on inspirational quotes by females)

For me it's:
Boudicca
Sophie Scholl (so incredibly brave at such a young age)
Anne Frank
Maya Angelou
Elizabeth I

I have no idea what to think of Mother Theresa. I used to think she was incredible and inspirational but then I read a bit of Christopher Hitchen's book on her. I would love to read more of it but he wrote a lot about how she was given millions in donations (sometimes from dictators) but spent them on convents to glorify god, leaving the people she was supposed to be helping to die in terrible pain, because that would supposedly bring them closer to Christ. It seemed like at worst a very evil and at best a misguided decision to make. CH saw her as a complete fraud.

Ada Lovelace for writing the first computer programme

Margaret Thatcher was part of the team that developed soft ice cream (Mr Whippy). Pretty amazing she did that and became the first female PM.

Constance Markievicz was the first to be elected.

Nancy Astor was the first to take her seat, not the first voted in.

Marie Curie.

Also: Marie Curie (radioactivity) and Rosalind Franklin (DNA) - scientist when it was hard for women to be recognised - Rosalind Franklin should have won the nobel prize along with Crick and Watson IMHO
Camilla Batmanghelidjh for helping and looking after dreadfully neglected kids in London and getting loads of important people to support/ fund the work
Marie Colvin, journalist killed in Homs, Syria for never giving up and getting important stories out to the world

Nancy Astor, the first woman voted to British Parliament.
Caroline Chisolm for the work she did with women in colonial Australia she used to be on the Australian 5 dollar bill.

Actually OP I have spent a bit of time thinking about this and to be honest i would say the most inspirational woman of the last century would be the average woman of the GB during the second world war. You worked the factories and aircraft building plants arriving with little industrial training yet quickly learning the skills to produce the munitions required and keeping the country and family life going all whilst being directly targeted from above with incredible stoicism.

Pah at Margaret Thatcher. She just pulled the feminist drawbridge up after her.

Margaret Thatcher for me too. Not for what she did but for what she represented to me as a young girl growing up in the eighties (I am a socialist politically). She showed me that I as a woman could achieve ANYTHING if I was strong enough and that (inadvertently on her part no doubt) was a BIG message for me.

I am not well read enough to know that many names but I do feel so grateful to all those women in our past who led the way and put their life at risk so that we women can now vote, speak out, earn a wage, drive, choose not to be in an abusive relationship, travel, walk the streets without a male chaperone wearing pretty much what clothes we choose, to plan a family if we want or not to, I feel so lucky especially when I think of women all over the world who don't have our rights and freedom!

My DD's fave book is 'Women Who Changed The World'. Here are a few not mentioned already:

Coco Chanel
Madonna
Oprah Winfrey
Benazir Bhutto
Mother TeresaEleanor Roosevelt
Dian Fossey

Margaret Thatcher

Mary Jones

Also Isabella Bird for flying in the face of convention of the time and just travelling exactly where she wanted to.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Benn. Proto-feminists way before their time.

Oprah Winfrey - (invested $40 million and some of her time establishing the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley on Klip south of Johannesburg)
Mo Mowlam
Doreen Lawrence
Ann Frank
Rosa Parks
Katie Piper

Sojourner Truth - she escaped slavery to become a powerful speaker against slavery and for women's rights.

Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who threw herself under the king's horse

Would definitely second Josephine Baker and Hypatia

Marie Stopes

Frieda Kahlo

Mary Seacole is inspirational, but she's not forgotten is she? I have read lots about her and watched a documentary on tv about her.

Mary Seacole The forgotten nurse at The Crimera
Elizabeth 1

Another for Violet Szabo here. An ordinary?? girl, worked in a shop in Brixton who stepped forward to make a difference. So brave and so young and so inspiring.

Yes, Rosa parks and Elizabeth Fry. Living woman I like Vanessa Redgrave.