Inspirational Women list

Marie stopes (birth control pioneer)
Dian Fossey (conservation program)
Mary Cronk (MBE - services to mid-wifery)

Jenny Murray
Polly Neate - Securing legislation to criminalise coercive and controlling behaviour

• Winning a total of £33 million in new Government funding for refuges
• Launching the Safer Futures project; increasing the capacity-building support offered to local domestic abuse services; and getting the issue of abuse in the family courts onto the public and political agenda with the Child First campaign
• Securing legislation to prevent survivors of domestic abuse being cross-examined by their abusive ex-partners in the family courts.
• Change that Lasts, Women’s Aid’s vision for the future which places the survivor at the heart of the response to domestic abuse.

Dorothy Hodgkin (I know she's been mentioned upthread but silentcrow's list of scientists overlooked for Nobels shouldn't have included her, she got one all to herself, she was that good)

Katherine Grainger

Ida B. Wells

Anne Frank
Helen Keller

Mary Seacole
Ada Lovelace
Margaret Hamilton
Malala Yousafzai

Posie Parker

Maryam Mirzakhani (first woman Fields medallist).

Composers Elizabeth Jacquet dear la guerre and Barbara Strozzi

Emelie du Chatelet (another mathematician). And Emmy Noether.

Denise Lewis
Victoria Wood
Betty Boothroyd
Mo Molam
Dawn French

Caroline Lucas
Helen Steel
Mona Elthawy
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Arundhati Roy
Germaine Greer
Elizabeth Kolbert
Anna Politskovskaya
Angela Davies
Franny Armstrong
Naomi Klein
Kathleen Stock
Dale Spender
Gloria Steinman
Julie Bindel
Helena Kennedy QC
Doreen Lawrence
Sheila Rowbotham

And Pussy Riot

Back in the mists of time
Emma Goldman
Mary Anning
Harriet Martineau
Dr James Barrie (Margaret Anne Buckley)
Simone De Beauvior

Vivienne Westwood
Germaine Greer
Floella Benjamin.

Doris Lessing Nobel Prize Winner.

Dropping in the Heroine Collective: www.theheroinecollective.com

In a similar vein TheCountryGirl

Stephanie Slater

A kidnap victim of Michael Sams who had already murdered his first kidnap victim Julie Dart after she attempted to escape. Stephanie died of cancer last year at the age of 50, her experience haunted her until the end.

Elsie Inglis

Told "go home and sit down", instead she set up camp hospitals in war zones and saved thousands of lives with good hygiene.

Total badass.

Helen Sharman.

Ellie Simmonds.

Jessica Ennis-Hill.

Margaret Thatcher.

Elisabeth Fritzl and Michelle Knight.
Men did their worst and these women found a strength within them that even men's fiercest fury couldn't diminish.

Lady Hale
Rose Heilbronn
Helen Sharman
Jocelyn Bell Bernell
Tani Grey Thompson
Mo Mowlem
Barbara Castle
Dorothy Parker
ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
Lee Miller

Elizabeth Anscombe

From her Guardian obit: “She was notorious for a forthright foulmouthedness which was only enhanced by the beauty of her voice...

Except when pregnant, she wore trousers, often under a tunic, which, in the 50s and 60s, was often disapproved of. Once, entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers. She simply took them off.”

Constance Markievicz

I'm googling the names that I don't recognise - such a wonderful variety of accomplished and inspirational women!

Katherine Johnson
Dorothy Vaughan
Mary Jackson

The hidden figures of the NASA Space programme who were incredibly intelligent, hard working women, equally if not more capable than the men that worked at NASA (the overwhelming majority of whom were white) who faced the double whammy of being female and black in racist segregated America. We should hear and be taught their stories and they didn't pull the ladder up behind them when they achieved success instead they encouraged and fought for their fellow women of whatever colour.

Rosa Parks

Made a very brave decision which cost her her job and resulted in her receiving thousands of death threats.

Noor Inayat Khan

Member of the SOE, parachuted into France behind enemy lines, collated and sent information back to the UK, worked with the French Resistance. Was given the option of being smuggled out of France back to the UK when the group she worked with was betrayed and most of them captured but refused saying she wanted to stay even though she knew the incredible danger she was in. Was inevitably betrayed, captured and tortured before being executed but never gave up her fellow SOE members or members of the French Resistance.

Ann Sinnott

Stephanie Davies Arai

Mary Robinson