--- title: Photos: 17 of History's Most Rebellious Women description: In honor of International Women's Day, TIME looks at some unlikely revolutionaries, from Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman to Russian punk-rockers. canonical: https://time.com/15991/most-rebellious-women-in-history-photos/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-03-11T09:40:57.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:44:25.321Z og:title: 17 Photos of History's Most Rebellious Women og:description: In honor of International Women's Day, TIME looks at some unlikely revolutionaries, from Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman to Russian punk-rockers. og:url: https://time.com/15991/most-rebellious-women-in-history-photos/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e8c82abe9d143e4/6986846c13c79fe273190eb6/rebellious-women-through-history-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1500 og:image:height: 844 og:image:alt: rebellious-women-through-history-01 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 17 Photos of History's Most Rebellious Women twitter:description: In honor of International Women's Day, TIME looks at some unlikely revolutionaries, from Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman to Russian punk-rockers. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e8c82abe9d143e4/6986846c13c79fe273190eb6/rebellious-women-through-history-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 17 of History's Most Rebellious Women > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=bbc3c255-164f-4753-ac4c-b8d7a46a0c97&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=bbc3c255-164f-4753-ac4c-b8d7a46a0c97&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: 25 Most Powerful Women of the 20th Century [Watch (HLS stream): 25 Most Powerful Women of the 20th Century](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/GVkMJugX.m3u8) (5:53)  _Published 2010-11-18. Women at TIME share their favorites on the 25 Most Powerful Women of the 20th Century list_ by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Mar 11, 2014 9:40 AM UTC ![Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia
Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. The group has since used its notoriety to promote human rights issues. The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful.](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e8c82abe9d143e4/6986846c13c79fe273190eb6/rebellious-women-through-history-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=3:2) Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. The group has since used its notoriety to promote human rights issues. The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. The group has since used its notoriety to promote human rights issues. The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful. Yuri Kozyrev—Noor for TIME by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Mar 11, 2014 9:40 AM UTC In honor of International Women’s Day, TIME looks at some unlikely revolutionaries, from Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman to Russian punk-rockers. _Read next:_ [_Here’s What 20 Famous Women Think About Feminism_](http://time.com/3419148/heres-what-18-famous-women-think-about-feminism/?xid=time%5Freadnext) ![Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia
Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. The group has since used its notoriety to promote human rights issues. The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful.](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e8c82abe9d143e4/6986846c13c79fe273190eb6/rebellious-women-through-history-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp) Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. The group has since used its notoriety to promote human rights issues. The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful. Yuri Kozyrev—Noor for TIME  Tawakul Karman, Yemen Tawakul Karman, chair of Women Journalists Without Chains — a Yemeni group that defends human rights and freedom of expression — pressured former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down from power, which he held from 1978 to 2012\. She was arrested several times during her peaceful protests. Hani Mohammed—AP  Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu has been the foremost leader in the effort to democratize the Southeast Asian nation as well as a courageous advocate for human rights and peaceful revolution. She spent 15 years under house arrest when the government refused to cede power to her after her party was elected. Alison Wright—Corbis  Corazon Aquino, the Philippines When Corazon Aquino's senator husband was assassinated in 1983, Aquino ran against 20-year autocrat Ferdinand Marcos in his stead. Though Marcos claimed victory, Aquino led a peaceful revolution across the nation of impoverished islands. Aquino became President of the Philippines upon Marcos' resignation. Willia Vicoy— Reuters/Corbis  Phoolan Devi, India Phoolan Devi began a streak of violent robberies across northern and central India, targeting upper castes. In 1981 she led her gang of bandits to massacre more than 20 men in the high-caste village where her former lover was killed. Devi negotiated her sentence with the Indian government to 11 years in jail. Getty Images  Angela Davis, the U.S. Angela Davis, a political activist, scholar and author, was accused of supplying the gun in the death of a federal judge. She fled, landing her a spot on the Most Wanted list. Davis was caught in New York but was acquitted in 1972, backed by activist supporters who demanded her freedom. Hulton Archive—Getty Images  Golda Meir, IsraelAlthough best known as Israel's Prime Minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Meir made her mark on the revolutionary Zionist movement during the pre-state period when during a 1948 trip to the U.S., she raised $50 million from the Jewish diaspora community, making a state of Israel possible. Bettmann—Corbis  Vilma Lucila Espín, Cuba The spirit of the Cuba's communist revolution was most vividly embodied by its "First Lady," Vilma Lucila Espín. After training as a chemical engineer, Espín took up arms against the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s and debunked the notion of the docile Caribbean woman with her full army fatigues. AP  Janet Jagan, Guyana Chicago-born Janet Jagan and her husband founded the People's Progressive Party in Guyana, which sought to promote Marxist ideals. Her hand in protests got her thrown in jail by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She was elected Guyana's first female President in 1997. Harry Benson—Getty Images  Jiang Qing, China After marrying Chairman Mao Zedong in 1938, Jiang Qing climbed the ladder of the Communist Party, eventually becoming the leader of the infamous Gang of Four. Jiang refused to apologize for the criminal charges that were eventually brought against her, instead spending a decade in prison before dying. Bettmann—Corbis  Nadezhda Krupskaya, RussiaAlong with fellow radical Vladimir Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya helped set up the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1895\. Police arrested them both, and they married while exiled in Siberia. After her release in 1901, she ran Iskra (the Spark), an international newspaper for Marxists. Hulton-Deutsch Collection—Corbis  Susan B. Anthony, the U.S. In 1851, Susan B. Anthony met fellow women's-rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the outspoken duo began touring the country arguing the case for women's suffrage.U.S. marshals arrested Anthony for voting illegally in 1872\. She died before the 19th Amendment was passed. Frances Benjamin Johnston—Corbis  Emmeline Pankhurst, Britain
>Margaret Sanger was the 6th of 11 children. She was [00:03] incredibly nurturing. She was incredibly compassionate. [00:06] >>She worked in very, very difficult conditions. She worked [00:10] with intensely radioactive materials. [00:12] >>Along with James George, she pioneered what we know [00:15] as stream of consciousness. [00:17] >>It struck me as so interesting that the first female [00:18] candidate, you almost didn't notice was a woman. [00:23] >>I'm Nancy Gibbs, I'm the Executive Editor [00:27] of TIME, and I wanted to talk about Hillary Clinton. [00:30] >>No one had quite seen a campaign in which the [00:33] candidate, in this case, Bill Clinton, was offering two for the [00:35] price of one, and was suggesting that by voting for him, you [00:38] will get this other brilliant person too. Her ambitions, their [00:42] marriage, that relationship was this drama that we watched [00:46] unfold in a way no one, no novelist, no Hollywood [00:50] director could have possibly scripted. And it [00:54] started out interesting, and it just got more interesting. At a [00:57] time when so many men and women were wrestling with [01:01] values and power and roles, she was this absolutely [01:05] perfect Rorschach test on which so many people projected [01:09] their own ideas about what was appropriate for men and [01:11] women. [01:11] >>My name is Julie Rawe, and I am a Senior Editor at [01:14] Time Magazine. Margaret Sanger was just so far ahead of [01:18] her time, her mother had a total of 18 pregnancies, and [01:23] Margaret Sanger became an obstetric nurse, and it was [01:26] through this work that she saw so many poor women with [01:29] uncontrolled fertility. She saw so much infant mortality and [01:32] maternal mortality, and also women dying from [01:36] self- induced abortion. She opened the first family planning [01:39] clinic in the U. S. before doctors even had the right to [01:42] prescribe contraception to women. It's largely because of [01:45] her that women can now control when we wanna have [01:49] children, how many children we wanna have. This has [01:53] given women the freedom to get more education, to work [01:56] outside of the home, to be on equal footing with men. I'm [02:02] Radhika Jones. I'm an Assistant Managing Editor at TIME. [02:05] Virginia Woolf, aside from being one of the most famous [02:10] well- regarded novelists of the 20th century, was also [02:14] an astounding and prolific critic. And she basically [02:20] set people's case for, I would argue, you [02:24] know the entire last century in terms of what we think of [02:28] as literary, what we think about literature. You think of [02:32] books like Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, [02:36] her later work Between The Acts, The Waves, certainly-- [02:41] very hard to read, very challenging, extremely rewarding. [02:45] But then on this side as a critic, she can be extremely [02:48] colloquial, she was sort of gloriously judgmental, but [02:53] always sharp and witty, and she is one these people who, [02:56] you know, when they ask who would in all of history would [02:59] you like to have had dinner with, I always think of Virginia [03:03] Woolf. [03:03] >>I'm Belinda Luscombe, I'm Editor- at- large at TIME [03:05] Magazine. What gives Mother Teresa? I think her influence [03:10] and power is partly that she was completely willing [03:14] to subsume herself. That she does not seek to become [03:18] powerful. That in fact she sought to work among the most [03:22] powerless. One of the other really remarkable things about [03:26] Mother Teresa is although she was like a man in her [03:29] laser- like focus of I am gonna get this gun. I'm gonna help [03:32] the poor. The way she did that was in a [03:37] classic feminine, virtuous way. She was incredibly [03:40] nurturing. She was incredibly compassionate. To me, these [03:43] seem to be like the best things about being a woman. They [03:47] are where we excel, and that is how she became [03:52] such a remarkable and powerful woman. [03:54] >>I am Sora Song, and I am the Health Editor at [03:58] TIME. The most likable and so ever inspiring thing about [04:02] Madonna was that just from a very early age, she [04:06] seems so willful and powerful and just sort of, you know, [04:09] kind of did whatever she wanted. You [04:15] know I grew up in an immigrant household that was really [04:17] strict. We had a lot of rules for everything. You know, we [04:20] couldn't go to sleepovers. We had to line up by the door [04:23] and bow when my dad came home from work. You know, it [04:26] was very patriarchal sort of, you know, strict family [04:30] life. And as a little girl growing up without really any [04:35] female role model, she to me was sort of like everything [04:38] you kind of want to be. [04:41] >>I'm Maia Szalavitz and I'm the Health and Science [04:43] Writer for TIME's Healthland. Marie Curie won two Nobel [04:47] Prizes, and her daughter won one, and she has been an [04:49] inspiration to women in science for generations now. My [04:53] father was a chemist, and I was a geeky little kid who liked [04:57] to do things like memorize the periodic table so I really [05:01] wanted to grow up and discover an element for myself. She [05:04] worked in very, very difficult conditions. She worked with [05:08] intensely radioactive materials. She had to go through [05:12] large quantities of this stuff. She would look at the pretty [05:16] glow that it made. She didn't realize that it was very [05:19] damaging to her own health, but what she was interested [05:22] in was how radiation could be used to heal people. And [05:26] this led almost directly to radiation therapy for cancer. [05:32] >>To see the full list of the 25 most powerful women of the [05:36] 20th century, visit TIME. com. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/15991/most-rebellious-women-in-history-photos/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/15991/most-rebellious-women-in-history-photos/"},"headline":"17 of History's Most Rebellious Women","datePublished":"2014-03-11T09:40:57.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:44:25.321Z","description":"In honor of International Women's Day, TIME looks at some unlikely revolutionaries, from Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman to Russian punk-rockers.","url":"https://time.com/15991/most-rebellious-women-in-history-photos/","keywords":["Living","feminism","Photos","Pussy Riot","photography","Harriet tubman","Aung San Suu Kyi","International Women's Day","activists"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e8c82abe9d143e4/6986846c13c79fe273190eb6/rebellious-women-through-history-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e8c82abe9d143e4/6986846c13c79fe273190eb6/rebellious-women-through-history-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"rebellious-women-through-history-01","caption":"Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. 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