Women of the Year

Why TIME Revisited a Century of Women and Influence

By Nancy Gibbs

Behind the Scenes of TIME's 100 Women of the Year Issue

By Kelly Conniff

Why Women's History Should Be Everyone's History

By Alma Har'el

What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? It's Complicated

By Susan Stryker
More in Women of the Year

We Designed 100 New Covers for TIME's Women of the Year Project. Here Are the Stories Behind Them

Each cover is visually emblematic of the period its subject represents

By D.W. Pine

50 Years Ago, Gloria Steinem Wrote an Essay for TIME About Her Hopes for Women’s Futures. Here’s What She'd Add Today

In the half-century since I wrote the essay below, as part of a cover story on “The Politics of Sex,” there has been some definite progress. “Women’s issues” are no longer in a silo but...

By Gloria Steinem

2009: Malala Yousafzai

When BBC Urdu asked Malala Yousafzai’s father if one of his students would blog about life under the local Taliban, his daughter took on the task. Her first post was published under the pen name...

By TIME Staff

2008: Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama spent 2008 campaigning for her husband Barack, experiencing a level of scrutiny that was undeniably linked to her race and would persist for years to come. That August, she delivered a stirring address...

By TIME Staff

2003: Serena Williams

After winning the 2003 Australian Open, Serena Williams became just the fifth woman in tennis history to hold the titles of all four Grand Slam tournaments—the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S....

By TIME Staff

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 100 Women of the Year

It’s hard to believe now that there was ever a time when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not known for her dissents. But for a stretch of 1996, the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court...

By TIME Staff

1991: Anita Hill

As the chorus of the #MeToo movement reached a crescendo, with women everywhere speaking out about abuse they had endured at the hands of powerful men, one voice from the past seemed to echo into...

By TIME Staff

1987: Diana, Princess of Wales

It’s easy to forget today what pariahs people with AIDS were in the year 1987. Ignorance, superstition and an aura of sexual seediness swirled around those afflicted, their cause of death noted in obituary columns...

By TIME Staff

1976: Indira Gandhi

In 1976, the “Empress of India” had become India’s great authoritarian. She was the daughter of the nation’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the constitutional democrat who strained every sinew after independence from Britain to...

By TIME Staff

1970: Gloria Steinem

By 1970, Gloria Steinem was already becoming a key voice in the women’s movement through her reporting for New York magazine. But that year, her activism left the page in a momentous way. Though she...

By TIME Staff

1969: Marsha P. Johnson

In 1969, police raided a gay bar in New York City called the Stonewall Inn, patrons resisted, and the LGBT-rights movement changed forever. One of the rioters who burst into the streets was Marsha P....

By TIME Staff

1955: The Bus Riders

In the hours after Rosa Parks’ arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, Women’s Political Council president and Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson used the school’s mimeograph machine to run off a set of flyers....

By TIME Staff

1938: Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was often seen through the lens of her more famous husband. In 1938, a press release for her first solo exhibit initially described her as the “wife of Diego Rivera” before conceding that...

By TIME Staff

2018: The Guardians: Maria Ressa

By 2012, Maria Ressa had already had an impressive career in news when she and three other women started Rappler, aiming to serve a Filipino population rapidly moving online. But the news site turned into...

By TIME Staff

2019: Greta Thunberg

She started a global movement at the age of 15, dominated headlines and became TIME’s youngest ever individual Person of the Year in 2019. But Greta Thunberg was understated when reflecting on her year. “I...

By TIME Staff

2017: The Silence Breakers

The hashtag #MeToo went viral in October 2017 after Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women. But the movement had been brewing all year. That February, Susan Fowler blew...

By TIME Staff
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