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Belva Ann Lockwood
Born
Lockwood made a habit of testing whether laws written for men could be read to include women. Refused admission to the Supreme Court bar, she drafted and lobbied through an 1879 act of Congress that let women lawyers practise there, and became the first to do so. In 1884, when almost no American woman could vote for president, she ran for the office anyway on the National Equal Rights Party ticket, and again in 1888. The official count credited her with a few thousand votes; her point was that nothing in the Constitution barred a woman from standing.
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Vida Goldstein
Born
Australia's 1902 franchise act gave most white women both the federal vote and the right to stand, a combination almost nowhere else had. Goldstein used the second half at once: in 1903 she ran for the Senate in Victoria, one of the first women anywhere to stand for a national parliament, and won more than 51,000 votes without winning a seat. She stood four more times without success. Her campaigns, run through the Women's Political Association she founded, show the gap between eligibility and election: no woman entered the federal parliament until 1943.
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Lucina Hagman
Born
Finland's 1906 parliamentary reform was the first anywhere to give women the vote and the right to stand for a national parliament on the same terms as men, and the effect was immediate: 19 women were elected in March 1907. Hagman, a teacher who had founded the Unioni women's rights association in 1892, was among them, and used her seat to push bills on married women's property and employment. The Finnish case is the clearest early proof that when eligibility and a mass campaign arrive together, women do get elected.
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Chrystal Macmillan
Born
Women graduates of Scottish universities had a quirk on their side: those universities elected MPs, and the electorate was defined as "persons" holding degrees. In 1908 Macmillan, a mathematics graduate of Edinburgh, argued that case herself in the House of Lords, the first woman to plead there. The Lords ruled against her, but the case put the "persons" argument on the record and built her name as a strategist. She went on to help found the Women's International League and later qualified as a barrister, working for equal nationality rights for married women.
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Millicent Fawcett
Born
The suffragettes get the films, but Fawcett's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies was the larger organisation, a federation of hundreds of local societies by 1913. Its most practical move came in 1912: the Election Fighting Fund, which paid for organisers to back Labour candidates against anti-suffrage Liberals, turning women's support into something parties could count. Fawcett then negotiated through the war towards the 1918 act, which let women stand for Parliament the same year. The law that won full equal franchise in 1928 arrived a year before her death.
More about Millicent Fawcett6
Jeannette Rankin
Born
Rankin was elected to the US House from Montana in 1916, four years before the 19th Amendment, because Montana's women had won the vote in 1914 in a state campaign she helped lead. The sequence matters: state-by-state victories created electorates that could send women to Washington before national suffrage existed. In January 1918 she opened the House debate on the suffrage amendment. She is also remembered for voting against entry into both world wars; she was the only member to oppose war with Japan in 1941, and did not stand again.
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Elvia Carrillo Puerto
Born
In 1923, three decades before Mexican women won the federal vote, Carrillo Puerto and two other women were elected to the state congress of Yucatán, the first women to sit in a Mexican legislature. She had spent years organising peasant women's leagues across the state, and her brother's socialist governorship opened the door. When he was assassinated in 1924 the women were driven out of their seats under threat. Her story shows how quickly a gain that depends on one government can be reversed, and why she kept campaigning until national suffrage arrived in 1953.
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Emily Murphy
Born
Canada's constitution allowed "qualified persons" to sit in the Senate, and governments argued that women were not persons in law. Murphy, an Alberta magistrate whose own authority had been challenged on those grounds, recruited four other women, the Famous Five, to petition for a ruling. The Supreme Court of Canada said no in 1928; the Privy Council in London reversed it in October 1929, calling the constitution a "living tree". Murphy was never appointed herself. Her support for eugenic sterilisation and her writing on race are also part of her record.
More about Emily Murphy9
Eva Perón
Born
Argentine feminists had campaigned for the vote for decades, but it was Eva Perón who pushed the 1947 suffrage law through and then built the machine that turned it into seats. Her Peronist Women's Party, founded in 1949, ran thousands of local branches, and in the 1951 elections, the first in which women voted, 23 women deputies and six senators were elected, among the highest shares in the world at the time. The gains came inside a government that was curbing the press and opposition, and the earlier campaigners she sidelined deserve credit too.
More about Eva Perón10
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
Born
In July 1960 Bandaranaike became the world's first woman prime minister, leading the Sri Lanka Freedom Party to victory a year after her husband's assassination. She entered politics through the route that gave many women in South Asia their first access to top office, family succession, and critics at first dismissed her as a stand-in. She proved them wrong across three terms spanning four decades, though her record, including the 1972 constitution and emergency rule, remains disputed. Her career is the starting point for any discussion of how women reached executive power.
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Shirley Chisholm
Born
Chisholm's 1968 election as the first Black woman in Congress came from a newly drawn Brooklyn district, created after a voting rights lawsuit, and from her refusal to wait for the local party machine's blessing. Her campaign slogan was "Unbought and Unbossed". In 1972 she became the first Black candidate and the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, knowing she would not win, to show that the field could include someone like her. She also co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus, which set out to recruit and train women candidates.
More about Shirley Chisholm12
Bella Abzug
Born
Abzug, a labour and civil rights lawyer elected to Congress from Manhattan in 1970 on the slogan "This woman's place is in the House", treated women's absence from office as an organising problem. In 1971 she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus with Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Steinem and others, a bipartisan group that recruited, trained and endorsed women for every level of office. When fewer than 3 per cent of Congress were women, the caucus made "more women candidates" a measurable goal. Her signature hats became the symbol of an unapologetic style.
More about Bella Abzug13
Berit Ås
Born
Norwegian local elections let voters cross names off party lists and write others in. In 1971 a cross-party group of women, Ås among the organisers in Asker, simply told voters to use that rule for women candidates. The "women's coup" gave women majorities on the councils of Oslo, Trondheim and Asker, where Ås became deputy mayor. It is the most direct demonstration on this list that ballot design shapes who gets elected. Ås, a social psychologist, went on to lead the party that became the Socialist Left, the first woman to lead a Norwegian party, and to name the "master suppression techniques" used to silence women in meetings.
More about Berit Ås14
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir
Born
Five years after Icelandic women's day off in October 1975, when around 90 per cent of the country's women stopped work to show what their labour was worth, Vigdís, a divorced single mother and theatre director, won the 1980 presidential election, the first woman in the world democratically elected head of state. The strike and the election are linked: the movement made a woman candidate thinkable, and her four terms made her a fixture. Three years later activists founded the Women's List, which took women's share of the Althing from 5 to 15 per cent in one election.
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Lesley Abdela
After the 1979 election returned just 19 women to a House of Commons of 635, Abdela, a journalist who had stood as a Liberal candidate that year, co-founded the 300 Group in 1980, named for the number of women MPs it wanted. Its approach was deliberately practical and cross-party: training women in public speaking, media handling and getting through candidate selection, which is where most were being filtered out. Women passed 260 MPs in 2024, still short of the target. Abdela later took the same work abroad, advising women's political projects in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989.
More about Lesley Abdela16
Ellen Malcolm
Born
Malcolm identified money as the barrier: women candidates were seen as long shots, so donors waited, and without early cash they stayed long shots. Her answer in 1985 was EMILY's List, short for "Early Money Is Like Yeast", which asked members to write cheques directly to endorsed candidates and bundle them. Its first big win was Barbara Mikulski's 1986 Senate race. The group backs only Democratic women who support abortion rights, so it is a partisan model, and Republicans and others have since built their own versions of the same idea.
More about Ellen Malcolm17
Gro Harlem Brundtland
Born
Norway's Labour Party adopted a rule in 1983 that each sex should have at least 40 per cent of its candidates and party posts, one of the first voluntary party quotas of its kind. When Brundtland formed her second government in 1986, she appointed eight women to a cabinet of 18, a share no democracy had come close to, and it became known as the "women's government". The lesson others copied was that parties, not laws, control most of the pipeline, and that a leader can change the norm for who looks like a minister in a single reshuffle.
More about Gro Harlem Brundtland18
Margarita Malharro de Torres
Born
Argentine parties had a habit of putting women on their lists, then at the bottom, where nobody gets elected. Malharro de Torres, a Radical senator for Mendoza, introduced the bill in 1989 that became the 1991 quota law: at least 30 per cent women on lists for national legislative elections, in positions where they could win. It was the first national candidate quota law in the world, pushed through with heavy lobbying by women across the parties, and the placement rule is why it worked: women's share of the Chamber of Deputies climbed from around 5 per cent to over a quarter within a decade. Dozens of countries copied it.
More about Margarita Malharro de Torres19
Françoise Gaspard
A former Socialist mayor of Dreux and member of the National Assembly, Gaspard co-wrote Au pouvoir, citoyennes! in 1992, the book that turned "parité" from a slogan into a demand: not a quota for a minority but equal numbers, because women are half of the people. The campaign that followed won a constitutional amendment in 1999 and the June 2000 law requiring parties to field equal numbers of men and women. Its limits are instructive: list elections reached parity quickly, but in single-seat races many parties preferred to pay the financial penalty, and the Assembly stayed well short of half for years.
More about Françoise Gaspard20
Geeta Mukherjee
Born
India had reserved a third of village and municipal council seats for women since the 1992 constitutional amendments, which brought more than a million women into local office, but Parliament kept stalling the same rule for itself. Mukherjee, a Communist MP from West Bengal, chaired the joint committee that examined the first women's reservation bill in 1996 and pressed for it until her death in 2000. It finally passed in September 2023, reserving a third of seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, with the catch that it applies only after a new census and redrawing of constituencies.
More about Geeta Mukherjee21
Aloisea Inyumba
As Rwanda's first minister for gender after the 1994 genocide, when women were a majority of the surviving population, Inyumba built a network of women's councils elected from village level upwards, giving women a structure in politics before the new constitution existed. The 2003 constitution then reserved 30 per cent of parliamentary seats for women, and in 2008 Rwanda became the first country with a female majority in its lower house. Read it with care: those numbers sit within a political system dominated by one party, where representation and competition are not the same thing.
More about Aloisea Inyumba22
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Born
Johnson Sirleaf's 2005 victory made her Africa's first elected woman head of state, two years after the women's peace movement led by Leymah Gbowee had helped force an end to Liberia's civil war. Those same networks of market women and church groups registered and turned out women voters for the runoff, which is the part of the story a single-name headline hides. Her presidency also shows the limits of a woman at the top: Liberia's legislature stayed overwhelmingly male, and a gender quota bill she supported did not pass during her two terms.
More about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf23
Michelle Bachelet
Born
Bachelet used both terms as Chile's president to change the numbers rather than just being the exception. In 2006 she named a cabinet with equal numbers of men and women, and in her second term she signed the 2015 electoral reform that ended the old binomial system and barred parties from fielding more than 60 per cent of candidates of either sex, with public money for women candidates. Women's share of the Chamber of Deputies rose sharply at the next election. In between, she was the first head of UN Women. Her 2026 bid to become the first woman UN secretary-general ended in September.
More about Michelle Bachelet
