Eva Perón

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.