52 Powerful Photos Of Women Who Changed History Forever

A Muslim woman covers the yellow star of her Jewish neighbour with her veil to protect her from prosecution. Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. [1941]

Maud Wagner, the first well know female tattooist in the United States. [1907]

18 year old French Résistance fighter, Simone Segouin, during the liberation of Paris. [19 August 1944]

Sarla Thakral, 21 years old, the first Indian woman to earn a pilot license. [1936]

Kathrine Switzer becomes the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, despite attempts by the marathon organizer to stop her. [1967]

Afghan women at a public library before the Taliban seized power. [c. 1950s]

Annette Kellerman posing in a swimsuit that got her arrested for indecency. [c. 1907]

The first women’s basketball team from Smith College [1902]

Photograph of a samurai warrior. [c. late 1800s]

106-year old Armenian woman protecting her home with an AK-47. [1990]

Women boxing on a roof in LA. [1933]

A Swedish woman hitting a neo-Nazi protester with her handbag. The woman was reportedly a concentration camp survivor. [1985]

Women's league roller derby skaters in New York. [March 10, 1950]

Voting activist Annie Lumpkins at the Little Rock city jail. [1961]

Members of the Hell's Angels gang. [1973]

Girls deliver heavy blocks of ice after male workers were conscripted [1918]

Komako Kimura, a prominent Japanese suffragist at a march in New York. [October 23, 1917]

Marina Ginesta, a 17-year-old communist militant, overlooking Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. [1936]

Anna Fisher, "the first mother in space" [1980s]

A woman suffrage activist protesting after "The Night of Terror." [1917]

Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, climbing the Chrysler Building. [1934]

A mother plays with her child on the beach. [c. 1950s]

Elspeth Beard, during her attempt to become the first Englishwoman to circumnavigate the world by motorcycle. [1980s]

Two women show uncovered legs in public for the first time in Toronto. [1937]

A woman drinking tea in the aftermath of a German bombing raid during the London Blitz. [1940]

Winnie the Welder. [1943]

Jeanne Manford marches with her gay son during a Pride Parade. [1972]

Sabiha Gökçen of Turkey poses with her plane, in 1937 she became the first female fighter pilot.

Volunteers learn how to fight fires at Pearl Harbor [c. 1941 - 1945]

A captured Soviet soldier is given water by a Ukrainian woman after being captured. [1941]

A mason high above Berlin. [c. 1900]

Railroad workers at lunch. Many were the wives and even mothers of the men who left for war. [1943]

Some of the first women sworn into US Marine Corps. [August, 1918]

Ellen O’Neal, one of the first professional female skaters. [1976]

Parisian mothers shield their children from German sniper fire. [1944]

Filipino guerilla, Captain Nieves Fernandez, shows a US soldier how she killed Japanese soldiers during the occupation. [1944]

A Dutch woman refuses to leave her husband, a German soldier, after Allied soldiers capture him. She followed him into captivity. [1944]

Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel. [1926]

Aviator Amelia Earhart after becoming the first woman to fly an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean. [1928]

Afghan women studying medicine. [1962]

A British sergeant training members of the ‘mum’s army’ Women's Home Defence Corps during the Battle of Britain. [1940]

The iconic photo of a concerned pea-picker and mother of seven children during the Dust Bowl. [1936]

Women's Liberation Coalition March, Detroit, Michigan. [1970]

A Los Angeles Police Officer looks after an abandoned baby in the drawer of her desk. [1971]

Female snipers of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. [May 4, 1945]

A mother shows a picture of her son to returning prisoners of war in an attempt to find him. [Vienna, 1947]

Leola N. King, America's first female traffic cop, Washington D.C. [1918]

American nurses land in Normandy. [1944]

A Lockheed employee working on a P-38 Lightning [Burbank, California, 1944]

A Red Cross nurse takes down the last words of a British soldier. [c. 1917]

Female pilots leaving their B-17, "Pistol Packin' Mama" [c. 1941 - 1945]