International Women’s Day March 8

Today is International Women’s Day. Traditionally it is a day where people from around the world celebrate female achievement and equality.

The global event began in 1909 and this is a list of women who have been the top 10 most influential women.

Coco Chanel, born in France, dramatically altered women’s clothing throughout the 20th century.

Julia Child is widely credited for changing the way Americans ate with her breakout cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As well as being First Lady while her husband was President of the United States Hilary Clinton has an impressive political career of her own.

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa has been widely accepted as a modern day saint.

Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first female Prime Minister and one of the longest-serving PM’s in the country’s history.

Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf pioneered modernist literature, and her work demonstrated how women in the early 1900s were oppressed and hidden from literature.

Diana, Princess of Wales, was known at the people’s princess, and was greatly mourned when she died in a car crash in 1997.

Meryl Streep has received 17 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and 27 Golden Globe nominations, winning eight. She has more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award.

Marie Curie, a Polish-French scientist, was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in two different sciences.

Called “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”, Rosa Parks championed the civil rights movement in America so black people could be treated equally.