10 women who made world history

After the death of her husband Thutmose II, Hatshepsut assumed the regency for her son, who was still an infant. She was one of the most successful pharaohs, reigning longer than any other woman in Ancient Egypt. The two decades of her rule were peaceful and trade flourished. Still, her successors tried to erase all historical records of her reign.

In 1425, the Hundred Years' War was raging between England and France when the then 13-year-old daughter of a farmer, Joan, had her first vision of saints inciting her to save France and to bring Charles VII to the French throne. Joan of Arc was captured in 1430, and then tried for heresy and burned at the stake.

Catherine II came to power following a coup during which her estranged husband was assassinated and she declared herself the new czar of Russia. She demonstrated her assertiveness by bringing the gigantic Russian Empire under her authority and leading campaigns to conquer Crimean and Polish territory. As the longest-ruling female leader of Russia, she became known as Catherine the Great.

The country was in turmoil when Elizabeth I succeeded to the British throne. She managed to pacify the religious war between Protestants and Catholics, leading the British Empire to a golden age during which culture flourished, most famously through playwrights such as Shakespeare. The British naval fleet also crushingly defeated the Spanish Armada, one the country's greatest military victories.

In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) founded an all-woman suffrage advocacy organization in Great Britain. Their acts of resistance included hunger strikes and arson campaigns. Pankhurst was imprisoned more than once, but she still managed to get the vote extended to women over 30 in 1918. She died in 1928, the year that full suffrage for women was declared in the UK.

At a time when women couldn't yet be elected to power, Rosa Luxemburg was at the head of the revolutionary social-democratic movement in Germany. The founder of the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany, she led strikes against the First World War. After the defeat of the Spartacus revolt in 1919, she was murdered by German officers.

Marie Curie (1867-1934) conducted pioneering research on radioactivity, leading her to become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but also to suffer from symptoms related to the until then unknown effects of exposure to radiation. She won a second Nobel Prize for discovering the elements radium and polonium. She also became the first woman to become a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Anne Frank kept a diary from 1942 to 1944. On one of the last photos published in the diary, the 13-year-old smiles happily. Two months after it was taken, her family moved into their hiding place on Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, in July 1942. She lived there until she was deported to Auschwitz, where died in March 1945. Her diary is one of the most important testimonies of the Shoah.

The Kenyan Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) became an environmental and women's rights activist in the 1970s. As the founder of the Green Belt Movement, she combated desertification, deforestation, as well as water crises and rural hunger. Although it took time for her to find acceptance in her own country, in 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for her work.

Malala Youfsafzai was only 11 years old when she reported about the terrorist regime of the Taliban in Pakistan for the BBC. When her girls' school was closed, she fought for her right to education. In 2012, she survived an assassination attempt. After her recovery, she wrote her autobiography: "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban."