The Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, was listed at No. 12 in a BBC History magazine poll where readers ranked the top 100 women in history who changed the world.
Results from the BBC History magazine poll, revealed on Thursday, were gathered from experts in 10 different fields of human endeavors who each nominated 10 women they believed had the biggest impact on world history.
“We then gave you, our readers the opportunity to vote for your favorite figures from that list. The results — presented here — may well provoke debate,” BBC admitted as it presented the list, though did not reveal how many readers voted.
At the top of the list came Polish-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie, who won a Nobel Prize in two different sciences.
Curie and her future husband, Pierre, identified two new elements, radium and polonium, during their time at a university in Paris. Curie would go on to fund laboratories and to develop cancer treatments in the U.S. and Europe after her husband died.
During World War I, she would also equip ambulances with X-ray equipment, and drive them to the front lines.
“The odds were always stacked against her,” says Patricia Fara, president of the British Society for the History of Science. “In Poland her patriotic family suffered under a Russian regime. In France she was regarded with suspicion as a foreigner — and of course, wherever she went, she was discriminated against as a woman.”
Second on the list was U.S. civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who in 1955 challenged racial segregation in Alabama by sitting in a whites-only section of a bus and refusing to move.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: Christian Post, Stoyan Zaimov