Or the impact of the indelible dance disrupter Martha Graham,

whom TIME would name "Dancer of the Century" in 1998 but whose concert ensemble's debut was called Heretic.

Or photographer Dorothea Lange, who started out shooting portraits of the privileged but whose eye gave us the faces of poverty and pride during the Depression:

"You will find it hard to forget this material of human erosion," one reviewer wrote of her incomparable curation of calamity.

Many of the women on this list exercised their influence at the margins, in defense of the marginalized.

Recy Taylor, victim of a brutal rape by a gang of white men in 1944, defied intimidation and insisted the attackers be prosecuted.

Her example emboldened civil rights leaders who followed, including fearless bus riders like Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin.

The Mirabal sisters were assassinated in 1960 for their protests against Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo.

Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers union and conceived the boycott that became the model for a movement.

Marsha P. Johnson helped lead the fight for LGBT rights, Judith Heumann for disability rights.

As individuals, as activists, they took substantial personal risks;

as models, they showed people whose stories weren’t being told and whose lives weren’t being valued that dignity is not the monopoly of the dominant.

Among these women are those whose contributions are infinitely more recognizable than they themselves ever were.

To this day, educators struggle to close the confidence gap that discourages girls from going into science; Melinda Gates has made this a core of her mission.

Would it be any easier if more people knew the stories, grasped the possibilities represented by women like Rosalind Franklin,

whose role in the identification of the DNA double helix was eclipsed by Watson and Crick;

or Grace Hopper, the mathematician/ Navy admiral/computer wizard;

or Tu Youyou, who worked on a cure for malaria;

or Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who helped discover the retrovirus that came to be known as AIDS.

Hollywood has started to color in some of those empty spaces, greenlighting movies about women like American spy Virginia Hall.

But particularly in science, “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it,” so these are stories whose illumination is long overdue.

Finally, there are women who exercised moral leadership, doing hard things against all self-interest.

Margaret Chase Smith staring down Joe McCarthy;

or Anna Walentynowicz organizing her fellow shipyard workers in communist Poland;

Wangari Maathai, fighting for both Kenya’s land and its democracy,

reminding people everywhere that invisible people who do the right thing can change everything.

If power is a muscle, driving progress through strength, influence is a magnet, drawing people toward possibilities they might otherwise never have imagined.

The women profiled here enlarged their world and explored new ones, broke free of convention and constraint, welcomed into community the lost and left behind.

They were the different drummers, to whose beat a century marched without always even knowing it.

So this special project is an act of discovery, and rediscovery, of the possibilities that come when we look and listen differently to the world these women made.

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