International Women's Day, which takes place this Sunday, has been around since 1908. It started when 15,000 women marched through New York demanding better working conditions and the right to vote, but for most of its history it was mainly celebrated by the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries. In 1977, the UN invited all its member states to make the 8 March a day for women's rights and world peace. Today, 27 countries have declared International Women’s Day an official holiday. Not the UK, unfortunately – but that doesn't mean you can't spend the day planning the feminist revolution. Here are ten women to inspire you. 

JULIA SCHEELE

If you've ever regretted that you were born at the wrong time and in the wrong place for Riot Grrrl, you should get in touch with Julia Scheele. Scheele runs One Beat Zines, a feminist zine collective and distro that is calling for submissions now. The idea is to bring in women who are new to the zine scene, and Scheele and her collaborator Sarah Broadhurst promise to help the novices they take on with creating and printing their work. Scheele is also an illustrator and comic-maker, and you can see a tonne of her illustrations over at her website. We especially like “I wished I was married to the sea”, about a short-lived relationship between a woman and the sea. “A girl can't live off the salty taste of regret alone,” its heroine realises. Too true.

SHULAMITH FIRESTONE

“If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it,” writes Shulamith Firestone on the first page of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). Firestone was one of the leading figures in the radical feminist movement of the 1960s, which called for a complete restructuring of society. “The end goal of feminist revolution must be...not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” What kind of a world would this produce? One in which “beauty and power” are present “not just occasionally” but “all the time, in every word and every brushstroke.”

AMRUTA PATIL

Amruta Patil is India's first female graphic novelist, and her debut, Kari (2008) is the first Indian graphic novel to make homosexuality one of its major themes. It tells the story of a failed suicide pact between Kari and her female lover, and their subsequent separation. Patil mixes the mundane with the surreal: one moment Kari is dealing with housemates' ever-present boyfriends or daydreaming about a workplace crush, the next she's rowing a boat through the sewers of Mumbai on a bizarre quest to unblock all its drains.

JACKIE WANG

Jackie Wang is a poet, performer and prison abolitionist, currently working on a PhD in African and African-American Studies and History. Her essay “Against Innocence”, published by Semiotext(e), is an investigation into the US legal system as a perpetrator of systematic racial violence. On her tumblr, she writes about writing, politics and the difficulties of finding one’s place in the world – and about anything else that takes her fancy, from fools to friendship to philosophy. She’s also a model interviewee: honest, digressive, and ready with a killer list of book recommendations. In this one, she talks about the years she spent living and working in different feminist communities, and the importance of finding fairy godmothers. (She’s lucky enough to count Chris Kraus as one of hers.)

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

In 2012, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke at TEDxEuston, an annual conference held in London for the African diaspora. Her talk was called “We Should All Be Feminists”, and she gave an angry, funny, optimistic account of what it's like to be a woman and a feminist in Africa. “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: you can have ambition, but not too much,” she said, words that Beyoncé sampled in her song “Flawless”. If you're in London, you can see Adichie for yourself when she visits next month to talk about fiction as a social force. For now, watch a video of her talk below.

WONDER WOMAN

With her bustier, hotpants and knee-high boots, Wonder Woman doesn't look like your average role model for little girls. But in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore explains that the cartoon Amazonian was designed to be just that. Born on an island of women who had lived without men for thousands of years, she arrives in the United States to fight for peace, equality and women's rights. As she does so, she gets into a lot of bondage-style situations: Lepore points out that on practically every single page she's “chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled”. Wonder Woman's creator, the feminist and psychologist William Moulton Marston, stressed that the ropes and chains weren't (just) about sex; he was, apparently, trying to draw readers' attention to the “male bonds of cruelty and destruction”. And Wonder Woman was certainly doing her bit for women's rights: as far back as the 1940s, she was leading rallies and fighting for equal pay. In the 1970s, Gloria Steinem chose her to appear on the cover of the first issue of legendary feminist magazine Ms.

HEATHER PHILLIPSON

Have you been waiting for a poem that brings together Being and Time, nudity and the Archway Roundabout? You have? Great! “I can't read any more of Heidegger's dasein-diction,/ I say as I kick off my slippers,” Heather Phillipson writes in “German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London” which, like much of her poetry, mocks its own erudition as often as it displays it. Phillipson is also a visual artist who creates amazing videos, sculptures and interactive installations. Her audiovisual tour “Cardiovascular Vernacular” (as in 'it's time for my regular cardiovascular vernacular')" took walkers from Gateshead to Newcastle while she urged them to eat multiple sticky buns from Greggs and propositioned them: "Not that I'm heteronormative... but the place is romantic, so why not get into it?"

AUGUSTA WEBSTER

Augusta Webster was born in 1837. As a child she learned Greek to help her none-too-bright brother; she soon surpassed him and went on to publish translations of plays by Aeschylus and Euripides. She also campaigned and wrote essays on women's right to vote, work and receive an education. But her main work was poetry, and you should know about her because she wrote a series of brilliant monologues channelling the voices of prostitutes, brides, mothers and sorceresses. A good place to start is “Medea in Athens”, in which she takes on the insane grief and vengeful fury of the angriest woman in literature.

PRIYA

Priya's Shakti, a graphic novel for teenagers, was launched at the Mumbai Comic Con in December 2014. Filmmaker Ram Devineni came up with the idea for its heroine, Priya, in the wake of the gang rape and murder of the Delhi medical student in 2012. Priya is a survivor of gang rape who, ostracised by her family, takes refuge in the jungle. There, the Hindu goddess Parvati helps her to tame an astonishingly green-eyed tiger and blesses her with fearlessness and the art of persuasion. Priya rides back to her village in magnificent style, astride the tiger, and then travels throughout India, convincing men and women to fight with her against gendered violence.

KRISTIN DOMBEK

Kristin Dombek is the agony aunt for n+1 magazine, and she gives the smartest and most thoughtful advice on the internet. Her most recent column used an abandoned baby bird to talk about how you balance your responsibility to those you love with your responsibility to this planet that we're hell-bent on destroying, and I think about it almost every day.