Person of the Year: Angela Merkel

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2. Here’s Why It’s Been 29 Years Since a Woman Was Person of the Year

http://time.com/4141766/time-person-of-the-year-angela-merkel-women/?xid=homepage


History
Here’s Why It’s Been 29 Years Since a Woman Was Person of the Year

Radhika Jones

6:31 AM ET

TIME person of the year women
TIME (4); Photo Illustration by Mia Tramz for TIME
We likely won't have to wait so long for the next one

The cover of TIME’s year-end issue of 1986 shows a confident woman in a red jacket, her gaze steady, her chin resting on her hand. It is Corazon Aquino, the first woman president of the Philippines, a political outsider who upended a dictator by, as Pico Iyer wrote in his cover story, “leading a democratic revolution that captured the world’s imagination.” If you look up the table of contents of that issue in the Time archive, you’ll find a line that reads “Woman of the Year.” Immediately following is a parenthetical: (Man of the Year).

“Woman of the Year (Man of the Year)”—that’s how they did it back then. Like Wallis Simpson and Queen Elizabeth before her, Corazon Aquino was a woman in a man’s franchise. In 1999, TIME changed the title to Person of the Year. But not since President Aquino has the Person of the Year been an individual woman. Not, at least, until 2015...............