7 Couples Who Changed the World

Each in their own way, these unions had a profound impact
It is perhaps clichéd to say that love makes us stronger. But it is certainly true that, throughout history, the power of some partnerships has been greater than the sum of their parts. Here are some of the most exceptional couples who together had a transformative and lasting influence on the world.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott was studying voice and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music when she met Martin Luther King, Jr., who was preparing his doctorate in theology at Boston University. Wed in 1953, the couple moved the following year to Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King became a pastor. The two became lifelong partners in the fight for civil rights in America.

A lifetime of commitment
The nonviolent movement Dr. King championed in the 1950s and 1960s led to sweeping political action on civil rights. In 1963, over 25 million people participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act ended legal discrimination against minorities in education, hiring, and public housing. That year, at just 35 years old, Dr. King became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act eliminated further barriers to voting for African Americans.

Continuing Dr. King’s legacy
Following Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, Coretta worked tirelessly to preserve his legacy. She was the driving force behind the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, in Atlanta, which hosts the largest archives of Civil Rights documents. She also fought to see her husband’s birthday observed as a national holiday.

Coretta was also an influential activist in her own right. In 1974, she founded and served as co-chair of the National Committee for Full Employment and the Full Employment Action Council, which sought to promote equal economic opportunities. Her commitment to civil rights took her around the world, from Greece to South Africa. Coretta Scott King died in 2006, and is buried in The King Center alongside her husband.

2. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Together, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns changed Modern art. The two artists sought to push beyond Abstract Expressionist painting, which dominated the New York art scene in the 1950s. Their revolutionary work linked Abstract Expressionism to Pop, performance art, and conceptual art.

From partnership to artistic inspiration
When the two met, Rauschenberg was recently divorced from the painter Susan Weil, and had come out of a relationship with the famous artist Cy Twombly. Rauschenberg and Johns began to work together as window designers, under the name Matson-Jones. As their relationship deepened, their union became its own form of artistic expression, offering the kind of freedom that, as gay men, they could not find within the Abstract Expressionist circle.

New ways of seeing
Rauschenberg and Johns moved in new artistic directions after meeting one another. Johns turned to painting, which asked the viewer to look at familiar objects in new ways and earned him a reputation as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Rauschenberg’s work began to more explicitly incorporate culture and politics. The two split in 1961 and both left New York.

3. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre met in 1929 when they were both studying philosophy in Paris. They became a power couple: Sartre is considered the father of Existentialism and the publication of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1949 inspired the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s.

An unconventional arrangement
Sartre famously proposed an open relationship and de Beauvoir agreed. As she would later write: “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.” Their exceptionally close partnership lasted a tumultuous, affair-filled 51 years, providing the foundation from which their groundbreaking contributions to philosophy, literature, and political theory could flourish.

5. Marie and Pierre Curie
Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867. At age 24, she traveled to Paris to study physics and math at the Sorbonne. "It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty," she would later write. By 1894 she had graduated with degrees in physics and math. It was around this time that she met Pierre Curie, eight years older than Marie and already a renowned physicist. The two married in 1895.

A radioactive relationship
After the birth of their daughter, Irène, in 1897, Marie turned to the study of uranium rays. To carry out her research, she used an electrometer Pierre had designed for his own earlier pioneering research on crystals. Marie and Pierre began to study natural ores that contained uranium, and stumbled upon an entirely new substance, which they named polonium. A few months later they discovered another highly active element, which they called radium. Their research also brought the world a new word: radioactive.

A scientific legacy
Together the Curies embarked on a period of painstaking and physically demanding research to confirm their findings. In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches.”

Tragically, Pierre was killed in a road accident in Paris in 1906, leaving Marie a single mother. But she did not slow down. In 1908, she was the first woman to be named a professor at the Sorbonne; in 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, for her work on radium and polonium.

Marie died in 1934 – one year before her daughter Irène, with her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of artificial radioactivity.

6. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
When Rivera and Kahlo met, Rivera was a highly respected artist, known for his vibrant, politically-inflected murals depicting Mexican culture, history, and workers’ struggles (he also had two marriages under his belt). Kahlo was a young art student. The two began courting in 1925, when Kahlo was just 18 and Rivera was twice her age. Married in 1929, they remained together until Kahlo’s death in 1954. Their partnership was famously peppered with affairs on both sides (including, on Kahlo’s part, liaisons with Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky). But their torrential, all-consuming love gave rise to some of Mexico’s most extraordinary art.

Icons of invention
If Rivera has become known as the most important Mexican artist of the 20th Century, Kahlo’s Surrealist art, which foregrounded her physical and psychic suffering, made her a feminist icon. Kahlo became the first Latin American woman to have a painting in the Louvre.

Kahlo and Rivera were lifelong political activists. Rivera’s murals inspired President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration program, which created jobs for artists during the Great Depression. Days before her death in 1954, Kahlo appeared with Rivera to protest American intervention in Guatemala.

Kahlo’s extraordinary love letters to Rivera, written over the course of their 27 years together, reveal the simmering intensity of their relationship. “I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love,” she wrote.

7. Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith
Jane Addams, one of the Progressive Era’s most important reformers, is considered the founder of social work in America. Chief among her many pioneering efforts was the co-founding in 1889 of Chicago’s Hull House, a settlement house for European immigrants. A committed suffragist, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and in 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mothers of social work
Addams’s longtime partner was Mary Rozet Smith, a Chicago native and a trustee of Hull House. Smith was involved in many social improvement initiatives in Chicago, including settlement houses, juvenile protection organizations, and women’s groups. Addams referred to her relationship with Smith as a marriage; when Smith died in 1934, they had spent 40 years together.

Individually, these extraordinary men and women made waves in their fields – be it art, science, or politics – but together they inspired cultural sea-changes. In some cases, their very union was an act of political or social defiance.