Empress Zhangsun 长孙皇后

She stood with the soldiers at the Xuanwu Gate on the morning her husband seized power, and then, as empress to Tang Taizong, spent ten years declining to give him her opinion on government. For years she kept her own brother out of high office, arguing that consort families destroy dynasties.

Your influence works sideways. When Taizong came home vowing to kill the minister Wei Zheng for contradicting him, she put on full ceremonial robes and congratulated him: an upright minister, she said, is the sign of an enlightened ruler. Wei Zheng lived and kept arguing for seventeen more years. She wrote thirty volumes of Rules for Women and asked that they never be published; after her death Taizong found them, published them, and wept.