Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; 28 December 1893 – 3 June 1960) was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ana Pauker became the world's first female foreign minister when entering office in December 1947. She was also the unofficial leader of the Romanian Communist Party immediately after World War II, as well as an advocate for women's rights.

Pauker was born on 28 December 1893 into a poor, religious Orthodox Jewish family in Codăești, Vaslui County (in central Moldavia), the daughter of Sarah and (Tsvi-)Hersh Kaufman Rabinsohn. Her father was a traditional slaughterer and synagogue functionary, her mother a small-time food seller. They had four surviving children; two more died in infancy.

As a young woman, Pauker became a teacher in a Jewish elementary school in Bucharest. While her younger brother was a Zionist and remained religious, she opted for Socialism, joining the Social Democratic Party of Romania in 1915 and then its successor, the Socialist Party of Romania, in 1918. She was active in the pro-Bolshevik faction of the group, the one that took control after the Party's Congress of 8–12 May 1921 and joined the Comintern under the name of Socialist-Communist Party (future Communist Party of Romania). She and her husband, Marcel Pauker, became leading members.

Pauker and her husband were arrested in 1923 and 1924 for their political activities and went into exile in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna in 1926 and 1927. In 1928, Pauker moved to Moscow to join the Comintern's International Lenin School, which trained senior Communist functionaries. In Moscow she became closely associated with Dmitry Manuilsky, the Kremlin's foremost representative at the Comintern in the 1930s.

Ana Pauker went to France, where she became an instructor for the Comintern being also involved in the communist movement elsewhere in the Balkans. She was one of the coordinators of the French Communist Party. Upon returning to Romania in 1935, she was arrested and shot in both legs when she tried to flee. Ana Pauker was the chief defendant in a widely publicized trial with other leading communists and was sentenced to ten years in prison. In May 1941, the Romanian government sent her into exile to the Soviet Union in exchange for Ion Codreanu, a former member of Sfatul Țării (the parliament of Bessarabia that voted for union with Romania on 27 March 1918), who was detained by the Soviets after their occupation of Bessarabia in 1940. In the meantime, her husband had fallen victim to the Soviet Great Purge in 1938. Rumors abounded that she herself had denounced him as a Trotskyist traitor; Comintern archival documents reveal, however, that she repeatedly refused to do so.

In Moscow, she became the leader of the Romanian communist exiles who later on became known as the "Muscovite faction". She returned to Romania in 1944 when the Red Army entered the country, becoming a member of the post-war government, which came to be dominated by the communists. In November 1947, the non-communist foreign minister Gheorghe Tătărescu was ousted and replaced by Pauker, making her the first woman in the modern world to hold such a post.

But it was her position in the Communist Party leadership that was paramount. Although she declined to become the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party because she was a woman, jewish and an intellectual, and had proposed the Romanian worker Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej for the job instead, Pauker formally held the number-two position in the Party leadership and was a member of the four-person Secretariat of the Central Committee. "Arguably the Jewish woman who achieved the most political power in the 20th century," Ana Pauker was widely believed to have been the actual leader of the Romanian communists in all but name during the immediate post-war period. In 1948 Time magazine featured her portrait on its cover and described her as "the most powerful woman alive" at that time. Infamous as the "Iron Lady" of Romanian Communist politics, she was universally seen as unreservedly Stalinist and as Moscow's primary agent in Romania.^{[contradictory]}

Unquestionably, Ana Pauker played a pivotal role in the imposition of communism on Romania. At the same time, however, she emerged as a force for moderation within the Romanian communist leadership during the early postwar period. Pauker was certainly complicit in the extensive purges and arrests in 1945 of tens of thousands of Romanians who were linked to the fascist Ion Antonescu regime. Yet, by August 1945 Pauker and interior minister Teohari Georgescu released all but two to three thousand of those arrested, offering amnesty to any member of the fascist Iron Guard who had not committed serious crimes and who would turn in his weapons. In late 1944 or early 1945, she pushed for creating a more broad-based coalition with the National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, but was overruled by Joseph Stalin; hence, the Communist-led government created in March 1945 comprised a more restrictive coalition with a faction of the National Liberals led by Gheorghe Tătărescu.