Welcome to WOW2 — Early May!
WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from May 1 through May 16.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists over the past three years that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages keep getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!
May is International Victorious Woman Month, sponsored by The Victorious Woman Project since 2006 – Their first Girlfriend Gala in 2012 has become an annual fundraiser for the Phil-Hanna Scholarship Fund for Women
For the entire previous EARLY MAY list as of 2018,
click HERE: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early May 2019 page are only the NEW people and events, or additional information, found since last year.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
This Week in the War on Women
will post soon, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines
Early May’s Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
_________________________________
- May 1, 1751 – Judith Sargent Murray born, poet, playwright, essayist and pioneering women’s rights advocate, known for her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” which was published in 1790 in Massachusetts Magazine, before Mary Wolstonecraft’s more famous 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women. With no formal education available to women, she took advantage of her family’s extensive library to teach herself history, philosophy, geography and literature. At age 9, she began writing poetry. At age 18, she married John Stevens, a ship’s captain in 1769. During the American Revolution, shipping suffered, and Stevens was facing debtor’s prison by the end of the war. She tried publishing under a pen name to help end their financial troubles, but her husband ended up fleeing to the West Indies, where he died in 1768. Two years later, she married John Murray, a Unitarian/Universalist minister. During her travels with him, she met George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Catherine Littlefield Greene, who encouraged Eli Whitney, whom she had hired as a tutor for her children, to pursue his inventions, including the cotton gin. At age 38, Murray gave birth to her first child, a son who only lived a few hours. In 1791, now 40 years old, she safely delivered her daughter, Julia Marie. She also built a literary life, frequently under pen names like “Honora” “Martesia” and “Constantia.” In 1792, she assumed a male identity as “The Gleaner” and wrote a column for the Massachusetts Magazine. The family moved to Boston in 1793, where her play, The Medium, was probably the first play by an American author to be produced on the stage. In her columns and essays, she advanced the idea of “Republican Motherhood,” arguing that the success of the new nation required intelligent and virtuous citizens, and since the early education of patriotic sons (future voters) rested with mothers, females should also be educated. She challenged the prevailing idea of the time that the female brain was inherently inferior; asserting that women were stifled not by any inherent dearth of intelligence, but by lack of access to education. Murray educated her daughter at home until she was old enough to attend an academy. Income from her writing kept the family solvent. In 1798, she published a collection of “The Gleaner” columns as a book, recruiting 800 presale “subscribers” and garnering endorsements by President George Washington and Vice President John Adams. John Murray suffered a stroke in 1809, and died in 1815. Murray went to live with her daughter, now married and living in the frontier town of Natchez, Mississippi. She died there in 1820. Her letters were discovered in Natchez 164 years later
- May 1, 1783 – Phoebe Hinsdale Brown born, considered the first notable American woman hymnwriter; noted for her hymn “I love to steal awhile away” based on her daily practice of retire some distance from her house every day at a certain hour for meditation and prayer. The well-beaten path to the woods was discovered, and she was ridiculed by a thoughtless neighbor woman, so she tearfully wrote the hymn that night. Brown’s original poem included her domestic cares, but they were removed by Reverend Ashale Nettleton in the published hymn
- May 1, 1831 – Emily Stowe, Canadian physician, suffragist and women’s rights activist, first woman to practice medicine in Canada. She was denied entrance into the Toronto School of Medicine in 1865, told by the school’s Vice Principal, “The doors of the University are not open to women and I trust they never will be.” She earned her degree from the homeopathic New York Medical College for Women in 1867, then returned to Toronto to open her medical practice, attracting attention by lecturing on women’s health and newspapers advertisements, which brought her a steady clientele. While studying medicine in New York, Stowe had met Susan B. Anthony and saw the divisions within the American women’s suffrage movement, which decided her to adopt a gradualist strategy in Canada. She founded the Toronto Women’s Literary Club in 1876. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario granted Stowe a license to practice medicine on July 16, 1880, based on her experience with homeopathic medicine since 1850. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, would become the first woman to earn a medical degree in Canada. In 1883, the Literary Club became the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association in 1883. They campaigned for improved working conditions for women and pressured schools in Toronto to accept women into higher education. In 1883, a public meeting of the Suffrage Association led to the creation of the Ontario Medical College for Women. When the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association was founded in 1889, Stowe became its first president and remained president until her death in 1903, fourteen years before Canadian women won the right to vote
- May 1, 1859 – Jacqueline Comerre-Paton born, French painter and sculptor; her painting Mistletoe was included in Women Painters of the World, published in 1905
- May 1, 1874 – Romaine Brooks born, American painter who worked in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray. Brooks ignored the contemporary artistic trends Cubism and Fauvism, drawing on her own original aesthetic. Her work frequently depicted women in androgynous or masculine dress
- May 1, 1881 – Mary MacLane born in Canada, American writer, dubbed “the Wild Woman of Butte,” whose controversially frank memoirs helped popularize the “tell all” style of autobiography. She was an outspoken feminist and openly bisexual. She submitted her first book for publication at the age of 19, calling it I Await the Devil’s Coming, which the publishers toned down considerably to The Story of Mary MacLane. It still sold 100,000 copies in the first month, especially after it was pilloried by conservative critics and lightly ridiculed by H.L. Menken. She wrote with a raw, blistering honesty and self-awareness about sexual attraction to both men and women, her egoism and self-love, and even a desire to marry the Devil. The books’ success enabled her to travel, and escape the isolation of Butte. Her second and third books, My Friend Annabel Lee and I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days, did not sell as well as the first book. In 1917, she wrote and starred in a 90-minute silent film, Men Who Have Made Love to Me, based on an earlier article with the same title which she had written for a Butte, Montana newspaper. The film was one of the first to “break the fourth wall” between performer and audience when she faced the camera and directly addressed her audience. Her work fell into obscurity during the 1930s, and all her writing was long out of print, when Elisabeth Pruitt rediscovered it, and in 1993 edited together MacLane’s first book ,with some of her early newspaper feature work, in Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology. Pruitt followed that with Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader in 2011
- May 1, 1891 – Lillian Estelle Fisher born, American historian; one of the first women to earn a doctorate in Latin American history in the U.S. Fisher published important works on Spanish colonial administration. She also wrote a biography of Manuel Abad y Queipo, the reform bishop-elect of Michoacan, and an account of the Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru
- May 1, 1910 – Raya Dunayevskaya born in Ukraine, American Marxist Humanist philosopher; at one time Leon Trotsky’s secretary, but later splits with him and founds the ‘News and Letters Committees’ which advocates the abolition of capitalism; advocate for women’s liberation and against discrimination by race or age
- May 1, 1924 – Evelyn Boyd Granville born, African American mathematician, pioneer in computer science, and academic; second American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics, from Yale University in 1949; honored by the National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and awarded the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal by the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association
- May 1, 1925 – Helen Balmuth Bamber born, British psychotherapist and human rights activist. Bamber worked with Holocaust survivors after the concentration camps were liberated in 1945. She was a 20-something secretary working for a Harley Street doctor in London when she responded to a call for volunteers to help Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps. She became part of a Jewish Relief Unit rehabilitation team at Bergen-Belsen, just months after its liberation, facing the daunting task of helping the camp’s 20,000 survivors with their physical and psychological recovery. She said, “I think it was something about repaying a debt. I was aware that if the Nazis had succeeded in invading England, we would have been the victims. . . when you were searching through things you were reminded of the enormity of it: once we came across a vast pile of shoes, sorted according to sizes, including children’s, all neatly lined up; you were never safe from that kind of confrontation.” She said that survivors “would dig their fingers into your arms and hold on to you to get to you the horror of what had happened. Above all else, there was a need to tell you everything, over and over and over again. And this was the most significant thing for me, realizing that you had to take it all. . . . After a while I began to realise the most important role for me there was to bear witness.” She remained in Germany for 2 ½ years. After negotiating the evacuation to Switzerland of a group of young survivors suffering from tuberculosis, she returned to England in 1947, where she worked with the Jewish Refugee Committee and was appointed to the Committee for the Care of Young Children from Concentration Camps. During the next eight years she trained to work with disturbed young adults and children while in close liaison with the Anna Freud Clinic, and also studied Social Science part-time at the London School of Economics. She married Rudi Bamberger, a German-Jewish refugee from Nuremberg who anglicized his name to Bamber, whose father had been killed during Kristallnacht. They had two sons, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1970. She was an early member of Amnesty International, and served on its Executive Council until 1980, then co-founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in 1985, to provide long-term care for survivors, after their initial therapy. In 2005, she created the Helen Bamber Foundation to help survivors of extreme cruelty and human rights violations. Throughout her life, she worked with those who were the most marginalised: Holocaust survivors, asylum-seekers, refugees, victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland, trafficked men, women and children, survivors of genocide, torture, rape, female genital mutilation, British Far East prisoners of war, former hostages and other people who suffered torture abroad. She worked in many countries including Gaza, Kosovo, Uganda, Turkey and Northern Ireland. In 2013, Bamber ended her role as Clinical Director of the foundation, and assumed the role of Director Emeritus, a year before she died at age 89
- May 1, 1939 – Judy Collins born, influential American singer-songwriter and social activist against the Vietnam War and the proliferation of firearms. She was a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and campaigned for the abolition of landmines
- May 1, 1948 – Patricia Hill Collins born, African American sociologist and scholar; head of the African-American Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati; noted for Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, published in 1990, and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (2004)
- May 1, 1950 – Gwendolyn Brooks becomes first African-American woman to receive Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950) for Annie Allen; named a Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry (now called Poet Laureate) in 1985
_________________________________
- May 2, 1559 – Misogynist Clergyman John Knox, founder of Presbyterianism, returns to Scotland from Geneva to lead the Scottish Reformation, and denounce all womankind
- May 2, 1729 – Catherine the Great born in Prussia, Empress of Russia, first as wife of Peter III, then in her own right after aiding a coup d'état against Peter, from 1762 until 1796. After she was inoculated against smallpox by Scottish doctor Thomas Dimsdale, she sought to have people inoculated throughout the empire. By 1800, about 2 million Russians had been inoculated
- May 2, 1759 – The charter for the Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers is issued, the first life insurance program in the U.S.
- May 2, 1813 – Caroline Leigh Gascoigne born, English poet and novelist; noted for The School for Wives; Evelyn Harcourt; and Dr. Harold’s Note-Book
- May 2, 1822 – Jane Miller Thengberg born, daughter of a Scottish father and a Swedish mother, was a teacher and administrator who founded and managed Klosterskolan, a girls’ school in Uppsala (1855-1863), and principal of Högre lärarinneseminariet (Advanced Seminary for Female Teachers) in Stockholm (1863-1868). She organized the rules of the newly founded teachers’ seminary, and was an active participant in contemporary debate about the educational system in Sweden. She is regarded as a pioneer of the education of girls and women in Sweden, but regarded equal education with men more as a necessity for women to be better wives and mothers rather than to prepare them to follow a profession. When she married, she resigned from Högre lärarinneseminariet
- May 2, 1878 – Nannie Helen Burroughs born, African-American civil rights activist, businesswoman, lecturer and educator; founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington D.C.
- May 2, 1882 – Isabel González born, Puerto Rican activist; plaintiff in Gonzales v. Williams (1904). As a young pregnant woman, in 1903 she tried to enter the U.S. to reunite with and marry her fiancé, but the U.S. Treasury Department refused her entry as an alien, “likely to become a public charge,” when she reached New York City. The Williams in the case was William Williams, the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York. Her case was appealed from the U.S. Circuit Court for the NY Southern District after her Writ of Habeas Corpus was dismissed. The Supreme Court case was the first time the Court ruled on the citizenship status of inhabitants of territories acquired by the U.S. González brought attention not only to her case, but the status of all Puerto Ricans by writing letters which were published in the New York Times. The Court’s ruling was ambiguous at best, declaring that under the immigration laws of the time, González was not an alien, and therefore could not be denied entry into New York. But the Court declined to declare that she was a U.S. citizen. The question of the citizenship status of the inhabitants of the new island territories remained confusing, ambiguous, and contested. Puerto Ricans came to be known as something in between: “noncitizen nationals.” Isabel González became a U.S. citizen by marrying her fiancé, but continued with others to press the cause of U.S citizenship for all Puerto Ricans. It finally became a reality in 1917, with the passage of the Jones-Shaforth Act, which conferred U.S. Citizenship on all Puerto Ricans, mostly so the men could be drafted for military service in WWI
- May 2, 1936 – Norma Aleandro born, Argentine actress, screenwriter, and theatrical director. She won the Cannes Award for best actress for her role in the 1985 film, The Official Story. Aleandro wrote the screenplay for 1970 film, The Inheritors. She was critical of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, and given 24-hours to leave the country. She, her husband and their son spent 10 years in exile in Uruguay and Spain before returning to Argentina
- May 2, 1937 – Gisela Eisner born, German author; won the Prix Formentor in 1964 for her novel Die Riesenzwerge (The Dwarf Giant)
- May 2, 1947 – Lynda Myles born, British writer, producer and film festival organizer; best known as the director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and for producing film adaptations of Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments; The Snapper; and The Van
- May 2, 1966 – Belinda Stronach born, Canadian business executive, philanthropist and Member of Parliament in the House of Commons (2004-2008) She was elected as a Conservative, but crossed the floor later to join the Liberals. She left politics, and became executive vice-chair of Magna International (2008-2010), and is currently chair and president of The Stronach Group, an entertainment and real estate company, primarily involved in managing Thoroughbred racetracks and off-track pari-mutuel wagering. In 2008, she founded and is the chair of the Belinda Stronach Foundation, a charity which works collaboratively on projects related to children and women, such as the One Laptop Per Child program, which has so far delivered education technology to 9,000 disadvantaged First Peoples children across Canada
_________________________________
- May 3, 1906 – Anna Roosevelt Halsted born, American newspaper and magazine editor, and children’s book author; appointed by President Kennedy to the Citizen’s Advisory Council on the Status of Women (1963-1968), and as vice-chair of the President’s Commission for the Observance of Human Rights (1968-1971); daughter of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt
- May 3, 1912 – May Sarton born, prolific American poet, novelist and memoirist; Journal of a Solitude. Her novel, Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, is notable for its positive depiction of homosexual and bisexual love
- May 3, 1923 – Clara Shepard Luper born, civil rights leader and teacher; earned a Master of Arts degree in History Education in 1951; advisor for the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council in 1957, led them in 1958 in a successful sit-in at Katz drugstore, resulting in the Katz corporation desegregating their lunch counters in three states; led campaigns for equal banking rights, employment opportunities, open housing, and voting rights (1958-1964); in 1968, one of the few African-American teachers hired at a previously segregated Oklahoma City high school as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan; co-author of Behold the Walls, an account of the campaign for civil rights in Oklahoma City (1979)
- May 3, 1937 – Nélida Piñon born, Brazilian author, won the Walmap Prize, 1970, for her historical novel, Fundador (Founders), known for A Republica dos Sonhos (The Republic of Dreams), President of Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters)
- May 3, 1951 – Tatyana Tolstaya born, Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist; noted for her dystopian novel, The Slynx; her acerbic essays on Russian life; and for hosting the Russian cultural television programme, Школа злословия (The School for Scandal), from 2002 to 2014
- May 3, 1959 – Uma Bharti born, Indian politician, member of the Indian Parliament; Minister of Drinking Water & Sanitation since 2017; Minister of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation (2014-2017)
- May 3, 1960 – The Anne Frank House opens in Amsterdam, Netherlands
- May 3, 1961 – Leyla Zana born, Kurdish politician, peace and human rights activist; member of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party until it was banned; elected as an independent member of the Grand National Assembly (1991-1994) ; imprisoned for 10 years when Turkish courts ruled her activities were against the unity of the country (1994-2004); the first Kurdish woman elected to Parliament (2011-2018)
- May 3, 1963 – Mona Siddiqui born in Pakistan, British Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the first person to hold this chair, and Dean International for the Middle East; her family moved to England when she was 5 years old; fluent in English, French, Arabic and Urdu
- May 3, 1979 – Margaret Thatcher, British Conservative politician, forms her government as the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
- May 3, 1996 – Prevent Teen & Unplanned Pregnancy Day is sponsored by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which was founded in 1996 to combat the nation’s incredibly high rates of teen pregnancy, and has since expanded their campaign to include all unplanned pregnancies
_________________________________
- May 4, 1559 – Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby born, notable English patron of the arts, she supported a company of players; encouraged Edmund Spenser, a distant relative, who represented her as ‘Amaryllis’ in an ecologue; co-founder with her second husband of the Bridgewater Library, which is the oldest large family collection in England to survive intact into modern times
- May 4, 1749 – Charlotte Turner Smith born, English poet and novelist, instrumental in a revival of the sonnet and establishing the conventions of Gothic fiction; forced into marriage at 15 by her father, she spent many unhappy years married to a violent drunkard. His extravagance landed them in debtors’ prison, where she began her writing career in order to pay their way out. Eventually she left him, as his increasing rages made her fear for her life
- May 4, 1852 – Alice Pleasance Liddell born, as children, she and her siblings were photographed by amateur photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (whose pen name was Lewis Carroll). She and her sisters were the first people to hear a story of the adventures of Alice in Wonderland, told amuse to them by Carroll during a summer boating excursion. When he later wrote the books, the story begins on May 4th, the real Alice’s birthday, and at the end of Through the Looking Glass, the first letter of each line in the poem “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” reads down as ‘Alice Pleasance Liddell’
- May 4, 1907 – Mary Hallaren born, first woman to officially join the U.S. Army; director of the Women’s Army Corps; recipient of the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal; elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996
- May 4, 1916 – Jane Jacobs born, American-Canadian journalist and activist, pioneer in urban studies and “slum clearance” opponent, wrote The Death and Life of American Cities (1961) showing how urban renewal did not address the needs of urban dwellers, introduced "eyes on the street" and “social capital” concepts, criticized as a “housewife” and “crazy dame” in the male-dominated field of urban planning; honored as Officer of the Order of Canada, and Order of Ontario
- May 4, 1925 – Ruth First born, South African Jewish Anti-Apartheid activist, journalist and academic. As a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, she was one of the founders of the Federation of Progressive Students. Among her fellow students were Nelson Mandela, her future husband and fellow activist Joe Slovo, and Mozambican Eduardo Mondlane, who became the first leader of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO). She was editor-in-chief of the radical newspaper The Guardian in 1946,which was banned by the Apartheid regime. First and Slovo were members of the Communist Party, and of the African National Congress, and participated in many protests. In 1955, she became the editor of Fighting Talk, a radical political journal. She was one of the first defendants in the Treason Trial of 1956-1961, along with 156 other leading anti-apartheid activists who were key figures in the Congress Alliance. After the state of emergency that followed the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, she was listed and banned. She could not attend meetings or publish, and she could not be quoted. In 1963, during another government crackdown, she became the first white woman imprisoned and held in isolation without charge for 117 days under the Ninety-Day Detention Law. Her book, 117 Days, is an account of her arrest, imprisonment and interrogation by the South African Police Special Branch. In March 1964, she went into exile in London, and was active in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. In 1978, she became director of research at the Centre of African Studies (Centro de Estudos Africanos), part of the university in Maputo, Mozambique. She was assassinated on August 17, 1982, when she opened a parcel bomb addressed to her at her university office. It was later determined that her assassination was ordered by Major Craig Williamson of the South African Police
- May 4, 1929 – Audrey Hepburn, born in Belgium, British-American film star and actress; UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, promoted immunization campaigns to end measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio; clean water and school building projects; testified before U.S. Congress; and launched UNICEF's State of the World's Children reports; Presidential Medal of Freedom
- May 4, 1951 – Colleen Hanabusa born, American Democratic politician and labor lawyer; Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for from Hawaii’s 1st district (2016-2019); first woman President of the Hawaii Senate (2009-2010); Member of the Hawaii Senate from the 21st district (1999-2010)
- May 4, 1958 – Jane Hodgson Kennedy born, British Labour politician; inaugural Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner since 2012; Member of Parliament (1992-2010)
- May 4, 1966 – Jane McGrath born in England, Australian who was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997, at age 31. She was deemed cancer-free by June 1998, but in 2003, metastatic cancer was found in her bones. She campaigned for cancer support, and she and her husband founded the McGrath Foundation in 2005, to fund breast care nurses in rural and regional Australia, and to increase breast cancer awareness in young women. In 2006, tests detected brain metastasis. She underwent radiation treatment and the tumor was surgically removed. McGrath died June 22, 2008, at age 42
- May 4, 1979 – Margaret Thatcher takes office as the first female United Kingdom Prime Minister
_________________________________
- May 5, 1809 – Mary Dixon Kies is awarded a U.S. patent, for a technique of weaving straw with silk and thread which speeded up hat-making, the 1st woman to apply to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in her own name. Prior to 1790, only men could author a patent. The Patent Act of 1790 opened the door for any male or female to protect his or her invention with a patent. However, in many states, women could not legally own property or sign contracts independent of their husbands or fathers
- May 5, 1824 – Lucy Larcom born, American poet and author, editor of Our Young Folks magazine, writes songs, poems and letters describing life working in the cotton mills, and for her book A New England Girlhood
- May 5, 1864 – Nellie Bly born, pseudonym of American journalist and author Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, a pioneer of the field of investigative journalism, especially for her exposé of conditions in a mental institution, and for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days
- May 5, 1882 – Sylvia Pankhurst born, British suffragist and socialist activist; she began working full-time for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1906, founded by her mother Emmeline Pankhurst and her sister Christabel. She devised the WSPU logo, and many of its leaflets, banners and posters. In 1907, she toured industrial towns in England and Scotland, painting portraits of working women and helping to establish the WSPU presence in Leicester. Unlike her mother and sister, she kept her affiliation with the labour movement, and did most of her campaigning among women labourers. She was arrested many times, and sent to prison, where she was repeatedly force-fed. But she wanted the WSPU to be aligned with the socialist movement and tackle more issues than women’s suffrage. In 1913, she was expelled from the WSPU, and founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914, which later became the Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF). She was founder/editor of Women’s (Workers’) Dreadnought. The WSF campaigned against WWI, unlike the WSPU, which supported the war drive and military conscription. The WSF spoke in support of women in the poorer parts of London, and set up “cost-price” restaurants to feed the hungry without the taint of charity. The WSF also helped soldiers’ wives by setting up legal advice centres, and campaigning for the government to provide allowances for poor soldiers’ wives. In 1936, she became a strong supporter of Ethiopia, moving to Addis Ababa in the 1950s, and becoming editor of the Ethiopia Observer. When she died in 1960, Haile Selassie named her “an honorary Ethiopian.” Sylvia Pankhurst is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in the capital, in a section for patriots of the war against the Italian invasion
- May 5, 1892 – Dorothy Garrod born, English archaeologist, pioneer in Near Eastern prehistory, directing excavations at Mount Carmel in Palestine (1929-1934) which spanned 200,000 years of human habitation, and additional Paleolithic research at Gibraltar and in Kurdistan; as a leading authority on the Paleolithic, she became the first woman to hold a chair at University of Cambridge, as a Professor of Archaeology (1939-1952), and the first woman to hold an Oxbridge chair, but she could not be a full member of the University, which excluded her from speaking or voting on University matters, until 1948; noted as author of the ground-breaking volume, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, and The Upper Paleolithic of Britain
- May 5, 1898 – Elsie Eaves born, American civil engineer; first woman associate member, and first woman admitted to full membership, in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE); founding member of the American Association of Cost Engineering (renamed the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering); started her career as a draftsperson for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in Colorado, and for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, then got her civil engineering degree in 1920 from the University of Colorado. Eaves worked for McGraw-Hill in New York (1926-1963), on the Engineering News-Record and other publications, retiring as the manager of Business News. She created databases on engineering projects and trends across the U.S., before there were computers to compile the information. After retiring from McGraw-Hill, Eaves continued practicing as an adviser on housing costs for the National Commission on Urban Affairs. In 1974, she was honored with the George Norlin Silver Medal, the University of Colorado’s highest alumni award
- May 5, 1900 – Helen Redfield born, American geneticist who did extensive research on Drosophila Melanogaster, the common fruit fly, at Stanford University, Columbia and the California Institute of Technology, then as a research associate at the Institute for Cancer Research (1951-1961)
- May 5, 1907 – ‘Iryna Vilde’ born as Daryna Makohon, Ukrainian author and Soviet correspondent; wrote short stories and novels about family life and society in the Western Ukraine; best known for her two-volume novel Sestry Richynski (Sisters of Richynsky),which won the Shevchenko Prize
- May 5, 1911 – Pritilata Waddedar born, Bengali educator and revolutionary nationalist, teacher and headmistress at Nandankanan Aparnacharan School in Chittagong; she commits suicide rather than be arrested by British authorities after an attack on a European club
- May 5, 1921 – Del Martin born, American feminist and gay rights activist; in 1955, with her partner Phyllis Lyon, she founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first social and political organization for lesbians in the U.S., and she served as the organization’s first president and first editor of its magazine, The Ladder. Martin and Lyon were the first openly lesbian couple to join the National Organization for Women. Martin was politically active in San Francisco's first gay political organization, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, which influenced then-mayor Dianne Feinstein to sponsor a citywide bill to outlaw employment discrimination for gays and lesbians. She helped form the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and was a participant in the White House Conference on Aging. Martin and Lyon married in 2004, the first same-sex marriage in San Francisco, after being life partners since 1952. In 2008, they remarried after the California Supreme Court's decision in In re Marriage Cases legalized same-sex marriage in California. Martin died two months after their second wedding from complications of an arm bone fracture at age 87
- May 5, 1922 – Irene Gut Opdyke born, Polish nurse who aided Jews persecuted by the Nazis during WWII; author of In My Hands, and honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking her life to save 12 Jews from certain death
- May 5, 1937 – Delia Derbyshire born, English composer of electronic music; known for her electronic arrangement of the Doctor Who theme music
- May 5, 1942 – Baroness Jean Corston, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament (1992-2005); first woman to serve as Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party (2001-2005); commissioned by the Home Office to write a report on the vulnerable women in the UK’s criminal justice system, which outlines alternative thinking on sending mentally ill women to prison, published as the Corston Report in 2007, which is now the standard by which progress and improvements in the prison and probation services treatment of women are measured
- May 5, 1964 – Efrat Mishori born, Israeli writer, poet, performance artist and filmmaker; recipient of the 2018 Landau Arts Award
- May 5, 1984 – Johanna Hedva born, Korean American genderqueer contemporary artist and writer; noted for her 2015 lecture, “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically” which became her “Sick Woman Theory” essay on chronic illness and the Western medical industry
- May 5, 1991 – International Midwives Day is launched by the International Confederation of Midwives, now an observance on the United Nations calendar
_________________________________
- May 6, 1829 – Phebe Hanaford born, American minister who was the first Universalist woman ordained as a minister in New England, and the first woman chaplain to the Connecticut state legislature. She was an abolitionist, a feminist and member of the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for both black and woman suffrage. Author of several non-fiction works, including Lucretia, the Quakeress, a biography of Lucretia Mott, and Life of Abraham Lincoln, the first biography of the president published after his death. She was also on the Revising Committee, headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which wrote commentary on the Church of England’s Revised Version of the Bible, published in sections between 1881 and 1894, the first new English-language version of the Bible in over two centuries. The work of the committee led to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s highly controversial two-part book, The Woman’s Bible, and Matilda Joslyn Gage’s book Woman, Church and State, which challenged traditional Judeo-Christian teaching that women were the source of sin, and that sex was sinful, contending that the double standard for morality hurt both sexes
- May 6, 1890 – Magdalena Sauer born, the first woman in South Africa to practice as a qualified architect; she earned a degree in science from the University of Cape Town in 1911, then became a trainee in architecture in Durban, and pursued further training in England at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Sauer registered with the Institute of South African Architects in 1927, and specialized in residential architecture and restoration of older buildings. She is noted for the 1960s restoration of the former Supreme Court building for its use as the South African Cultural History Museum, which also became the home of the Slave Lodge Museum in 1988
- May 6, 1922 – Gloria Hayes Richardson born, American civil rights leader; noted as co-chair with Inez Grubb of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), founded in 1962 in Cambridge, Maryland, the only affiliate of the Student Nonviol;ent Coordinating Committee that was not student-led. CNAC began by picketing businesses which refused to hire black employees, then staged sit-ins at lunch counters which would not serve black customers. In the spring of 1963, Richardson and 80 other protesters were arrested. Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes met with the protesters, but they rejected the deal he offered, and Tawes declared martial law, sending the National Guard to Cambridge. The protests continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The movement led to the desegregation of all schools, recreational areas, and hospitals in Maryland and the longest period of martial law within the United States since 1877. The Cambridge movement is often cited as the birth of the Black Power movement
- May 6, 1954 – Angela Hernández Nuñez born, Dominican author, poet and feminist; active member of Circulo de Mujeres Poetas (Circle of Women poets) and a founding member of the Grupo de Mujeres Creadoras (Group of Creative Women); awarded the Dominican National Literary Award in 1998
- May 6, 1981 – Maya Ying Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is selected from 1,421 other entries
- May 6, 2017 – France bans too-thin fashion models and requires that digitally enhanced photos be labeled as enhanced
_________________________________
- May 7, 160 AD? (exact year uncertain) – Julia Maesa born in Syria, Augusta (Feminine form of Augustus, a Roman Imperial honorific title for empresses and other prominent women of the imperial families). Politically able and ruthless, she contended for political power after her sister, Roman Empress Julia Domna, wife of Septimus Severus, committed suicide following the assassination of her son, Emperor Caracalla. Julia Maesa was ordered into exile in Emesa in Syria by the Praetorian prefect Macrinus, who had usurped the throne. She used her immense wealth to gain support from soldiers stationed at a nearby military base, and launched a coup to put her 14-year-old grandson, Elagabalus, on the throne in place of the upstart Macrinus. But Elagabalus lavished favors on male courtiers, and caused so many sex scandals that Julia Maesa became part of the plot to assassinate him at age 18. He was replaced by her other grandson Severus Alexander, who ruled from 222 to 235, before being assassinated by his own army because he was trying diplomacy and bribes instead of warfare to deal with the Germanic and Sarmatian tribes who were crossing the Rhine and the Danube in hordes. The date of Julia Maesa’s death was not recorded, but it was likely around 224-226 AD. She was deified in 227 AD
- May 7, 1429 – Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) is wounded between the neck and shoulder, pulls the arrow out herself, and returns to lead the charge on the key English position, les Tourelles, a turreted gatehouse at Orléans, which breaks the siege that had lasted over six months
- May 7, 1748 – Olympe de Gouges born, French playwright, philosopher, feminist and abolitionist; Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791); executed during the Reign of Terror for attacking the Revolutionary government
- May 7, 1845 – Mary Eliza Mahoney, one of the first African Americans to graduate from nursing school, and the first African American to work as a professionally trained nurse; co-founder with Adah B. Thoms of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, which challenged racial discrimination in the registered nursing profession. The NACGN merged in 1951 with the American Nurses Association. Mahoney was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993
- May 7, 1909 – Dorothy Tabbyyetchy (‘Sunrise’) Lorentino born, Native American Comanche teacher. As a child, Dorothy Sunrise v. District Board of Cache Consolidated School District No. 1, became a landmark education judgment which allowed Native American children in Comanche County, Oklahoma, to attend public schools rather than the government-mandated Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools. Language from her case was incorporated into the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Her case predated a case allowing Native American children in California to attend public schools, and Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation of schools unconstitutional. She grew up to be a special education teacher, and taught ESL classes and students with disabilities for 34 years in schools in Arizona and Oregon, then retired to return home, where she taught the Comanche language and songs to tribal members. She became the first Native American and first Oklahoman to be inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame in 1997
- May 7, 1919 – Eva Perón born, dubbed Evita, influential First Lady of Argentina (1946-1952), advocate for labor rights, healthcare and women’s suffrage
- May 7, 1936 – Aviator Amy Johnson sets a new world record, flying from England to Cape Town, South Africa, in 3 days, 6 hours and 26 minutes. She was a pioneer in women’s aviation, the first woman to fly solo. Johnson died while ferrying a plane for the Air Transport Auxiliary during WWII when she was caught in a snowstorm, and forced to parachute into the icy water of the Thames Estuary near Herne Bay in Kent in January 1941. Her body was never recovered
- May 7, 1954 – Joanna D. Haigh born, British physicist, meteorologist and academic; professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London; co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment since 2014; noted for work on solar variability, radiative transfer, and stratosphere-troposphere climate modeling; Fellow of the Royal Society since 2013, and former president of the Royal Meteorological Society
- May 7, 1957 – Kristina M. Johnson born, American executive, optical engineer, and academic; appointed as U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary (2009-2010), where she developed an integrated Strategic Technologies Energy Plan for reducing our dependence on imported oil by 75%, achieving greenhouse gas reductions of 83% by 2050, and achieving 80% low-carbon electricity by 2035; leader in developing optoelectronic processing systems and 3-D imaging; co-founder of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, and the Center of Excellence in Optoelectronics at the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute; Chancellor of the State University of New York; advocate for women in leadership, science and engineering; first woman awarded the International Dennis Gabor Award for creativity in modern optics in 1993, and recipient of the John Fritz Medal for engineering; in 2015 elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2016
- May 7, 1960 – Almudena Grandes born, Spanish writer, columnist and leftist political activist; in 1989, won the La Sonrisa Vertical prize for her novel Las ededes de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu)
- May 7, 1961 – Dame Sue Black born, Scottish forensic anthropologist, anatomist and author; Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee (2005-2018); will be Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University beginning in August 2018; co-author of Disaster Victim Identification: The Practitioner’s Guide, and Age Estimation in the Living: The Practitioners Guide
- May 7, 1962 – Judith S. Donath born, American computer scientist; fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab; combines concepts from many disciplines, including evolutionary biology, architecture, ethnography and cognitive science, in developing and optimizing designs of mediated virtual cities on the internet and online virtual identities; Inhabiting the Virtual City
_________________________________
- May 8, 1865 – Dr. Mary Harris Thompson opens the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children because, of the two existing hospitals in Chicago, neither allowed women on staff, and one didn’t allow women patients. Thompson initially opens the hospital to treat widows and orphans of the Civil War
- May 8, 1867 – Margarete Böhme born, German novelist and autobiographer; her best-selling book, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (The Diary of a Lost Girl), the story of a woman forced by circumstances into a life of prostitution, created a sensation when it was published in 1905, at first anonymously, and remained in print until suppressed at the beginning of the Nazi regime
- May 8, 1929 – Girija Devi born, Indian classical singer, known for the genre thumri, on the faculty of ITC Sangeet Research Academy and Banaras Hindu University
- May 8, 1929 – Ethel D. Allen born, African American physician and Republican politician; she described herself as a ‘ghetto practitioner” and made house calls in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Concerned about the crime she saw daily, she ran for the Philadelphia City Council, and won after out-performing the incumbent in series of debates. She was the first black woman on the city council (serving the Fifth District 1972-1976, and then as an At-Large member 1976-1979); appointed as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1979). She died in 1981 from complications after double-bypass heart surgery
- May 8, 1929 – Miyoshi Umeki born in Japan, Japanese-American actress and singer; first Asian and the only Asian woman to win an Academy Award for acting, for her supporting role as Katsumi in Sayonara; also originated the role of Mei Li in Flower Drum Song on Broadway and in the 1961 film; operated a business with her husband renting editing equipment to film studios and college film departments
- May 8, 1943 – Pat Barker born, English novelist; her novel Union Street, featuring interlinked stories of seven working class women was rejected by publishers as “too depressing” until she submitted it to the feminist publisher Virago; noted for her WWI-based historical novels in The Regeneration Trilogy about the aftermath of trauma for British soldiers in the Great War, and her re-telling of the Trojan War, The Silence of the Girls
- May 8, 1945 – Janine Haines born, Australian Democratic politician, the second Leader of the Australian Democrats in Parliament, and first woman to be a federal parliamentary leader of an Australian political party (1986-1990); Australian Democrats Deputy Leader (1985-1986); Senator for South Australia (1981-1990); author of Suffrage to Sufferance: One Hundred Years of Women in Politics, published in 1992, which has been a prescribed text in many Australian universities and schools. She died in 2004 from a degenerative neurological condition, and was honoured with a state funeral
- May 8, 1946 – Estonian schoolgirls Aili Jõgi (age 14) and Ageeda Paavel (age 15) blow up a wooden Soviet memorial erected in front of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, protesting the Soviet occupation authorities’ systematic destruction of memorials to the fallen in the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, even the gravestones of the Tallinn Military Cemetery; they are later apprehended, and sent to forced-labor camps in the USSR, but are finally released after years of hardship and able to return home. In 1998, they become the only women awarded the Order of the Cross of the Eagle, as “freedom fighters of military merit”
- May 8, 1954 – Pam Arciero born, American puppeteer and voice actress for Grundgetta, Oscar the Grouch’s girlfriend, on the PBS children’s series Sesame Street
- May 8, 1970 – Naomi Klein born, Canadian nonfiction author, environmental and anti-capitalism activist; noted for No Logo; The Shock Doctrine; This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. In 2016, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her climate justice activism
- May 8, 1973 – Hiromi Arakawa born, her male pen name is Hiromu Arakawa; Japanese manga artist known for Fullmetal Alchemist
- May 8, 1977 – Kathrin Bringmann born, German number theorist, noted for her substantial contributions to the theory of mock theta functions; she was the Emmy Noether Lecturer of the German Mathematical Society in 2015
- May 8, 1999 – Nancy Macy becomes the first female cadet to graduate from The Citadel, the formerly all-male military school in South Carolina
- May 8, 2013 – The first World Ovarian Cancer Day. Ovarian cancer is responsible for 140,000 deaths each year. Statistics show that 45% of women with ovarian cancer are likely to survive for five years compared to about 89% of women with breast cancer
_________________________________
- May 9, 1865 – Elizabeth Garver Jordan born, American journalist, author, editor, and suffragist, editor of Harper’s Bazaar
- May 9, 1914 – Patricia Swift Blalock born, American librarian, social worker, and civil rights activist in Alabama. After earning a master’s degree in social work from the University of Chicago, in 1937 she went to work for the Alabama State Department of Education and Rehabilitation, as district supervisor of the State Crippled Children’s Services, but retired in 1946 after she married and had a child. In 1951, she began working as a part-time assistant in the Dallas County Public Library, the only library in Selma. After ten years, the library director became seriously ill, and Blalock became the acting director. When the library board asked her to become the permanent director she hesitated because she did not have a degree in librarianship, but the board expressed their confidence in her, and she assumed the permanent position in 1963. Because Selma did not have a separate library for black patrons, they were served through the library’s back door by the library’s maid. When Blalock became the library’s director, one of her first priorities was desegregating the library. The real political power in Selma at the time was the White Citizens’ Council, founded in 1955 as a reaction to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Two of its members, Selma’s Mayor, Chris Heinz, and Judge Bernard Reynolds were also ex officio members of the library board. They wanted to protect the status quo in Selma from “outside agitators.” Blalock met individually with each of the regular members of the board trying to convince them that desegregation was inevitable, and citing recent integration orders by the federal government in Montgomery and protests in Birmingham. She argued that Selma should take control of its integration process rather than have outsiders do it for them. By May, 1963, she told the Board that there was a push to protest the library’s segregation policies, and she was unsure if she would even be able to open on the library on Monday without some kind of desegregation plan in place. An emergency meeting of the board was held at her home to work out a plan. The resulting plan was far from what she sought, but it was a beginning. The library would be closed from Monday, May 13 to Sunday, May 19. When it reopened the following Monday, all its chairs had been removed to present black and white patrons from sitting together. The desegregation was not publically announced. All library card applicants would be required to provide two references. On May 20, 1963, the library reopened. Library visitors who asked about the lack of chairs were told they were stored temporarily in the basement. Black patrons, not informed of the policy change, were slow to enter the library at first, but by November, they were becoming more common. Blalock took a few chairs out of storage, and scattered them around the library, slowly adding a few more at a time. She also pushed for integration of the library staff. Annie Molette, the library maid who had quietly served Selma’s black readers through the back door, was promoted to be the first African-American library assistant in the city, and a new library maid was hired to do the official parts of the job. Some white library patrons did not react well to the new policies. One white man, seeing black patrons using the library, angrily tore up his library card, and vowed never to return. When he came back two weeks later to check out a book, Blalock handed him his card, which she had carefully taped back together, in case he came back. She retired in 1988. In 1992, she was honored by the Alabama Library Association with its Distinguished Service Award. In ‘retirement’ she served two terms as director of the Selma and Dallas County Chamber of Commerce, chaired the Tale Telling Association, and was a two-term vice president of the Selma and Dallas Tourism Council, among other commitments. She also helped found the Selma Performing Arts Center. In 2000, she was the recipient of a Librarian of the Year for Exceptional Leadership award from the International Library Science Honor Society. Her daughter Irene also became librarian and recently retired as the Director of the Birmingham Public Library
- May 9, 1917 – Fay Kanin born, American screenwriter, playwright and producer; Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President (1979-1983); co-author of the screenplay for Teacher’s Pet; in the early 195os, she and her husband were blacklisted for two years by the HUAC because she had taken classes at the Actors Lab in Hollywood – some of the teachers were suspected of being communist sympathizers – and they had both been members of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a group which supported U.S. efforts during WWII
- May 9, 1921 – Sophie Scholl born, German student-activist, member of the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany; in 1943, she was convicted of high treason for distributing anti-war leaflets, and executed by guillotine
- May 9, 1921 – Mona Van Duyn born, American poet; Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1992); among her honors are the 1971 National Book Award for Poetry for To See, To Take; the 1971 Bollingen Prize; and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Near Changes
- May 9, 1946 – Ayşe Nur Zarakolu born, Turkish author, publisher and human rights advocate; co-founder of the publishing house Belge (fire-bombed in 1995); as director of Cemmay, a book-distribution company, she was the first Turkish woman hired as a company director. A relentless challenger to repressive Turkish press laws, she helped publicize in Turkey the Armenian Genocide and the plight of Kurdish people living within its borders in spite of government bans on mentioning them. She was imprisoned multiple times for her publications. Amnesty International designated her a prisoner of conscience, and the International Publishers Association honored her with its inaugural International Freedom to Publish Award in 1998, but Turkish authorities confiscated her passport and she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony. In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Turkey for convicting Zarakolu for publishing a book about journalist Ferhat Tepe, murdered by the militant ultra-nationalist Turkish Revenge Brigade (used by Turkish military intelligence in operations against Kurdish insurgents). İnsan Hakları Derneği (İHD), a Turkish human rights organization she helped found, bestows the Ayşe Zarakolu Freedom of Thought prize in her honor
- May 9, 1953 – Eleanor Roosevelt lobbies Congress for a National Teachers’ Day. In 1985, the National PTA expands her idea into Teacher Appreciation Week, now in association with the National Education Association, held during the first full week in May
- May 9, 1960 – The Food and Drug Administration announces approval of birth control as an additional indication for Searle’s Enovid, making it the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill
_________________________________
- May 10, 1872 – Victoria Woodhull is the first woman nominated for President of the U.S, by the Equal Rights Party
- May 10, 1893 – Tonita Peña born, renowned influential American Pueblo artist and teacher
- May 10, 1898 – Ariel Durant born in Russia, American historian and co-author with her husband Will Durant of the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization
- May 10, 1900 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin born, British astronomer and astrophysicist, first person to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe, proposed an explanation for the composition of the stars in her thesis, confirmed four years later by Henry Norris Russell, who has often been given credit for the discovery, even though his paper credited her work
- May 10, 1918 – Diva Diniz Corrêa born, Brazilian marine zoologist; first woman director of the University of São Paulo of the Department of Zoology
- May 10, 1927 – Nayantara Sahgal born, Indian author, one of the first women from India to receive wide recognition for her works in English; Rich Like Us
- May 10, 1929 – Antonine Maillet born, Acadian-Canadian novelist, playwright and scholar; taught literature and folklore at several Canadian Universities, including the University of Montreal (1974-1975) and worked for Radio-Canada in Moncton, New Brunswick, as a scriptwriter and host; she was the first non-European to win the Prix Goncourt, in 1979, for Pélagie-la-Charrette (Pélagie: The Return to Acadie)
- May 10, 1944 – Marie-France Pisier born in French Indochina, French actress, screenwriter, novelist and director; she appeared in over 70 films, including Cousin Cousine; author of the novel, Le Bal du gouverneur (The Governor’s Ball), she also wrote the screenplay based on her book for the 1990 film, which was her directorial debut; in 2002, she directed Comme un avion (Like an Airplane)
- May 10, 1950 – Natalya Bondarchuk born in the Soviet Union, Soviet and Russian actress, screenwriter, stage and film director; she also heads a child opera theatre in Moscow; noted for writing and directing the 2oo6 film, Pushkin: Poslednyaya Duel
- May 10, 1971 – Monisha Kaltenborn born in India; Indian-Austrian co-founder of KDC Racing, a Formula One team since 2018. She was team principal of the Sauber Formula One team (2010-2017), in charge of corporate and legal affairs, the first woman team principal in Formula One. She left the company after it was taken over by Longbow Finance. Earned master’s degree in International Business Law at the London School of Economics (1996)
- May 10, 2010 – President Obama nominates Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court
_________________________________
- May 11, 1771 – Laskarina Bouboulina born, Greek naval commander, heroine of the Greek War of Independence in 1821; when her second husband was killed fighting Algerian pirates, she took over his fortune and his trading business and had four more ships built at her own expense, including the large warship Agamemnon. When the Turks tried to confiscate her property because her husband had fought with the Russians in the Turko-Russian wars, she met with Russian Ambassador Pavel Stroganov, and gained Russian protection. The Agamemnon was one of the largest warships in the hands of Greek rebels, and she spent much of her fortune on arms and food for the men under her command, taking part in naval blockades and capturing cities held by the Turks, including Tripolis, where she saved most of the female members of the sultan’s household. After her death, Emperor Alexander I of Russia granted her the honorary Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy, making her the only woman in world naval history to hold that rank until the 20th Century
- May 11, 1838 – Isabelle Bogelot born, philanthropist, feminist and author; noted for setting up temporary shelters for women and children, and transitional housing for women released from prison. She also campaigned for major reforms at the infamous women’s prison, St. Lazare. Co-founder in 1901 of the National Council of French Women (CNFF). Author of Trente ans de solidarité (Thirty Years of Solitude)
- May 11, 1894 – Martha Graham born, American dancer and choreographer, had tremendous impact on modern dance over her 70 year career, founder of the oldest modern dance company in the U.S., recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
- May 11, 1901 – Rose Ausländer born in Cernauti, Austria-Hungary, lived in the U.S and Germany, Jewish poet who wrote in both German and English, editor of the U.S. German language newspaper Westlicher Herold; most copies of her first books of poems were destroyed when the Nazis occupied Cernauti in 1941
- May 11, 1918 – Sheila Burnford born in Scotland, British-Canadian author; best known for The Incredible Journey, which won the Canadian Library Association award, 1963 Book of the Year for Children
- May 11, 1918 – Mrinalini Sarabhai born in British India, Indian classical dancer and choreographer of over 300 dance dramas; founder and director of the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad; chair of the Gujarat State Handicrafts and Handloom Development Corporation; honored in 1992 by the Indian government with the Padma Bhushan, its third highest civilian award
- May 11, 1922 – Ameurfina Melencio-Herrera born, Filipina judge; second woman justice on the Philippine Supreme Court (1979-1992)
- May 11, 1933 – Anna M. McCann born, American art historian, archaeologist and academic; in the early 1960s, she became the first American woman underwater archaeologist, scuba diving with Jacques Cousteau to explore ancient Roman shipwrecks in the waters near Marseille; Roman Sarcophagi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- May 11, 1956 – Theresa Burke born, Canadian journalist, writer and producer for CBC television’s newsmagazine, The Fifth Estate. She won a Canadian Association of Journalists award in 2000 for the program ‘His Word Against History’ about the life of convicted murderer Steven Truscott
- May 11, 1961 – Cecile Licad born, Filipina classical pianist; winner of the 1981 Leventritt Competition Gold Medal
_________________________________
- May 12, 1777 – Mary H. Reibey born in England, transported to Australia at age 14 under the name James Burrow, because she ran away from service disguised as a boy, on a stolen horse. At 17, she married Thomas Reibey, who had served as a junior officer aboard the ship that took her Australia, and they farmed land he was granted on the Hawkesbury River, then started a cargo business on the river, acquired more land, and Thomas went into partnership in a trading business; when he died in 1811, Mary took over all the enterprises while continuing to raise their seven children; she expanded her business interests, and helped found the Bank of New South Wales; to further her ambitions for her daughters, she took them to England in 1820, returning the following year; so in the 1828 census, she listed her status as “came free in 1821”; she gradually went into semi-retirement, undertaking additional charitable works, and serving as one of the Governors of the Free Grammar School; she is featured on the obverse side of the Australian 20 dollar bill
- May 12, 1820 – Florence Nightingale born, English nurse, social reformer and statistician; considered the founder of modern nursing, she was known as “The Lady with the Lamp” during the Crimean War. She instituted sanitation procedures which greatly improved the survival rate of the sick and wounded; after the war, she was director of the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. Her book, Notes on Nursing, was widely read, and was the first book on nursing which covered what are now standard sanitary practices. She greatly improved the public perception of nursing, and did much to make it a “respectable” profession for women. She introduced trained nurses into the British workhouse system. Previously, more able-bodied paupers did what little they could to ease the suffering of those who fell ill in the harsh conditions. By 1882, several Nightingale nurses had become matrons at several leading hospitals, and in 1883, Nightingale was the first recipient of the Royal Red Cross. In 1907, she was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit
- May 12, 1899 – Indra Devi born as Eugenie Peterson in the Russian Empire; in 1917, she and her mother, a Russian noble, escaped to Berlin as the Bolsheviks came to power. In Germany, she became an actress and dancer, but had been fascinated for years by India and yoga. In 1927, she sailed for India and adopted her stage name. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, an attaché in the Czechoslovak consultate. She was eventually accepted as a student by the famed Yoga guru Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, and in 1938 she became the first foreign women among the dedicated yogi. When she told the guru that her husband was being transferred to China, he asked her to work there as a yoga teacher. In 1939, she held what are considered the first Yoga classes in China, and opened a school in Shanghai with help from Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She also has many American and Russian students. She gave lectures on yoga and free lessons in orphanages. After her husband died unexpectedly in 1946, she moved the following year to the U.S., then opened a yoga studio in Hollywood in 1948. Among her students were Greta Garbo, Eva Gabor, Gloria Swanson, Robert Ryan, Jennifer Jones, and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. In 1961, she opened the Indra Devi Foundation in Tecate, México, where she trained yoga instructors. In 1985, she moved to Argentina, and died in Buenos Aires at age 102 in 2002
- May 12, 1926 – Paulette Poujol-Oriol born, Haitian author, dramaturge, actress and feminist. She was fluent in French, Creole, English, Spanish, German, and Italian. Her family moved to Paris when she was an infant, then returned to Haiti when she was six. She founded the Piccolo Teatro, to teach drama to children; Poujol-Oriol was president of
the Ligue Féminine d'Action Social (Feminine League for Social Action) from 1997 until her death in 2011, and was a founding member of the Club des femmes de carrière libérale et commerciale (Liberal and Commercial Career Women's Club) in 1994, and of the Alliance des Femmes Haïtiennes, an umbrella body coordinating the work of fifty feminist organizations; author of the novel Le creuset (The Crucible), which won the 1980 Prix Littéraire Henri Deschamps. She was the second woman to win the award
- May 12, 1928 – Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ends women’s rights in Italy; he rescinded women’s suffrage, restricting the right to vote only to men aged 21 and over, who would have to pay a tax of 100 lire for the privilege, no small amount in those days
- May 12, 1937 – Miriam Stern Stoppard born, Lady Hogg, English physician, author, television presenter on medical and science programmes, and columnist for the Daily Mirror newspaper. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, and grew up on a council housing estate (British public housing). As a teenager, she attended the Central High School in Eskdale Terrace on a scholarship, then trained as a nurse at Newcastle General Hospital. She then studied medicine at King’s College, Durham. After qualifying as a doctor, she worked as a dermatologist, and became a senior registrar (senior resident) at Bristol Royal Infirmary, then switched to research at the Syntex pharmaceutical laboratories, where she was promoted to managing director. Author of several advice books on pregnancy, parenting and healthcare for children. After her divorce from playwright Tom Stoppard, she married industrialist Sir Christopher Hogg, but has kept the name Stoppard professionally
- May 12, 1949 – Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit of India is the first foreign woman ambassador to be received in U.S.
- May 12, 1967 – Mireille Bousquet-Mélou born, French mathematician, specialist in enumerative combinatorics, and senior researcher for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS – French National Center for Scientific Research) at the computer science department (LaBRI) of the University of Bordeaux. She won the French Academy of Sciences’ Charles-Louis de Saulces de Freycinet Prize in 2009, and the silver medal of the CNRS in 2014
- May 12, 1977 – Maryam Mirzakhani born, Iranian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research work included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. In 2014, she was honored with the Fields Medal, to date the only woman and the first Iranian to receive the most prestigious award in mathematics, for her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces." In 2013, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which spread to her bones and liver by 2016. She died in 2017 at age 40. Memorials by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and in Iranian newspapers broke taboo by including pictures of her with her hair uncovered. Her death has also renewed debates within Iran regarding matrilineal citizenship for children of mixed-nationality parentage; Fars News Agency reported that 60 Iranian MPs urged the speeding up of an amendment to a law that would allow children of Iranian mothers married to foreigners to be given Iranian nationality, in order to make it easier for Mirzakhani's daughter to visit Iran. The Women’s Committee within the Iranian Mathematical Society campaigned successfully for the International Council for Science to declare Mirzakhani's birthday as International Women in Mathematics Day
- May 12, 2016 – The Italian Parliament approves a law recognizing civil unions for same-sex couples, but it does not recognize same-sex marriages, and will not allow couples in these civil unions to legally adopt a partner’s biological children
_________________________________
- May 13, 1373 – English anchoress Julian of Norwich has visions which are later transcribed in her Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1395), the first book in English known to be written by a woman
- May 13, 1717 – Maria Theresa born, only woman to rule over the Habsburg dominions, and the last of the House of Habsburg. Her father, Emperor Charles VI, paved the way for her succession with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723, bypassing the prevailing Salic law, which precluded female inheritance. Her ascension to the throne after her father’s death in 1740, caused an immediate invasion by Frederick II of Prussia, who took the affluent Habsburg province of Silesia, but Maria Theresa managed to secure the support of the Hungarians and held him off. Meanwhile, Saxony, Prussia, Bavaria, and France all repudiated their recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction which they had agreed to during her father’s lifetime, and the War of the Austrian Succession began. She was crowned Holy Roman Empress in 1745, and reigned until her death in 1780. She and her husband, Francis I, had eleven daughters and five sons, and ten of them survived to adulthood
- May 13, 1847 – Linda Gilbert, American prison reformer; her family home was opposite the Cook County jail in Chicago. When she was 11, she gave some books to prisoners at the jail; she spent most of an inheritance on philanthropy; incorporated the Gilbert Library and Prisoners’ Aid Society, and succeeded in placing libraries in 22 prisons in six states, and procured employment for 6,000 ex-convicts
- May 13, 1850 – Ellen Spencer Mussey born, lawyer, educator and women’s rights advocate. With Emma Gillett, opened the first ‘Woman's Law Class’ (1896). They began with three students, but the program quickly expanded, with several prominent Washington D.C. attorneys providing assistance. When Columbian College refused a request by Mussey and Gillett to take on the women they had educated for their final year of education — on grounds that "women did not have the mentality for law" — they established a co-educational law school specifically open to women (1898), the Washington College of Law, the first law school in the world founded by women
- May 13, 1859 – Kate Marsden born, British missionary, explorer, writer and nurse; she became a nurse at 16, and later was matron as Wellington Hospital. She went with other nurses to Bulgaria in 1877 to nurse Russian soldiers during Russia’s war with Turkey, and was given an award by Empress Maria Fedorovna for her devotion to her patients. It was here that she first encountered lepers. She and her mother traveled to New Zealand when her sister became ill, but arrived just days before she died. She set up a St. John’s Ambulance group and gave ambulance lectures while she was there. Wanting to treat leprosy, she obtained help from Queen Victoria and the Russian Royal family, and traveled to Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus and Turkey. In Constantinople (now Istanbul), she met a British doctor who told her about the curative properties of an herb found in Siberia. She next went to Moscow, where she obtained a letter of introduction from the Tsarina, and began an 11,000-mile round trip from Moscow to Siberia seeking the herb, with her assistant and translator, Ada Field. They found the herb, but it was not the cure for leprosy she had hoped. She did set up a leper treatment centre in Siberia. When she returned to England, she faced derision, disbelief in her journey, questions about her finances, and accusations of “immoral behavior” with other women. Marsden was one of the founders of the Bexhill Museum, but was forced to resign before the museum opened in 1914 because the Mayor of Bexhill contacted the museum’s committee and revealed the controversies about her. She died in 1931, after suffering from dropsy and ‘senile decay’
- May 13, 1888 – Inge Lehmann born, Danish seismologist and geophysicist, proved the Earth’s inner core was solid, but surrounded by a molten outer core, and made advances in the understanding of seismic waves during earthquakes; the Lehmann seismic discontinuity is named for her
- May 13, 1914 – Antonia Ferrín Moreiras born in Galacia, an autonomous community in Spain; mathematician, professor and the first Galacian woman astronomer; worked on stellar occulations by the moon, measurements, including those of double stars; in 1963, she was the first Spanish woman to defend an astronomy thesis, Observaciones de pasos por dos verticales (Observations of passages of stars through two verticals)
- May 13, 1923 – Ruth Adler Schnee born in Germany; her Jewish family fled Germany in 1938; American textile and interior designer, a pioneer in modern abstract textile design
- May 13, 1948 – Sheila Jeffreys born in England, Australian professor of political science at the University of Melbourne until her retirement in 2015; radical lesbian feminist and author; The Spinster and Her Enemies, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution and The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade
- May 13, 1951 – Sharon Sayles Belton born, African American community and civil rights activist, Democratic politician; senior fellow at the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice (2001-2006); first woman and first African American mayor of Minneapolis (1994-2001); City Council President (1990-1993), City Council member (1983-1993); co-founder in 1978 of the Harriet Tubman Shelter for Battered Women, and a founding member of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault
- May 13, 1953 – Ruth A. David born, American electrical engineer; while working at the CIA, she reorganized the agency’s intelligence technology system, and designed a proposal to procure technology at the stage of development from the private sector; awarded the National Security Agency Distinguished Service Medal
- May 13, 1981 – Luciana Berger born, British politician; Change UK Spokesperson for Home Affairs, Health, Digital and Culture since 2019; Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree since 2010; originally a member of the Labour Party, she resigned to help form the Independent Group in 2019
- May 13, 1986 – Lena Dunham born, American writer, actress, and producer-director; best known for creating, writing and starring in the HBO series Girls. She also directed several episodes. In 2012, she was the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing–Comedy Series
_________________________________
- May 14, 1851 – Anna Laurens Dawes born, American author and newspaper correspondent, suffragist and advocate for women’s education; founder and president of the Wednesday Morning Club, and vice president of the Massachusetts State Suffrage Society; a trustee of Smith College (1889-1896), which named Dawes House in her honor; noted as author of How We are Governed, The Modern Jew: His Present and his Future, A United States Prison, An Unknown Nation, Charles Sumner, and The Indian as Citizen
- May 14, 1899 – Charlotte Auerbach born, German-Jewish geneticist who worked in primarily in Scotland, a pioneer in the science of mutagenesis, a process that changes the genetic information of an organism, causing a mutation, which can occur naturally, or due to exposure a mutagen, such as radiation or harmful chemicals; co-discoverer with A.j.Clark and J.M.Robson that mustard gas could cause mutations in fruit flies. She wrote 91 scientific papers. Auerbach was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1949) and of the Royal Society of London (1957). In 1976, she was awarded the Royal Society's Darwin Medal
- May 14, 1900 – Cai Chang born, Chinese politician and women’s rights activist; she was the first chair of the All-China Women’s Federation, a women’s rights group founded in 1949. She began to work for the Central Women's Department in the Nationalist Party in 1925, and in 1927 joined the Central Women’s Committee, and contributed to the Marriage Decree of 1930, which declared that "free choice must be the basic principle of every marriage. She also helped write the Provisional Constitution of 1931. From 1934–1935, she joined her husband Li Fuchun on the Long March
- May 14, 1921 – Florence Allen becomes the first woman judge to sentence a man to death. In Ohio, gangster Frank Motto is convicted of murdering two men during a robbery. Allen went on to be the first woman to serve on a state supreme court, and one of the first two women appointed as U.S. federal judges
- May 14, 1925 – Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" is published
- May 14, 1952 – Orna Grumberg born, Israeli computer scientist and academic; Leumi Chair of Science at the Technion; developer of model checking, a method for formally verifying hardware and software designs; named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2015
- May 14, 1958 – Christine Brennan born, sports reporter and columnist, advocate for women in sports journalism; first woman sports reporter for the Miami Herald (1981), first woman on the Washington Redskins beat for the Washington Post (1985); first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media (1988) and developer of AWSM’s scholarship-inter program for female journalism students; currently sports columnist for USA Today; author of The Miracle of Miami, and the best-seller Inside Edge; public speaker on topics such as the importance of Title IX and the scourge of performance-enhancing drugs; her columns in USA Today sparked a national debate on the men-only membership of Augusta National Golf Club
- May 14, 1972 – Amma Asentewaa Asante born in Ghana, Dutch Labour politician; she and her mother moved to the Netherlands in 1978, following her father who became a Dutch citizen in 1975. Asante is Labour Party spokesperson for higher education; Member of the House of Representatives (2016-2017); Member of the Municipal Council of Amsterdam (1998-2006)
- May 14, 2011 – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and potential candidate for president of France, is charged with sexually assaulting a Manhattan hotel maid; he resigns from the IMF; charges against him are dropped
- May 14, 2013 – Brazil becomes the 15th country to legalize same-sex marriage
_________________________________
- May 15, 1759 – Maria Theresia Paradis born, Austrian musician and composer, who lost her sight before the age of five and by age 16 was performing as a singer and pianist in Viennese salons and concerts, having committed by ear dozens of concertos, solos and other works accurately to memory; she wrote five operas, three cantatas and numerous solo pieces for piano and voice; founded a music school for girls in Vienna (1808-1824)
- May 15, 1869 – In New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National Woman Suffrage Association
- May 15, 1897 – Elizabeth Fouché Vermeulen born, South African Afrikaans novelist, and author of children’s reading primers, Goggas and What They Had to Say, and When the World was Young; noted for her novel Plains and Stars, and the trilogy Temmers of the Northwest, Stormlaagte and Elsa
- May 15, 1900 – Ida Rhodes born in the Ukraine as Hadassah Itzkowitz, and came to America with her family when she was 13; mathematician who joined the Mathematical Tables Project in 1940, working under Gertrude Blanch as a pioneer in the analysis of programming systems; co-designer with Betty Holberton of the C-1o programming language for UNIVAC; awarded a Gold Medal by the Department of Commerce for “significant pioneering leadership and outstanding contributions to the scientific progress of the Nation in the functional design and the application of electronic digital computing equipment"; after she retired in 1964, she continued to consult for the Applied Mathematics Division of the National Bureau of Standards, traveling and lecturing; she created “the Jewish Holiday” algorithm still used in calendar programs today
- May 15, 1903 – Maria Reiche born, German mathematician and archaeologist, known for her research into the Nazca Lines in Peru, which she made her life’s work, helping to gain recognition for the site, and Peru’s protection of them, as well as Nazca’s classification as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995
- May 15, 1915 – Hilda Bernstein born in Britain, South African author, artist and activist against apartheid and for women’s rights; a founding member of the multi-racial Federation of South African Women, and one of the organizers of the Women’s March to Pretoria in 1956. By 1958, she was banned from writing or publishing, and in 1960 was working entirely undercover; in 1963, after her husband was arrested, acquitted, and then re-arrested, andput under house arrest awaiting another trial, she and her husband fled from South Africa on foot to Botswana, an ordeal described in her book The World that was Ours. They went into exile in England where they continued to advocate for the African National Congress, and an end to apartheid. They returned to South Africa for the 1994 election in which Nelson Mandela was voted into office as President
- May 15, 1916 – Catherine East born, American feminist, worker for Civil Service Commission, and the first Presidential Advisory Commission on the Status of Women; uses her access to official data to disprove claims of opponents to feminist-advocated legislation, and helps reconcile differences between labor activists and feminists; Legislative Director of the National Women’s Political Caucus; Betty Friedan called her “the midwife of the contemporary women’s movement”
- May 15, 1924 – Maria Koepcke born, German-born Peruvian ornithologist and zoologist; noted for her work with Neotropical bird species; four species of birds are named in her honor. She was killed in a plane crash in 1971 at the age of 47. Her 17-year-old daughter Juliane, the only survivor of the crash, though injured and without food, hiked through the rainforest for 11 days before she reached help. She became a mammalogist, and studies bats
- May 15, 1925 – Mary F. Lyon born, English geneticist who discovered the X-chromosome inactivation, which prevents females from having twice as many X chromosome gene products as males. For example in tortoiseshell and calico cats, for any given patch of fur the inactivation of an X chromosome that carries one gene results in the fur color being that of the other, active gene
- May 15, 1930 – Grace Ogot born, Kenyan nurse, author, journalist, politician and diplomat, delegate to the United Nations and UNESCO, helped found the Writers’ Association of Kenya, Member of Parliament and cabinet minister; writes in both English and her native language of Luo
- May 15, 1936 – Amy Johnson arrives in England, and is greeted with much acclaim, after her record flight of twelve days and fifteen hours from London to Cape Town and back
- May 15, 1937 – Madeleine Albright born in Czechoslovakia, American politician, diplomat and academic, first woman to serve as United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
- May 15, 1938 – Nancy Garden born, American fiction author for children and young adults, best known for the lesbian novel Annie on My Mind; recipient of the 2003 ALA Margaret Edwards Award for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature”
- May 15, 1940 – Nylon fabric and nylon stockings had first been introduced at the New York World’s Fair by DuPont; the first full-scale nylon manufacturing plant went into production at the end of 1939, and nylon stockings are offered for sale on this day; 64 million pairs of nylons are sold the first year
- May 15, 1948 – Kate Bornstein born, American author, playwright, performance artst and gender theorist, She identifies as gender non-conforming, and says, "I don't call myself a woman, and I know I'm not a man." She was assigned male at birth, but later received gender affirmation surgery. She teaches workshops and is the author of several gender theory books, including Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Hello Cruel World, which she wrote to discourage non-conforming teens and others from committing suicide
- May 15, 1967 – Lauren Hillenbrand born, American non-fiction writer; best known for Seabiscuit: An American Legend, and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
- May 15, 1968 – Cecilia Malmström born, Swedish Liberals party politician and Member of the European Parliament (1999-2006); current European Commissioner for Trade since 2014; European Commissioner for Home Affairs (2006-2010); Minister for European Union Affairs (2006-2010)
- May 15, 2008 – California's Supreme Court declared gay couples in the state can marry – a temporary victory for the gay rights movement that is overturned by the backlash passage of Proposition 8 the following November, but the state of California refused to defend the resulting law in court, and the proposition was overturned in federal court, but on appeal the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional for California to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples, only to take them away shortly after. This ruling was stayed, pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that the proponents of initiatives such as Proposition 8 did not possess legal standing in their own right to defend the law in federal court, and remanded the case for further proceedings. On June 28, 2013, the Ninth Circuit, on remand, dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction and dissolved their previous stay of the district court's ruling, enabling California Governor Jerry Brown to order same-sex marriages to resume
_________________________________
- May 16, 1718 – Maria Gaetana Agnesi born, child prodigy, the “Witch of Agnesi,” Italian mathematician, linguist, and philosopher, wrote about the curve, author of 1st book dealing with both integral and differential calculus. In 1750, appointed chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Bologna Academy of Sciences, incredible accomplishment for any mid-eighteenth century woman, when few universities in Europe allowed women to study, let alone hold teaching positions. Later in life, Agnesi, a deeply religious woman, joined a nunnery, devoting her final years to working with the poor
- May 16, 1804 – Elizabeth Palmer Peabody born, American educator, business woman and translator, founded the first English-language kindergarten in the United States; She had a reading knowledge of ten languages, and a grounding in history. Peabody served as business manager for the Transcendentalist publication The Dial, and she opened the Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s West Street Bookstore in her Boston home in the 1840s. Margaret Fuller held her “Conversations” women’s meetings there, and many women’s rights activists in the Boston area took part. Peabody translated a portion of the Buddhist Lotus Sutra from French into English, which was published in The Dial in 1844, shortly before it ceased publication, lacking enough subscriptions to cover its costs
- May 16, 1880 – Anne O’Hare McCormick born, journalist, foreign news correspondent for the New York Times who wrote the first in-depth reports of the rise of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist movement in Italy. Interviewed Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and FDR. 1937 Pulitzer Prize winner for Correspondence, the first woman to be awarded a major journalism Pulitzer; first woman member of the NY Times editorial board
- May 16, 1898 – Desanka Maksimović born, Serbian poet, author and translator; became professor at Belgrade’s First High School for Girls 1926; but was dismissed from her position by the Nazis in 1941; while working odd jobs to survive, she wrote secretly a collection of poems, including one about the Wehrmacht’s massacre of schoolchildren at Kragujevac, which were published after Serbia was liberated
- May 16, 1923 – Victoria Fromkin born, American linguist who contributed to the field of Phonology, how sounds of a language are organized in the mind, and studied linguistic development in a child who had been in severe isolation for the first 13 years of her life; Fromkin was the first woman to become Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs in the University of California system (1980-1989); elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1996
- May 16, 1925 – Nancy Roman born, American astronomer, advocate for women in the sciences, first Chief of Astronomy in the Office of Space Science at NASA; often called ‘the mother of Hubble” for her role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope
- May 16, 1929 – Adrienne Rich born, American poet, essayist, author and feminist; declined the National Medal of Arts in protest of a Congressional vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. In a New York Times review of Rich’s poetry, Craig Morgan Teicher described her impact: “Rich’s early books of poetry narrate an apprenticeship in the status quo, a slow, steady casting off of immeasurably old, unspeakably limiting ideas about what women could do, think and be in relation to men, followed by the rigorous creation of an empowered female identity for the second half of the 20th century. For Rich, this meant a new life sprung from the old, as a lesbian and groundbreaking feminist writer, as a distiller and popularizer of academic feminist theory, and as a poet who would exert a reshaping influence over other writers forever after.”
- May 16, 1931 – Hana Brady born Hanička Bradyová in Czechoslovakia, a Jewish girl who was 13 years old when she was murdered in the gas chambers at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Polish occupied territory. When she was eight years old, she and her older brother George saw their parents arrested and taken away by the Nazis. They never saw them again. The children were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1944, Hana was deported to Auschwitz, and was sent to the gas chambers a few hours after her arrival. Her brother survived by working as a laborer. In 1999, Fumiko Ishioka, director of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, visited Auschwitz. Ishioka explains “I …asked for a loan of some children's items. I specifically asked [for] a shoe, this little shoe, and I asked for a suitcase…A suitcase – that really tells you a story of how children, who used to live happily with their family, were transported and were allowed to take only one suitcase... That really helped them a lot, to focus on this one little life that was lost. They could really relate her to themselves and try to think of why such a thing could happen to a girl like her. Why the Jewish people? And why children? They then realized there were one and a half million children. . . In Japan, the Holocaust is so far away. Some people don't see any connection whatsoever. But when they look at the suitcase, these children [are] really shocked” The suitcase has large writing on it, a name and birthdate and the German word, Waisenkind(orphan). Ishioka began painstakingly researching Hana's life and eventually found her surviving brother in Canada. The story of Hana Brady and how her suitcase led Ishioka to Toronto became the subject of a CBC documentary. Karen M. Levine, the producer of that documentary, was urged to turn the story into a book by a friend who was a publisher and whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Said Levine: I first read about Hana's suitcase in December 2000. . . in The Canadian Jewish News. My heart started to beat. I fell in love with the story instantly. This was a different kind of Holocaust story. It had at its centre a terrible sadness, one we all know too well. But it had a modern layer to it that lifted it up, that had connection, and even redemption.” In February 2004, Lara Brady, Hana's niece, discovered inconsistencies between the suitcase on display and the suitcase pictured with Hana's friend after the war in the 1960s. Not only did the physical suitcase appear newer than in the photographs, but the location of the handle was also reversed. In March, Fumiko and George Brady inquired about the suitcase with the director of the Auschwitz museum, who explained that a replica had been created based on the pictures after the original suitcase was destroyed in a fire in 1984, while on loan to an English exhibit in Birmingham. This fire was likely caused by arson (according to the director and police at the time). As the museum personnel had omitted information when they loaned it to the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, the fact that the suitcase was a replica had gone unnoticed for several years. The family and the Center assert that even as a a replica, the suitcase's contribution to the cause of human rights and peace education is not lessened by its lack of authenticity. Karen M. Levine’s 2002 book, Hana’s Suitcase, became a bestseller and was honored with the National Jewish Book Award, and won the 2006 Yad Vashem award, presented to George Brady at a ceremony in Jerusalem
_________________________________
Sources