Continued from PART ONE . . .
www.dailykos.com/…
Early June Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History
PART TWO — June 2 through June 15
_________________________________
- June 2, 1816 – Grace Aguilar born, British novelist, poet and author of Jewish non-fiction on history and religion: The Spirit of Judaism, The Women of Israel and History of the Jews in England, one of the first histories of the Jews living in England
- June 2, 1865 – Adelaide Casely-Hayford born, advocate for the Sierra Leone Creole identity and cultural heritage, feminist, educator and writer; she was educated in England, attended Jersey Ladies’ College, then studied music at the Stuttgart Conservatory in Germany; after 25 years abroad, she returned to Sierra Leone, and joined the Ladies Division of the Freetown branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, but resigned in 1920, and went on a lecture tour in America to raise funds for a vocational school for girls, which opened in 1923 with 14 pupils; created a sensation in 1925 when she wore traditional Sierra Leone dress at a reception for the Prince of Wales
- June 2, 1907 – Dorothy West born, American Harlem Renaissance author; The Living is Easy
- June 2, 1913 – Elsie Tu born in England as Elsie Elliott; Hong Kong social activist who originally came to Hong Kong as a missionary; outspoken critic of British colonialism, and advocate for LGBT rights, better housing, welfare services, playgrounds, bus routes, hawker licenses. Her campaign against corruption is credited with the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974; she served as a member of the Urban Council (1963-1995), the Provisional Legislative Council (1997-1998), and the Legislative Council (1988-1995). She lived to be 102 years old
- June 2, 1918 – Ruth Atkinson born in Canada, American cartoonist and one of the first women comic book writer-artists, working for Iger Studio, a comic book “packager” that produced comic books on an out source basis; creator of the Marvel Comics character Millie the Model, the publisher’s longest-running humor title, and the Patsy Walker series
- June 2, 1918 – Kathryn Tucker Windham born, American storyteller, author, photographer, folklorist and journalist; the first woman hired as a journalist by the Alabama Journal in 1939; worked for the Birmingham News (1944-1956); worked for the Selma Times-Journal after that, and won several Associated Press awards for writing and photography; published a series of “true” ghost story collections, and many books about the Southern states, including recipe books and folklore; after appearing at the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee, she made frequent appearances at storytelling events, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered
- June 2, 1924 – June Callwood born, Canadian journalist, author and social activist; worked for the Brantford Expositor, then the Toronto Globe and Mail;ghost-writer for several autobiographies including Barbara Walters and Otto Preminger; she and her husband Trent Frayne hosted a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television talk show The Fraynes (1954-1955), which led later to her own shows In Touch, National Treasures and Caregiving with June Callwood; she was a well-known activist for social justice, especially issues affecting women and children, involved with over 50 Canadian social action organizations, including youth and women’s hostels, and founded Casey House in Toronto for people with AIDS, Jessie’s (Now Jessie’s: The June Callwood Centre for Young Women, PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Feminists Against Censorship; Companion of the Order of Canada, awarded as the highest degree of merit for a Canadian civilian
- June 2, 1935 – Carol Shields born in America, Canadian novelist and short story writer; her best-known novel, The Stone Diaries, won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for English language fiction, and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the only novel to date to win both of these awards (Shield, as an American-born naturalized Canadian was eligible for both prizes). It also won the National Book critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize
- June 2, 1937 – The Right Honourable Rosalyn Cohen Higgins born, Baroness Higgins, British judge and legal scholar; first woman elected to the International Court of Justice (ICJ – 1995-2009), and the ICJ’s first woman President (2006-2009); in 2009, she was appointed as advisor on International Law to the British Government’s inquiry into the Iraq War, headed by Sir John Chilcot, and often called the Chilcot Inquiry (2009-2016). Higgins has published several influential works on international law, including Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It
- June 2, 1950 – Anne Phillips born, a leading figure in feminist political theory; Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, and Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics; carried out a research project on tensions between sexual and cultural equality in the British Courts (2002-2004); collaborated on an exploration of gender and culture issues in their specifically European context (2005-2008); Fellow of the British Academy since 2003; co-winner of the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award for Best Book on Women and Politics, Engineering Democracy
- June 2, 1959 – Rineke Dijstra born, Dutch photographer, noted for single portraits, often in a series, showing a group of people, such as Beach Portraits (1992) and Israeli soldiers (1999-2000); she also did a series of photographs of a single subject, Almerisa, a Bosnian refugee, taken every two years from age 6 until age 18, from an asylum centre through her family’s relocation in Western Europe; awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society, and the 2017 Hasselblad Award
- June 2, 1964 – Caroline Link born, German film director and screenwriter of documentary and feature films; her first feature film, Jenseits der Stille (Beyond Silence, 1996) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix; her third feature film, Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
- June 2, 1966 – Candace Gingrich born, American LGBT rights activist at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), served as the HRC’s National Coming Out Project spokesperson in 1995, and was one of Ms. Magazine’s 1995 Women of the Year; currently Senior Manager of the HRC’s Youth & Campus Outreach, and coordinator of the HRC University Internship Program; autobiography, Accidental Activist: A Personal and Political Memoir, was published in 1996; Newt Gingrich’s half-sister
- June 2, 1975 – International Sex Workers Day commemorates the Occupation of Saint-Nizier in Lyon by over 100 prostitutes protesting their inhumane working conditions. The women occupied the church for eight days, until police removed them on June 10. Other churches were soon occupied by protestors in Paris, Marseille, Grenoble, Saint-Étienne and Montpellier. French police had been increasing reprisals against prostitutes, forcing them into greater secrecy, which increased the violence against them. In April, 1975, the Lyon prostitutes organized, and their leader, known as ‘Ulla’ appeared on television with their demands. After three women were murdered, and the government’s continued in difference to their plight, they went on strike and occupied the church. They demanded the end of fines, police harassment, and the release from jail of ten of them who had been imprisoned a few days earlier for soliciting. The striking workers sang political chants and demanded decent working conditions and an end to stigma, becoming headline news nationally, and reports in the international press. Some local people supported their strike, bringing them clothes and food, while political, union and feminists organizations also announced their support. The parish priest refused to call police to remove the women, but the French government ordered the police to forcibly clear the church. The Minister of the Interior, Michel Poniatowski, claimed the women had been manipulated into the occupation by pimps, and the Womens Rights Minister, Françoise Giroud, refused to meet with the women, claiming she was not competent in the matter. This event was a flash point which launched an international movement for sex worker’s rights
- June 2, 1985 – Maggie Thrash born, American young adult fiction writer and memoirist; noted for her graphic novel memoir Honor Girl, describing coming out in her teens as a lesbian at a conservative summer camp, and her Strange Truth mystery series
_________________________________
- June 3, 1733 – Eleanor Coade born, British businesswoman and proponent of women’s rights, who manufactured Neoclassical statues, architectural decorations and garden ornaments made of Lithodipyra, also called Coade stone, from 1769 until her death in 1821. Lithodipyra (“stone fired twice”) was a high-quality, durable moulded weather-resistant, ceramic stoneware; statues and decorative features from this still look almost new today. Coade did not invent ‘artificial stone’, as various inferior quality precursors had been both patented and manufactured before, but she likely perfected both the clay recipe and the firing process. Her company produced stoneware for St George’s Chapel, Windsor; The Royal Pavilion, Brighton; Carlton House, London and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Shortly after her death, the company produced a large quantity of stoneware used in the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace. She was born into a Nonconformist (devout Baptist) family, and her grandmother Sarah Enchmarch was a successful businesswoman in the wool textile business in Tiverton. Eleanor Coade began in business as a linen draper in the City of London, using ‘Mrs’ as a courtesy title as was the custom for unmarried women of the day. After her father went bankrupt and died in 1769, she bought an artificial stone factory, and lived on the premises for the first several years. She developed her talent as a modeler, and exhibited several pieces each year between 1773 and 1780 at the Society of Artists. In her will, after making bequests to her family, she left much of her fortune to charity schools, clergy, and to some of her women friends, with the provision that their husbands would have no control over the funds. The Coade Stone, part of a mill from the factory, was placed under Westminster Bridge by the footpath to Royal Festival Hall, which now occupies the former site of Coade’s factory at “Narrow Wall,” and commemorates both Coade and her factory
- June 3, 1879 – Alla Nazimova, Ukrainian-American actress, successful producer-screenwriter for Metro Pictures of several films, including adaptations of works by Oscar Wilde (Salomé) and Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House), developing her own filmmaking techniques; she is credited with the phrase ‘sewing circle’ as a discreet code for lesbianism, she had affairs with Actor-Theatre Producer Eva Le Gallienne, film director Dorothy Arzner, and novelist-playwright Mercedes de Acosta
- June 3, 1897 – Memphis Minnie, born as Lizzie Douglas, American Blues singer-songwriter
- June 3, 1898 – Rosa Chacel born, well-known and controversial Spanish writer and feminist. She was the daughter of a teacher in Valladolid, a sickly child who was sent by her mother to live with her grandmother in Madrid in 1908. By 1909, she was enrolled in a school to study drawing, but briefly became interested in sculpture, until she abandoned art in 1918. She became a regular at cafes in Madrid where aspiring writers from all over Spain and Europe met, but was dismissed by most of the men because she was a vocal champion of women’s potential and a ‘new way to live’ for the Modern Woman. In 1921, she married Timoteo Perez Rubio, a well-known painter, and they moved to Rome after he received a scholarship to study at the Academia de España en Roma. In 1927, they returned to Madrid. She published her first novel, “Estacion, Ida y Vuelta” in 1930. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, her husband enlisted in the Republican Army, and Chacel became a nurse, but was soon forced to take their son, and move frequently, to Barcelona, Valencia, and then to Paris. Meanwhile, her husband was responsible for moving the treasures of the Museo del Prado to safety, during the siege of Madrid (1936-1939). At the end of the war, the family was reunited, and went into exile in Brazil. In 1959, Chacel won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and went to New York, where she was finally able to resume writing (1959-1961). She returned to Spain in 1961, but left to go back to Brazil (1963-1973), then once again went back to Spain. She flew back and forth between Madrid and Rio de Janiero until her husband died in Rio in 1977. Chacel wrote more novels, and began to receive recognition, including the Premio nacional de las letras españolas, in 1987, and the 1990 Premio Castilla y Leon de las letras
- June 3, 1900 – Adelaide Ames born, American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard; member of the American Astronomical Society; co-author of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude; killed in a boating accident in 1932
- June 3, 1906 – Josephine Baker born, black American-French actress, singer, and dancer; French Resistance operative during WWII
- June 3, 1916 – Gloria Martin born, socialist, ‘Radical Women’ feminist organizer, who began Shakespeare & Martin Booksellers
- June 3, 1919 – Elizabeth Duncan Koontz born, first African-American president of the National Education Association, and Director of the U.S. Women’s Bureau (1969-1973)
- June 3, 1926 – Flora I. MacDonald born, Canadian politician and humanitarian; one of the first women to vie for leadership of a major Canadian political party, the Progressive Conservatives, becoming a member of the ‘Red Tory’ wing; Minister of Communications (1986-1988); Minister of Employment and Immigration (1984-1986), and was intensely involved in the global response to the Vietnamese boat people crisis after the Vietnam War, setting an example by creating a plan in which the Canadian government would match funding for the number of refugees sponsored by members of the Canadian general public, which allowed over 60,000 Vietnamese refugees to enter Canada. She was a Member of Parliament (1972-1988), and became Canada’s first woman foreign minister as Secretary of State for External Affairs (1979-1980) – she authorized the issue of false passports and money to the American diplomats who took refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, which enabled them to leave the country with the Canadian staff. At the 1979 Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka, she declined to go shopping with the other ministers’ wives, driving out to spend five hours in a Zimbabwean refugee camp instead. In 1988, she became Chair of the Board of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (1992-1997). MacDonald was made Companion of the Order of Canada in 1998
- June 3, 1950 – Melissa Mathison born, American film and television screenwriter, Tibetan freedom activist; noted for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Black Stallion. Mathison was on the board of the International Campaign for Tibet. She died in 2015 from neuroendocrine cancer at age 65
- June 3, 1954 – Susan Landau born, American mathematician, engineer, and cybersecurity policy expert; Bridge Professor in Cybersecurity at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; author of Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (2017)
- June 3, 1959 – Imbi Paju born in Estonia, resident in Finland; journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker; correspondent for the Estonian newspapers Eesti Päevaleht and Postimees; wrote the book and made the film of Memories Denied, about her mother’s experiences in a Soviet labor camp, and the occupation of Estonia, which won international attention, and was selected for the Swedish school program Living History
- June 3, 1960 – Catherine Davani born, first woman judge in Papua, New Guinea; served on her country’s Supreme Court (2001-2016); member of the Lawyers Statutory Committee (1995-2001)
- June 3, 1972 – Sally Jane Priesand is the first woman ordained by a U.S. rabbinical seminary
- June 3, 2012 – The Diamond Jubilee pageant for Elizabeth II takes place on the River Thames
_________________________________
- June 4, 1784 – Eight months after the first manned balloon flight, Élisabeth Thible becomes the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon. Her flight with M. Fleurant covers four kilometers in 45 minutes, and reaches an estimated altitude of 1,500 meters. She dressed as the goddess Minerva, and fed the firebox to keep them aloft
- June 4, 1866 – Miina Sillanpää born, key figure in the Finnish workers’ movement and editor of two different magazines for working women; she was one of nine children in a peasant family, and went to work at age 12 in a cotton factory, then at a nail factory; in 1884, at age 18, she moved to the city of Porvoo and became a maid – 4 years later, she founded the Servant’s Association and became its director in 1898; in 1907 she was one of the first 19 women to be elected to parliament in the world, and served intermittently for 38 years; among her many accomplishments, she was one of the architect’s of Finland’s first Municipal Homemaking Act in 1950, a system of municipal homemakers paid by their municipalities to help rural families with children who were living in poverty; she became the first woman minister in Finland, as the Minister of Social Affairs (1926-1927); in 2016, the Finnish government declared October 1st an official day to raise the Finnish flag in her honor
- June 4, 1870 – Virginia Ragsdale born, American mathematician; graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, as valedictorian in 1887. She was one of the founders of Guilford’s Alumi Assocation. Ragsdale was awarded a scholarship to Bryn Mawr because she had the highest scholastic average of women graduates in her year. She studied physics at Bryn Mawr with Charlotte Agnes Scott, then won a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. When she returned, she taught school until another scholarship allowed her to complete her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr. Her dissertation, “On the Arrangement of the Real Branches of Plane Algebraic Curves,” was published in 1906 by the American Journal of Mathematics. Ragsdale was hired by the mathematics department (1911-1928) at Woman’s College in Greensboro (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro), and was the department’s head (1926-1928). She retired in 1928 to care for her ailing mother. Ragsdale bequeathed her home to Guilford College, which now serves as the house of the college’s president
- June 4, 1879 – Mabel Lucie Atwell born, successful British illustrator and comics artist, specializing in cute babies and toddlers for everything from cards and calendars to children’s china and nursery equipment; illustrator for children’s classics like Mother Goose, The Water Babies, and Alice in Wonderland, but also contributed to popular periodicals like The Tatler and The Illustrated London News, and advertising artwork
- June 4, 1907 – Patience Strong born as Winifred May; English lyricist, poet and author of books on Christianity and psychology; she wrote lyrics for over 100 songs, and daily poems for her own column, The Quiet Corner, for The Daily Mirror newspaper, and for the weekly magazine Woman’s Own
- June 4, 1912 – Massachusetts becomes the first U.S. state to enact a minimum wage law, which only applies to women and children under age 18. It doesn’t set a standard wage, just a panel to study complaints about low wages; employers found to pay wages inadequate to cover the cost of living and maintain a worker’s health, are reprimanded by having their names printed in local newspapers
- June 4, 1913 – Emily Davison, British suffragette, is trampled by King George V’s horse Anmer at the Epsom Derby after she rushes out on the course carrying a white, green and purple suffrage flag. She never regains consciousness, and dies four days later
- June 4, 1919 – The U.S. Congress finally approves the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification
- June 4, 1926 – Judith Malina born in Germany, American co-founder of The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe prominent in New York and Paris in the 1950s and 60s; honored in 2008 with an Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for Off-Off-Broadway
- June 4, 1934 – Dame Monica Dacon born, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines educator and politician; acting Governor-General of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2002); Deputy Governor General (2001); teacher at her alma mater, The Girl’s School, for fifteen years, then lecturer at St. Vincent Teachers’ Training College
- June 4, 1934 – Dame Daphne Sheldrick born in Kenya of British parents; Kenyan author, conservationist and expert in reintegrating orphaned animals, especially elephants, into the wild, the first person to perfect a substitute milk formula for elephants and rhinos; co-warden with her husband David of Tsavo National Park (1955-1976). When her husband died in 1978, she founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, which operates the most successful orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation programme in the world, and runs mobile veterinary units, anti-poaching teams, and other projects to safeguard habitats and educate the public
- June 4, 1953 – Linda Lingle born, American Republican politician, first woman and first Jewish governor of Hawaii (2002-2010)
- June 4, 1956 – Joyce Sidman born, American poet and children’s author; Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night was a 2011 Newbery Honor Book
- June 4, 1966 – Svetlana Jitomirskaya born, Ukrainian mathematician, noted for her pioneering work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization. Earned her undergraduate degree and Ph.D. (1991) from Moscow State University. Since 1990 she has held a research position at the Institute for Earthquake Prediction Theory in Moscow. In 1991, she came with her family to Southern California, and started at the University of California, Irvine, as a part-time lecturer (1991-1992), then rose through the ranks to become a visiting assistant professor (1992-1994), and a regular faculty member (since 1994). She took a leave from UCI to spend nine months at Caltech (1996). She was a Sloan Fellow (1996-2000) and a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002. In 2005, Jitomirskaya was awarded the Ruth Lyle Satter Prize from the American Mathematical Society, a prize recognizing outstanding contributions to mathematics research by a woman in the previous five years
- June 4, 1982 – On August 19, 1982, at an emergency special session on the question of Palestine, the UN General Assembly, “appalled at the great number of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese children, victims of Israel’s acts of aggression,” decided to commemorate the fourth of June of each year as the International Day of Innocent Child Victims of Aggression
_________________________________
- June 5, 1646 – Elena Cornaro Piscopia born, Venetian mathematician, philosopher and linguist; one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first woman in the world to earn a Ph.D. The illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and a peasant – her father later married her mother, but that did not change her status or that of her brothers born out of wedlock. When it was discovered that she was a child prodigy, she was given a classical education by tutors, becoming proficient in Latin, Greek, French and Spanish by age 7, and also learned Hebrew and Arabic, earning the title “Oraculum Septilingue” and went on to study mathematics, philosophy, theology and music, playing several instruments and composing music, and in her twenties, took up physics and astronomy. She rebuffed all her father’s attempts to marry her off, and took the habit of a Benedictine Oblate, but without taking the vows to become a nun. Felice Rotondi, her advisor in theology, petitioned the University of Padua to grant her the laurea (equivalent to a bachelor’s degree) in theology, but Gregorio Cardinal Barbarigo, the bishop of Padua, refused to allow it because she was a woman, but did allow her to work toward a degree in Philosophy, which was conferred on her in 1678, with great ceremony in Padua Cathedral, attended by most of the Venetian Senate, the University authorities and faculty, and guests invited from the Universities of Bologna, Perugia, Rome and Naples. The Lady Elena discoursed for an hour in classical Latin on the works of Aristotle. She then devoted herself to study and charitable works until her death from tuberculosis in 1684 at age 38
- June 5, 1836 – Miriam Folline Squiers Leslie born, author, publisher and suffragist; after her husband Frank died, she took over his publishing business, then legally changed her name to Frank Leslie; she bequeathed most of her estate to Carrie Chapman Catt, to be used for the cause of women’s suffrage
- June 5, 1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper
- June 5, 1884 – Ivy Compton-Burnett born, English novelist, author of over 20 dark and sometimes humorous books about families and domesticity, including Pastors and Masters, A House and Its Head, Daughters and Sons, Manservant and Maidservant
- June 5, 1887 – Ruth Fulton Benedict born, American anthropologist and folklorist, President of the American Anthropological Association, member of the American Folklore Society. Her fieldwork among the Native Americans of the Southwest provided the basis of her first book, Patterns of Culture, in which she compared and contrasted Zuñi, Dobu, and Kwakiutl. She also wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and “The Races of Mankind,” a WWII pamphlet for the troops showing racism wasn’t grounded in scientific reality. Margaret Mead was one of her students
- June 5, 1914 – Beatrice de Cardi born, British archaeologist, a specialist in the Persian Gulf, Qatar, Baluchistan and Pakistan. She studied history, Latin, economics and archaeology at University College London (1933-1935), and worked for Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the London Museum (1936-1939), first as his secretary and later as his assistant. During WWII, she was based in Chungking, China, working for the Allied Supplies Executive of the War Cabinet, but she frequently visited India. After the war, de Cardi was Britain’s Assistant Trade Commissioner in Karachi, Delhi and Lahore. She worked with Sadar Din of the Pakistani Archeological Department constructing archaeological surveys in western Baluchistan, collecting ceramic potsherds, copper objects, bone and flint from a number of sites in Jhalawan. In the 1960s, she discovered distinctive pottery at sites near the Bampur River which led to a new understanding of the nature of trade links in the Persian Gulf region in the Bronze Age. She also carried out work in the Persian Gulf, and launched a number of expeditions in the United Arab Emirates that yielded the first examples of Ubaid pottery in the region, and also discovered more than 20 tombs from the second millennium B.C. In 1973, the government of Qatar appointed de Cardi to lead an archaeological expedition aiming to illustrate Qatar’s history for its new national museum. Her team discovered domestic tools and pottery which suggested that Qatar had traded with other regions much longer ago than previously thought. She didn’t give up field work until she was over 90 years old, and lived to be 102
- June 5, 1915 – Denmark amends its constitution to allow women to vote
- June 5, 1930 – Alifa Rifaat born as Fatimah Rifaat, Egyptian author of controversial short stories which the dynamics of female sexuality, relationships, and loss in rural Egyptian culture, while her protagonists still maintain their religious faith, and accept their fates. She did not attempt to undermine the patriarchal system, but used her work to depict problems inherent in a patriarchal society when men do not adhere to their religious teachings that advocate for the kind treatment of women; noted for Distant View of a Minaret, Bahiyya’s Eyes and My World of the Unknown
- June 5, 1937 – Hélène Cixous born, French academic, feminist writer, poet and rhetorician; her article Le Rire de la Méduse (The Laugh of Medusa) in 1975 established her as an early theorist of poststructuralist feminism; she founded the centre of feminist studies at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris, the first feminist studies program at a European university
- June 5, 1939 – Margaret Drabble born, Lady Holroyd, English novelist and biographer; The Millstone won the 1966 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden won the1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize; also published biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and critical studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy; outspoken critic of Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the policies of the Bush administration
- June 5, 1949 – Orapin Chaiyakan is elected as the first woman member of Thailand’s Parliament
- June 5, 1949 – Susan Lindquist born, molecular biologist, pioneer in the study of protein folding; her work showed that alternate structural shapes of protein molecules could result in substantially different effects, and demonstrated instances in fields as diverse as human diseases, evolution and synthetic biomaterials designed to interact with biological systems. Prion protein are known as disease agents, but her work with yeast prion proteins also demonstrated a mechanism of protein-only inheritance. She extended this to interpret involvement in cellular memory and cross-kingdom communication
- June 5, 1951 – Suze Orman born, American financial adviser and columnist, author, television host and motivational speaker; published several books, including The Road to Wealth and The Laws of Money
- June 5, 1963 – Dame Lois Browne-Evans Day – Browne-Evans is elected as a Member of the Colonial Parliament, the first black woman to be elected in Bermuda, during the first election in Bermuda in which non-property owners could vote; also the first woman in Bermuda called to the bar
- June 5, 1981 – The Center for Disease Control (CDC) describes five cases of a rare form of pneumonia, a deadly immune deficiency disease which later became known as AIDS. By the year 2000, more than 40 million people worldwide are affected by it. Though much progress has been made since then, one demographic is disproportionately likely to contract HIV. Globally, nearly 1000 girls and women ages 15 to 24 contract HIV every day, and the vast majority of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where young women are twice as likely as young men to be living with HIV. Stigma and social taboos still surround girls being sexually active, which limits education or open conversation about safe sex and protection, so girls are less likely to get the vital information they need to protect themselves against HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases. Girls are also more economically vulnerable. With limited opportunities to earn income, girls face pressure to enter into transactional sexual relations, both inside and outside marriage, exchanging unprotected sex for financial support
- June 5, 2018 – Judge Aaron Persky, who came under heavy fire across the U.S. when he sentenced Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to just six months in jail after he was found guilty of the sexual assault of an unconscious woman, is recalled by Santa Clara County voters in California, by a margin of 61.5% to 38.4%. Persky was the first judge to be recalled in California in over 80 years. (Chief Justice Rose Bird of the California Supreme Court had been removed from office in 1986 when Californians voted by a margin of 52% to 48% not to reconfirm her because of her opposition to the death penalty)
_________________________________
- June 6, 1539 – Katarina Vasa of Sweden born, oldest daughter of Gustav Vasa; in her marriage contract with Edzard II, Count of East Frisia, she was assured the dower lands of Berum and Norden, and the post of Regent if Edzard should be succeeded by an underage son of hers. Frisia was divided between Edzard and his brother John. From the beginning of her marriage in 1561, she took an active part in policy and the complicated affairs of state. She strongly Lutheran, and used all her family connections to support her husband in his conflict with his brother John, who was a Calvinist. In 1578, the childless John reluctantly agreed that Catherine and Edzard’s son would be his heir, but the conflict between the brothers continued. When Edzard died in 1599, Catherine took control over her dower lands as an autonomous ruler, declaring herself a vassal directly under the emperor, and refused to acknowledge any right within her dower lands to collect taxes or exert authority by her son, Enno III. Katarina was described as learned and intelligent by contemporaries, with an interest in literature and theology. She gave birth to eleven children, but two died in infancy. Katarina died in 1610, at age 71
- June 6, 1654 – Queen Christina abdicates the Swedish throne and is succeeded by her cousin Charles X Gustav, in part because she wants to convert to Roman Catholicism
- June 6, 1826 – Sarah Parker Remond born, African-American abolitionist, inspiring orator, American Anti-Slavery Society agent in England during Civil War, gathers support for anti-slavery cause and the Union Army, later moves to Italy and becomes a physician
- June 6, 1841 – Eliza Orzeszkowa born, Polish author of novels, sketches, and dramas; Nobel Prize nominee in 1905; activist with the Positivism movement during the foreign Partitions of Poland; worked to improve social conditions in Poland; best known for her novel, Nad Niemnem (On the Niemen River)
- June 6, 1898 – Ninette de Valois born, English ballerina, choreographer/director, a founder of The Royal Ballet, and the Royal Ballet School in Great Britain
- June 6, 1901 – Joyce Anstruther born, English writer who published under the pen name Jan Struther, and also wrote hymn lyrics; contributor to Punch magazine, and wrote a fortnightly column for The London Times, where she created the character of Mrs. Miniver, who became so popular that the columns were published as a book in 1939, which inspired the screenwriters of the Academy Award-winning film Mrs. Miniver; her best-remembered hymn, written for children, is “Lord of All Hopefulness”
- June 6, 1913 – In South Africa, an anti-pass campaign was born when about 700 women marched to the Bloemfontein City Council in the Orange Free State to petition the mayor. The Orange Free State was the only province in which passes were stringently enforced to control the movement of women residing and working in towns. The Campaign gained momentum and spread to other areas. 34 women were arrested and convicted for not having passes. The direct result of this campaign was the founding of the Bantu Women’s League under the leadership of Charlotte Manye Maxeke. The Bantu Women’s League was re-launched by the African National Congress as its Women’s League in the 1940s
- June 6, 1925 – Maxine Kumin born, American poet and author, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1981-1982)
- June 6, 1939 – Marian Wright Edelman born, lawyer and activist, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund
- June 6, 1948 – Arlene J. Harris born, inventor and entrepreneur, “First Lady of Wireless” the holder of numerous wireless patents; co-founder of Cellular Business Systems Inc (CBSI) who guided development of the leading billing/CRM service bureau and the first automated cellular service activation systems, now used worldwide, and participated in development of intersystem roaming protocols. She founded Great Call in 2004 to offer simple-to-use cellular service to baby boomers and senior citizens, offering the Jitterbug cell phone. Harris was the first woman inductee to the Wireless Hall of Fame (2007)
- June 6, 1949 – Holly Near born, American singer-songwriter, feminist and peace activist. She became involved with anti-war groups in college in the late 1960s, and in 1970 she was cast in the Broadway musical Hair. Her song, “It Could Have Been Me,” was a response to the Kent State shootings that same year. In 1971, she was part of the Free the Army Tour, an anti-Vietnam War road show which performed for audiences of soldiers. In 1972, she founded Redwood Records to produce and promote politically conscious artists, but the independent label went out of business in the mid-1990s; she sang “We Are Gentle Angry People” at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, and has also been a guest at the GALA conferences for LGBTQ choirs and choruses. Her autobiography is called Fire in the Rain, Singer in the Storm
- June 6, 1951 – Marietta Giannakou born, Greek neuropsychologist at the University of Athens Faculty of Medicine before she entered politics; New Democracy politician since 1990; Minister for Health, Welfare and Social Security (1990-1991); Minister for National Education and Religious Affairs (2004-2007); Greek New Democracy member of the European Parliament (2009-2014)
- June 6, 1955 – Sandra Bernhard born, American comedian, singer and LGBTQ rights activist; noted for her stand-up routines, and her comedy and singing albums
- June 6, 1972 – Natalie Morales born, American television journalist at NBC; Today Show West Coast anchor since 2016
- June 6, 1988 – Maria Alyokhina born, Russian musician and political activist, member of the punk rock group Pussy Riot. In 2012, she was convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. She has been recognized as a political prisoner by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Amnesty International named her a prisoner of conscience due to “the severity of the response of the Russian authorities.” Alyokhina was close to the end of her two-year prison sentence when she and band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were freed in December 2013, under an amnesty which they saw as a propaganda stunt to improve Putin’s image ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics
- June 6, 2016 – U.S. media reports Hillary Rodham Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, the first woman nominee of a major party in 240-years of U.S. history
_________________________________
- June 7, 1757 – Georgiana Cavendish born as Georgina Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire (1774-1806), English social leader, political organizer, style icon, author and a political activist. She was married at 17 to one of the wealthiest and most men in England, but he was an emotionally reserved man with whom she had little in common. He made few changes in his bachelor way of life, devoting much of his time to playing cards at Brooks, the exclusive gentlemen’s club, and continued to keep a series of mistresses, which left little time to spend with his wife. There was also much marital discord caused by a series of pregnancies which resulted in miscarriages or the birth of daughters instead of a male heir, until finally William George Spencer Cavendish was born in 1790. With the birth at last of a male heir, Georgina was able to find consolation with a lover her own, Charles Grey, who later became Earl Grey (the tea is named for him), and Prime Minister of England (1830-1834). When Georgina became pregnant, she was exiled to France, where she gave birth to her lover’s daughter, then was forced to give the child to Grey’s family. Throughout all these tribulations, she remained a leader of fashion, but also contributed to politics, science and literature, holding a major salon where the most influential figures of the day would gather. Newspapers chronicled the details of what she wore, and all her activities. She was renowned for hosting dinners that became poltical meetings, and also cultivated brilliant radicals. She wrote both prose and poetry, some of which was published, including Emma, “A Sentimental Novel,” The Sylph, which was published anonymously, and the 30-stanza poem, The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard. She played a role, along with Tomas Beddoes, in establishing the Pneumatic Institution, a medical research facility in Bristol, and took an interest in scientific experiments. She died in 1806, at the age of 48. It was after her death that the Duke discovered the full extent of her mountain of gambling debts, which were not fully paid off until her son succeeded his father
- June 7, 1831 – Amelia B. Edwards born, English novelist, journalist, travel writer, women’s rights activist, and Egyptologist; co-founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund, which sponsored the early work of Flinders Petrie; author of A Thousand Miles up the Nile
- June 7, 1843 – Susan Elizabeth Blow born, American pioneer in kindergarten education
- June 7, 1848 – Dolores Jiménez y Muro born, Mexican schoolteacher, poet and socialist activist, who became a revolutionary and supporter of General Emiliani Zapata during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). A collection of her poems written when she was in her 20s was published as Un rayo de luz (A Ray of Light). She was teaching in the rural school system until 1904, but was also published in newspapers like La Sombra de Zaragoza, and worked on La Potosina magazine. She was arrested and sent to prison for writing articles against the regime of Porfirio Diaz. In prison, she met Elisa Acuña Rossetti, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, and Inés Malváez, and they joined forces to publish a radical journal, Fiat Lux, which became the voice of the Mutual Society for Women. They called for better working conditions for women, labor strikes, and protested election fraud in 1910, and were again imprisoned. Jiménez continued to work from prison for land reforms and improving the economy, and for the rights of women and indigenous people. She campaigned to replace Diaz with Francisco Madero, and wrote a position paper for the Mexican Liberal Party, calling for fair wages, affordable housing, safer working conditions and curbs on foreign investments. She was arrested again and wasn’t released until she staged a hunger strike. Disappointed by Madero, she switched her loyalty to Zapata, joining his forces and directing the newspaper La voz de Juárez. After yet another term in prison, she rejoined Zapata until his assassination in 1919. Jiménez worked in the Secretary of Education’s Cultural Missions program (1921-1924) and died in 1925
- June 7, 1861 – Alice Moore Hubbard born, feminist, educator and author; noted for Justinian and Theodora, and Woman’s Work
- June 7, 1884 – Ester Claesson born, Swedish landscaping pioneer; considered the first Swedish woman landscape architect; after studying and working in Germany and Austria, she returned to Sweden, and soon started her own business, where she designed gardens to compliment the work of Swedish architects like Ivar Tengborn, becoming the best-known and most-published landscape architect in Sweden during the early 20th century, but died at age 47 in 1931
- June 7, 1896 – Vivien Kellems born, American woman industrialist/inventor, lecturer/political activist, co-inventor of a cable grip to pull and relieve strain on electrical cables. Enthusiastic supporter of voting reform, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abolishing the income tax
- June 7, 1899 – Elizabeth Bowen born in Ireland, Anglo-Irish author; moved to England r at age 8, brought up by her aunts after her mother died in 1912; became acquainted with the Bloomsbury Group, and was befriended by writer Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, Encounters; worked for the British Ministry of Information during WWII; noted for her novel The Heat of the Day; her final book Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes won the 1969 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
- June 7, 1909 – Jessica Tandy born, award-winning actress, who appeared in over 100 stage productions and 60 films, 1920s to 1990s, including A Streetcar Named Desire (the original Blanche Dubois, on Broadway, 1948) and Driving Miss Daisy (film version, 1989)
- June 7, 1909 – Virginia Apgar born, anesthesiologist, developed the Apgar score to assess the health of newborns, increasing infant survival rates. Pioneer in anesthesiology, raised respect for the discipline; she warned use of some anesthetics during childbirth negatively affected infants; helped refocus March of Dimes from polio to birth defects
- June 7, 1910 – Marion Post Wolcott born, documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration (1938-1941); she usually traveled alone, and is notable for contrasting images of the poorest and the wealthiest during the Depression. Her FSA photographs are in the permanent collections of many major U.S. museums. She was honored with Society of Photographic Educator’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Press Photographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award, and were published in 1983 in FSA photographs / Marion Post Wolcott, and featured in other books covering photography of the period
- June 7, 1917 – Gwendolyn Brooks born, poet, first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950), and the first black woman to be named a Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry (1985-1986)
- June 7, 1931 – Virginia McKenna born, British stage and film actress, author and wildlife activist. Best known portraying Joy Adamson in the film Born Free, which inspired her activist for animal rights and protection of their natural habitat, and her work as a Trustee of the Born Free Foundation. She is also a Patron of Cinnamon Trust, a charity that helps elderly people keep their pets. Her autobiography, The Life in My Years, was published in 2004
- June 7, 1944 – Annette Lü born, Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party politician and feminist; elected to the Legislative Yuan (1993-1996); Magistrate of Taoyuan County (1997-2000); Vice President of the Republic of China (2000-2008); author of Xin Nüxing Zhuyi (New Feminism) and the novel These Three Women, written while she was in prison, after a 1979 International Human Rights Day rally held by the Taiwanese democracy movement, where she and all the other speakers were arrested for violent sedition. Amnesty International named her as a prisoner of conscience, which brought pressure both internationally and in Taiwan to secure her release after 5½ years
- June 7, 1954 – Louise Erdrich born, Ojibwe novelist/poet/children’s book author, enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a band of Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe and Chippewa)
- June 7, 1965 – The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 7-2 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, cutting down state laws that made use of birth control by anyone, including married couples illegal, citing the “right to marital privacy” in deciding whether or when to have a child, which becomes the basis for extending right to privacy in later reproductive rights decisions, including Roe v. Wade
- June 7, 1968 – Women sewing machinists at Ford Motor Company Limited’s Dagenham plant in London go out on strike; Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in Harold Wilson’s government, intervenes and the strike ends three weeks later, after a deal that immediately increases their rate of pay to 8% below that of men, to rise to the same category B rate as the men the following year. This had repercussions in the U.S. as well: international media attention to the Dagenham strike contributed to the passage of the U.S. Equal Pay Act of 1970
_________________________________
- June 8, 1858 – Charlotte Angas Scott born, mathematician; competed in “Tripos” final examinations (1880) offered at Cambridge. Mastery of Tripos exams qualified her to receive a bachelor’s degree with honors, previously only awarded to male Cambridge students. Ranked 8th in test scores, but not allowed at awards ceremony, solely because she was female; one of first English women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics; published An Introductory Account of Certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry (1894), which is still widely used
- June 8, 1860 – Alicia Boole Stott born, Irish-English mathematician known for her models of three-dimensional geometric figures, coined “polytope” for a convex solid in four (or more) dimensions
- June 8, 1900 – Lena Baker born, to an African American sharecropper family in Cuthbert Georgia. The mother of three children, she was hired by Ernest Knight, a white employer, who sexually assaulted her multiple times and held her imprisoned for days at a time. Knight’s son and several townspeople disliked their “relationship” and tried to end it by threatening her. One night in 1944, Baker was trying to escape from Knight when he threatened her with an iron bar, and then they struggled over his pistol. Baker shot and killed him. She reported the incident immediately to the coroner, who was her former employer, saying she had acted in self-defense. Lena Baker was charged with capital murder. Judge William “Two Gun” Worrill, who kept a pair of pistols in view on his judicial bench, presided over her trial. The all-white, all-male jury convicted her of capital murder by the end of the first day of the trial. After Baker’s court-appointed counsel filed an appeal, he dropped her as a client. Governor Ellis Arnall granted Baker a 60-day reprieve so that the Board of Pardons and Parole could review the case, but in January 1945 it denied Baker clemency. She was transferred to Georgia State Prison at Reidsville on February 23, 1945. Her last words before her execution were: “What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself. Where I was I could not overcome it. God has forgiven me. I have nothing against anyone. I picked cotton for Mr. Pritchett, and he has been good to me. I am ready to go. I am one in the number. I am ready to meet my God. I have a very strong conscience.” On March 5, 1945, she became the only woman in Georgia executed by electrocution. In 2005, sixty years after her execution, the state of Georgia granted Baker a full and unconditional pardon
- June 8, 1900 – Estelle Griswold born, birth control advocate and pioneer, defendant in the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut which legalized contraception for married couples in 1965
- June 8, 1903 – Jessie Bernard born, sociologist, feminist critic and author of The Paradox of the Happy Marriage (1971), and The Female World (1981)
- June 8, 1903 – Marguerite Yourcenar born in Belgium, French novelist and essayist; Memoirs of Hadrian; winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980. The Yourcenar Prize is named in her honor
- June 8, 1912 – Wilhelmina Barns-Graham born, one of the foremost British abstract painters, and co-founder of the influential Penwith Society of Arts
- June 8, 1920 – Gwen Harwood born in Tasmania, one of Australia’s finest poets whose early work was published under various pseudonyms, including Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer and Miriam Stone; librettist for over a dozen works by prominent Australian composers; she won many awards for her poetry, including the 1977 Robert Frost Medallion; The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize was created in her memory in 1996
- June 8, 1929 – Margaret Bondfield becomes Minister of Labour, the first woman appointed to a Cabinet position in the United Kingdom
- June 8, 1937 – Gillian Clarke born, Welsh poet, playwright, Welsh-speaker and translator; co-founder in 1990 of Tŷ Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, which offers residential creative writing, courses in Welsh and English, retreats, seminars and forums. She held the pole of National Poet of Wales (2008-2016), and in 2010 became the second Welsh poet to be awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2011 she was made a member of the Gorsedd of Bards, and in 2012 she received the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award
- June 8, 1947 – Sara Paretsky born, American novelist and author of detective fiction, best known for her V.I. Warshawski series
- June 8, 1949 – Helen Keller and Dorothy Parker are named in an FBI report as members of the Communist Party
- June 8, 1953 – U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. Inc., a lawsuit spearheaded by Mary Church Terrell against a segregated restaurant in Washington DC, that its policy of segregation is illegal, upholding laws passed in the District of Columbia in 1872 and 1873 prohibiting segregation in public places, which, although never enforced for decades, are still on the books in 1953
- June 8, 1957 – Sonja Vectomov born, Czech sculptor based in Finland, known for bronze statues of Finnish cultural figures
- June 8, 1958 – Louise Richardson born, Irish political scientist, specialist in the study of terrorism; Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford since 2016; Principal and vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews (2009-2015), the first woman and first Roman Catholic in modern times to hold the position; executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study (2001-2008); author of What Terrorists Want, and When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations in the Suez and Falkland Crises
- June 8, 1961 – Mary Bonauto born, American lawyer and civil rights advocate and activist in the struggle to eradicate discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. She has been working with GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) since 1990. Bonauto was one of the leaders who worked with the Maine legislature to pass a same-sex marriage law, then defended it at the ballot in a narrow loss during the 2009 election campaign. But in the 2012 election, Maine voters approved the measure, making it the first state to allow same-sex marriage licenses via ballot vote. Bonauto is best known for being lead counsel in the case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health which made Massachusetts the first state in which same-sex couples could marry in 2004. She is also responsible for leading the first strategic challenges to section three of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
- June 8, 1970 – Gabrielle Giffords born, American Democratic politician and gun control advocate; U.S. House of Representatives (D-AZ, 2007-2012), the third woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress from Arizona; she resigned after she was shot in the head, but survived with a severe brain injury; the gunman shot 24 others, killing six people
- June 8, 1976 – Catherine McKinnell born, British Labour politician, member of Parliament for Newcastle upon Tyne North since 2010; prominent campaigner for the Women Against State Pension Inequality
_________________________________
- June 9, 1836 – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson born, first woman to complete medical qualifying exams and first woman physician in Great Britain (1870). After an 1859 lecture by Elizabeth Blackwell on “Medicine as a Profession for Ladies,” entered training as a surgical nurse – the only woman in the class, she was banned from full participation in the operating room. Rejected by medical schools, finally admitted for private study for an apothecary license, fought to take the exam and get a license. Society of Apothecaries then amended their regulations so no more women could be licensed. Opened a dispensary in London for women and children in 1866; she studied French so she could apply for a medical degree at the Sorbonne in Paris, which had just begun to accept women as medical students, and earned her degree in 1870; by 1872, the dispensary expanded into the New Hospital for Women and Children, specializing in treating gynaecological conditions; in 1874, she and Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women, the first teaching hospital in Britain to offer courses to women
- June 9, 1843 – Bertha von Suttner born, Austrian novelist and pacifist; published Die Waffen nieder! (Down with Weapons!) in 1889; first woman to be solely awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1905)
- June 9, 1860 – The first “dime novel” is published: Malaseka, The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, written by Mrs. Ann Stevens
- June 9, 1861 – Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke begins serving in the Civil War as a Union hospital nurse and administrator (1861-1865), working in a total of nineteen battles, establishing 300 field hospitals; after the war, she is a tireless advocate for veterans, becoming a lawyer to help them and their families with legal problems, including getting their pensions
- June 9, 1865 – Helen Marot born, American writer, librarian, labor organizer and social reformer. She was the head of a private library in Philadelphia specializing in works on social and economic issues, and published Handbook of Labor Literature in 1899. Best known for her investigations, for the U.S. Industrial Commission into the working conditions in Philadelphia’s tailoring trades, and for the New York Association of Neighborhood Workers into child labor, which led to the forming of the New York Child Labor Committee. She co-authored a report with Florence Kelley and Josephine Clara Goldmark which was influential in passage of the 1903 Compulsory Education Act, which raised the end-age of compulsory attendance to age 16. She was the secretary for the New York branch of the Women’s Trade Union League (1906-1913). Marot was a key figure in the organization of the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union of New York, one of the first trade unions for white-collar women, and was the principle organizer of the 1909-1910 strike of shirtwaist and dress makes, called the Uprising of the 20,000, under the banner of the International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union. She served on the editorial board of the radical journal Masses (1916-1917), then on The Dial (1981-1920), and published Creative Impulse in Industry in 1918
- June 9, 1896 – Catherine Shouse born, philanthropist and political activist; worked for the Women’s Division of the U.S. Employment Service of the Department of Labor, and was the first woman appointed to the Democratic National Committee in 1925. She was also the editor of the Woman’s National Democratic Committee’s Bulletin (1929-1932), and the first woman to chair the Federal Prison for Women Board. In 1966, she donated her personal property, Wolf Trap Farm, to the National Park Service, which became the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, where Shouse served as the founding member until her death in 1994
- June 9, 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey, 22-year-old homemaker from Hackensack, New Jersey, becomes the first woman to drive across the U.S., in a Maxwell 30; travels 3,800 miles from Manhattan to San Francisco in 59 days
- June 9, 1921 – Phyllis Wallace born, American economist and pioneer in the study of sex and race discrimination in the workplace. She earned a master’s degree (1944) and Ph.D. (1948) in Economics from Yale University. Wallace worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the 1960s, and was an important contributor to the anti-workplace-discrimination contingencies of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She was the first African-American woman full professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT (1974), and the first African American and the first female president of the Industrial Relations Research Association. Author of Pathways to work: Unemployment among black teenage females and Women, minorities and employment discrimination
- June 9, 1931 – Nandini Satpathy born, Indian politician and Odia language author; a leader in the national youth movement in college, she was severely injured in 1951 when police charged the students during a protest, and was jailed with many others; in 1962, she was elected to the upper house of India’s Parliament, and served two terms; appointed as Minister of Information and Broadcasting in 1966; became Chief Minister of Odisha (1972-1976). She was accused in 1977 of corruption, but her attorney argued several points concerning the manner of the investigation, which led to strengthening the rights of the accused, including the right to an attorney, the right for a woman to be questioned at home with relatives present, and only to be brought to the police station if formally arrested, and the right for women to be searched only by women; over the next 18 years, Satpathy won all of the cases against her
- June 9, 1931 – Phoebe Burnett Snetsinger born, birder and amateur ornithologist. After receiving a “terminal cancer” diagnosis in 1981, she became famous for her birding life list of 8,398 species (out of about 10,000 in the world) before her death, a world record for the time, often traveling to remote areas, some in politically unstable countries. Her copious field notes included distinctive subspecies. She is killed in 1999, not by cancer, but when the vehicle overturned while she traveled in Madagascar. Her memoir, Birding on Borrowed Time, was published posthumously (2003)
- June 9, 1936 – Nell Dunn born, English playwright, screenwriter and author; best known for her play Steaming, winner of the 1981 Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy; her novel Poor Cow and the screenplay for the film version; Up the Junction, a collection of short stories, and her book of interviews, Talking to Women
- June 9, 1949 – Georgia Neese Clark confirmed as the first woman U.S. Treasurer
- June 9, 1949 – Kiran Bedi born, Indian politician and activist, Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry since 2016; the first woman to join the Indian Police Service (1972-2007), rose from police officer to the first woman appointed as a UN civilian police advisor (2003-2005) to her retirement as Director General, Bureau of Police Research and Development; founder of India Vision Foundation (IVF) which advocates for police and prison reform, empowerment of women, and community development; a key leader of the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement
- June 9, 1954 – Elizabeth May born in America, leader of the Green Party of Canada, and first Green Party candidate to be elected as a Member of Parliament, for Saanich-Gulf Islands, incumbent since 2011; environmental activist, author, lawyer and politician; Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada (1989-2006)
- June 9, 2014 – Actress and LGBT advocate Laverne Cox becomes the first transgender person to appear on the cover of TIME magazine
_________________________________
- June 10, 1692 – Bridget Bishop, the first person to go on trial in the Salem Witch trials, becomes the first person hanged, at Gallows Hill near Salem, Massachusetts, for “certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft & Sorceries”
- June 10, 1720 – Mrs. Clements of Durham, Great Britain begins selling the first paste-style mustard
- June 10, 1822 – Lydia White Shattuck born, internationally known botanist, naturalist, and chemist, graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary (1851); becomes a faculty member there until her retirement in 1888, just months before her death. Teaches several science and math subjects: algebra, geometry, physiology, physics, and astronomy
- June 10, 1835 – Rebecca Latimer Felton born, American reformer, writer, lecturer and the widow and unofficial campaign manager of William Harrell Felton, U.S. Congressman (Democrat-Georgia 1875-1881); first woman in the U.S. Senate, but she was appointed and only served for one day, sworn in on November 21, 1922; at age 87 years, 9 months and 22 days, she was also the oldest freshman senator, and to date, still the only woman to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate; she was an advocate for prison reform, woman’s suffrage and educational modernization, but also a white supremacist, former slave owner, and spoke publicly in favor of lynching
- June 10, 1854 – Sarah Grand, born Frances Bellenden Clarke, Irish feminist author whose novels and other writings promote the ideal of the ‘New Woman’ who wants an education and the ability to be self-supporting, and one who will not stay in an oppressive marriage. Grand writes about the double standard, which condemns women for promiscuity that is tacitly accepted in men; as a student, she was expelled from the Royal Naval School in Twickenham for organizing protests against the Contagious Diseases Act, which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the sole cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, subjecting them to indignities such as inspection of their genitals and being held in locked hospital wards
- June 10, 1895 – Hattie McDaniel born, American actress and singer-songwriter; best known for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind, for which she became the first African American to win an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress. McDaniel was also the first black Oscar winner to appear on a U.S. postage stamp. She recorded blues sides between 1926 and 1929, was the first African American woman to sing on U.S. Radio, where she became a frequent performer. McDaniel was the best-known homeowner in the black West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, and became part of the 1945 ‘Sugar Hill’ lawsuit over the racial restriction covenant that was part of the development of West Adams Heights in 1902. Superior Judge Thurmond Clarke threw the case out of court: “It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations or evasions, the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. Judges have been avoiding the real issue too long.”
- June 10, 1904 – Lin Huiyin born, also known as Phyllis Lin in the U.S., first modern woman Chinese architect, and also a well-regarded novelist, writer and poet; educated in England and the U.S., where she had to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts in 1924 because the School of Architecture didn’t admit women, she then took graduate courses in stage design at Yale. After returning to China, by 1928, she was co-founder and first faculty with her husband, architect Liang Sicheng, of the Architecture Department of Northeastern University in Shenyang. The University was forced to evacuate in 1931 when the Japanese invaded and took over its province. She and her husband then began doing surveys and restoration work on Beijing’s cultural heritage sites, but had to stop in 1937 and flee south before the invading Japanese. By 1940, Lin Huiyin was in exile with her husband and children in the old town of Lizhuang. While bedridden and suffering from tuberculosis, she was told in 1941 that her younger brother had been killed serving as a combat pilot. After 1949, they were both professors at Tsinghua University in Beijing; she was involved in the design of the Chinese national flag, the People’s Republic of China National Emblem, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes for Tiananmen Square, as well as the standardization of Beijing city planning. She died in 1955 of tuberculosis
- June 10, 1930 – Aranka Siegal born, Czech author, and Holocaust survivor; her children’s book Upon the Head of the Goat, a 1982 Newbery Honor Book, and ALA Notable Children’s Book, is a memoir of her childhood in Hungary before she was sent to Nazi concentration camps during WWII
- June 10, 1938 – Vasanti N. Bhat-Nayak born, Indian mathematician known for Combinatorics and Graph Theory; was head of the University of Mumbai department of mathematics
- June 10, 1952 – Kage Baker born, American scifi and fantasy author; best known for her historical time travel Company series; The Women of Nell Gwynne’s won the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novella
- June 10, 1953 – Christine St-Pierre born, French Canadian journalist and Quebec Liberal Party politician; current Member of the National Assembly of Quebec for Acadie, since 2007; journalist for Radio-Canada (1976-2007); served as Minister of Culture, Communications and Status of Women (2007-2014); Minister of International Relations and La Francophonie since 2014
- June 10, 1954 – Dame Moya Green born, Canadian businesswoman, CEO pf the UK’s Royal Mail postal service since 2010, the first woman and first non-Britain to hold the post; President and CEO of Canada Post (2005-2010)
- June 10, 1963 – U.S. Equal Pay Act is signed into law by President Kennedy: “To prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.”
- June 10, 1965 – Susanne Albers born, German theoretical computer scientist and academic; her research is primarily in design and analysis of algorithms; recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize; in 2014, she was one of the ten inaugural fellows of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science
- June 10, 1966 – Janis Joplin makes her first appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company in San Francisco at the Avalon Ballroom
- June 10, 1969 – Kate Snow born, American television journalist; has been with NBC News since 2010, and anchor since 2015 for the Sunday edition of NBC Nightly News; previously at ABC (2003-2010), CNN (1998-2003), and local television in New Mexico (1995-1998) . Snow is a member of the national board of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America
- June 10, 1972 – Radmilla Šekerinska born, Macedonian politician; Minister of Defense of the Republic of North Macedonia since 2017; Prime Minister of North Macedonia (first in 2004 and then in 2006)
- June 10, 1976 – Esther Ouwehand born, Dutch Partij voor de Dieren (PvdD – Party for the Animals) politician; current Member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands since elected in 2006, when PvdD became the first party to gain seats in a national legislative body with a party platform primarily devoted to animal rights
- June 10, 1979 – Svetlana Zakharova born, Russian prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet, and an étoile (leading dancer) of the La Scala Theatre Ballet
- June 10, 1990 – Miriam Makeba returns to South Africa after 31 years in exile. She was the first well-known black musician to leave the country because of apartheid. In retaliation, the government revoked her passport, and she was unable to enter the country for her mother’s funeral in 1960. Her music was banned in South Africa after she testified about apartheid at the United Nations in 1963
_________________________________
- June 11, 1815 – Julia Margaret Cameron born in Calcutta, British photographer who experimented with soft focus and manipulating the picture during processing
- June 11, 1847 – Dame Millicent Fawcett born, English academic and woman suffrage leader who was President (1897-1919) of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the moderate non-violent branch of the movement; a tireless campaigner who also focused on improving women’s opportunities for high education; co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge
- June 11, 1860 – Mary Jane Rathbun born, American marine zoologist, widely recognized as the crustacean authority of her time; she established the basic taxonomic information on Crustacea; Rathbun worked at the Smithsonian for almost 60 years, most of that time serving as the entire Department of Marine Invertebrates, finally resigning her position as superintendent to use her salary to hire an assistant, and continuing her work as a volunteer. She described over 1000 new species/subspecies, and published over 160 scientific papers
- June 11, 1877 – Renée Vivien born as Pauline Mary Tarn, an American-British poet who wrote in French and lived in Paris during the Belle Époque. Vivien was a high-profile lesbian, dubbed “Muse of the Violets” because of her love of the flower. She was as notable for her series of relationships as for her Sapphic verse; the famed French writer Colette was her neighbor from 1906 to 1908, and wrote a controversial portrait of Vivien in The Pure and the Impure. Renée Vivien died at the age of 32 in 1909, the result of drug and alcohol abuse, and anorexia nervosa – she only weighed about 70 pounds at the time of her death
- June 11, 1880 – Jeannette Rankin born, American social worker, politician, peace and women’s rights activist, first woman elected to U.S. House of Representatives, voted in Congress against declaration of war for both WWI and WWII, casting the only vote against WWII
- June 11, 1909 – Natascha Artin Brunswick born in Russia, mathematician, translator; her family left after Russia after the October Revolution in 1917, eventually arriving in Germany; she studied mathematics at the University of Hamburg, graduating in 1930; also a photographic enthusiast who took many pictures of pre-WWII Germany. Because her mother was a Jew who had converted to Christianity in order to marry her father, Natascha became classified as half-Jewish under Nazi law. After she married her former mathematics professor, Emil Artin, he was forced into early retirement from his professorship in 1934. In 1937, the Artins and their two children left Germany for the U.S; he was able to get a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame, but she was classified as an enemy alien, and her camera was confiscated by police in 1942 (by the time it was returned to her, she had lost interest in photography, but her son discovered her photographs decades later, and arranged for their exhibition). Nevertheless, the U.S. Army hired her to teach Russian to soldiers in an Army Specialized Training Program. Emil Artin was hired by Princeton University in 1946; two years later, the couple divorced and he moved back to Germany. In 1959, she married composer Mark Brunswick. She was technical editor and translator for the journal Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, founded at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where she worked until 1989
- June 11, 1913 – Women in Illinois celebrate passage of a state woman suffrage bill allowing women to vote in presidential elections
- June 11, 1920 – Hazel Scott born in Trinidad, Jazz/Classical pianist, singer, and civil rights activist; was recognized early as a musical prodigy, her mother took her to New York City at the age of four. Scott was given scholarships from the age of eight to study at the Juilliard School, and began performing in a jazz band and on the radio by age 16. She was prominent as a jazz singer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, she became the first black person to have a TV show, The Hazel Scott Show, featuring variety entertainment. When on tour she refused to perform in segregated venues. Her television show was cancelled a week after she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in September 1950. In 1945, she had married U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. They divorced in 1960, after Scott had moved to Paris in the late 1950s to revive her career, not returning to the United States until 1967. She died of cancer in 1981, survived by her son, Adam Clayton Powell III
- June 11, 1922 – Jean Sutherland Boggs born, Canadian art historian, specialist in Edgar Degas’ work, academic and civil servant; the first woman director at both the National Gallery of Canada (1966-1976), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1978-1982); Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard (1976-1979); chair and CEO of Canada Museums Construction Corporation (1982-1985), where she directed the construction of a National Gallery building and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which opened in 1986, and is now called the Canadian Museum of History; author of Portraits by Degas, and several other books about the painter’s life and work; became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1973
- June 11, 1987 – Diane Abbott is elected as the first black woman Member of Parliament in Great Britain
_________________________________
- June 12, 1161 (day uncertain) – Constance born, daughter of Duke Conan IV and Margaret of Huntingdon. At age five, she became the Duchess of Brittany when Henry II of England invaded Brittany, and forced her father to abdicate in her favor, so he could arrange the betrothal of Constance to his son Geoffrey. She spent the rest of her youth at the English court. In 1181, Constance, age 20, was forced to marry Geoffrey, but in 1186, he was trampled to death during a tournament, leaving Constance as the effective ruler of Brittany. In 1191, King Richard I proclaimed Constance’s son Arthur, his nephew, as his heir in a treaty signed with Philip II of France. Constance began including her son in the government of the Duchy in 1196, but King Richard had other plans for the Duchy and summoned her to Bayeau, where he arranged for her to be abducted by Ranulf, Earl of Chester (who already styled himself as the Duke of Brittany, although this was never accepted in Brittany.) She was imprisoned Saint-James de Beuvron, and the rumor was spread that it was for matrimonial reasons. This sparked rebellions in Brittany by her loyal subjects, and Arthur was sent to Brest. Richard eventually bowed to growing pressure, and had Constance released in 1198. Back in Brittany, the Duchess had the “marriage” annulled, and Arthur became her co-ruler. In 1199, she married Guy of Thouars. In 1201, Constance died at age 40, probably of complications from the birth of twin daughters
- June 12, 1686 – Marie-Catherine Homassel-Hecquet born, French writer who wrote under the pen name “Madame H―” a pamphlet biography of the feral child Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc (also known as the Wild Girl of Champagne) called Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans, which was translated several years later into English as An Account of a Savage Girl. The girl is believed to have survived in the forest for ten years, from about ages 9 to 19, before being captured by villagers in Songy, Champagne. At least one researcher found some evidence that she may have been a Native American of the Meskwaki (Fox) people, who re-learned human speech, and learned to read and write as an adult, a feat unique among long-term feral children
- June 12, 1802 – Harriet Martineau born, English sociologist and author of numerous books and essays, known as the first female sociologist and for her feminist perspective; she earned enough to support herself entirely by writing, rare for a woman in the 19th century
- June 12, 1889 – Lilian Jeannette Rice born, American architect, noted for the California Spanish Colonial Revival style; lead planner of the Rancho Santa Fe development in San Diego County CA (1922-1927), opened her own firm in 1928, became one of the few women members of the American Institute of Architecture (ALA) when she joined the San Diego chapter in 1931; several of her employees were women, including architect Olive Chadeayne; Rice died of ovarian cancer in 1938 at age 49
- June 12, 1892 – Djuna Barnes born, American author, journalist, playwright, illustrator and artist; started in 1913 as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and quickly became a very busy feature reporter and interviewer; published her illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women, in 1915; sent by McCall’s magazine to Paris, she lived there from 1921 to 1931, and wrote A Book, published in 1923, and began her novel Nightwood, published in 1936, a classic of lesbian fiction, also considered an important book in modernist literature; in the 1940s, she drank heavily and did little work, often making ends meet with donations from friends, but swore off alcohol in 1950, and wrote her verse play The Antiphon and much poetry, in spite of being ravaged by arthritis; became increasingly reclusive; elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961
- June 12, 1895 – Eugénie Brazier born, French chef, who developed Lyonnaise cuisine. In 1921, she opened her first restaurant, La Mère Brazier, in Lyon. Brazier was the first person and first woman hold six Michelin stars simultaneously, three Michelin stars at two restaurants, after she opened a second restaurant in Col de la Luère. She held this record alone for 36 years. Noted nouvelle cuisine chef Paul Bocuse was one of her students. Eugénie Brazier Prizes include the Grand Prize for a cookbook by a woman or about women’s cooking, and a prize for best illustrations or photographs in a cookbook
- June 12, 1908 – Marina Semyonova born, Russian ballet dancer, first Soviet-trained prima ballerina, named a People’s Artist of the USSR
- June 12, 1912 – Eva Crane born, earned a doctorate in nuclear physics, but abandoned physics to become an expert on bees as a researcher, historian, archivist, editor and author; founder of the International Bee Research Association (1949)
- June 12, 1917 – Ansuyah Ratiul Singh born, South African physician, community worker, novelist and playwright. Earned her medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1944, and returned to South Africa in 1946. She became part of the Passive Resistance Movement in Durban, and founded a series of clinics to serve the poor. In 1956, she was the first Indian woman appointed to the Natal Provincial Administration, and in 1962, she earned a diploma in Public Health from the University of Natal. Singh also wrote novels, including Behold the Earth Mourns, considered the first novel published by an Indian South African writer, an historical novel about the struggle against apartheid. She lectured to students on health and family planning, the Arts, and the role of women in the Indian community
- June 12, 1918 – Georgia Louise Harris Brown born, the second African American woman to become a licensed architect in the U.S. She was also the first black woman to earn a degree in architecture from the University of Kansas, and the only black member of the Chicago chapter of Alpha Alpha Gamma (women architects and allied women professionals. Before she became a license architect, Brown worked for Kenneth Roderick O’Neal (1945-1949), When she became licensed on 1949, she went to work for Frank J. Kornacker & Associates, and took evening classes in civil engineering. In 1953, she left for Brazil, where there were fewer racial barriers in her field. Brown learned to speak Portuguese by studying with a friend, and permanently moved to São Paulo by 1954, where she started a design firm, Escandia Ltda. She was project manager and designer for a large complex in Osasco, did a project for Pfizer Pharmaceutical Corporation in Guarulho, designed a Jeep factory in San Bernardo, a shipping facility for Siemens, and a Kodak Brasileire Comerico film factory. She also designed a number of homes for wealthy Brazilians. She retired to Washington DC in 1995, and died in 1999
- June 12, 1919 – Uta Hagen born in Germany, German-American actress; blacklisted during the McCarthy era, she became better known as a highly influential acting teacher and author of Respect for Acting and A Challenge for Actors; elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981
- June 12, 1922 – Margherita Hack born, influential Italian astrophysicist and author, who contributed to the spectral identification of many stars; first woman administrator of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory (1964-1987), member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. She was a vocal advocate for civil rights and equality, and a member of and the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics, and battled the strictures of the Vatican. She also launched a successful campaign against construction of nuclear power plants in Italy
- June 12, 1924 – Grete Dollitz born in Germany, American classical guitarist, educator, and radio host; author of a story of her family’s experiences as immigrants
- June 12, 1925 – Gladys Hansen born, American librarian, curator of the Museum of the City of San Francisco; San Francisco’s longtime city archivist, and a renowned expert on the city’s history, especially the 1906 earthquake and fires. Using old records, letters and newspaper accounts, she put together a list of missing casualties, first on three-by-five cards and later on computers. Her research uncovered over 3,000 people who died in the quake or the fires afterwards, a much higher number than the official list of 478 dead. Co-author, with former San Francisco Fire Chief Emmet Condon, of Denial of Disaster, published in 1989, arguing that the city fathers had covered up the real death toll because admitting such a high number was bad for business
- June 12, 1929 – Brigid Brophy born, British author, critic, social reformer and animal rights activist; Hackenfeller’s Ape and Mozart the Dramatist
- June 12, 1929 – Anne Frank born, Dutch author and WWII Holocaust victim; know for The Diary of Anne Frank
- June 12, 1930 – Barbara Harris born, American minister and Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, first woman ordained a bishop in the Anglican Communion
- June 12, 1931 – Rona Jaffe born, American novelist, noted for controversial book Mazes and Monsters (1981) about possible dangers of fantasy role-playing games; hired in 1960s by Editor Helen Gurley Brown to write cultural pieces for Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1995, she created the Rona Jaffe Foundation, which gives the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Awards, exclusively for women authors, in Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry categories
- June 12, 1932 – Mimi Coertse born, South African operatic soprano
- June 12, 1935 – Ella Fitzgerald, age 17, makes her first recordings: “Love and Kisses” and “I’ll Chase the Blues Away”
- June 12, 1941 – Lucille Roybal-Allard born, American Democratic politician, U.S. House of Representatives for three different California districts since 2003, first Mexican-American woman elected to U.S. Congress; currently serving the 40th District; California State Assemblywoman (1986-1992); currently on House Appropriations Committee, Homeland Security Subcommittee and Labor/Health/Human Services/Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee; member of Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Co-Chair with Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) of the Women’s Working Group on Immigration Reform
- June 12, 1946 – Catherine Bréchignac born, French physicist, co-founder of the field of cluster physics; President of CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) from 1997 to 2002; commander of the Légion d’honneur, and “secrétaire perpétuel” of the Académie des sciences since 2011
- June 12, 1948 – The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act is signed into law allowing women to serve as regular members of the United States armed forces. Prior to this they could only serve during times of war
- June 12, 1950 – Little League Girls Baseball Day – In the spring of 1950, 13-year-old “Tubby” Johnston signs up to tryout for the King’s Diary Team of the Knights of Columbus League in New York. “Tubby” makes the team, but then confesses to the coach that “he” is really Katherine Johnston, who had talked her mother into cutting off her braids, and then dressed like a boy for the tryouts. The coach said, “You know, we don’t have rules for girls and you’re really good so we’d like to have you on the team.”She played that entire season. But then the Little League organization instituted the “Tubby Rule,” banning girls from the league. The ban stays on the books until 1974, when the National Organization for Women (NOW) backs Maria Pepe in a discrimination lawsuit in which the New Jersey Superior Court decides that Little League must allow girls to try out
- June 12, 1957 – Geri Allen born, African American jazz pianist and composer
- June 12, 1958 – Margaret Atieno Ogola born, Kenyan novelist and physician, noted for The River and the Source, which won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, and its sequel, I Swear by Apollo. She was the medical director of Cottolengo Hospice, for orphans with HIV and AIDS
- June 12, 1967 – Loving Day: Mildred and Richard Loving are each sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other, a violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, because she is black and he is white. They bring suit, and the U.S. Supreme Court makes a unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia that the Virginia law is unconstitutional, making all race-based restrictions on marriage in the U.S. unconstitutional
_________________________________
- June 13, 1752 – Fanny Burney born, became Madame d’Arblay, English author of journals, diaries, and novels; Evelina is a landmark in development of the novel of manners; she wrote a first person account of undergoing a mastectomy without anesthesia
- June 13, 1840 – Augusta Lundin born, the first international Swedish fashion designer, who introduced Parisian clothing construction methods to Sweden. In 1886, she was commissioned by the Reformed Dress Society to design a more healthful form of dress for women. Lundin designed a loose dress without a corset of bustle. She employed only women until 1910, and instituted a 12-hour work shift, with a two-week summer vacation, the first Swedish employer to do so
- June 13, 1859 – Christine Terhune Herrick born, American author and journalist; published many books on cooking and household management; notable contributor to Harper’s Bazaar
- June 13, 1872 – Chrystal MacMillan born, Scottish women’s rights activist, pacifist and one of the first British women called to the Bar, in 1924; member of the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies, campaigning for women’s suffrage, and organizer and delegate to the pro-peace 1914 Women’s Congress in The Hague, and a delegate to the International Congress of Women in Zürich in 1919, which issued a strong condemnation of the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. She was also the second woman member of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. In her will, she left bequests for the Open Door International for the Economic Emancipation of the Woman Worker, and to the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene
- June 13, 1873 – Karin Swanström born, Swedish actress, theatre company founder, silent film producer and director. She founded and ran the Karin Swanström Theater Company (1904-1921), then began acting in silent films. In 1923, she became head of production at Bonnierfilm, and directed her first film, for AB Svensk Filmindustri. She starred in several silent films, and directed three more films between 1923 and 1926, then returned to the stage (1926-1931), but still appeared in silent films. 1934 to 1941, she again worked for AB Svensk Filmindustri, this time as producer, artistic adviser, and then as production manager and co-head of production with her husband, Stellan Claësson. In 1942, Swanström died in Stockholm. Noted for her direction of Flickan i frack (Girls in Tails)
- June 13, 1875 – Miriam “Ma” Ferguson born, American politician, first woman Governor of Texas serving from 1925-1927 and 1933-1935. She ran after her husband, the former governor, was barred from public office. During her first term, she followed through on her campaign promise to pass a law forbidding anyone to participate in public activity while wearing a mask. Although the courts eventually overturned the anti-mask law, it did accomplish Ferguson’s goal of undermining the political power of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas
- June 13, 1879 – Lois Weber born, American silent film director, actress, screenwriter, and producer; an important and prolific director of the silent film era, credited with directing at least 135 films, writing 114 screenplays and acting in 100 films; pioneer of the split screen technique in her 1913 film Suspense; early experimenter with sound; first woman to direct a full-length feature film, The Merchant of Venice (1914); in 1917, the first woman director to own a film studio, Lois Weber Productions (1917-1921). Weber discovered silent film actress Billy Dove, and screenwriter-director Frances Marion. She was the only woman member of the Motion Picture Directors Association (1915-1936), which was replaced by the Screen Directors Guild, an official craft union
- June 13, 1881 – Mary Antin born in the Russian Empire, American author and immigration rights activist, known for her autobiography The Promised Land about her life in Czarist Russia, immigration and assimilation into American culture
- June 13, 1890 – Osceola Macarthy Adams born, one of the first African American actresses on Broadway, appearing in The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson and in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. As a director, she helped start the careers of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. She was also a drama teacher, and clothing designer
- June 13, 1893 – Dorothy L. Sayers born, British author, poet and playwright; noted for the Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mystery novel series
- June 13, 1902 – Carolyn Eisele born, American mathematician and historian of mathematics, professor of mathematics at Hunter College for almost 50 years
- June 13, 1931 – Nora Kovach born, Hungarian-American ballerina; in 1953, she and her husband were the first highly publicized dancers who defected from the Soviet bloc to the West
- June 13, 1935 – Jeanne-Claude born as Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon in Morocco, where her father, a French general, was stationed. French artist, and collaborator with her husband, Christo Javacheff, better known as Christo, from 1961 on
- June 13, 1937 – Eleanor Holmes Norton born, civil rights activist, feminist and politician; Since 1991, U.S. Representative for the District of Columbia (a non-voting, at-large position because Congress maintains supreme authority over the city, and may even overturn local laws); Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1977-1981); Assistant Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1965-1970); in 1970, Norton represented sixty female employees of Newsweek who filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because Newsweek only allowed men to be reporters, and she won the case
- June 13, 1944 – Dame Christine Beasley born, British nurse and National Health Service (NHS) administrator; held a range of senior posts with broad experience if policy development and leadership, including Head of Development with the Directorate of Health and Social Care and Director of Nursing, and NHS Human Resources & Organisational Development; established the London Standing Conference, contributing to improvements in service and clinical practice; appointed Chief Nursing Office for England in 2004; became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours
- June 13, 1949 – Ann Druyan born, American documentary screenwriter and producer, co-author of the 1980 documentary series Cosmos; Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, the golden discs affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft
- June 13, 1949 – Ulla Schmidt born, Social Democratic Party of Germany politician; Vice-President of the German Bundestag (2013-2017); Federal Minister of Health (2005-2009); Federal Minister of Health and Social Security (2001-2002); Federal Minister of Health and Social Security (2002-2005); North Rhine-Westphalia Member of the Bundestag since 2009
- June 13, 1954 – Ngozi Okonjo-born, Nigerian economist; first woman Minister of Finance in Nigeria (2011-2015); Managing Director of the World Bank (2007-2011); Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs (2006-2006); current chair of the board for Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), and for African Risk Capacity (ARC)
- June 13, 1955 – Leah W. Sears born in Heidelberg Germany to a U.S Army family; American jurist; Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court (2005-2009), the first African-American woman Chief Justice in the U.S.; Associate Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court (1992-2005), the first woman and youngest person to sit on Georgia’s Supreme Court; first black woman Superior Court judge (1988-1992) in Georgia
- June 13, 1964 – Kathy Burke born, English comedian, playwright, theatre director and actress; she directed her first play, Mr. Thomas, at the Old Red Lion Theatre in 1990; known for playing the semi-regular role of Magda in the BBC series Absolutely Fabulous
- June 13, 1969 – Virginie Despentes born, French author, screenwriter, and director; member of the Société littéraire des Goncourt (Goncourt Literary Society) since 2016; her novel Apocalypse bébé won the 2010 Renaudot prize; she made her directorial debut in 2000 with the film, Baise-moi, adapted from her novel, a crime thriller with elements of the rape and revenge genre, considered an example of the ‘New French Extremity’ because of its graphic violence and explicit sex scenes
- June 13, 1969 – Laura Kightlinger born, American comedian and writer; consulting producer and writing on the TV series Will & Grace; created, wrote, directed, produced and starred in TV series The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman (2006-2007)
_________________________________
- June 14, 1811 – Harriet Beecher Stowe born, American author and abolitionist; Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a huge best-seller: 1.5 million copies are sold in its first year
- June 14, 1839 – Alice Fisher born in England, pioneer in American nursing, whose tenure as a superintendent at the Philadelphia General Hospital dramatically improved the standard of care; she also started the hospital’s nursing school
- June 14, 1894 – Marie-Adélaïde born, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg; She became Grand Duchess regnant and ruler of Luxembourg at age 18, reigning from 1912 to 1919. She was Luxembourg’s first woman ruler since Duchess Maria Theresa (1740–1780), and the country’s first monarch to be born within its territory since Count John the Blind (1296-1346). She abdicated in favour of her sister Charlotte in 1919, and retired to an Italian monastery, where she died of influenza in 1924 at age 29
- June 14, 1900 – Ruth Nanda Anshen born, American philosopher, editor, creator of the Science of Culture Series, and author; The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of an Idea, and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival; member of the International Philosophical Society
- June 14, 1903 – Rose Rand born in Austria Hungary to a Jewish family, logician and philosopher; member of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met regularly at the University of Vienna (1924-1936); she received her PhD in 1938, but was blocked from finding employment, and emigrated to London as a Jew without nationality; she was admitted to the faculty of Moral Science at Cambridge, but lost her privileges in 1943; she struggled financially, then got a small research grant at Oxford, and also worked in practical engineering; moved to the U.S. in 1954, becoming a research associate at the University of Chicago and Notre Dame University; in 1959, she began getting grants and fellowships to work on translations; her research, detailed notes she took at the Vienna Circle meetings, and extensive correspondence with notable philosophers are now at the University of Pittsburg
- June 14, 1904 – Margaret Bourke-White born, American photojournalist, and war correspondent; she was the first woman photojournalist hired for LIFE magazine, and photographed the magazine’s first cover
- June 14, 1907 – Norway grants middle class women the right to vote in parliamentary elections
- June 14, 1914 – Winifred Milius Lubell born, American artist, illustrator, writer and activist for social justice. She created pen and ink portraits of victims of the Great Depression, before proceeding to examine the struggles of the working poor in the towns of the Eastern United States through woodcuts, as well as producing drawings from the sit down strikes in Chicago
- June 14, 1923 – Judith Kerr born in Germany; her family fled to England in 1933, British children’s author and illustrator, known for the Mog series, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and her semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
- June 14, 1931 – Marla Gibbs born, African American comedian, singer and television producer; best known for her role as Florence Johnston in the CBS sitcom, The Jeffersons (1975-1985). She was a co-producer and star of the NBC show 227 (1985-1990), and sang the show’s theme song. Gibbs has won seven NAACP Image Awards. From 1981 to 1999, she owned a jazz club in South Central Los Angeles
- June 14, 1936 – Irmelin Sandman Lilius born, Swedish-speaking Finnish writer, translator and poet; her best-known work is a large chronicle of over a dozen books about a fictitious Finnish town she named Tulavall; awarded the 1976 Astrid Lindgren Prize
- June 14, 1953 – Janet Mackey born, New Zealand Labour Politician; Member of the New Zealand Parliament for East Coast (1999-2005); Member of Parliament for Mahia (1996-1999); Member of Parliament for Gisborne (1993-1996). Chair of the East Coast Regional Employment and Access Council (1984-1990). She was appointed as a justice of the peace in 1988, and became a marriage celebrant in 1989. Her daughter, Moana Mackey, was also a Labour Party Member of Parliament (2003-2014)
- June 14, 1955 – Kirron Kher born, Indian theatre, film and television actress, TV talk show host, social activist, and member of the Bharatiya Janata political party. Since May 2014, she has served as the representative for Chandigarh in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament. Kher has been active in Laadii, the campaign against female infanticide, and the Roko cancer awareness campaign
- June 14, 1957 – Mona Simpson born, American novelist; her first novel, Anywhere but Here, won a 1986 Whiting Award for Fiction. Simpson’s 1992 sequel, The Lost Father, won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Her most recent book is Steps (2017)
- June 14, 1970 – Heather McDonald born, American comedian, writer and actress; she started with The Groundlings improvisational theatre group, then began writing with Keenan Ivory Wayans, and doing stand-up comedy. She was a writer-performer on MTV’s Lyricist Lounge (2001-2002). McDonald has been a writer and made guest appearances on the Chelsea Lately TV show since its premier in 2007. In 2010, she published the memoir, You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again: One Woman’s Painfully Funny Quest to Give It Up, and followed it with My Inappropriate Life (Some Stories Not Suitable for Nuns, Children, or Mature Adults) in 2013. In 2015, her stand-up special, Heather McDonald: I Don’t Mean to Brag, was released on Netflix
_________________________________
- June 15, 1860 – Florence Nightingale opens the first school for nurses at the St. Thomas hospital in London
- June 15, 1878 – Margaret Abbott born, American golfer and Olympic winner, first American woman to win an event in the Olympics, in possibly the weirdest Olympics story ever. The 1900 Paris Games were held at the same time as the Paris Exhibition, and were a poorly organized and little-publicized sideshow to the Exhibition. Many of the participants, including Abbott, did not even know they were competing in Olympic events. It was the first Olympics where women were allowed to participate, and only 22 women competed, compared to 975 men. The games stretched out over six months, and no one got a medal – it was the only Olympics where various objects, like porcelain bowls, were given as prizes instead of medals. Margaret Abbott and her mother Mary were living in Paris between 1899 and 1902, and Margaret had won several local amateur golfing events back home in Illinois, but wasn’t one of the official U.S. Olympians – she was just there in Paris and knew how to play. All the women golfers wore long skirts and fashionable hats – some even showed up wearing high heels and tight skirts. It was just a nine-hole event, and Margaret won with a score of 47; her mother also played, and came in seventh with a score of 65. This was the only time in Olympic history that a mother and daughter competed in the same sport in the same event at the same Olympics. It wasn’t until after Margaret Abbott’s death, when historical researchers found evidence the women’s golf event was actually part of the 1900 Olympics, that her win became an official Olympic record, so she never knew she was an Olympian. Women’s golf did not return to the Olympics until the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janiero
- June 15, 1887 – Malvina Hoffman born, American artist and author; her monumental bronze sculpture series, “The Races of Mankind,” is commissioned in 1930 by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History
- June 15, 1914 – Hilda Terry born, American cartoonist; comic strip Teena; first woman to join the National Cartoonists Society
- June 15, 1915 – Nini Theilade born, Danish ballet dancer and choreographer, leading dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (1938-1940) and choreographed several works for the Royal Danish Ballet. She went to Brazil during WWII, where she taught ballet, and then returned to Copenhagen in the 1950s, and started a ballet school. She lived to age 102
- June 15, 1920 – Amy Clampitt born, American poet and author; she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor, before taking up writing poetry again in her 40s, which she had first written in college. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Kingfisher, wasn't published until 1983, when she was 63 years old. Clampitt published five more books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and her last book, A Silence Opens, in 1994, the year she died of cancer
- June 15, 1921 – Bessie Coleman receives her pilot’s license after graduating from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. She is the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license and the first woman to earn an international license
- June 15, 1924 – Hédi Fried born in Romania, Swedish psychologist and author; a Holocaust survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson, she arrived in Sweden in July 1945. Fried has received many honors, including the Swedish Illis Quorum medal, the 1998 Natur & Kulturs Kulturpris for her literary work, and the Order of the Star of Romania in 2016
- June 15, 1926 – Carol Fox born, American impresario, co-founder and director of the Chicago Lyric Opera (1954-1980)
- June 15, 1938 – Jeanette W. Hyde born, American diplomat; President Bill Clinton appointed her as U.S. Ambassador to Barbados/Dominica/St. Lucia (1994-1998) and as Ambassador to Antigua/Grenada/St. Vincent and St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla (1995-1998). In 1996, the U.S. Coast Guard presented her with the highest civilian award for Public Service for treaty work on drug trafficking, and in 1997 the U.S. Department of Defense, the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency presented her with Civilian Service awards. Member of the Council of American Ambassadors
- June 15, 1945 – Miriam Defensor Santiago born, Filipino judge and politician; as a senator of the Philippines, in 1995 she authors a record number of bills and laws; in 2012, she becomes the first Filipina and first Asian from a developing country to be elected as adjudge of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, but is forced to resign when she is diagnosed with lung cancer; in 2016, joins the Advisory Council of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), an intergovernmental body that promotes the rule of law
- June 15, 1950 – Juliana Azumah-Mensah born, Ghanaian politician and nurse-midwife; Member of the Ghana Parliament since 2005; Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs (2010-2012); Minister for Tourism (2009-2010)
- June 15, 1951 – Jane Amsterdam born, American magazine and newspaper editor. She was a section editor for the Washington Post (1979-1983), then became editor of Manhattan, Inc. magazine (1984-1987), which won the 1985 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, In 1988, she became a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, then left to be an editor at the New York Post, but was forced out when her shift in emphasis from tabloid sensationalism to investigative journalism failed to sell more newspapers
- June 15, 1953 – Ana Castillo born, Mexican-American author, poet, editor, playwright and scholar, recipient of an American Book Award and a Carl Sandburg Award, and the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University
- June 15, 1963 – Helen Hunt born, American actress, director and screenwriter; best known for the sitcom Mad About You, for which she won four Emmys, and her performance in the film As Good as It Gets, which earned her an Oscar for Best Actress. She made her directorial debut with Then She Found Me (2007) and also starred and co-authored the screenplay. She wrote the screenplay and directed Ride in 2014, as well as directing numerous episodes of several television series
- June 15, 1985 – Ashley Nicole Black, African American comedian, writer and actress. She began in comedy at Second City; writer and correspondent for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (2016-2019)
- June 15, 2019 – Zuzana Čaputová takes office as the first woman president of Slovakia
_________________________________
Sources