“In order for us as poor and oppressed
people to become part of a society that
is meaningful, the system under which
we now exist has to be radically changed
... It means facing a system that does not
lend its self to your needs and devising
means by which you change that system.”
– Ella Jo Baker, American civil rights
activist, NAACP field secretary
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So many amazing women trailblazers, we had to go to a second post to finish!
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- December 16, 1630 – Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort born, English gardener and botanist, whose collection of plant specimens and seeds numbered in the thousands; she published a 12-volume herbarium.
- December 16, 1717 – Elizabeth Carter born, English poet, classicist, and translator; a member of the Bluestocking Circle; first to translate into English the extant works of Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher.
- December 16, 1775 – Jane Austen born, English author, one of the most widely read authors in English literature – best known for Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; and Emma.
- December 16, 1787 – Mary Russell Mitford born, English author, poet, and dramatist; noted for her five-volume Our Village, a collection of short stories and sketches.
- December 16, 1843 – Josephine Shaw Lowell born, American charity worker and social reformer; first woman appointed to the New York State Board of Charities (1876-1889); founder of the NY Consumers League (1890) which advocated for better wages and working conditions for women, publishing a “White List” of retail stores which treated their women clerks well (which initially had few stores on it), and inspired chapters in other cities across the nation, becoming the National Consumers League, a powerful lobbying group.
- December 16, 1844 – Fanny Garrison Villard born, suffragist and philanthropist. During Reconstruction, helped feed and clothe newly freed slaves, and funded schools for their education; president (1898-1922) of NY Diet Kitchen Association, which provided more nutritional food that doctors associated with the program would “prescribe” as cures for sick slum dwellers; founding member of the NAACP; American Woman Suffrage Association member; worked with Women’s Peace Party. She helped found Barnard College, and the Harvard Annex (which became Radcliffe College).
- December 16, 1847 – Mary Hartwell Catherwood born, American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She sometimes used the pen name Lewtrah. Best known for her popular historical romances, which featured a high standard of historical accuracy and period detail. Several of her novels featured early French culture in North America, including The Romance of Dollard and Old Kaskaskia. Catherwood poems and short stories were published in Harper’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.
- December 16, 1867 – Amy W. Carmichael born, Irish Protestant missionary and author, founder of a mission and orphanage in the Tamil Nadu state in India, where she served for 55 years; her work with girls and young women saved many of them from forced prostitution. Noted for Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India; and Gold Cord.
- December 16, 1869 – Bertha Lamme Feicht born, American mechanical engineer with a specialty in electricity; in 1893, she was the first U.S. woman to earn an engineering degree in other than civil engineering, and the first woman graduate in engineering from Ohio State University; first woman engineer hired by Westinghouse; her daughter Florence became a physicist for the U.S. Bureau of Mines.
- December 16, 1895 – Marie Hall Ets born, American illustrator and children’s author; won the 1960 Caldecott Medal for her illustrations in Nine Days to Christmas, which she co-authored.
- December 16, 1900 – Lucille Lortel born, American theatrical producer/co-producer/artistic director of nearly 500 plays, five of which were nominated for Tony Awards; noted for producing Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera, which ran Off Broadway for seven years, and which the New York Times said “put Off Broadway on the map.”
- December 16, 1901 – The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter’s first book, is published, setting a new standard for children’s books and marking her first step to independence.
- December 16, 1901 – Margaret Mead born, renowned American cultural anthropologist, best known for her studies of the indigenous people of Oceania, including the cooperation, competition, and communication between them, together with the oceanic ethnology and comparative child psychology. She first began her research in the South Pacific at age 23, as a doctoral student. Throughout her life, she traveled in other countries doing research on various cultures, including the Arapesh, Mudugumor and Tchambuli of New Guinea. Her public lecture topics ranged widely from atomic politics to cybernetics to feminism. Author of Coming of Age in Samoa; and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.
- December 16, 1916 – Ruth Johnson Colvin born, founder of the non-profit Literacy Volunteers of America (now ProLiteracy Worldwide); worked with literacy specialists to develop training materials for volunteer tutors, now considered authoritative sources for basic literacy and ESL tutor training courses; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, the same year she turned 100.
- December 16, 1932 – Grace Alele-Williams born, first Nigerian woman to earn a doctorate degree and first woman to become a Nigerian university vice-chancellor, at the University of Benin. She is also a professor of mathematics education, and a consultant to UNESCO and the Institute of International Education Planning.
- December 16, 1938 – Liv Ullmann born, Norwegian actress and film director; her first directing project was Sofie in 1992, followed by Faithless (2000), which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in 2009, she directed Cate Blanchett in a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened in Sydney Australia, then moved to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. In 2014, her film adaptation of Miss Julie, starring Jessica Chastain, was released.
- December 16, 1941 – Leslie Stahl born, American television journalist; recounts that on the night of the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election, her on-air studio chair was labeled “Female” in masking tape, instead of with her name as her colleagues chairs were; noted for her coverage of Watergate, which earned her a promotion to CBS White House Correspondent; since 1991, she has reported for 60 Minutes; when Katie Couric was hired in 2006, CBS news asked Stahl to take a $500,000 cut in pay to accommodate Couric’s salary; Reporting Live is her memoir.
- December 16, 1949 – Dame Heather Hallet born, English judge; as a Bencher of the Inner Temple, she became the first woman to chair the Bar Counsel in 1998; appointed in 2005 as the fifth woman to sit in the Court of Appeal; since 2013, Vice-President of Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal.
- December 16, 1951 – Sally Emerson born, English novelist, poet, anthologist, and travel writer; worked for the Illustrated London News, and as editor of Books and Bookmen (1978-1985). Her first novel, Second Sight, was published in 1980, and won the Yorkshire Post Best First Novel award. 1983’s Listeners was followed by the bestsellers Fire Child, Separation, Heat and Broken Bodies. She also edited several anthologies of both prose and poetry, and has been a travel writer for the Sunday Times since 2003.
- December 16, 1955 – Carol Browner born, American lawyer and environmentalist; Director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (2009-2011), a position abolished by the Trump administration; Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA – 1993-2001).
- December 16, 1965 – Melanie Sloan born, Minority Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, working on criminal justice issues for Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI), and as Counsel for the Crime Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, drafting portions of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act; District of Columbia Assistant U.S. Attorney (1998-2003); co-founder in 2003, and first Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) which publishes a “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list; in November 2017, Sloan publicly accused John Conyers of harassment and verbal abuse when she worked for the House Judiciary Committee, and several other woman also came forward; Conyers has denied all the allegations, but later announced his resignation.
- December 16, 1976 – Jen Golbeck born, America computer scientist, academic and author; Associate Professor at the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, and director of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab (2011-2014); noted for her work on computational social network analysis; program co-chair of ACM RecSys 2015; contributor to the on-line magazine Slate; she started The Freedom of Science Network after the last presidential election to help government scientists to find new jobs if they were fired, then used the network to ask for help in finding housing and work for scientists who were stranded by the administration's travel ban in 2017, and got 1,000 offers of help within 72 hours; her publications include Online Harassment (editor), and Trust on the World Wide Web: A Survey.
- December 16, 2012 – The gang rape and fatal torture of Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old Indian physiotherapy intern, on a private bus in Delhi sparks international outrage, and protests in India demanding tougher penalties for rape and sexual violence.
- December 16, 2013 – Michelle Bachelet wins back the presidency of Chile in a runoff election; leading her opponent by 62 percent to 38 percent. Bachelet is the first Chilean leader to serve two terms since General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
- December 16, 2017 – Film director Peter Jackson admitted to blacklisting Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino in response to a smear campaign orchestrated by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, accused sexual predator. “I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs,” Jackson said, referencing the production company Weinstein ran with his brother Bob. As a direct result, he said, both women fell out of the running for parts in his Lord of the Rings series. “At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us. But in hindsight, I realize that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing. I now suspect we were fed false information about both of these talented women.” Harvey Weinstein’s “complicity machine” was built out of the witting, the unwitting, and those in between. He commanded enablers, silencers, and spies, warning others who discovered his secrets to say nothing. He used it to protect himself against sexual assault claims, and to punish those who rejected his advances. Sorvino and Judd have both said they refused Weinstein’s pressure to have physical relationships, and Sorvino said she felt “iced out” of the industry after rejecting his advances. On seeing Jackson’s interview, Sorvino tweeted: “I burst out crying. There it is, confirmation that Harvey Weinstein derailed my career, something I suspected but was unsure. Thank you Peter Jackson for being honest. I’m just heartsick.” Judd said, “I remember this well.” Jackson said he did not know about the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, but he had long since ceased working with the Weinstein brothers because they acted like “second-rate mafia bullies.”
- December 16, 2019 – The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests are given every three years to 15-year-olds from 80 countries across the globe. The most recent results for British girls have alarmed UK educators: they rank as the fifth “most afraid of failure” in the world, behind Taiwan, Macau, Singapore, and Brunei, and the gender gap is substantial. The pressure to excel is great, because passing exams with good rankings leads to opportunities in higher education, and degree holders earn higher wages. The difference in earnings for women between a graduate career and a lower-paid vocational role is even greater than the difference for men. Add to this finding the NHS (National Health Service) statistic that one in five UK girls are struggling with emotional disorders by age 19, often including self-harm, a rate that is three times higher than same-age boys, and the alarm bells get louder. Girls in this age group still regularly test higher academically than their male counterparts, but at what cost? Students in countries which wait to give tests that have such an impact on their future academic careers until they reach age 18 show lower stress levels for both girls and boys.
- December 16, 2020 – In the UK, Ella Kissi-Debrah reveloped severe asthma, and was only nine years old when she died in February 2013. Her mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, fought for years for a second inquest into her death, and was finally vindicated when the coroner at the second inquest ruled “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.” It is the first known ruling that air pollution was a major contributing cause of an individual’s death. “The whole of Ella’s life was lived in close proximity to highly polluting roads,” the coroner said. “I have no difficulty in concluding that her personal exposure to nitrogen dioxide and PM was very high.” Her family lived within 25 metres of the south circular road in Lewisham, and other busy routes. During her lifetime, nitrogen dioxide emissions and particulate matter (PM) limits in Lewisham exceeded EU and national legal limits and World Health Organization guidelines. In the three years before her death, Ella had multiple seizures and was admitted to hospital 27 times after severe asthma attacks. Air pollution he said had induced and exacerbated her severe asthma. Rosamund Kissi-Debrah said, “We’ve got the justice for her which she so deserved. I think that it would be a fitting legacy, to bring in a new Clean Air Act and for governments – I’m not just talking about the UK government – governments around the world to take this matter seriously. My biggest desire is to prevent future deaths, anything that saves future lives I am going to be in support of.”
- December 16, 2021 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration permanently lifted a restriction against accessing abortion pills by mail. The regulator previously required women to obtain the pills for medication abortion, an increasingly common method authorized for ending pregnancies up to 10 weeks' gestation, in person from certified health-care providers. In April, 2021, the FDA had temporarily suspended the requirement to obtain the drug, mifepristone, in person due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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Sources
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FEMINIST REINDEER!
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Male reindeer lose their antlers in
winter, while female reindeer do not,
so Santa’s sleigh is pulled by a team
of strong, unacknowledged women!
Let’s Hear It for the Girls!