WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from May 17 through May 24.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, May 28, 2022.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
May is Women’s Health Care Month
Roe v. Wade
”… ensures a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. It also, at its root, protects the fundamental right to privacy. What is clear is that opponents of Roe want to punish women and take away their rights to make decisions about their own bodies. Republican legislators in states across the country are weaponizing the use of the law against women … This is the time to fight for women and for our country with everything we have.”
— Vice President Kamala Harris
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
is up, so be sure to go there next, and catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- May 17, 1794 – Anna Brownell Jameson born in Dublin, British author, early feminist, and considered the first British art historian; The Diary of an Ennuyée, The Loves of the Poets, Characteristics of Women.
- May 17, 1836 – Virginie Loveling born in Belgium, Flemish poet, novelist, and children’s author; she was co-author with her sister Rosalie of poetry and two collections of essays, and also wrote solo under the pen name W. E. C. Walter; best known for her novels, Een Dure Eed (An Expensive Oath), De twistappel (The Twist Apple), and Een revolverschot (A Gunshot).
- May 17, 1838 – Mary Edwards Bryan born, American journalist, editor, and novelist; editor for several different publications; one of the best paid women editors in New York in 1891.
- May 17, 1860 – Charlotte Barnum born, American mathematician and social activist; after being turned down for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University because they did not accept women, she persisted, and became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University (1895). From 1901 to 1913, she worked in Washington DC, for the U.S. Naval Observatory, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She was one of the first women members of the American Mathematical Society. Barnum was also active in several social and charitable organizations. She died of meningitis at age 73 in 1934.
- May 17, 1863 – Rosalía de Castro publishes Cantares Gallegos, the first book published in the Galician language – this day has been celebrated in Galicia since 1963 as Día del las Letras Galegas.
- May 17, 1873 – Dorothy Richardson born, British journalist, feminist, and author of Pilgrimage, a sequence of 13 novels, beginning with Pointed Roofs. Richardson’s work fell out of favour in the 1930s, but was reprinted by Virago Press in the 1970s, and she is now considered a pioneer in ‘stream of consciousness’ narration.
- May 17, 1889 – Dorothy Gibson born, American stage and early silent film actress, singer, dancer, and survivor of the Titanic disaster. In 1912, she had been on vacation with her mother in Italy before they embarked on the Titanic to return home. They were in the first lifeboat launched after the collision. When they reached New York, her manager arranged for her to star in a one-reel drama about her experience, for which she wrote the scenario, and wore the same clothing she had worn that night – a white silk evening dress topped with a cardigan and polo coat. Saved From the Titanic was a tremendous success in America, Britain, and France, but the only known copies were lost in a 1914 fire at the Eclair Studios in New Jersey. In 1911, she had also starred in one of the first feature films made in the U.S., Hands Across the Sea, and went on to co-star in the first American-produced serial, The Revenge of the Silk Masks, in 1912. After making 22 films for Eclair Studios, she left films in 1913 after the scandal broke about her affair with married movie tycoon Jules Brulatour. Her only surviving film is A Lucky Holdup, made in 1912. She went to live in Paris in 1919. At the beginning of WWII, she was known as a Nazi sympathizer, and some thought she was also an intelligence operative, but she became disillusioned and publicly renounced her involvement. Gibson was then arrested in Milan as an anti-fascist agitator and put in prison. She and two other prisoners escaped with help from a Milanese resistance group and the Archbishop of Milan. She returned to Paris after the war. Gibson died of a heart attack in her apartment at the Hôtel Ritz Paris in 1946 at age 56.
- May 17, 1899 – Carmen de Icaza born, later Baroness of Claret; Spanish journalist and novelist; (1925-1930) worked for newspaper El Sol; noted for her novel, Cristina Guzmán.
- May 17, 1903 – Lena Levine born, American psychiatrist and gynecologist; director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau of New York. She was a pioneer in the development of marriage counseling. Levine was an advocate for birth control, and women’s right to sexual enjoyment. Co-author with David Loth of The Frigid Wife: Her Way to Sexual Fullfillment.
- May 17, 1904 – Marie-Anne Desmarest born as Anne-Marie During, French novelist; La passion de Jeanne Rieber (The passion of Jeanne Rieber) won the 1935 Prix de l’Alsace littéraire, and Torrents, won the 1939 Prix Max Barthou de l’Académie française.
- May 17, 1912 – Mary B. Davidson Kenner born, African American inventor most noted for developing the sanitary belt with a moisture-proof napkin pocket, but the company that first showed interest in her invention rejected it after discovering that she was a black woman, so it wasn’t used until 30 years after she invented it. She earned her living as a professional floral arranger, eventually owning her own business.
- May 17, 1918 – Birgit Nilsson born, Swedish dramatic soprano, famed interpreter of Wagner.
- May 17, 1921 – At the first meeting of the Lucy Stone League, Ruth Hale, who used her maiden name exclusively in her career as a journalist, launched her crusade to make it explicitly legal, as well as socially acceptable, for married women in all U.S. states to be able to use their birth names after marriage. At the time, the State Department refused to issue passports to married women in their birth names, as Hall had found out the previous year, when she and her husband were to go on a trip to France. After months of discussions, the State Department finally issued a passport to “Ruth Hale, also known as Mrs. Heywood Broun,” but she refused to accept it, and their trip was canceled.
- May 17, 1937 – Hazel R. O’Leary born, American lawyer, educator, and civil servant; first woman and first African American to serve as U.S. Secretary of Energy (1993-1997); president of Fisk University (2004-2012).
- May 17, 1938 – Marcia Freedman born in the U.S., American-Israeli activist for peace, women’s and LGBT rights, and politician; she and her family moved to Israel in 1967, and she was one of the early leaders of the feminist movement in Israel. Freedman was founding president of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom (Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace); served in the Knesset (1974-1977); was a co-founder of Israel’s first shelter for battered women in Haifa in 1977, and a founder of the Community of Learning Women in the 1990s, which provided education in women’s studies and computer literacy. Her memoir, Exile in the Promised Land, was published in 1990.
- May 17, 1950 – Valeriya Novodvorskaya born, Soviet dissident, writer; founder and chair of the Democratic Union party (1988-2014); member of the editorial board of The New Times. She became active in the Soviet dissident movement as a student, and was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1969, for distributing leaflets criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and confined in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed, like many dissidents, with ‘sluggish schizophrenia.’ She underwent two years of ‘treatment,’ and described her experiences in Beyond Despair. In 1972, she helped to copy and distribute an underground publication. She continued her political activities while working. She was tried in 1978, 1985 and 1986 for her dissident activities, and spent more time in mental hospitals. Novodvorskaya continued to organize unauthorized meetings, helped found the Democratic Union Party, and wrote for the underground newspapers like Svobodnoye Slovo (Free Word). In 2014, she died from toxic shock syndrome, caused by an acute infection in her left foot.
- May 17, 1956 – Annise Parker born, American Democratic politician and LGBT activist; second woman Mayor of Houston (2010-2016); Houston City Controller (2004-2010); Houston City Council member (1998-2004).
- May 17, 1961 – Enya born as Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin, Irish singer-songwriter, former member of Clannad before pursuing her solo career; Ireland’s top selling solo artist; winner of 7 World Music Awards, 4 Grammy Awards for Best New Age Album, and an Ivor Novello Award; nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Song for “May It Be” which she wrote and performed for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). In the 1980s, she was the victim of several stalkers, including an Italian man who stabbed himself after being ejected from her parents’ pub, and a pair who broke into her house, attacked one of her employees, and then escaped with several stolen items.
- May 17, 1962 – Lise Lyng Falkenberg born, Danish writer of fantasy fiction, rock musician biographies, literary studies; freelance journalist.
- May 17, 1962 – Jane Moore born, English journalist, author, and presenter for Channel 4 online videos. Best known as a columnist for The Sun newspaper, and a contributor to The Sunday Times. Noted for her novels, Fourplay, and The Second Wives Club.
- May 17, 1962 – Rosalind Picard born, American computer scientist and engineer, pioneer of affective computing, which recognizes the importance of emotion in human communication; her work expanded into the fields of autism and developing devices to help humans recognize emotional nuances; Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT; co-founded Affectiva; Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers since 2005.
- May 17, 1971 – Gina Raimondo born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Secretary of Commerce since March 2021; first woman Governor of Rhode Island (2015-2021); chair of the Democratic Governors Association (2018-2019); General Treasurer of Rhode Island (2011-2019). A graduate from Yale Law School, she was a venture capitalist before entering politics.
- May 17, 1984 – Lena Waithe born, American actress, screenwriter, and producer; in 2017, she became the first African American woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for the “Thanksgiving” episode of Master of None; noted for creating the Showtime series The Chi (2018-present), as well as the BET comedy shows Boomerang (2019-2020) and Twenties (2020-pressent)
- May 17, 1990 – The General Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) eliminates homosexuality from the list of psychiatric diseases.
- May 17, 2004 – The first legal same-sex marriages in the United States are performed in the state of Massachusetts, now celebrated as Same Sex Marriage Day.
- May 17, 2012 – A report on American Roman Catholic nuns from the Vatican’s orthodoxy watchdog, the Congress for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was publicly released by the United States Conference of Bishops, causes controversy. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents over 80% of Roman Catholic nuns in the U.S., who have been vocal about social justice issues, were praised for their work with the needy, but taken to task for being unacceptably silent on issues like opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. The Vatican ordered the American nuns to focus more on promoting church orthodoxy. In June, 2012, Nuns on the Bus, an American Catholic social justice advocacy group, launched their first tour in the U.S. to protest proposed budget cuts to assistance programs for the poor.
- May 17, 2019 – The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, legislation amending the Civil Rights Act to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. It would ban discrimination in housing, education, finances, and other federally funded areas, a long-discussed expansion to the 1964 law. The bill was passed 236-173 in the Democratically-controlled House. Eight Republicans voted to approve the legislation. The Republican-majority Senate took no action on the bill. The House passed the Equality Act again in February 2021. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the bill in March 2021. Republicans are unyielding in their opposition, claiming it would “open the floodgates” for transgender girls and women to play on female sports teams and hurt others’ chances to compete. The bill is in limbo, as Senate Democrats don’t have the 60 votes needed to pass it.
- May 17, 2020 – Lina Attalah, founder and editor-in-chief of the website Mada Masr, the last independent media outlet in Egypt, was arrested by Egyptian security forces, part of a growing crackdown linked to Covid-19. She was outside Tora prison south of Cairo interviewing the mother of jailed activist and blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah. His mother was attempting to bring medication and hand sanitizer to her son. Atallah’s mobile phone was seized, and she was taken to a police station and held on undisclosed charges, before she was questioned by a prosecutor. Her attorney was prevented from seeing her while she was detained. Atallah was later ordered released on bail of 2,000 Egyptian pounds (about $147 US). Mada Masr is internationally recognised as the last bastion of press freedom in Egypt, a lone award-winning independent outlet in a repressive media environment where the majority of newspapers are state-controlled. Plainclothes security officials had raided the media outlet’s offices in November 2019, and detained Attalah, but she was released following international pressure. The website of Mada Masr has been blocked in Egypt since May 2017, one of at least 500 sites blocked in the country. Other Egyptian journalists have been detained after reporting on the spread of Covid-19, part of a continuing pattern of repression. Egypt is considered one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, ranked 166 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.
- May 17, 2021 – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the Mississippi law enacted in 2018 which would ban almost all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, which was blocked by lower courts as inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent that protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion before the fetus can survive outside her womb. When the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, sued to try to block the measure, a federal judge in 2018 ruled against the state. In 2019 the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached the same conclusion, prompting the state to appeal to the Supreme Court, making it the first abortion case considered the court after the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, gave the conservative justices a 6-3 majority.
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- May 18, 1852 – Gertrude Käsebier born, American photographer, known for portraits of mothers and Native Americans; she promoted photography as an occupation for women.
- May 18, 1867 – Elisabeth Luther Cary born, American biographer and art critic; in 1908, she was named the first full-time art critic for the New York Times, where she worked for the next twenty five years. Following WWI, she encouraged the founding of industrial arts schools and the introduction of machinery into the studio; Cary published a series of studies on prominent literary figures (1895-1904), and in 1904 co-authored with Annie M. Jones a book of recipes inspired by literary quotes called Books and My Food. She was also the founding publisher and main writer for a monthly art journal called The Scrip (1905-1907).
- May 18, 1886 – Jeanie MacPherson born, American screenwriter and actress who wrote, directed, and starred in her own silent film, The Tarantula, then focused on screenwriting, and wrote scripts for 30 of Cecil B. DeMille’s silent films; one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
- May 18, 1907 – Irene Hunt born, American author of historical novels written for children; Newbery Medal winner for Up a Road Slowly. Also noted for her first book, Across Five Aprils, published when she was 57 years old, and honored in 1965 as a Newbery Honor book, and with a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. It is considered one of the first Young Adult novels.
- May 18, 1910 – Ester Boserup born, Danish economist who worked for international organizations, including the United Nations; author of seminal books on agrarian change and the importance of women’s work; Women’s Role in Economic Development was one of the inspirations for the UN Decade for Women (1975-1985).
- May 18, 1919 – Dame Margot Fonteyn born, British ballerina, appointed Prima Ballerina Assoluta of The Royal Ballet; her career spanned an astonishing 45 years. She was in her 40s when she danced with Rudolf Nureyev — her debut appearance in Swan Lake had been in the year Nureyev was born.
- May 18, 1922 – Gerda Boyesen born, Norwegian psychologist, founder of Biodynamic Psychology.
- May 18, 1925 – Lillian Hoban born, American author, illustrator, and dancer with the Martha Graham troupe; known for her children’s picture books series, Arthur the Chimpanzee and Frances the Badger.
- May 18, 1938 – Janet Fish born, American realist artist, primarily of still life paintings, often incorporating light reflecting off water or plastic wrap.
- May 18, 1941 – Miriam Margoyles born in England, now an Australian citizen; veteran character actress known for her performances as Mrs. Mingott in The Age of Innocence and Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. As a new citizen of Australia, she “came out” as a lesbian live on national television in front of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, on Australia Day in 2013. Her life partner since 1967 is Heather Sutherland, a retired Australian professor of Indonesian Studies. Margoyles is a member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and the British-based ENOUGH! Coalition, seeking “a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.”
- May 18, 1952 – Diane Duane born, American sci-fi and fantasy author and screenwriter; noted for her Young Wizards and Feline Wizards series.
- May 18, 1952 – Jeana Yeager born, American aviator, co-pilot with Dick Rutan on first non-stop, non-fueled flight around the world in Rutan Voyager.
- May 18, 1953 – Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier.
- May 18, 1956 – Catherine Corsini born, French film director and screenwriter; known for Replay and Three Worlds.
- May 18, 1957 – Dame Henrietta Moore born, British social anthropologist and author; director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College, London; William Wyse Director of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2009-2014); Still Life: Hopes Desires and Satisfactions.
- May 18, 1967 – Nina Björk born, Swedish left-wing equity feminist, author, and columnist; noted for the feminist book Under det rosa täcket (Under the Pink Duvet).
- May 18, 1967 – Nancy Juvonen born, American film producer; co-founder of the Flower Films production company.
- May 18, 1967 – Mimi MacPherson born, Australian environmentalist and entrepreneur; at age 21, she began crewing aboard a whale-watching boat, and the following year, she launched her own whale-watching business, which won a 1996 Queensland Tourism Award. She was named 1997’s Businesswoman of the Year by the Women’s Network of Australia. She served as spokesperson for several environmental organizations, including Planet Ark, Clean Up Australia, and Sydney Water. MacPherson raised over $100,000 AUSD for the Pacific Whale Foundation. Currently, she is working with the World Wildlife Fund and the Born Wild program.
- May 18, 1970 – Tina Fey born, American comedian, writer, and producer; first female head writer for Saturday Night Live (1999); creator of the comedy series 30 Rock (2006-2013); she is the winner of 9 Primetime Emmy Awards, 3 Golden Globe Awards, 5 Screen Actors Guild Awards, and 7 Writers Guild of America Awards; and the youngest winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (2010).
- May 18, 1988 – Ksenija Sidorova born, Latvian classical accordionist; her first album for Deutsche Grammophon was a recreation of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen on the accordion.
- May 18, 1991 – Chemist Helen Sharman becomes the first Briton in space when the Soyuz TM-12 mission is launched; she performed medical and agricultural tests as well as photographing the British Isles.
- May 18, 2016 – A young Nigerian woman escaped after being held by Boko Haram for two years, according to Nigerian authorities. Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki was the first of the 250 Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamist extremist group in April 2014 to return. She reportedly emerged from a wooded area with a 4-month-old baby and a suspected Boko Haram member who identified himself as her husband. She told authorities her schoolmates were still in the Sambisa forest, a Boko Haram stronghold.
- May 18, 2019 – After Alabama’s state legislature passed a near-total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, Donald Trump tweeted that he is “strongly pro-life,” but supports three exceptions for abortions: rape, incest and when necessary to protect the life of the mother. The governors of Missouri and Georgia signed their own restrictive abortion bills the previous week as part of an orchestrated attempt to overturn Roe V. Wade. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, responded to Alabama's abortion ban: "This ban is dangerous and exceptionally cruel - and the bill's authors want to use it to overturn Roe v Wade. I've lived in that America and let me tell you: We are not going back - not now, not ever. We will fight this. And we will win."
- May 18, 2020 – When Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès visited the Saint Pierre Hospital in Brussels, hospital staff turned their backs on her in silent protest over nurses’ low pay and stressful working conditions. “Politics constantly turns its back on our appeals for help,” one anonymous nurse told the Francophone state broadcaster RTBF. “The teams are understaffed and the burnout rates show it. We are asking for our work to be valued and for more staff on our teams.” A spokesperson for Wilmès said she had spoken to representatives from the protesting staff for 40 minutes during her visit. “I think that there will be an ‘after Covid,’” Wilmès said. “No one can claim not to have understood nor felt the distress of nursing personnel, which was already there before the crisis, which has aggravated difficulties.” However, Marie-Christine Marghem, a government official and member of the prime minister’s party, aggravated the situation when she wrote on Facebook that the protest was “ridiculous” and participants were acting like “children who couldn’t get what they wanted.” Wilmès had taken charge of a minority government in March 2020, after coronavirus forced Belgium’s warring parties to a truce, following 15 months of stalemate since the previous government collapsed in December 2018. She said she hopes “a real government” will be in place by September, once emergency powers granted to tackle coronavirus expire. The numbers of new cases had been dropping until October 2020, when the newly-formed government under Alexander De Croo removed the mask mandate and loosened some restrictions. The number of Covid-19 cases soared, and in some hospitals, doctors and nurses who tested positive but didn’t have symptoms were asked to keep working, because so many staff members were already out sick with the virus.
- May 18, 2021 – In the UK, an exhibition opened in Manchester to celebrate the life and legacy of MP Jo Cox at the People’s History Museum, Britain’s national museum of democracy. She was murdered in 2016 by a far-right terrorist, after leaving a meeting in her West Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen, because she opposed Brexit. Her children, Lejla, age 8, and Cuillin, age 10, provided captions for the exhibition displays. They explained how they helped to design the Jo Cox coat of arms, installed in parliament after she was killed in June 2016. “This is the coat of arms of Jo Cox (our mum),” reads the caption on a display case showing the ornate certificate produced to certify the heraldic shields which are produced for all MPs killed in office. “Daddy and the two of us designed it. It has the three suffragette colours of green, white and violet, in the middle is a mountain and the green and blue represent rivers and hills. The rivers are the Thames, where they lived on a houseboat; the Wye, where they holidayed; and the Swale in Yorkshire, where Cox was born. “The red rose stands for the Labour party and the white rose stands for Yorkshire. There are four roses because there are four of us. It means a lot to us because it is handwritten and because it shows things Mummy cared about.” The motto “More in Common” comes from one of her speeches: “… we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than the things that divide us …” Central to the exhibition is the Jo Cox Memorial Wall, on public display for the first time since her murder, when it was erected outside the Houses of Parliament. Now part of PHM’s permanent collection, the wall features the handwritten tributes of hundreds of people, including children, expressing their horror at her death. “Love will prevail – one day soon?” wrote one mourner.
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- May 19, 1800 – Sara Miriam Peale born, American portrait painter, painted primarily politicians and military figures.
- May 19, 1832 – Madeline Carter Daniell born in India to Scottish parents; Scottish campaigner for women’s right to higher education, and one of the founders in 1867 of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Educational Association (ELEA), which, into addition to campaigning for women’s admittance to universities, offered lectures for women by university professors on English literature, and later classes in physics and philosophy of mind (the relationship of mind to body). In 1877, Daniell helped found the St. Leonard’s School for Girls (coeducational since 1999), a prep school for girls to prepare them for attending university. She moved to London, where she worked with impoverished women, and she met Constance Naden. In 1887, she and Naden traveled together through Europe, Egypt, and India. After Naden’s death in 1889, she moved to Southport, campaigning for women’s rights including suffrage, joining the Women’s Local Government Society, the Southport University Extension Society, and the Women’s Liberal Association. She died in 1906 at age 73 after a long illness.
- May 19, 1834 – Catherine Furbish born, American botanist who spent over sixty years meticulously collecting, classifying, and drawing the flora of Maine. She began work in 1870, and extensively traveled the state for 38 years. She enthusiastically explored the depths of wilderness areas to discover new specimens. The exquisite, accurately detailed watercolors and drawings she made of the collected specimens were highly regarded by academic botanists. In 1895, she helped found the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine. Her work has been preserved in the 16 folio volumes she gave to Bowdoin College Library in 1908.
- May 19, 1861 – Dame Nellie Melba born, Australian soprano, first internationally recognized Australian operatic soprano and classical musician. She was one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century.
- May 19, 1879 – Nancy Astor born Nancy Langhorne in America, Viscountess Astor, English politician; first woman Member of Parliament, in the British House of Commons (1919-1945); though she was anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, she disliked the Nazis for devaluing the position of women, and was strongly opposed to the idea of another World War. As she grew older, she became increasingly insular and out of touch with the post-WWII changes in culture and politics, and was alienated from her children; she outlived both her husbands and all of her closest friends, and died in 1964.
- May 19, 1903 – Ruth Ella Moore born, American bacteriologist, first African-American woman to earn a PhD in a natural science; head of the Department of Bacteriology at Howard University (1955-1973); worked on tuberculosis, immunology, dental caries, and African-American blood types.
- May 19, 1920 – Tina Strobos born, Dutch physician-psychiatrist who, with her mother and grandmother, rescued over 100 Jewish refugees as part of the Dutch resistance during the WWII Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, hiding them in a secret compartment in her attic, and forging passports to help them get out of the country; she was arrested and interrogated nine times by the Gestapo, but never betrayed anyone involved; after the war, she emigrated to the U.S.; in 1989, she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, and in 1998, received the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal for her medical work.
- May 19, 1930 – White women win voting rights in South Africa, after a campaign originally started by women reformers campaigning against alcohol.
- May 19, 1930 – Lorraine Hansberry born, American playwright; A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, directed by Lloyd Richards, the first black director to have a show on Broadway; won the NY Drama Critics Circle Award, becoming the first black person, fifth woman and youngest playwright to win. She died of pancreatic cancer at age 34 in 1965.
- May 19, 1932 – Elena Poniatowska born in France, Mexican author and journalist; first woman to win Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Periodismo (National Journalism Prize), and numerous other awards, including the 2006 International Women’s Media Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
- May 19, 1941 – Nora Ephron born, American author, journalist, director, producer, and screenwriter; known for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle.
- May 19, 1946 – Nederlandse Vereniging voor Seksuele Hervorming (NVSH – the Dutch Society for Sexual Reform) is founded, a birth control organization which becomes the only source of condoms in the Netherlands. It will gain 220,000 members and run over 60 birth control clinics at its height. Contraceptives become legal in the Netherlands in 1970, causing membership to drop to only a few hundred by 2008.
- May 19, 1952 – Lillian Hellman sends her letter to the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities that she refuses to testify against friends and associates, saying “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
- May 19, 1953 – Victoria Wood born, English comedian, singer-songwriter, TV sketch writer, producer, and director, one of Britain’s most popular stand-up comics; winner of four BAFTA TV awards.
- May 19, 1954 – Lena Einhorn born, Swedish director, writer, and physician. After working as a doctor specializing in tumor viruses and causes of cancer in infants, she moved to the U.S. and began working as a medical editor at Lifetime television, then also produced and wrote medical documentaries for PBS and other independent companies. Returning to Sweden in 1994, she became an independent filmmaker, best known for her book and film Nina’s Journey, based on her mother’s escape from the Warsaw ghetto during WWII.
- May 19, 1966 – Jodi Picoult born, American author and feminist; advocate for literary gender parity and advisory board member of Vida: Women in the Literary Arts; has spoken out against the death penalty; co-founder of the Trumbull Hall Troupe (theatre for kids); known for her novels: My Sister’s Keeper; The Tenth Circle; and Change of Heart.
- May 19, 2019 – Hundreds of demonstrators chanted "my body, my choice" and "vote them out" on Sunday during a march to the Alabama Capitol in protest of the state's abortion ban, which Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed into law the previous week. Similar protests also were held in Birmingham and Huntsville. "Banning abortion does not stop abortion. It stops safe abortion," said Staci Fox, CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Southeast, at the demonstration in Montgomery. The law, the most restrictive anti-abortion legislation in the nation at that time, essentially bans abortions, with no exceptions for cases of rape and incest. It was intended as a challenge to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Several other states have approved bans on abortions once a so-called “fetal heartbeat” is detected.
- May 19, 2020 – Police in Toronto, Canada, uncovered evidence that the teenager who killed Ashley Arzaga, a 24-year-old mother, and injured two other women with a machete in February, was motivated by Incel rhetoric, the ideology that the world is unjustly stacked against unattractive heterosexual men. The youth entered the massage parlor owned by Arzaga, brandishing his machete. He allegedly killed her when she tried to subdue him. The initial charges against the suspect were first degree and attempted murder, but the evidence tying him to the Incel movement brought in federal authorities, and the charges were upgraded to murder-terrorist activity. The use of terrorism charges against the minor suspect are probably the first for an act of violence not tied to Islamic extremism, and indicate the Canadian government views the Incel movement as a growing threat in Canada.
- May 19, 2021 – In Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, leader of the Fa'atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi political party, who had campaigned by going out to meet Samoa’s citizens in person, rather than depending solely on media coverage, has been confirmed by Samoa’s supreme court as the winner of the election – she will be the first woman prime minister of her country. Fiame is a Tama Aiga hereditary chiefly title.
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- May 20, 1768 – Dolley Payne Madison born, American First Lady whose efforts saved the portrait of George Washington and other national treasures in 1814 when the British set fire to Washington DC, including the Executive Mansion, during the War of 1812 – only a sudden heavy storm saved the city from total destruction. In 1844, Dolley Madison was granted the rare privilege of the floor of the House of Representatives, with a chair reserved for her there.
- May 20, 1825 – Antoinette Brown Blackwell born, American women’s rights activist, writer, and orator; first U.S. woman ordained as a mainstream Protestant minister; she wrote for Frederick Douglass' abolitionist paper, The North Star. Blackwell spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention (1850). Her speech was well received, and marked the beginning of a speaking tour addressing abolition, temperance, and women's rights.
- May 20, 1856 – Helen Hopekirk born, Scottish concert pianist and composer who made her American debut in 1883 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After her husband, music critic William A. Wilson (who was also her manager) was seriously injured in a traffic accident, she accepted a teaching position at the New England Conservatory (1897-1901), then became a private teacher while still continuing to give performances. She and her husband became U.S. citizens in 1918. Hopekirk composed works for piano, violin, and orchestra, as well as writing songs and piano pieces in which she often incorporated Scottish folk melodies. She died of a cerebral thrombosis in 1945 at age 89.
- May 20, 1872 – Madeline McDowell Breckinridge born, American social reformer; advocate for child welfare, women’s rights, and tuberculosis treatment; co-founder of the Women’s Emergency Committee in Kentucky, which successfully campaigned for playgrounds and kindergartens in poorer districts and legislation setting up a juvenile court system, regulations for child labour, and compelling school attendance. Helped establish and served on the Kentucky Tuberculosis Commission, co-chair of fundraising for the Blue Grass Sanitorium; advocate for woman suffrage, helped win Kentucky women the right to vote in school elections; vice president of National American Woman Suffrage Association (1913-1915), and largely credited with ratification of the 19th Amendment by the Kentucky legislature in 1920.
- May 20, 1872 – Wivi Lönn born as Olivia Lönn, Finland’s first woman architect, who founded her own office; studied architecture at Polytechnic College, and graduated in 1896. She established her reputation early by winning first prize in several architectural competitions. Lönn was one of the architects who worked on the design of Finland’s National Theatre, built in 1902. She also created designs for over 30 schools, although some were not built, and several industrial buildings. Noted for her skillful and economic use of space.
- May 20, 1875 – Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of Abraham Lincoln, after being forcibly taken to the Chicago courthouse the day before, is put on trial to determine her sanity. This is arranged without her knowledge by her only surviving son, attorney Robert Todd Lincoln. The “defense attorney” arranged by Robert, a friend of the family, doesn’t contest the case, allowing 17 witnesses to testify against his “client” and calls no witnesses of his own. Robert Lincoln testifies, “I have no doubt that my mother is insane. She has long been a source of great anxiety to me.” Mary Lincoln is declared incompetent to testify on her own behalf. She did have a long history of migraine headaches, and the primary drug for pain relief at that time was laudanum, an opiate, but most of her questionable behavior was better described as “eccentric.” The verdict of insanity puts Robert Lincoln is control of his mother’s finances, and requires that she be committed to the State Hospital for the Insane, but she is allowed to stay in a private hospital if finances allow. Robert commits her to Bellevue Place, where patients are routinely given drugs or physically restrained, but as a former First Lady she’s allowed to do what she was convicted of failing to do: live the normal life of an upper class woman of the 19th century. She visits the wife of the superintendent, “takes the air” in their carriage, spends time with their retarded daughter Blanche, and writes letters. Robert visits his mother often, but she hides her plans to get out behind a subdued demeanor. With the help of lawyers James and Myra Bradwell, Mary Lincoln gains a release from her indefinite confinement. Myra Bradwell tells a Chicago newspaper reporter, "Mary Lincoln is no more insane than I am." Mrs. Lincoln leaves Bellevue Place on September 11, 1875, released into the custody of her sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards. And on June 15, 1876, she is officially declared sane in a Chicago court.
- May 20, 1882 – Sigrid Undset born, Norwegian novelist; 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature winner; known for her trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter.
- ay 20, 1894 – Adela Rogers St. Johns born, American author, journalist, and screenwriter; her first job in 1912 working as a reporter for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. She reported on crime, politics, society, and sports news before transferring to the Los Angeles Herald in 1913. Dubbed the “World’s Greatest Girl Reporter,” she covered everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping trial to the Dempsey-Tunney boxing match. She wrote ‘sob sister’ celebrity interviews, and short stories for Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1915, she was commissioned by James R. Quirk, editor at Photoplay magazine, to do interviews with Hollywood celebrities. From the early days of silent films through the 1940s, she wrote a number of screenplays, including What Price Hollywood? In the mid-1930s, she moved to Washington, D.C., to report on national politics for the Washington Herald. Her coverage of the assassination of Senator Huey Long in 1935, the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the Democratic National Convention of 1940, and other major stories made her one of the best-known reporters of the day. St. Johns left newspaper work in 1948 to concentrate on writing books, including Final Verdict, a biography of her father, notable trial lawyer Earl Rogers. In 1970, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 1988 at the age of 94.
- May 20, 1899 or 1900 – Lydia Cabrera born, Cuban artist and writer, pioneer in preserving Afro-Cuban culture, beliefs, rituals, songs, stories, and language. She did extensive work in Matanzas, and also the small towns south of the city of Matanzas itself, places such as Perico and Union de Reyes.
- May 20, 1901 – Doris Fleeson born, American journalist and columnist; co-author with her then-husband of “Capital Stuff” for the New York Daily News (1933-1942); she was a WWII war correspondent in France and Italy (1943-1945); after the war, she wrote a political column for The Boston Globe and Washington Evening Star, becoming the first U.S. woman to have a nationally syndicated column when the Bell syndicate picked it up, and it ran in 100 newspapers by 1960; member of the Women’s National Press Club.
- May 20, 1904 – Margery Allingham born, English author of detective fiction; noted for her Albert Campion mysteries.
- May 20, 1911 – Annie M. G. Schmidt born, Dutch children’s author, poet, songwriter, and screenwriter; included in the Canon of Dutch History as a national icon.
- May 20, 1918 – Aleksandra Boiko born, Russian WWII tank commander; she was a chemist before the war; she and her husband raised 50,000 Soviet rubles to pay for the construction of a tank for the Soviet Army, appealing to be sent to the Eastern Front. After they both graduated from the accelerated programme at the Chelyabinsk Tank School, she was appointed as a tank commander, and her husband was her engineer. Their first battle was the Riga Offensive in 1944; they were credited with destroying five enemy tanks and two guns. She was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War first class. Later, they were both injured fighting in the Baltics, but released from hospital in time to celebrate Victory Day in Czechoslovakia. After the war, she ran a bakery in Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, where she was elected to the city council twice, in 1947 and 1953.
- May 20, 1932 – Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland to begin the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a woman pilot, landing in Ireland the next day.
- May 20, 1941 – Maria Liberia Peters born, Netherlands Antilles Prime Minister (1984-1986 and 1988-1994); education advocate; Council of Women World Leaders member.
- May 20, 1946 – Cher born as Cherilyn Sarkisian, American singer-songwriter, actress, and producer; one of the best-selling music artists in history, she is also the winner of a Grammy, an Emmy, three Golden Globes, and an Oscar for Best Actress in Moonstruck; her charitable foundation supports health research, anti-poverty initiatives, veterans rights, protection of vulnerable children, humanitarian efforts in Armenia, and Habitat for Humanity – Cher has been an honorary chair of Habitat’s “Raise the Roof” campaign.
- May 20, 1949 – Michèle Roberts born, British-French essayist, novelist, and poet; a socialist and feminist, she was the poetry editor (1975-1977) at the feminist magazine, Spare Rib; her novel Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
- May 20, 1958 – Jane Wiedlin born, American musician, singer-songwriter, and animal rights activist; best known as the co-founder and rhythm guitarist of The Go-Go’s, but she has also had a successful solo career. Noted for the songs “Blue Kiss,” “Girl of 100 Lists,” “Rush Hour,” and “Inside a Dream.” Wiedlin is a long-time supporter of PETA, and was a performer in PETA’s 1989 “Rock Against Fur” concert.
- May 20, 1974 – Allison Amend born, American novelist and short story writer; noted for her short story collection Things That Pass for Love, and the novel Stations West, nominated for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
- May 20, 1974 – Karina Buhr born, Brazilian singer-songwriter, percussionist, and poet.
- May 20, 1996 – The U.S Supreme Court rules in Romer v. Evans against a law that would have prevented any city, town, or county in the state of Colorado from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to protect the rights of gays and lesbians.
- May 20, 2011 – Mamata Banerjee is sworn in as the Chief Minister of West Bengal, the first woman to hold the office.
- May 20, 2014 – Hominin fossils of very early human ancestors were found in the Turkana Basin in Northern Kenya; Dr. Sonia Harmand and Dr. Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University’s West Turkana Archaeological Project announced discovery of tools found near Lake Turkana dated to 3.3 million years ago, making them the oldest tools yet discovered.
- May 20, 2016 – Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, a Republican, vetoes a bill that would have effectively banned abortions in the state by making it a felony for doctors to perform abortions, except on women whose lives are at risk. Governor Fallin said, “The bill is so ambiguous and so vague that doctors cannot be certain what medical circumstances would be considered ‘necessary to preserve the life of the mother.’”
- May 20, 2018 – A report from the Center for American Progress shows that U.S. women made steadier and larger gains toward equality and leadership between 1980 and the early 2000s, but progress has been uneven, and there were far greater barriers faced by woman of color and women from ethnic minorities. While women have outnumbered men as college graduates since the 1990s, they are still underrepresented at the top levels in most fields, including business, science, medicine, and the law. In the 1990s and 2000s, the narrowing of the wage gap began to grind to a halt, and the percentage of women in management positions, especially in top management, stagnated. The most hopeful news in the 21st century has been the huge wave of women running for office in 2018, and the dramatic successes of many of them across the political field, from local and statewide offices through historic wins in the U.S. Congress. The number of women serving in state legislatures passed 2,000 for the first time; the number of women governors increased from six to nine, and there are now a total of 127 women serving in both houses of the U.S. Congress, holding 23.7% of the total. Most of the gains have been in the House of Representatives, and almost all the women are Democrats, which pundits credit to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s participation in the primaries, which its Republican counterpart does not, and the very effective spending for Democratic, pro-choice woman candidates by Emily’s List, the largest resource for U.S. women running for office at all levels of government.
- May 20, 2020 – New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has suggested employers consider a four-day working week and other flexible working options as a way to boost tourism and help employees address persistent work/life balance issues. There are questions about whether seismic, systemic change will result from the pandemic – or whether life will return to what it was before. Speaking from Rotorua, one of the country’s tourist hubs, Ardern said many New Zealanders said they would travel more domestically if they had more flexibility in their working lives. The country’s tourism market has taken a massive downturn after the pandemic, with all borders remaining closed to foreign nationals, and many New Zealanders taking pay-cuts or tightening their belt in case of lay-offs. “I hear lots of people suggesting we should have a four-day workweek. Ultimately that really sits between employers and employees. But as I’ve said there’s just so much we’ve learnt about Covid and that flexibility of people working from home, the productivity that can be driven out of that,” Ardern said.
- May 20, 2021 – Announcement of the final tally in Chile’s historic election to select the members of a new Constitution Convention to replace the 1980 Constitution written under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The results dealt a severe blow to the right-wing coalition Chile Vamos. Chile Vamos won just 37 of the 155 seats for the convention. Chileans, especially young voters, also rejected traditional center-left parties as insufficiently responsive to people’s craving for a more egalitarian society. 77 women were elected, and with their male allies, they should now be successful in decriminalizing abortion. 17 of the seats at the convention were reserved for Indigenous peoples, who have been fighting for rights over their ancestral lands for decades. Other likely reforms include ending discrimination against LGBTQ people, rooting out corruption, and increased protection of the environment.
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- May 21, 1758 – Twelve-year-old Mary Campbell is abducted by a band of Lenape, also known as the Delaware, in Pennsylvania. Increased numbers of British military troops in Pennsylvania and Ohio because of hostilities between Native Americans and settlers eventually led to a meeting of several tribes with Colonel Henry Bouquet in which he demanded return of all known captives, a list of 60 names, including Mary Campbell. She was returned to her family in 1764.
- May 21, 1780 – Elizabeth Fry born, English philanthropist, reformer, and Quaker, called “angel of prisons” for her campaigns to improve prison conditions after she made a visit to Newgate Prisons in 1813, and found overcrowded conditions and women who had not even been tried; she later funded a school for the children living in the prisons with their prisoner mothers, and founded the ‘Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate’ which provided materials for the women to learn sewing and knitting in order to earn money after their release.
- May 21, 1799 – Mary Anning born, British fossil collector and self-taught paleontologist, who made a number of important finds. She made her living, beginning in childhood with her father and brother, by finding fossils, often risking her life as she worked the unstable cliffs at Lyme. Once she was almost buried in a landslide, which did kill her old faithful dog. Although widely known for her fossil studies and knowledge, she wasn’t permitted to join the Geological Society of London because she was a woman, and did not always receive credit for her work. She was however greatly valued by some of its members. When it was learned that she had been diagnosed with cancer, they raised funds to help with her expenses, and the council of the Dorset County Museum made her an honorary member. She died at age 47 of breast cancer. Geological Society President Henry De la Beche gave a eulogy, the first for a woman at a meeting of the Geological Society, which was also published in the society’s quarterly – honors normally only accorded to fellows of the society, which did not admit women until 1904. A stained-glass window in her local parish church is inscribed: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life."
- May 21, 1806 – Harriet Elizabeth Georgiana Sutherland-Leveson-Gower born, Duchess of Sutherland. During Whig administrations, she was Mistress of the Robes (the senior lady in the Royal Household – when the Queen is queen regnant, meaning queen in her own right, as Victoria was, instead of queen consort, married to the ruling king, the appointment is political). She used her social position to undertake philanthropic projects, including organizing the protest by English ladies against American slavery.
- May 21, 1832 – Elizabeth Storrs Mead born, American academic, Mount Holyoke College President (1890-1900). Mount Holyoke, a private women’s liberal arts college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, was founded in 1837 as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and received its collegiate charter in 1888 as the Mount Holyoke Seminary and College. During Mead’s tenure, ‘Seminary’ was dropped, and it became Mount Holyoke College. She also pushed the Trustees for more on-campus accommodations for students, and for the hiring of servants to take over many of the domestic chores, such as washing dishes, being done by the students, to allow them more time for their studies.
- May 21, 1856 – Grace Hoadley Dodge born, American philanthropist and organizer, founder of the Association of Working Girls’ Societies, the first working girls society in New York City; she was also the main source of funds for the New York College for the Training of Teachers. In 1855, she brokered merging the AWGS with another young women’s group to form an American branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). She also organized a Travelers Aid Society in New York in 1907 to protect women travelers, and campaigned until her death in 1914 for all the societies to aid travelers founded in U.S. cities to form a national organization. Her goal became reality in 1917. The national TAS agencies help all travelers, and began operating troop transit lounges during WWI.
- May 21, 1864 – Princess Stéphanie of Belgium born, Crown Princess of Austria, and inventor; she took out patents on a combination chafing dish and spirit lamp.
- May 21, 1881 – Clara Barton founds the American Red Cross, in Washington D.C. She serves as the organization’s first president until 1904.
- May 21, 1887 – Ruth Law born, pioneering American woman aviator who was inspired to become a pilot by her brother, movie stuntman Rudman Law. Orville Wright refused to give her lessons because he believed that women weren’t mechanically inclined, which only made her more determined. Law not only learned to fly at the Burgess Flying School, she became an adept mechanic. She earned her pilot’s license in 1912. In 1915, she gave an aerobatics demonstration in Daytona Beach, Florida, where she looped the loop twice, causing her husband great anxiety. In 1916, she was a close second to a male flyer in an altitude competition, and in 1916, she broke the existing cross-America flight air speed record of 452 miles (728 km), set by Victor Carlstrom, when she flew nonstop 590 miles (950 km) from Chicago to New York State. The next day, as she flew over Manhattan, her fuel cut out, but she glided safely to land on Governors Island, where ‘Hap’ Arnold, future Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, changed her spark plugs. When the U.S. entered WWI in 1917, she campaigned unsuccessfully for women pilots to fly military aircraft. After the war, she set a women’s altitude record of nearly 14,7oo feet (4,481 m), but it only lasted two days before Raymonde de Laroche broke it. In 1922, her husband, exhausted by her dangerous exploits, announced her retirement to the newspapers without telling her, and she reluctantly gave in to his demand.
- May 21, 1901 – Baroness Suzanne Lilar born, Belgian journalist, author, and playwright, member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature; Le Divertissement portugais.
- May 21, 1901 – Regina M. Anderson born, American playwright and librarian; her mixed heritage included Native American, Jewish, East Indian, Swedish, and other European ancestry (including a Confederate general grandfather); one of her grandparents was of African descent, born in Madagascar; though she identified herself as simply American, she was a key member of the Harlem Renaissance. She was born in Chicago, and spent a year at Wilberforce University and worked in its Carnegie Library. In 1921, she returned to Chicago, and was hired as a junior library assistant at the Chicago Public Library. She then moved to New York, and was living at the YWCA when she applied for a job with the New York Public Library. When the interviewer saw that she had filled in ‘American’ in the blank for nationality, he told her that she was a Negro, not an American. But she was hired to work at the 135th Street branch in Harlem, which was run by innovative librarian Ernestine Rose. The 135th Street Branch became a community center where groups like the NAACP and a high school boys' group studying black history held meetings, and there were frequent speakers and events. Anderson’s apartment, dubbed ‘Dream Haven,’ was shared with civil rights activist Ethel Ray and Louella Tucker, on the staff at Opportunity magazine. It quickly became a social center for writers like Zora Neale Hurston (she slept on their couch during a financial drought), Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude MacKay. Soon a Who’s Who of the Harlem Renaissance were frequent visitors to Dream Haven. Anderson also read voraciously so she could recommend new books to the library’s patrons. She became involved in two theatre groups and wrote three plays under the pen name Ursula Trelling. She was promoted within the library system, but then found herself being passed over. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a series of letters on her behalf to the NY Public Library higher-ups, and in 1938, she became the first African-American head of a branch, at the 115th Street branch, and later became head of the Washington Heights branch. After almost 40 years, she reached the mandatory retirement age of 65, and spent much of her retirement traveling, before she passed away in 1993.
- May 21, 1913 – Gina Bachauer born, Greek classical pianist who frequently appeared with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. In 1976, the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition was founded in Salt Lake City in her memory.
- May 21, 1918 – The U.S. House of Representatives passes the amendment to give women the vote by 274 to 136. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in Congress (a Republican from Montana, where women got the vote in 1914) spoke: “How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen: how shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?” The amendment fails to pass in the Senate, and has to be introduced all over again 1919.
- May 21, 1923 – Dorothy Hewitt born, Australian poet, novelist, playwright and feminist; while working under pen names for the Communist paper, The Tribune, she also worked in a clothing factory, so her first novel, Bobbin Up, is semi-autobiographical; she became disillusioned with the Communist Party in the 1960s, and renounced her membership after the Soviet Army’s brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968; her collection of poems, Rapunzel in Suburbia, was published in 1975, and Virago Press published her autobiography, Wild Card.
- May 21, 1927 – Lida Kittrell Barrett born, American mathematician, and head of the mathematics department at the University of Tennessee (1973-1980), then administrator and mathematics faculty member at Northern Illinois University, where she was Associate Provost, and at Mississippi State University, where she was Dean of Arts and Sciences. After retiring from MSU, she was a Senior Associate at the Education Directorate of the National Science Foundation for 3 years, followed by 3 years as a Professor of Mathematics at West Point. She is an active member of the American Mathematics Society and the second woman president of the Mathematical Association of America. In 2008, the MAA presented Barrett with the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics.
- May 21, 1932 – Inese Jaunzeme born, Latvian Olympic javelin thrower who won the gold medal at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne; served as head of the Latvian Olympians Association (1999-2011). She was also a plastic surgeon, in the field of traumatology, the repair of damage caused by accidents or violence.
- May 21, 1932 – Even though strong winds and dangerous icy conditions force Amelia Earhart to land in a pasture in Derry, Northern Ireland, far short of her intended goal of Paris, she is the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. The U.S. Congress awards her the Distinguished Flying Cross.
- May 21, 1934 – Jocasta Innes born in China, British author, journalist, and businesswoman; her father was an oil company executive, and her mother was a teacher; by the time she was 12, Innes had lived on every continent except Antarctica. She read Modern Languages at Girton College, Cambridge. Early in her career, she worked on the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ and was known for her charm in gatecrashing debutante balls that were a main source of material for the ‘Diary.’ In 1971, after she left her first husband and two children, her first book was published, The Pauper’s Cookbook, and became a bestseller in Britain, followed by The Pauper’s Homemaking Book, The Country Kitchen, and Paint Magic. She founded her company, Paint Magic, and was the company’s CEO during its ten years of operation.
- May 21, 1944 – Mary Robinson born, first woman President of Ireland (1990-1997), graduate of Harvard Law School, advocate for gender equality, and women’s participation in peace-building and human rights expansion; UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002).
- May 21, 1944 – Haleh Afshar born in Iran, Baroness Afshar, British academic and life peer in the House of Lords; prominent Shi’a Muslim feminist; educated in England, earning a Ph.D. from New Hall, Cambridge; in Iran, she worked as a civil servant in land reform, and as a journalist, one of the first cohort of Iranian women to vote, but left during the Iranian Revolution; professor of women’s studies at the University of York; appointed to the board of the Women’s National Commission in 2008, and is a founding member of the Muslim Women’s Network.
- May 21, 1947 – Linda Laubenstein born, American physician, specialist in hematology and oncology, she was an early HIV/AIDS researcher and activist, one of the first U.S. doctors to recognize the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s; co-author of the first article linking AIDS with Kaposi’s sarcoma; a childhood bout of polio left her paraplegic, and in a wheelchair for the remainder of her life; she died suddenly at age 45 of a heart attack.
- May 21, 1948 – Elizabeth Buchan born, British non-fiction writer and novelist; known for a biography, Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit, and the novels Consider the Lily and That Certain Age.
- May 21, 1954 – Janice Karman born, American actress, film and record producer, singer and voice artist; co-founder with her husband of Bagdasarian Productions, which creates records and cartoons.
- May 21, 1955 – Vicki L. Ruiz born, American historian, author, and essayist, expert on Mexican-American women in the 20th century. Her first book, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950, was inspired by her graduate school professor Albert Camarillo at Stanford University, who introduced her to the history of women’s cannery unions in California, and the Labor activist Luisa Moreno. Her other books include Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women’s History (editor), Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family and Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boricua and Chicana Histories. In 2015, Ruiz was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
- May 21, 1958 – Muffy Thomas Calder born in Canada, Scottish computer scientist and academic; since 2005, Vice-Principal and Head of College of Science and Engineering, as well as Professor of Formal Methods at the University of Glasgow; Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government (2012-2015).
- May 21, 1966 – Lisa Edelstein born, American actress and playwright; best known for playing Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the TV series House. In the 1980s, she wrote, composed, and starred in Positive Me, a musical about the growing AIDs crisis, which was performed at the LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. She is an ambassador for Best Friends Animal Society, and promotes vegetarianism.
- May 21, 1973 – Eleven months after Title IX becomes effective, Swimmer Lynn Genesko receives first athletic scholarship awarded to a woman (University of Miami).
- May 21, 1979 – Sonja Vectomov born, Czech-Finnish electronic musician and composer; noted for her debut album Lamprophenia, and her music workshops for at-risk youths and disadvantaged Romani children in the Czech Republic.
- May 21, 1995 – Hannah Einbinder born, American comedian, actress, and writer; best known for playing Ava on the HBO Max series Hacks (2021 - ), for which she was nominated for both a Primetime Emmy and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
- May 21, 2001 – France’s Taubira law, named for French Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira, officially recognizes the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity.
- May 21, 2019 – #StoptheBans Protesters rallied across the U.S. in opposition to the restrictive abortion laws recently signed by Republican governors in Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri. There were over 500 demonstrations, but the main protest took place on the steps of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, where Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lambasted Republican lawmakers for voting for judges who have criticized Roe v. Wade, and Representative Jackie Speier (Democrat-California) spoke about her own experience with a second-trimester abortion, which would be banned under the new state bills. Multiple Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators Amy Klobuchar (Democrat-Minnesota), Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont), Cory Booker (Democrat-New Jersey), and Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat –New York), were also in attendance. Senator Gillibrand said that if Donald Trump wants to have “a war on women in America . . . he will have it and he will lose it. Because American women are not going to accept this." Senator Kamala Harris tweeted, “We will fight with everything we’ve got to protect a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions.”
- May 21, 2020 – Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers founded Chief, a private network for women leaders in business in 2019. They say that networking is even more important during the Covid-19 pandemic. Investors in the New York-based startup agree, and have raised $15 million USD in new funding for the organization. "When we founded Chief, we set out to create a community that would support women leaders for their lifetime, even through global disruption," said Chief CEO Carolyn Childers in a statement. "When you surround yourself with peers who are equally qualified, intelligent and capable, the impossible suddenly becomes possible. In an uncertain world, we have never been more certain about the power of community to drive meaning, support and connection. Chief was built for this moment." The new funding will be used to expand Chief’s digital offerings and online services.
- May 21, 2021 – Lady Gaga revealed new details about the sexual assault she suffered when she was 19. Speaking on The Me You Can’t See, Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry’s new Apple TV+ series about mental health, she said the rape – that she first disclosed in 2014 – was by a music producer and left her pregnant. “I was 19 years old, and I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off,’” she said. “And I said no. And I left, and they told me they were going to burn all of my music. And they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop asking me, and I just froze and – I don’t even remember.” She said “I was sick for weeks after ... the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner [by] my parent’s house, because I was vomiting and sick. Because I had been abused, and I was locked away in a studio for months.” She did not name the producer, saying: “I do not ever want to face that person again.” In an interview in 2015, she said, “I didn’t tell anyone for I think seven years. I didn’t know how to accept it. I didn’t know how to not blame myself or think it was my fault. It changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed thoughts.”
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- May 22, 1772 – Ram Mohan Roy born, Indian philosopher and reformer, advocate for abolishing sati, the custom of a widow (suttee, “good woman”) casting herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, which was held up as an ideal of Hindu womanly devotion, but there were instances of compulsion applied to widows of propertied men, from other relatives wanting to inherit her share of the estate.
- May 22, 1814 – Amalia Lindegren born, Swedish painter, one of only four women given a dispensation to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (1849-1850), and the first woman to be given a scholarship by the academy to study art in Paris (1850-1853).
- May 22, 1844 – Mary Cassatt born, American Impressionist painter and printmaker, one of “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism. The Paris Salon accepted her paintings for exhibitions in 1872, 1873 and 1874.
- May 22, 1846 – Rita Cetina Gutiérrez born, Mexican teacher, poet, and pioneering Mexican feminist who promoted secular education; opened La Siempreviva (‘everlasting’), Mexico’s first secular school for poor girls, and an art college for young women; established simultaneously a scientific and literary society and a newspaper of the same name, specifically written for young women.
- May 22, 1907 – Edith Margaret Faulstich born, American philatelist and philatelic journalist and editor, a specialist in postal history and postal covers; a founding member of the Postal History Society of the Americas, and its first woman president.
- May 22, 1909 – Margaret Brown Mee born, British botanical artist, environmentalist, and trade unionist, specialist in plants of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest; after moving to Brazil in 1952, she worked as a botanical artist for São Paulo’s Instituto de Botanica (1958-1964), creating 400 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks and 15 diaries of her explorations; one of the first people protest the impact of large-scale mining and deforestation on the Amazon Basin; she is noted for Flowers of the Brazilian Forests and The Diaries of Margaret Mee.
- May 22, 1913 – Dominique Rolin born, Belgian novelist and feminist who wrote over 30 books; she won the 1952 Prix Femina for Le Souffle (The Breath). In her later work, such as Le Gâteau des morts (The Deathday Cake), she explored more introspective, psychoanalytic, and often semiautobiographical, themes.
- May 22, 1930 – Marisol Escobar born in Paris, French sculptor of Venezuelan heritage who worked in New York City; feminist who used exaggerated, stylized feminine poses and behaviors in several satirical works.
- May 22, 1943 – Betty Williams born, Northern Irish peace activist, co-founder with Mairead Corrigan of the Community of Peace People; co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize; co-founder of the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006 with Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Jody Williams, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, to support women’s rights campaigns around the world.
- May 22, 1946 – Lyudmila Zhuravleva born, Ukrainian astronomer; at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, she discovered 213 minor planets and asteroids. The main-belt asteroid 26087 Zhuravleva, discovered by her colleague Lyudmila Karachkina at Nauchnij, was named in her honor.
- May 22, 1950 – Irène Frain born, French novelist, journalist, and historian; founding member of the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society; Le Nabab (The Nabob); advocate and activist for the Tibetan cause and Aid to Tibetan Children.
- May 22, 1954 – Barbara May Cameron born, American photographer, poet, writer, and nationally recognized human rights activist in the fields of lesbian rights, women's rights, and Native American rights. She was a member of the Hunkpapa Lakota of the Standing Rock Nation. She attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1975, Cameron was the co-founder, with Alaska native activist Randy Burns, of the Gay American Indians (GAI), and was an organizer (1980-1985) of the San Francisco Lesbian Gay Freedom Day Parade and Celebration. In the late 1980s, she was vice president of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, and part of a Somos Hermanas (We Are Sisters) delegation that went to Nicaragua to find out about the situation of women there, and help to improve their lives. Cameron was executive director (1989-1992) of Community United Against Violence (CUAV), assisting victims of domestic violence and hate crimes. In 1992-1993, she was the first recipient of the Bay Area Career Women Community Service Award, and became part of the International Indigenous AIDS Network, traveling to reservations across the U.S. as a leader in AIDS education. She founded the Institute on Native American Health and Wellness, and working on publishing the works of Native American women writers. She died in 2002 at age 47.
- May 22, 1954 – Galina Vasilyevna Amelkina born, Russian physician and cosmonaut (1980-1983); Assistant Director of Moscow Stomatological (diagnosis and treatment of mouth and dental disease) Institute.
- May 22, 1956 – Lucie Brock-Boido born, American poet who published four collections of poetry; winner of the Witter-Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She died of cancer at age 61 in 2018.
- May 22, 1959 – Mehbooba Mufti born, Indian politician; since 2016, the first woman Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and the second Muslim woman chef minister in India; president of the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party, and a member of the Indian Parliament (2004-2009).
- May 22, 1967 – Brooke Smith born, American actress whose first break came in 1991 as the young woman abducted in the film The Silence of the Lambs, but she is best known for playing Dr. Erica Hahn on the TV series Grey’s Anatomy (2006-2008). She has directed a short film and a full-length documentary.
- May 22, 1976 – Cheyenne Carron born, French film director, screenwriter, and producer; noted for her film Jeunesse aux coeurs ardents (translated as Youth with Burning Hearts).
- May 22, 1980 – Sharice Davids born, lawyer and Democratic politician; U.S. Representative for the Kansas Third District since 2019. She and Deb Halland of New Mexico are the first two Native American women elected to the U.S. Congress, and Davids is the first openly gay person elected from Kansas to the U.S. House. She has written a children’s book called Sharice’s Big Voice: A Native American Kid Becomes a Congresswoman.
- May 22, 2002 – Thirty-nine years later, a jury in Birmingham, Alabama, convicts former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Frank Cherry of the 1963 murders of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
- May 22, 2003 – Annika Sörenstam plays in the men’s Colonial golf tournament in Fort Worth Texas, the second woman to play against the men in a PGA Tour event, after Babe Zaharias played in the 1945 Los Angeles Open. Asked if she would ever play a men’s event again, Sörenstam said, “No. I play golf for one reason, to have a chance to win on Sunday. I can't do that out here so why should I play? I proved I could handle it. That's all I wanted."
- May 22, 2009 – In Washington state, Linda Fleming, a 66-year-old woman with pancreatic cancer, becomes the first assisted suicide under the state’s “Death With Dignity” law.
- May 22, 2012 – British Naval Commander Sarah West becomes the first woman to take command of major British warship, the HMS Portland.
- May 22, 2015 – The Republic of Ireland becomes the first nation in the world to legalize same-sex marriage in a public referendum.
- May 22, 2018 – Former Georgia state House minority leader Stacey Abrams wins the Democratic primary for Georgia’s gubernatorial race, the first woman nominee for governor of Georgia from either party. She went on to lose the hotly contested race by roughly 18,000 votes, amid charges of conflict of interest and voter suppression against her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, who was Georgia’s secretary of state and refused to step down until after the election. Among the responsibilities of the Georgia secretary of state are oversight of voter registration and certification of the state’s election results.
- May 22, 2019 – The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed changing an Obama-era rule that protected homeless transgender people. The change would let federally funded shelters deny transgender people admission on religious grounds. The facilities could also make transgender women share bathrooms and sleeping quarters with men. The proposal came one day after HUD Secretary Ben Carson testified at a congressional hearing that HUD had no plans to scrap the 2012 Equal Access Rule prohibiting federal housing discrimination due to sexual orientation or gender identity. "I'm not currently anticipating changing the rule," Carson said under questioning by Representative Jennifer Wexton (Democrat-Virginia).
- May 22, 2020 – In the 2018 midterm elections, 529 women ran for Congress, a historic high, but at this point in 2020 that record was already broken: 538 women candidates had filed their paperwork. According to Rutger University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), the majority of them, 490 women, were running for seats in the House, up from 476 in 2018. 48 women have filed to run for the Senate in 2020, down from 2018’s record high of 53. The number of Republican women running for House seats rose from a midterm election high of 133 women in 2010 to a new record new record of 195 GOP candidates.
- May 22, 2021 – Billie Piper, who began her performing career as a 15-year-old pop music wunderkind before becoming an acclaimed dramatic actress, made her directorial debut with the feature film Rare Beasts, billed as an “anti rom-com.” The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival in August, 2019, but its opening in UK theaters was delayed by the pandemic until this date. She also wrote the screenplay and played the film’s protagonist, a single mother working at a production company “whose creative meetings are like an encounter group for raving misogynists” according to the Guardian. Piper denies that the worst male character of the lot, who finds women “intolerable,” is based on her second ex-husband. Critics gave Piper higher marks for her directing skills than for her screenplay.
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- May 23, 1430 – Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) is captured by the Burgundians while with the army marching to raise the Siege of Compiègne; the Burgundians sell her to their English allies.
- May 23, 1810 – Margaret Fuller born, journalist, editor, author, and women’s rights advocate. She was the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial (1840-1844). Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first major U.S. feminist work, which began as an essay in The Dial in 1843. Her non-fiction book Summer on the Lakes, 1843, chronicles her trip to the Great Lakes Region. She met several Native Americans, including members of the Ottawa and the Chippewa tribes, and considered that they had been much wronged. She also wrote critically of the wholesale clearing of the land by white settlers. By her 30s, Fuller was considered the best-read person in New England, male or female, and was the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. She joined the New York Tribune staff under Horace Greeley (1844), becoming one of the first American literary critics, then became the first American female foreign correspondent, and the first American woman war correspondent, while traveling in England, France, and Italy, where she reported on the Italian States Revolution of 1848, sending back eye-witness accounts of the uprising in Rome. She met Giovanni Angelo, the Marchese d’Ossoli, a liberal revolutionary who was ten years younger. They became lovers, and she had a son in 1848. They were married the next year. After the Roman uprising was put down, they fled to Florence (1849). When the family sailed for the U.S., their ship ran aground in a storm off Fire Island, NY, in July 1850. Their bodies were never found.
- May 23, 1827 – The Infant School Society: the first U.S. nursery school was established in New York by Joanna Bethune and Hannah L. Murray, “to relieve parents of the laboring classes from the care of their children while engaged in the vocations by which they lived, and provide for the children, a protection from the weather, from idleness and the contamination of evil example besides affording them the means of early and efficient education.” Almost 500 children of mothers working to support their families were cared for in the first 2 years.
- May 23, 1842 – Maria Konopnicka born, Polish poet, novelist, short story writer, translator, journalist, activist for women’s rights, and for Polish independence. She was a notable figure in Poland’s ‘Positivist’ sociocultural movement, which followed Poland’s 1863 uprising against the Russian Empire, and lasted until the beginning of the 20th century. She married in 1862, but it was an unhappy union, as her husband disapproved of her writing career, so she often used pen-names. In 1878, she took their six children and left him, moving to Warsaw. She published five poetry collections. In 1890, she published her short story, Mendel Gdański, to speak out against the anti-Semitism prevalent in Poland at the end of the 19th century. She died at age 68 in 1910.
- May 23, 1846 – Arabella Mansfield born as Belle Aurelia Babb, the first U.S. woman to pass the bar exam (and scored highly), in Iowa, even though only men were supposed to take the exam. Shortly after her court challenge, Iowa amended its licensing statue and became the first U.S. state to accept women and minorities to the bar. She didn’t earn a living as a lawyer, but taught English and History at Simpson College and Iowa Wesleyan, and later served as a dean in both the music and art schools at DePauw University. Mansfield was one of the organizers of the Iowa Suffrage Society.
- May 23, 1855 – Isabella Ford born, English author, lecturer, suffragist, trade unionist and social reformer; she was brought up in an atmosphere of radical liberal politics, women’s rights, and humanitarian causes. Visitors to her family’s home included prison reformer Josephine Butler and women’s health pioneer Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Ford grew up to work with women mill workers and trade unionists; she was a member of the National Administrative Council of the Independent Labour Party, and the first woman to speak at a Labour Representation Committee conference (now the British Labour Party).
- May 23, 1875 – Kate Bernard born, teacher, social reformer, a secretary for territorial Oklahoma territorial legislature (1904), and the first woman to be elected to a statewide position in Oklahoma, as Commissioner of Charities and Corrections in 1907. She was reelected in 1910. As commissioner, she was a key player in enacting compulsory education legislation, state support for poor widows dependent on their children's earnings, statutes implementing a constitutional ban on child labor, statues addressing unsafe working conditions, and ending the blacklisting of union members. She also worked for increased federal protection of all Five Tribes’ members, and exposed abusive treatment of prisoners being held in Kansas prisons under a contract with Oklahoma, including forced labor in coal mines and torture. Her work and outspoken denunciation led to the construction of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary to house Oklahoma’s prisoners. But her advocacy on behalf of Native American children during her second term led to pressure from business interests on the state legislature, which defunded her office. She died in 1930 at age 54.
- May 23, 1879 – Elizabeth Gunn born, New Zealand pediatrician and children’s health pioneer; served in WWI as a captain in the New Zealand Medical Corps; after the war, she was employed by the school medical service, and set up “health camps” for malnourished children to spend 3 weeks eating nourishing food, and getting fresh air and sunshine, eventually organized as the National Federation of Health Camps.
- May 23, 1898 – Blanche Charlet born in London; she was managing an art gallery in Brussels when the Nazis invaded Belgium in May 1940. She fled to England, and joined the Women’s Transport Service, but was soon recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) because she was fluent in French, and was in the first training program for F Section (F for France) female agents. At age 44, she was one of the oldest SOE agents sent to France. Covertly landed on the French Riviera in Vichy France in September 1942, she reached Cannes, but her contact had been arrested, so she went on to Lyon, because she had been sent to replace Virginia Hall, an American who worked with both the OSS and the SOE there. However, Hall directed her to the Ventriloquist Network in the Sologne region of central France. Charlet's first task was to find a safe house where wireless operator Brian Stonehouse could transmit and receive messages. She found a rental house in a suburb of Lyon, then served as a courier between Ventriloquist’s leader, Philippe de Vomécourt, and Stonehouse. Charlet and Stonehouse were arrested in October 1942 as he was sending a wireless message to SOE headquarters in London. Many SOE agents were tortured and executed after their arrests, but Charlet under interrogation proved adept at portraying herself as a vacuous woman ignorant of politics, concocting elaborate stories about lovers and fainting when under pressure from her interrogators. In November 1942, she was sentenced to incarceration in Castres prison in southern France. The French-run prison was lax about security. In September 1943, Charlet was one of at least 37 prisoners who escaped, after stealing pistols and cell keys, and locking up or tricking the guards. Charlet and Suzanne Warenghem, a young French woman who had been a courier for the Pat O'Leary Escape Line, reached open country and a local farmer helped them reach a Benedictine monastery. They were hidden in the monastery’s guest house for two months before the monks could take them to an escape line which took refugees over the Pyrénées mountains to Spain, but heavy snow prevented them from crossing. Unable to reach Spain, Charlet and Warenghem, now in touch with SOE headquarters in London, went to Paris and then Lyon. Charlet was worried she might be recognized in Lyon, and traveled to the Jura Mountains near the border of Switzerland to work as a courier and guide for SOE. In April 1944, SOE arranged for Charlet and Warenghem to escape from France. They had to cross France again, to Brittany, where they were picked up on a beach by a small boat, and rowed offshore to a motor torpedo boat, a dangerous operation as the Germans were fortifying the French coast in anticipation of an Allied invasion. During their escape they were fired on, but their boat outraced German pursuers and they arrived safely in Plymouth in April 1944. In 1946, Charlet was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for "services in France during the enemy occupation."
- May 23, 1908 – Hélène Boucher born, notable French aviator and aerobatics pilot, who set several women’s world speed records, and held the international (male or female) record for speed over 621 mph (1,000 km) in 1934; after she was killed in a plane crash, she became the first woman to lie in state at Les Invalides.
- May 23, 1910 – Margaret Wise Brown born, children’s book author; best known for Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny.
- May 23, 1914 – Barbara M. Ward born, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, British economist and writer. She graduated in 1935, and did post-graduate work on Austrian politics and economics, and witnessed the growing anti-Semitism there and in Nazi Germany, and began to help Jewish refugees. She was one of the founding members of the Sword of the Spirit, originally intended as an organization to bring together Catholics and Anglicans opposing Nazism, but which quickly became a Roman Catholic group. During WWII, she worked for the Ministry of Information, and traveled in Europe and the U.S. After publication of her 1938 book, The International Share-out, she was offered a job at The Economist, where she was promoted to foreign editor before she left the magazine in 1950 for marriage to Australian Commander Robert Jackson, a UN administrator. Ward continued to use her own name professionally. Because of his work, they lived for a time in West Africa, and then made several trips to India. These experiences helped form her view that Western nations should contribute to the economic development of poorer countries. Before and during her marriage, she had been a frequent lecturer and public speaker, and several of her lecture series were published in book form. In 1966, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also published Spaceship Earth, her first book on sustainable development and her concerns about the conservation of Earth’s finite resources. Ward was also a Carnegie Fellow at Harvard University, and acted as an adviser to Robert McNamara at the World Bank and to Lyndon Johnson, who appreciated her thoughts on the Great Society in spite of her opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1971, she was the first woman to address a synod or Roman Catholic bishops. After 20 years of near constant travel, together and separately, their marriage began to unravel, and they legally separated in the early 1970s, but did not divorce because of her Catholicism. When Ward was given a life peerage in 1976, she used her estranged husband’s surname for her title. In 1972, she and René Jules Dubos co-authored a pioneering report, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, for the UN Stockholm conference on the Human Environment, which became their book, Only One Earth. Ward’s last book, Progress for a Small Planet, was written while she was fighting cancer. It was published in 1979. She died in 1981.
- May 23, 1914 – Celestine Sibley born, American journalist for the Atlanta Constitution (1941-1999), covering the Georgia General Assembly, and author of Children, My Children, which won the 1982 Townsend Prize for Fiction.
- May 23, 1919 – Ruth Fernández born, Puerto Rican contralto, known as “La Negra de Ponce” who broke racial barriers as the first Afro-Puerto Rican female singer to gain popularity and success at home and on tour in Latin American and the U.S.; as a member of the Puerto Rican Senate (1973-1981), she campaigned for many reforms, including better working conditions.
- May 23, 1923 – Alicia de Larrocha born, Spanish pianist, considered the “greatest Spanish pianist in history.”
- May 23, 1926 – Aileen Clarke Hernandez born, union organizer, civil rights activist, second National Organization for Women national president, co-founder of Black Women Organized for Action, San Francisco.
- May 23, 1940 – Cora Sadosky born, Argentinean mathematician and academic, left Argentina because of political unrest, and was Professor of Mathematics at Howard University in the 1980s; appointed to a visiting professorship for women from the National Science Foundation for 1983-1984 and again in 1995-1996; elected president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1993-1995).
- May 23, 1943 – Rejoice Thizwilondi Mabudafhazi born, South African activist and public servant; Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture (2014-2017); Deputy Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs (1999-2014); Deputy Minister of Tourism (1999- 2009); member of the National Executive Council of the African National Congress (ANC) since 2007; served as a Commissioner on the Human Rights Commission (1990-1992); founding member of the National Education Co-Ordination Committee, and the NECC’s national organizer for self-help projects for rural women (1985-1986).
- May 23, 1947 – Jane Kenyon born, American poet and translator; she won the 1994 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, for body of work; she was the author of five poetry collections, the final one, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, was published posthumously in 1996, a year after her death from leukemia at age 47.
- May 23, 1956 – Ursula Plassnik born, Austrian diplomat and People’s Party politician; Austrian ambassador to Switzerland since 2016; Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs (2004-2008); Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s cabinet chief (1997-2004); member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
- May 23, 1961 – Norrie May-Welby born in Scotland, Australian transsexual person who pursued legal status as being neither a man or a woman from 2010 to 2014, when the High Court of Australia ruled in NSW Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages v Norrie that it is in the power of the New South Wales Registry of Births to register May-Welby as ‘non-specific’; began protesting the Australian marriage law defining marriage as between a man and a woman until 2017, which prevented May-Welby and partner from obtaining a marriage license.
- May 23, 1963 – Viviane Baladi born in Switzerland, French mathematician researching dynamical systems; a director of research at the Centre national de la recherché scientifique (CNRS) in Paris since 1990, with a leave of absence to teach at the University of Geneva (1993-1999); author of Positive Transfer Operators and Decay of Correlation (2000).
- May 23, 1964 – Ruth Metzler born, Swiss politician and corporate executive; Vice President of Switzerland (2003); Minister of Justice and Police (1999-2003); Member of the Swiss Federal Council (1999-2003); working for pharmaceutical company Novartis since 2005.
- May 23, 1967 – Anna Ibrisagic born in Yugoslavia, Swedish Moderate Party politician and member of its Executive since 2001; interpreter (English, German, Russian, and Swedish); member of the European Parliament (2004-2014), and sat on the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs.
- May 23, 1968 – Guinevere Turner born, American screenwriter and actress; wrote screenplays for Go Fish, American Psycho, and The Notorious Bettie Page.
- May 23, 1974 – Manuela Schwesig born, German Social Democratic Party politician; Acting Leader of the Social Democratic Party since 2019; Prime Minister of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern since 2017; Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth (2013-2017); Minister of Labour, Equality, and Social Affairs of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (2011-2013).
- May 23, 1987 – Gracie Otto born, Australian documentary and short subject filmmaker, noted for 2013’s The Last Impresario.
- May 23, 1991 – Sarah Jarosz born, American singer-songwriter; she has had a successful solo career, and is also a co-founder of the all-woman band I’m With Her in 2014. Jarosz won Grammy Awards for Best Folk Album (Undercurrent in 2017) and Best Americana Album (World on the Ground in 2021).
- May 23, 2012 – UN International Day to End Obstetric Fistula is a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly as part of efforts to end child marriage and early childbearing, which increases the risks of complications like Obstetric Fistula during pregnancy, especially among girls and women living in poverty who lack access to obstetric care and are often malnourished.
- May 23, 2015 – Myanmar President Thein Sein implements controversial population control law requiring women to wait 3 years between births, seen as targeting minorities, particularly Rohingya Muslims. In a cruel irony, Rohingya women in refugee camps are the frequent targets of rape by soldiers and sex traffickers.
- May 23, 2018 – A record number of women were on the ballot for Lebanon’s first parliamentary elections since 2009. An unprecedented 113 women registered as candidates for party lists, and 86 of them became party candidates. In 2009, only 12 women had registered to become candidates. Just six of the 86 women in this election were elected to Parliament, but the outgoing lawmaking body only had four women out of 128 parliamentarians.
- May 23, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) said that Donald Trump had committed impeachable offenses and that he wanted the House to impeach him so the Republican-controlled Senate could exonerate him. Pelosi said, however, that she would be sticking to an effort to investigate him to get the truth out to the American people without resorting to impeachment, which she said was "a very divisive place to go in our country." Pelosi openly questioned Trump's fitness for office, and said his family or staff should stage an "intervention" for the good of the country. Trump responded by calling Pelosi crazy. "She's a mess," Trump said. "I'm an extremely stable genius."
- May 23, 2020 – On a Saturday when the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 had reached 96,000, after a morning round of golf, Donald Trump went on a Twitter spree, retweeting posts mocking several big-name Democratic women, including conservative talk show host John Stahl’s tweets in which he called Hillary Clinton a “skank,” insulted Nancy Pelosi’s looks, and made fun of Stacey Abrams’ weight.
- May 23, 2021 – In the UK, Kim Leadbeater, younger sister of the late MP Jo Cox, was selected by of 80% of local Labour party members to contest a byelection in Batley and Spen, the constituency where her sister was murdered in 2016. The byelection follows the resignation of Tracy Brabin, after she was elected the first ever mayor of West Yorkshire earlier in May. Leadbeater had been working with the Jo Cox Foundation, which was set up in 2016 in memory of the slain MP. Leadbeater told members of the Batley and Spen Labour party: “I’m a proud Yorkshire woman and have lived in Batley and Spen all my life. I have a deep understanding of the area, its people and some of the challenges it faces. I feel passionately about the strength there is in such a diverse constituency … I am overwhelmed and humbled by the support and faith from members in Batley and Spen. I’m ready to hit the ground running and take Labour’s campaign to local people.” She was elected, assumed office in July, 2021, and gave her maiden speech in Parliament during a debate on her sister’s legacy in September 2021, declaring that the safety of MPs was not being taken seriously enough.
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- May 24, 1576 – Elizabeth Carey born, English courtier, and patron of the arts. She was educated by her mother and a tutor in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, amassing a multi-lingual library of thousands of books. In 1596, when she was 19, she married Sir Thomas Berkeley, and became Lady Berkeley. He ran up enormous debts by 1607, and she took over the management of his affairs, selling properties which were her own inheritance to pay down some of the debt. In 1609, Sir Thomas signed a contract handing over all responsibility for household management jointly to Elizabeth and John Smyth, the Berkeley family steward. By her husband’s death at age 37 in 1611, she was able to pay off the remaining outstanding debts. She remarried in 1622, and was a notable patron of Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe and antiquarian William Camden, as well as Frenchman Peter Erondelle, who wrote a French primer and book of manners for English readers.
- May 24, 1819 – Queen Victoria born, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and from 1876 on, also Empress of India; she was opposed to women's rights for all women, except herself.
- May 24, 1840 – “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is published as a poem by American writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who campaigned for higher education for women, and for a national Thanksgiving Day.
- May 24, 1870 – Ynes Mexia born, Mexican-American botanist and explorer; although she did not take her first field trip until age 55, she discovered over 132,000 plant species, mostly in the Andes and Central America, providing research institutions with vast collections of specimens with accurate and extensive annotations. In 1929, she began a 2½ year expedition in Peru and Brazil, during which her team was trapped by floods for three months in a deep gorge, before escaping by building a raft and running the river rapids.
- May 24, 1878 – Lillian Moller Gilbreth born, American psychologist, industrial engineer, efficiency expert, and author; time-and-motion study pioneer; first woman member of the Society of Industrial Engineers and the first woman to win the Hoover Medal for distinguished public service by an engineer; author of Cheaper by the Dozen.
- May 24, 1885 – Susan Sutherland Isaacs born, CBE; British educational psychologist and psychoanalyst, and nursery school advocate.
- May 24, 1892 – Elizabeth Foreman Lewis born, American children’s author who was a Methodist missionary and teacher in China until illness forced her to return to the U.S.; her first book, Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze, inspired by her experiences in China, won the 1933 Newbery Award.
- May 24, 1898 – Kathleen Hale born, British author, artist, and illustrator; best known for her children’s book series Orlando the Marmalade Cat.
- May 24, 1898 – Helen Brooke Taussig born, American physician, and founder of pediatric cardiology; a pioneer in using X-rays and fluoroscopy to identify heart defects in newborns; with Alfred Blalock, developed Blalock-Taussig surgical procedure for treating ‘blue baby’ syndrome, and the Blalock-Taussig shunt (between the pulmonary artery and the aorta). One of the first doctors to expose the terrible birth defects caused by the drug thalidomide; Taussig was the first woman president of the American Heart Association; co-recipient with Blalock of the 1954 Albert Lasker Award, and a 1964 Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson.
- May 24, 1902 – Sylvia Daoust born, French Canadian sculptor, one of the first women sculptors in Québec; noted for portrait busts; lived to age 104.
- May 24, 1917 – Florence Knoll Bassett born, American architect, interior designer, and furniture designer, known for bringing modernist design to office interiors. She worked to professionalize the field of interior design, fighting against gender stereotypes of the decorator. Known for her open office designs, populated with modernist furniture and organized for the needs of office workers. She was a partner with her husband Hans Knoll in Knoll Associates from 1945 until his death in a car crash in 1955, when she took over as president of the company. Among her innovations, she redesigned conference tables from long rectangles to boat-shapes so that people could see one another to make group discussions easier. Before Knoll's influence, interior decor was mostly a non-professional pursuit, and mostly applied to the home. Spaces like offices were not usually professionally planned or designed. Knoll saw an opportunity: “In those days the boss usually had a decorator. They did his office and maybe some of the other senior executives, but the people further down the line had offices designed by a purchasing agent, who ordered furniture out of a catalog. So when I came along with my questionnaire, I wanted to know what they needed. It was kind of a radical ideal, but it was also logical and obvious.” Among her many awards and honors, Knoll was honored twice by the Museum of Modern Art, received the inaugural award from the American Institute of Decorators, and was the first woman to receive the Gold Medal for Industrial Design from the American Institute of Architects. She died at age 101 in 2019.
- May 24, 1930 – English pilot Amy Johnson becomes the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia when she lands in Darwin, Northern Territory.
- May 24, 1933 – Jane Byrne born, American politician, the first woman elected as Mayor of Chicago (1979-1983); Chicago’s Consumer Affairs commissioner (1968-1977).
- May 24, 1935 – Joan Micklin Silver born, American director and screenwriter; known for Hester Street; Between the Lines; Finnegan Begin Again; and the Made-for-TV movie A Private Matter, about Romper Room host Sherri Chessen Finkbine. In 1962, a firestorm of controversy erupted when she sought an abortion after finding out that thalidomide, a drug she had taken for morning sickness, was causing severe birth defects.
- May 24, 1941 – Baroness Patricia Hollis of Heigham born, British Labour politician, historian, and member of the House of Lords since 1990; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and author of several books on women’s history and labour history, including Jennie Lee: a life, which won the Orwell Prize for political biography.
- May 24, 1944 – Patti LaBelle born, American singer, lead singer for Labelle, the first African-American vocal group on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine.
- May 24, 1946 – Tansu Çiller born, Turkish economist and politician, first woman Prime Minister of Turkey (1993-1996); leader of the True Path Party, served concurrently as Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister and as Minister of Foreign Affairs (1996-1997).
- May 24, 1961 – Lorella Cedroni born, Italian political philosopher and theorist; author of books, articles and papers on political representation, gender studies, party systems in European countries, political language, electoral communication, and human rights.
- May 24, 1963 – Valerie E. Taylor born, African American computer scientist, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory since 2017; head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University (2003-2011); notable for work on high performance computing; fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the Association of Computing Machinery.
- May 24, 1988 – Monica Lin Brown born, U.S. Army sergeant and combat medic; first woman during the War in Afghanistan and the second woman since WWII to receive the Silver Star, the U.S. military’s third-highest medal for valor in combat. She was honored for treating the wounded and repeatedly shielding them with her body while under heavy enemy mortar fire and grenade rounds.
- May 24, 1990 – Judi Bari, union organizer, feminist, and Earthfirst nonviolent activist, while driving in her car with fellow activist Darryl Cherney, is nearly killed when a pipe bomb hidden under her seat explodes in Oakland, California. They had been organizing for the Redwood Summer campaign, a grassroots effort to halt logging of the last remaining old-growth California redwoods. Numerous threats had been made against them, and a timber worker had already rammed Bari’s car and run it off an isolated rural road; the threats were reported to Oakland police, but there had been little response. Yet within minutes after the explosion, the police and the FBI arrived on the scene. They arrested Cherney and Bari, in the hospital with a fractured pelvis and other major injuries, for “transporting a bomb.” But law enforcement’s case fell apart when a letter from “The Lord’s Avenger” was sent to a newspaper reporter, taking credit for the bombing, with credible details kept from the public. Charges were dropped against Bari and Cherney. They sued the FBI and Oakland PD for violating their civil rights, and finally won the case, and were awarded $4.4 million in 2002 (posthumously to Bari’s estate, who died of cancer in 1997). No other arrests have ever been made for the bombing.
- May 24, 2018 – Voters in Ireland cast ballots in a referendum on loosening the country's abortion ban. The referendum would decide whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the country's constitution, which was adopted in 1983 and required authorities to equally protect the right of a mother and a fetus from conception. A Yes vote to appeal the amendment meant parliament would consider more liberal abortion laws. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar tweeted support for repeal before a moratorium on campaigning took effect. The government proposed allowing abortions during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, with the procedure permitted later only in special cases. Forty years before, Irish women could not even buy a condom legally, divorce was banned and abortion almost unmentionable in public. The campaign for change escalated after Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist in Galway, died of sepsis in 2012 caused by an incomplete miscarriage, and the refusal of the hospital to perform a therapeutic abortion because a faint fetal heartbeat could still be detected. “It’s nice to see that we are finally throwing off the shackles of the Catholic church,” said Sarah McCormack, 25, as she left flowers at a mural of Halappanavar which was part of the YES campaign. The vote was 66.4% in favour of loosening the ban.
- May 24, 2019 – Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have filed a lawsuit on behalf Alabama abortion providers, seeking to block the state of Alabama from implementing a law making abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. The law threatens doctors with felony charges and up to 99 years in prison for performing an abortion, with no exception for rape or incest. It only allows abortions in cases of a serious threat to a woman’s health. The lawsuit argues that the ban blatantly violates the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. Dr Yashica Robinson, owner of Alabama Women’s Center and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said her patients “already have to overcome so much just to get to our doors, and this law further shames them, punishes providers like myself and stigmatizes essential healthcare. Alabama has a long track record of passing laws designed to close clinics and push abortion care out of reach, and just like we have before, we will fight for our patients and do all we can to stay open.”
- May 24, 2020 – With health and social services systems overwhelmed by the pandemic, women’s organizations in many countries have had to take on the role of first responders in cases of domestic violence. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a call came in to the police two hours after the 8 p.m. COVID-19 curfew, from a woman who had been thrown across the room by her ex-husband, who also ripped out hair from her head—all in front of her children, aged 10 and 15. She called from a neighbor’s house after fleeing with her children, but the police told her that they wouldn’t bring her ex-husband in, or issue a restraining order, because they were no longer married. Her next call was to the Centre of Women’s Rights, funded by the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women (UN Trust Fund), which immediately connected her with a lawyer and a therapist. “If we didn’t intervene and provide the woman with guidance … this report of violence could have gone off the radar because of the insensitivity and ignorance of the police officer. It could have ended in a fatal outcome,” said Meliha Sendic, President of the Centre of Women’s Rights, adding that COVID-19 has exposed “long-standing institutional issues we have been pointing out for years.” The Centre is among the 144 grantees of the UN Trust Fund, which is managed by UN Women on behalf of the UN system in 69 countries and territories. Stay-at-home orders have isolated survivors with their abusers and led to increased reports of domestic violence around the world. In neighbouring Serbia, UN Trust Fund grantee Association Fenomena reached out to other women’s organizations providing specialized services, creating an emergency ad-hoc coalition. Programme Coordinator Marija Petronijević said, “In general, NGOs are facing a lack of capacity to adequately respond to emergency crises: lack of IT knowledge and equipment, emergency-related working protocols, as well as lack of staff and funding.” Association Fenomena runs a 24/7 SOS hotline and launched a social media campaign on the need to report violence. They’ve been reaching out to women’s networks and local media, while gathering data on public responses to violence. Association Fenomena has also developed a partnership with pharmacies and pharmacists to inform and help women survivors access safety planning tools and support services. “We expect that this model will be useful during the health crisis, as well as post-crisis,” says Petronijević. The UN Trust Fund is helping local organizations in Haiti, Malawi, and Rwanda, among many others. “Women’s organizations on the front lines of the COVID-19 response continue to adapt and provide vital services for survivors, even in the face of unprecedented challenges. As violence against women rises, the services offered by women’s organizations must be included in governments’ COVID-19 response packages,” said Aldijana Sisic, Chief of the UN Trust Fund.
- May 24, 2021 – According to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time U.S. workers, in 2020, American women earned 84% of what men earned. Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 42 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2020. However, the 2020 wage gap was smaller for workers ages 25 to 34 than for all workers 16 and older. Women ages 25 to 34 earned on average 93 cents for every dollar a man in the same age group earned. In 2019, the year of the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent analysis, full-time, year-round working women earned 82% of what their male counterparts earned. In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, one-in-four employed women said they had earned less than a man who was doing the same job; just 5% of men said they had earned less than a woman doing the same job. Mothers were also nearly twice as likely as fathers to say taking time off had a negative impact on their job or career. Among those who took leave from work in the two years following the birth or adoption of their child, 25% of women said this had a negative impact at work, compared with 13% of men.
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Listen to Mama Cat:
Please fight to save Roe V. Wade
and Griswold v. Connecticut, and VOTE
for those true Democrats who will also fight for them.
If you have too many kittens, not only will YOU have a shorter and unhappier life, but so many kittens will go hungry, and their lives will be short and unhappy too – because those mean Republicans never vote to help the mamas, or to help the babies either, after they’re born.
The Declaration of Independence doesn’t just say ‘right to life’
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.―That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ―That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness ...”
And that is straight-out “original intent” of those Founding Fathers.