“Heterosexuality is not
normal, it's just common.”
― Dorothy Parker
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WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog
to This Week in the War On Women
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“I never said it would be easy,
I only said it would be worth it.”
― Mae West
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“Lawmakers, either get out of the
vagina business or go to medical school.”
― Wendy Davis,
Texas State Senator (2009-2015)
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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 events in women’s history.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
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.
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- August 17, 1801 – Fredrika Bremer born, Swedish writer and feminist reformer. In the mid-1800s, her Sketches of Everyday Life were extremely popular in Britain and the U.S., where she was hailed as the “Swedish Jane Austen.” She found the role of a debutante in Stockholm’s upper-class society intolerably stultifying, and started doing charity work, including volunteering at a hospital. Her writing funded her charity projects after Sketches of Everyday Life, first published as an anonymous serial, became an immediate success. Under the terms of Sweden’s 1734 civil code, all unmarried women were minors under the guardianship of their closest male relative until they married and became wards of their husbands; only widowed and divorced women were of legal majority. Under this law, her elder brother completely controlled her finances, even though he squandered the family fortune within ten years after their father’s death. The sole recourse of unmarried women to appeal to the King for emancipation. In her late 30s, she successfully petitioned King Charles XIV to end her brother’s wardship. In 1842, Bremer published Morning Watches, the first work she published under her own name. In her 50s, she wrote the novel Hertha, based on the injustice of keeping women under guardianship, which included an appendix recounting recent court cases related to the legal status of adult Swedish women. It launched a social movement which ultimately won all Swedish women automatic legal majority at age 25. It also inspired Sophie Adlersparre to publish the Home Review, Sweden’s first women’s magazine. Bremer founded the Stockholm Women’s Society for Children’s Care to help the orphans left by a cholera outbreak in 1853. She also founded the Women’s Society for the Betterment of Prisoners, to provide female inmates with moral guidance and rehabilitation. She died in 1865 at the age of 64. In 1884, the Fredrika Bremer Association was founded, Sweden’s first women’s rights organization.
- August 17, 1837 – Charlotte Forten Grimké born in Philadelphia, into a prominent African American abolitionist family; American essayist, diarist, teacher, and poet. Educated at the Higginson Grammar School, a private academy for girls, known for its emphasis on critical thinking, with classes in history, geography, drawing, and cartography. She was the only non-white student in a class of 200. Forten then studied literature and trained as teacher at the Salem Normal School. She was active in the anti-slavery movement, helping to build coalitions and raise funds, and arranging for lectures by well-known writers and speakers. She sometimes spoke herself. She kept journals from an early age, and began writing poetry while recovering from tuberculosis in 1858. During the American Civil War, Forten was the first black teacher to join the South Carolina Sea Islands mission known as the Port Royal Experiment. The Union allowed Northerners to set up schools to teach freedmen remaining on the islands. She became friends with Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment. After Shaw and most of the men were killed storming Fort Wagner in 1863, she nursed the wounded survivors. After the war, she worked in Washington DC, recruiting teachers, and then as a clerk in the Treasury Department. At age 41, she married Presbyterian minister Francis Grimké, a mixed-race nephew of Southern abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké. She organized many of his congregation’s charitable and educational efforts. Her diaries were published in 1981 as The Journal of Charlotte Forten.
- August 17, 1838 – Laura de Force Gordon born, American lawyer, editor, and women’s rights activist. In February 1868, she gave the first speech in California advocating for woman suffrage, "The Elective Franchise: Who Shall Vote.” In 1870, she co-founded the California Woman’s Suffrage Society, making suffrage speeches in both California and Nevada. By 1873, she was editor and manager of the Stockton Daily Leader, the first woman to run a daily newspaper in California. She and Clara Shortridge Foltz led the campaign for the Woman Lawyer’s Bill, which passed in 1878, so women could practice law in California. Foltz was the first woman admitted to the bar in California, and Gordon was the second. Gordon became president of the California State Suffrage Association (1884–1894), and was a paid speaker for suffrage in the 1888 presidential election. In 1892, she spoke at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Gordon retired from the legal profession in 1901. She died from pneumonia at age 68 in 1907.
- August 17, 1858 – Caroline Bartlett Crane born, American suffragist, educator, journalist, reformer, and Unitarian minister. In 1889 Bartlett became pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Kalamazoo, leading the congregation in starting the first free public kindergarten, a school of manual training and domestic science, a gymnasium for women, a day nursery, a cafeteria, and the Frederick Douglass Club for the “young colored people of the city.” The church continued to expand, outgrowing its building, and moving in 1894 into a new building, renamed “People’s Church.” She worked for public health and sanitation reforms, inspected and wrote sanitary surveys for over 60 cities, campaigned for meat inspection ordinances, and succeeded: before 1900, Michigan had the highest standards in the nation.
- August 17, 1863 – Geneva Stratton-Porter born, American author writing as ‘Gene’ Stratton-Porter; columnist, naturalist, wildlife photographer, and best-selling novelist; noted for Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost.
- August 17, 1865 – Julia Marlowe born as Sara Frances Frost in England; American actress, known for her interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. Her family emigrated to the U.S. when she was four. Marlowe’s career began in the chorus of a juvenile opera company which toured performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. She went to New York for vocal lessons, took the stage name Julia Marlowe, and made her New York debut in 1887 in Ingomar, the Barbarian. In 1891, she contracted typhoid fever, but after a slow recovery, returned to the stage. She made her Broadway debut in 1895, was married and divorced. In 1904, she played Mary Tudor in When Knighthood was in Flower, her first huge hit, and formed a partnership with actor E.H. Sothern to mount several Shakespeare plays, starting with Romeo and Juliet. She spoke in favor of woman suffrage. After success on Broadway, she and Sothern toured the U.S. with their own company, playing in Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. After a less successful tour of Britain, they returned to New York, presenting Shakespeare plays at affordable prices at the Academy of Music, bringing in audiences who had never seen Shakespeare performed before. After briefly splitting up, they renewed their partnership, with productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. They resumed touring, giving special matinee performances for schoolchildren. Marlowe and Sothern were married in 1911, and in the 1920s they made recordings of Shakespeare for the Victor company. A production of The Merchant of Venice in 1921 was Marlowe’s last, as her health began to fail. She retired in 1924. Sothern died in 1933, and she became withdrawn. She died in New York at age 85 in 1950.
- August 17, 1893 – Mae West born, American star of stage and screen, playwright, screenwriter, and witty sex icon. Known for amusing and bawdy double entendres, she was often in trouble with the censors. She wrote and played the lead in her 1927 play Sex, which ran for 10 months on Broadway before a grand jury found it to be such an “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama” that it might “corrupt the morals of youth.” West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for obscenity, and travelled there in style – garlanded in roses, wearing silk underwear, and riding in a limousine. Sex made her both notorious and a star. Her films include She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, and My Little Chickadee.
- August 17, 1896 – Bridget Swift Driscoll, age 44, became the first recorded pedestrian killed by a motor car in Great Britain. The vehicle belonged to the Anglo-French Motor Carriage Company, and was being used to give demonstration rides in the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London. The jury returned a verdict of "accidental death" after an inquest lasting about six hours. The first person in the world known to be killed by a motor vehicle was Mary King Ward, a 42-year-old Irish scientist. In 1869, she was thrown from an experimental steam car making a sharp turn at a bend in the road, then fell under the car’s wheels.
Bridget Swift Driscoll
- August 17, 1900 – Vivienne de Watteville born, British travel writer and adventurer; her mother died when she was 9; thereafter her father referred to her as “Murray, my son.” In 1923, Vivienne, age 24, took charge of a hunting and fauna-specimen-collecting (she handled all the taxidermy) expedition to the Congo and Uganda led by her father, after he was killed by a lion. Her first book, Out in the Blue, describes her experiences on safari. She spent months (1928-1929) in Kenya photographing and filming elephants, camping for 5 months in the Masai Game Preserve with porters from the 1923-1924 expedition and her Irish Setter, then 2 months on Mount Kenya collecting seeds and sketching flora; when she got a bad toothache, she pulled out the tooth herself with pliers. Her second book, Speak to the Earth: Wanderings among Elephants and Mountains, was published in 1935. Her last book, Seeds that the Wind May Bring, chronicles her impulsive decision to rent a house on Port-Cros off the Côte d’Azur as a “rest-home for world-weary friends.” Instead, it was a tension-fraught winter of high winds and her young Italian servant becoming obsessed with her, then driven to frenzies of jealousy when her friend “Bunt” (Captain George Gerard Goschen) arrived. Bunt shared her love of solitude, natural beauty, music, and games. In spite of fears about losing her freedom, and saddling herself with the wrong companion for the rest of her life, they became engaged, and married in July 1930. They moved to Shropshire, and had two children, David and Tana (named for Kenya’s Tana River). Seeds that the Wind May Bring wasn’t published until 1965, eight years after her death from cancer. Ernest Hemingway was influenced by her two books on Africa, and originally included a quote from Speak to the Earth as an epigraph to his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
- August 17, 1900 – Pauline A. Young born, African-American historian, teacher, librarian, and community activist. When her father died, her family moved from Massachusetts to Wilmington, Delaware, to live with her mother’s family. She and her siblings were raised by her mother, grandmother, and her aunt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a writer and activist who greatly influenced Pauline. Pauline joined the NAACP at age 12, and remained a life-long member. Civil Rights activists and writers such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson stopped overnight at their house while traveling because there was no hotel in the area which would allow Negro guests. She went to Howard High School, the only school for black children in the state of Delaware, where her mother and aunt both taught. Young became the only black student in her class at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, earning a B.A. in history and English, then did some graduate work on educational tests and measurements. After two brief jobs in unrelated fields, she taught social studies and Latin at a segregated high school in Newport News, Virginia. There, she was thrown off a bus for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. She returned to Wilmington in 1928, and became a librarian, then a history and Latin teacher, at her old high school. After receiving her graduate degree in 1935 from the Columbia University School of Library Service, she taught at the University of Southern California, then became a member of the press staff at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1942, she completed 114 hours of ground school work and 12 hours of dual flight at the black-owned Coffey School of Aeronautics in Chicago. In 1943, she went through 50 hours of pre-flight instruction for teachers at Temple University, then taught pre-fight at Howard High’s night school. Young chaired the Delaware NAACP education committee, and was a membership drive coordinator in Delaware, and during her time in Chicago. She also served on the Wilmington Council on Youth representing the Wilmington Federation of Teachers. She wrote book reviews for The Baltimore Afro-American, The Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, and The Journal of Negro History, and countless letters to editors of newspapers, and to publishing companies advocating for better Black representation and opportunities. She was a founder of the Delaware Fellowship Commission, fighting against segregated facilities and discriminatory hiring practices, and campaigning for equal opportunity for nurses’ training. Young wrote the chapter “The Negro in Delaware: Past and Present” in Delaware: a History of the First State, which was the first published comprehensive history of Black Americans in Delaware.
- August 17, 1906 – Hazel Bishop born, organic chemist, creator of “kiss-proof” lipstick in her home kitchen in 1949; during WWII, she was senior organic chemist at Standard Oil, and discovered the cause of deposits which were affecting the superchargers of aircraft engines.
- August 17, 1909 – Electa “Exy” Johnson born, American author, sail training pioneer and lecturer. She and her husband Irving Johnson began sailing the world together and teaching young enthusiasts in 1932. From then until 1958, they went on seven tours circumnavigated the world, three before WWII and four after. Each voyage visited 120 ports of call, and lasted about 18 months.
Electa “Exy” Johnson —
by Thomas Abercrombie/NatGeo
- August 17, 1920 – Lida Moser born, American ‘New York school’ photographer and author; noted for photojournalism and street photography. She started as an assistant to photographer Berenice Abbott in 1947, and got her first independent assignment from Vogue in 1949, travelling across Canada, then did work for Harper’s Bazaar, Look and Esquire. Moser wrote “Camera View” articles (1974-1981) for The New York Times and published both how-to books on photography and collections of her photographs. Her work is displayed at over 40 museums worldwide.
‘Musee de la province a Quebec’ — by Lida Moser
- August 17, 1936 – Margaret Heafield Hamilton born, American computer scientist and systems engineer, noted for her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBFT) for systems and software design, and for coining the term, “software engineer.” Hamilton is the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies (since 1986). She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, and lead developer of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo space program (1964-1973). Recipient of numerous awards, including the 1986 August Ada Lovelace Award, the 2003 NASA Exceptional Space Act Award, and a 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- August 17, 1945 – Rachel Pollack born, American science fiction, ‘magic realism’ fantasy novelist, comic book author, and transsexual; Unquenchable Fire won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award; Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award. She also wrote non-fiction books on the Kabbalah, the Tarot, and the history of the Goddess. She died at age 77 in April 2023.
- August 17, 1946 – Martha Coolidge born, American filmmaker, producer, editor, and screenwriter; president of the Directors Guild of America (2002-2003); began her career making award-winning documentaries; noted for Not a Pretty Picture, Valley Girl, Rambling Rose, Real Genius, and the TV miniseries Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.
- August 17, 1953 – Herta Müller born in Romania of Banat Swabian heritage, German-language novelist, poet-lyricist, and essayist; won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature; often depicted “the landscape of the dispossessed.” In 1984, her second book, Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango), a short story collection, was banned in Romania, and she moved to Germany.
- August 17, 1968 – Helen McCrory born, British actress and philanthropist; made her stage debut in 1990 in The Importance of Being Earnest, and onstage was Lady Macbeth, Olivia in Twelfth Night, and Rosalind in As You Like It. In films, she played Cherie Blair, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife, in both The Queen and Special Relationship. She was Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, and Clair Dowar in Skyfall. On television, she played Emma Banville in Fearless (2017-2018). McCrory was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to drama. In 2018, she read Millicent Fawcett’s 1918 victory speech at the unveiling of Fawcett’s statue in Parliament Square. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, McCrory and her husband Damian Lewis became supporters of Feed NHS, which delivered food from high street restaurants to National Health Service staff, raising £1 million for the charity by early April 2020. Helen McCrory died of cancer at age 52 in April 2021.
- August 17, 1970 – Nicola Kraus born, American novelist; co-author with Emma McLaughlin of The Nanny Diaries, a #1 New York Times Bestseller in 2002, and the sequel Nanny Returns.
- August 17, 2019 – The triennial summit of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) began in Geneva, Switzerland. The destruction of nature has reduced wildlife populations by 60% since 1970 and plant extinctions are running at a “frightening” rate, according to scientists. In May, 2019, the world’s leading researchers warned humanity was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the planet’s natural life-support systems, which provide the food, clean air, and water on which society depends. Ivonne Higuero, secretary general of CITES said, “We do depend on biodiversity. It is not just an environmental issue. There are so many species that, if they went extinct, would be sorely missed and we just don’t realise it.”
- August 17, 2020 – Donald Trump took a swipe at New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who received world-wide acclaim for her handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in her country. After bringing the number of new cases down to zero, New Zealand reported nine new cases this day. Before these new cases, New Zealand had gone 100 days with no new cases reported. Trump said, "The places that they were using to hold up, they're having a big surge. And I don't want that, I don't want that. But they were holding up names of countries, and now they're saying, 'Whoops!' In fact, even New Zealand, do you see what's going on in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front page, 'They beat it,' because they wanted to show me something," Trump said. "The problem is, big surge in New Zealand. So you know, it's terrible." In fact, on the same day in the U.S., almost 42,000 new cases were added, compared to New Zealand’s “big surge” of nine new cases. New Zealand had a total of 22 deaths from Covid-19, compared to 170,000 deaths to this date in the U.S., with the number of new U.S. cases increasing daily. Ardern responded, "Obviously it's patently wrong. I don't think there's any comparison between New Zealand's current cluster and the tens of thousands of cases that are being seen daily in the United States … every country is experiencing its own fight with COVID-19. It is a tricky virus, but not one where I would compare New Zealand's current status to the United States."
- August 17, 2021 – In the UK, MP Caroline Nokes, chair of the women and equalities committee, led an inquiry into discrimination in the workplace against women going through menopause. Nokes said changing equality legislation to protect menopausal women should “not be ruled out.” The inquiry heard from women who suffered discrimination in the workplace and were forced to use disability legislation to seek redress in the courts. “One of the key messages coming through is that people don’t feel that they’ve got adequate recourse to tribunals, because they think the legislation isn’t clear enough,” Nokes said. “We are hearing too many stories of people finding the most convenient mechanism to bring a claim for disability discrimination – the menopause isn’t a disability … If the current legislation is working then great, but if it’s not working, and we’ve made maternity a protected characteristic, then do we need to look at making the menopause a protected characteristic?” Nokes added that she was struck by the number of individual women who contacted the inquiry to share their experiences, and warned businesses that if they did not take action to help menopausal workers they risked losing talent and productivity. Nokes credited celebrities with increasing awareness of menopause discrimination, with Davina McCall and Lorraine Kelly among those backing a public awareness campaign by The Menopause Charity in recent weeks. McCall, who has written a book called Menopausing, revealed she had been advised not to talk about her symptoms, which began when she was 44, but decided she was not “going to be ashamed about a transition that half the population goes through.”
Caroline Nokes — Davina McCall — Lorraine Kelly
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- August 18, 1606 – Maria Anna of Spain born, Holy Roman Empress, German Queen, Queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess consort of Austria; first wife (1631-1646) of Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor. It was a successful marriage, with affection and respect on both sides. She was a trusted advisor to her husband, acted as regent during his absences, and promoted a strengthening of relations between the Imperial and Spanish branches of the House of Habsburg. She was a notable patron of the arts, especially painting. Maria Anna gave birth to six children – three lived to adulthood. Her first-born son Ferdinand IV was King of Bohemia (1646-1654), and briefly King of the Romans (1653-1654), and her son Leopold I, succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor (1658-1705). She died from complications during her final pregnancy at age 39 in 1646.
- August 18, 1885 – Gertrude “Nettie” Higgins Palmer born, Australian poet and essayist, one of Australia’s leading literary critics.
- August 18, 1886 – Florence Lawrence, daughter of inventor Charlotte Bridgwood, becomes the “Biograph Girl” - the first actress in silent films to be a star without being famous before making movies. Like her mother, Lawrence was inventive, now credited with designing the first "auto signaling arm," a predecessor to the modern turn signal, along with the first mechanical brake signal. Unfortunately, she did not patent these inventions, so she received no acknowledgement or money for either.
- August 18, 1893 – Ragini Devi born, American specialist in classical and folk ethnographic dances, won acclaim from dance critics, author of Dance Dialects of India (1972), and performed with her daughter and granddaughter.
- August 18, 1898 – Elizabeth Yung Kwai born; graduated from Wellesley College; worked in the Electricity Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology investigating self-luminous materials used by the military in aircraft instruments, compasses, watches, and gunsights. Co-author of a paper, “Studies of Radium Luminous Materials,” presented at the April 1919 meeting of the American Physical Society. After raising a family during the 1920s and 1930s, she returned to government service during World War II as a member of the Women's Army Corps.
- August 18, 1900 – Ruth Grigorievna Bonner born, Soviet Communist activist sent to a labor camp during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1937, she was a health official in Moscow when her husband was arrested on charges of espionage and sentenced to death. She was arrested a few days later, and spent 8 years in the Gulag in Kazakhstan, then another 9 years in internal exile. In 1954, she was one of the first of Stalin’s victims to be “rehabilitated” under new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Her husband was rehabilitated posthumously. Then her daughter, human rights activist Yelena Bonner, and her son-in-law, Andrei Sakharov, were exiled to Gorky in 1980. Ruth Bonner, at age 80, was allowed to move to the U.S. to be with her grandchildren. After her daughter was released, she returned to Moscow in 1987 and died there a few months later.
- August 18, 1902 – Leona Baumgartner born, physician, first woman commissioner of the New York City Department of Health (1954); advocate for public health education; head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (1962).
- August 18, 1902 – Mardy (Margaret) Murie born, author and pioneering conservationist, worked for wilderness preservation, helped pass the Wilderness Act of 1964, and in establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Author of Two in the Far North and Island Between. Murie was honored with the 1980 Audubon Medal, the 1983 John Muir Award, and with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. She lived to be 101 years old.
- August 18, 1911 – Klara Dan von Neumann born in what was Austria-Hungary, Hungarian-American pioneer in computer science. As a teenager she was a figure skating champion. She emigrated to America in 1938 to be with her second husband, physicist John von Neumann. By 1943, she headed the Statistical Computing Group at Princeton University. In 1946, she and her husband moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory where she worked on programming the MANIAC I machine designed by John von Neumann and Julian Bigelow. She also designed new controls for ENIAC, and was a primary programmer.
- August 18, 1911 – Amelia Boynton Robinson born, American suffragist, civil rights activist, and playwright; she ran for Congress, the first African American woman to run for office in Alabama and the first woman of any race to run on the ticket of the Democratic Party in the state. She was a key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. Robinson was the founding vice-president of the Schiller Institute; awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Freedom Medal in 1990.
- August 18, 1914 – Lucy Ozarin born, American psychiatrist and physician, one of the first seven women in psychiatry who served as commissioned officers during WWII. After Pearl Harbor, almost all the male staff left the state hospital where she was working, leaving her the only physician for 1000 patients, and she quickly felt overwhelmed. When Federal legislation established the W.A.V.E.S. as part of the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942, she joined. The hospital refused to approve her request for leave, so she resigned her position. As an “officer and a gentleman” (the Navy just used the same commission papers that they already had for men to sign up the women), she was an Assistant Surgeon, Lieutenant Junior Grade. With no military training, she was immediately assigned to the military hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, then sent to Camp Lejeune. There, the hospital’s commander assigned her to doing physical examinations on civilian applicants for laborer jobs, even though male doctors with only 90 days of psychiatric training were treating psychiatry patients. A colleague helped her get a transfer, and she returned to Bethesda to treat WAVES. She also studied for and passed the boards in psychiatry (1945). After the war, she went to work for the Veterans Administration, and was promoted to Chief of Hospital Psychiatry. She visited all the Veterans Hospitals to investigate and make recommendations on clearing up the backlog in mental health services. She started programs for VA hospital staffers to improve their skills in relating to patients, and a training institute for clinical directors on advances in psychiatry. Ozarin joined the U.S. Public Health Services in 1957, working in the Kansas City regional office while studying for a Master’s in Public Health, which she earned in 1961. The National Institute of Mental Health chose her as one of 5 people to write the regulations and establish community health centers across the U.S. after passage of the 1963 Community Mental Health Act. She was an advocate for deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients. In the 1970s, she did a study for the World Health Organization (WHO) on drug and alcohol treatments in 9 European countries, then convened a conference to report her findings, attended by representatives from 21 countries. After her “retirement” in 1983, she volunteered to catalog medical books, thousands of documents, medical dissertations, and publications for the National Library of Medicine, to facilitate medical research. Received the Director’s Honor Award for her efforts in 2008. Even in her late nineties, she continued working, this time as author of over 50 mini-biographies of notable psychiatrists, posted at Wikipedia. She lived to be 103 years old.
- August 18, 1916 – Dame Moura Lympany born, English concert pianist; in February 1945, she was the first British musician to perform in Paris after the city was liberated, with the orchestra of the Conservatoire de Paris.
- August 18, 1920 – 19th Amendment Yellow Rose Day: The U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote. But it almost didn’t happen. Battle of the Roses: Yellow roses were worn by suffrage supporters, red roses by opponents. Tennessee became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the 19th Amendment, by a single vote. That vote was cast by 24-year-old Harry Burn, who had been in the anti-ratification camp and was still wearing his red rose when he voted for passage, because he had received a last-minute letter from his mother that morning. Phoebe Ensminger Burn, called “Miss Febb,” wrote, “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet.” She ended the missive with a rousing endorsement of the suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt, imploring her son to “be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.” He explained his sudden change of heart, “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
Harry Burn — Yellow Rose — “Miss Febb”
- August 18, 1921 – Lydia Litvyak born, Soviet fighter pilot during WWII, called the ‘White Lily of Stalingrad.’ First woman fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft, and one of the first two women certified as aces. She was shot down and killed during the Battle of Kursk in 1943.
- August 18, 1927 – Rosalynn Carter born, U.S. First Lady (1977-1981) who focused on mental health, senior citizens, and community voluntarism; co-founder with her husband of the Carter Center; active supporter of Habitat for Humanity.
- August 18, 1937 – Sheila Cassidy born, English doctor and leader in the UK hospice movement. She completed her medical studies at Oxford in 1963. In the 1970s, she practiced medicine in Chile when Salvador Allende was president. In 1975, Cassidy gave medical treatment to Nelson Gutierrez, a political opponent of the new Pinochet regime being sought by police. She was arrested by the Chilean secret police, kept in custody without trial, and severely tortured at the notorious Villa Grimaldi, trying to force her to disclose information about her patients and other contacts. The British Embassy worked with Argentinean diplomat Roberto Kozak to secure her release. The interviews she gave about her imprisonment and torture on the parrilla (a metal frame to which a victim is strapped and subjected to electric shock) brought attention in the UK to the widespread human rights abuses in Chile. She also published her account in Audacity to Believe. After recovering from her ordeal, she continued to practice medicine. She was medical director of the new St. Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth (1982-1997), and set up palliative care service for Plymouth hospitals. Since retiring from St. Luke’s, she has advocated for hospice, and written books with hospice and religious themes.
- August 18, 1952 – Elayne Boosler born, American comedian and writer; in 1986, she was the first woman comedian to get her own one-hour comedy special when Showtime aired Party of One on cable. She is active in liberal politics, and was the moderator for a 2003 Democratic presidential candidates’ debate on C-Span hosted by the National Organization for Women (NOW). A frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, she is a strong supporter of women’s reproductive rights. Boosler founded Tails of Joy in 2001, which supports the smallest animal rescue organizations, and advocates for animal rescue.
- August 18, 1959 – Winona LaDuke born, American economist, writer, environmentalist, and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development. La Duke is an enrolled member of the Ojibwe Nation. In 1985, she helped found the Indigenous Women’s Network, which since 1991 has been publishing Indigenous Women, the first and currently the only magazine written by and for Native women. In 1989, LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a foundation to buy back land that had originally been part of the Anishinaabe White Earth Indian Reservation, but which had been sold to non-natives after the Nelson Act of 1889. By 2000, the foundation had purchased 1200 acres, which it is holding in a conservation trust while restoring forests, reviving cultivation of traditional food like wild rice, and introducing a herd of buffalo. The trust also started a wind-energy project, and introduced an Ojibwe language program. In 1993, she became the executive director and co-founder, with the Indigo Girls, of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. In 1996 and 2000, she was a Green Party vice-presidential candidate with Ralph Nader.
- August 18, 1974 – Nicole Krauss born, American writer and novelist; noted for her contributions to The New Yorker, and her novels Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, and Forest Dark.
- August 18, 1997 – Beth Ann Hogan was the first woman to attend Virginia Military Institute (VMI). She dropped out in January 1998, in part because a of tendon injury.
Virginia Military Institute
- August 18, 2000 – A Federal jury finds the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guilty of discrimination against Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, passed over for promotion after repeatedly reporting complaints that a U.S. company was mining toxic vanadium in South Africa; her example helped to pass “No FEAR,” the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-Discrimination and Retaliation Act (2002). Her memoir, No Fear, was published in 2011.
- August 18, 2015 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved flibanserin, the first prescription drug to treat low sex drive in premenopausal women. The approval came with restrictions, including labels warning of potential side effects, such as low blood pressure and fainting, especially for women who drink alcohol while taking the drug. In trials, women with low sex drive reported a slight increase in "satisfying sexual experiences" while taking the pink pill — to be sold under the brand name Addyi by Sprout Pharmaceuticals. Skeptics said the limited impact was not worth the side effects. "Women's sexuality is very complicated. It's not a matter of just taking that pill, by the way, and then all of a sudden the lights go on," said Judy Kuriansky, a clinical psychologist and certified sex therapist. "You have to feel good about your body. You have to feel good about yourself ... It's complex. It's not the same as a man taking a pill."
Judy Kuriansky
- August 18, 2016 – A Cambridge University Press study revealed what most women already know: sports reporting is really sexist. Researchers, who studied over 160 million words related to sport in the Cambridge English Corpus, a multibillion-word collection of written and spoken English, found “notable terms that cropped up as common word associations or combinations for women in sport, but not men, include ‘aged,’ ‘older,’ ‘pregnant,’ and ‘married’ or ‘unmarried’. The top word combinations for men in sport, by contrast, are adjectives like ‘fastest,’ ‘strong,’ ‘big,’ ‘real,’ and ‘great’– all words regularly heard to describe male Olympians.” The study concluded women were more likely to be referred to as “girls” while men were rarely referred to as “boys” by the newscasters tasked with covering their sport. “The breadth of sources we’ve analyzed means we’re able to give a unique insight into the language used to describe women and men within the context of sport,” said Sarah Grieves, a language researcher at Cambridge University Press. “It’s perhaps unsurprising to see that women get far less airtime than men, and that their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned. It will be interesting to see if this trend is also reflected in our upcoming research on language used at the Rio Olympics.” Predictably, The Chicago Tribune tweeted “Wife of a Bears' lineman wins a bronze medal today in Rio Olympics” when Corey Cogdell won the bronze medal for women’s trap shooting. They were not the only media outlet to refer to her as “the wife of NFL/Bears lineman Mitch Unrein” instead of using her name.
Corey Cogdell (R) with the medal SHE won
- August 18, 2020 – Jessica Johnson, an 18-year-old UK student, predicted the A-level results crisis in an award-winning 2019 dystopian story about an algorithm deciding school grades according to social class. Now her real life results have been downgraded. “I’ve fallen into my story. It’s crazy. I based it on the educational inequality I already saw. I just exaggerated that inequality and added the algorithm. But I really didn’t think it would come true as quick as it did!” Johnson won an Orwell youth prize senior award in 2019 for her short story titled A Band Apart. Set in 2029, it imagined a system where students were sorted into bands based on their background. “Mum still thinks I can be a doctor. She doesn’t understand how hard it is to get into Band 1 for people like us,” says a character in the story. Johnson had her 2020 English A-level result downgraded from A to B and lost her place at the University of St Andrews before the government announced it would allow A-level and GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) students to use grades awarded by teachers, after a computer moderation process designed to combat grade inflation mistakenly downgraded legitimate scores, causing many students like Johnson to miss out on university places. With results based on teacher assessments instead, she became hopeful that her place will be restored. “I’ve been so stressed and anxious these past few days, waiting to hear back from universities,” she said. “We got told you can go wherever you want in life if you work hard enough, but we’ve seen this year that no matter how hard you worked, you got a grade based on where you live.” Professor Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell prize, said: “Jessica saw into the heart of what the system represents and her story demonstrates the human ability which exams only exist to uncover.” After Johnson’s results were reevaluated based on teacher predictions, the University of St Andrews, her first-choice school, reinstated its offer to her. “I’m definitely relieved and I’m really excited to go,” the 18-year-old said. “I’m glad, for me at least, it’s been sorted but obviously there’s still a lot of people in a really confusing situation so I’m hoping university places start to be sorted for them, too.”
- August 18, 2021 – Sakira Ventura, a 28-year-old music teacher from Valencia, Spain, created an interactive map featuring over 500 women composers from across the globe. “… nobody ever spoke to me about female composers.” She said. “They don’t appear in musical history books, their works aren’t played at concerts and their music isn’t recorded ... They deserve a place in history.” She continued, “I had always talked about putting these composers on the map – so it occurred to me to do it literally … There’s a moment where you ask yourself, where do I look for this information?” She added, “When I started I thought I wouldn’t know more than five female composers.” After more than a year and hundreds of hours of work, the site documents 530 composers – including a short description of each one and a link to listen to their music (https://svmusicology.com/mapa/). Ventura is continuing her work, and already has a list of 500 more names. Entries range from Kassia, a Byzantine abbess born in 810 whose hymns are still sung in the Orthodox church, to Alma Deutscher, a British teen born in 2005, who composed her first piano sonata at age six. Many of the women listed on the map languished in obscurity, their careers marred by the long-held notion that music could be a pastime for women but not a profession. Some, like Maria Anna Mozart, Mozart’s sister, saw their careers come to an abrupt halt amid concerns that performing and touring could put her reputation at risk. “It was taken for granted that a work composed by a woman wouldn’t be of the same quality as that composed by a man,” said Ventura. The barriers forced female composers to get creative; some enrolled in convents in order to study music while others published works under male pseudonyms.
photo of a section of the Interactive map of over 500 female composers who can be accessed online
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- August 19, 1612 – The Samlesbury Witches: three women from the village of Samlesbury in Lancashire, England, are accused by a 14-year-old girl of practicing witchcraft, including child murder and cannibalism. Ten others accused during the same Assizes are hanged, but the three from Samlesbury are acquitted when the girl who accused them is discredited as a “perjuring tool of a Catholic priest.”
Samlesbury: Lancaster Castle and St Leonard the Less Church
- August 19, 1692 – Five people found guilty of witchcraft executed by hanging in Salem, in the Massachusetts colony, including John Proctor, who with his wife Elizabeth, would be used by Arthur Miller as major characters in his play The Crucible. Elizabeth Proctor was given a stay of execution because she was pregnant, then released after the witch hysteria died down.
Recreation of Salem Village Meeting House where the witch trials began
- August 19, 1814 (?) – Mary Ellen Pleasant born as a slave, American abolitionist and entrepreneur, self-made multimillionaire; she often “passed for white” which helped keep her from getting caught as an Underground Railroad conductor, but changed her designation to “Black” after the civil war; sometimes called the “Mother of Civil Rights in California” – her successful lawsuit against a streetcar company for forcing her and two other black women off the streetcar ended segregation on public transportation in San Francisco, and set a precedent used by the California Supreme Court in other cases.
- August 19, 1858 – Ellen Willmott born, English horticulturalist, influential member of the Royal Horticultural Society, one of the first women to be elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and with Gertrude Jekyll, one of only two women to receive the Victorian Medal of Honour in 1897, newly instituted that year for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. She published Warley Garden in Spring and Summer, and a two-volume work, The Genus Rosa.
Ellen Willmott and the Ellen Willmont Hybrid Tea Rose
- August 19, 1870 – Annie Webb Blanton born, American suffragist, educator, and author of grammar textbooks. Blanton was professor of English at the North Texas State Normal College in Denton (1901-1918). In 1916, she was the first woman elected as president of the Texas State Teachers Association. Blanton was elected Superintendent of Texas Public Instruction in 1918, the first year Texas women could vote in statewide elections. She was the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office, and served two terms. While in office, she launched the successful Better Schools Campaign, which amended the state’s constitution to allow local property taxes to fund public schools. She also instituted a system of free textbooks, revised teacher certification standards, raised teacher salaries, improved rural education, and promoted equal pay for women teachers. Blanton then taught at the University of Texas at Austin for 22 years.
- August 19, 1871 – Florine Stettheimer born, American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical director, poet, and salonnière. Credited with painting the first feminist nude-self-portrait, and noted for paintings depicting controversial issues of race and sexual preference. In 1934, she became internationally famous for her stage designs and costumes for Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Known for four monumental works illustrating what she considered to be New York City's "Cathedrals": Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and art museums.
Florine Stettheimer — self-portrait
- August 19, 1883 – Coco Chanel born, influential French fashion designer of the ‘little black dress’ and the Chanel suit. She began her fashion career as a milliner in 1910, then opened a boutique in 1913, in the resort town of Deauville, to sell deluxe clothing for leisure and sport, making jersey and tricot fabrics into high-fashion sportswear. Next, she expanded her enterprise to Biarritz in 1915, so successful she was able to pay back her lover’s investment after the first year. In 1919, she was a registered couturière and established her maison de couture in Paris. By 1927, she owned her original building and four adjacent buildings. By 1935, she employed 4,000 people, but Elsa Schiaparelli had become a serious rival. She closed her business in 1939, moved into the Hotel Ritz, the favored hotel of high-ranking Nazi officers, and narrowly escaped being tried as a Nazi collaborator after the war, due to Winston Churchill’s intervention, said by some to be due to her close association with several English peers, and even members of Britain’s royal family. After several years living in a sort of exile in Switzerland, she returned to Paris in 1954 with her come-back collection. She was back in business, and continued until her death at age 87.
- August 19, 1900 – Dorothy Burr Thompson born, classical archaeologist, art historian, and academic; a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines; the first graduate from Bryn Mawr College with a major in Greek and archaeology, summa cum laude in 1923. She then studied at the American School of Classical Studies, and worked on excavations at Phlius on the Peloponnese peninsula with Carl Blegen. She discovered a tholos (‘beehive’) tomb in 1925, the burial place of the king and queen of Midea. Completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr in 1931. In 1933, she was the first woman appointed as a Fellow of the Athenian Agora excavations, where Canadian archaeologist Homer Thompson was the assistant director of field work. They were married in 1934. In between giving birth to three daughters, she still did some work on the Athenian excavations, discovering the garden of the Temple of Hephaistos in 1936. The family moved to Princeton NJ in 1946 when Homer Thompson accepted a chair at the Institute for Advanced Study. She continued to carry out her research and publish her work. In 1987, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement by the Archaeological Institute of America.
Dorothy Burr Thompson — with husband Homer Thompson
- August 19, 1911 – Anna Terruwe born, Dutch psychiatrist, known for her work on emotional deprivation disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder; she based her work on that of Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Terruwe, a devout Catholic, made church history in the fifties. After complaints about her by some Jesuits, a high-ranking Dutch Jesuit (Dr. Sebestian Tromp) of the Holy Office issued a ban: it was forbidden for priest students to see 'female psychiatrists' (there was only one: Dr. Terruwe). At the time, there were still many priest students, and quite a few religious superiors sent some of them to see Dr. Terruwe for their ‘emotional distractions.’ Rome also ordered Terruwe's mentor and advocate, Professor Willem Duynstee, to come to Rome in exile. Within ten years, the Vatican admitted that a terrible error of judgment had been made. Dr. Terruwe was not only rehabilitated, Pope Paul VI called her work "a gift to the Church."
- August 19, 1914 – Dame Rose Heilbron born, British barrister and High Court judge; first woman to achieve a first class honours degree in law at the University of Liverpool (1935); first woman to win a scholarship to Gray's Inn (1936); one of the first two women to be appointed King's Counsel (1949) in England. She was the first woman to lead in a murder case, first woman recorder (1956), and first woman judge to sit at the Old Bailey (1972), and first woman treasurer of Gray's Inn. She was also the second woman appointed as a High Court judge (1974), after Elizabeth Lane.
- August 19, 1934 – Renée Richards born as Richard Raskind, American ophthalmologist, author, and tennis player; United States Tennis Association Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame inductee in 2000; after undergoing sex reassignment surgery in 1975, she was denied entrance to the U.S. Open by the USTA; she fought the ban in court – the New York State Court ruled in her favor in 1977.
- August 19, 1946 – Dawn Steele born, one of the first women to run a major Hollywood Studio. Began in merchandising, then rose through the ranks of production to President of Production at Paramount Pictures in 1985. Took over as President of ailing Columbia Pictures (1987-1990), but after a string of loses, she resigned, and the studio was sold to Sony Corporation. She formed Steel Pictures and made films for the Walt Disney Company (1990-1993), then was a partner in Atlas Entertainment (1994-1997); her 1993 memoir, They Can Kill You But They Can’t Eat You, described her tenure at Columbia. In Steel’s obituary, Norah Ephron said she was the first powerful woman in Hollywood to hire large numbers of women as executives, producers, marketing people, and directors.
- August 19, 1947 – Anuška Ferligoj born, Slovenian mathematician; noted for work in network analysis, multivariate analysis, social networks, and survey methodology. Professor of Multivariate Statistics and head of the graduate program on Statistics at the University of Ljubljana, and Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.
- August 19, 1955 – Patricia Scotland born in Dominica, British Leeward Islands, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, called to the Middle Temple in 1977, specializing in family law. In 1991, she became the first black woman to be appointed as a Queen’s Counsel. She was named as a Millennium Commissioner, and a member of the Commission for Racial Equality, in 1994. Received a Life Peerage in 1997, and is a Lord Temporal Member of the House of Lords. Parliamentary Under-secretary of State (1999-2001), then Parliamentary Secretary (2001-2003). Appointed as Attorney General (2007-2010) then Advocate General (2010) for Northern Ireland, and also served as the first woman Attorney General for England and Wales (2007-2010); first woman Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations (since 2016).
- August 19, 1957 – Gerda Verburg born, Dutch politician and trade union member; Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations organizations for Food and Agriculture (2011-2015); Member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands (2010-2011.
- August 19, 1965 – Maria de Medeiros born, Portuguese actress, singer, and director, known for performances in Henry and June and Pulp Fiction. Directed seven films, including Capitães de Abril (April Captains), for which she co-wrote the screenplay with Eve Deboise. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.
- August 19, 1988 – Veronica Roth born, American writer and dystopian novelist, known for her Divergent series.
- August 19, 2019 – After widespread complaints, Google changed a policy allowing deceptive ads from “pregnancy crisis centers,” but left a loophole allowing these centers to continue to post ads. The centers are anti-abortion clinics designed to discourage women from getting abortions, and do not provide healthcare. The Google loophole meant only users who specifically searched under the word 'abortion' would be provided information on abortions. Google has continued to misdirect women to these centers. In June 2023, the Guardian reported that Google had earned an estimated $1o million USD between March 2021 and February 2023 from shunting abortion seekers to “pregnancy crisis centers,” which now outnumber clinics which do provide abortion care in the U.S. by 3 to 1.
- August 19, 2020 –U.S. Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the two first Muslim women to serve in Congress, held a press conference to denounce the Israeli government’s decision to deny them entry to the country, saying the travel restrictions are part of a broader effort to suppress voices of dissent over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in occupied and disputed territories. "Netanyahu's decision to deny us entry might be unprecedented for members of Congress," Omar said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "But it is the policy of his government when it comes to Palestinians. This is the policy of his government when it comes to anyone who holds views that threaten the occupation. The only way to preserve unjust policy is to suppress people's freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of movement.” Additional public pressure was applied by Donald Trump, a vocal critic of Omar and Tlaib, before Netanyahu's government said it wouldn’t allow the two lawmakers to enter the country, citing their support for boycotting Israel. The Israeli government did offer to let Tlaib in on humanitarian grounds to visit her 90-year-old Palestinian grandmother on the condition that she did not promote a boycott of Israel. Tlaib said she made the decision to not accept the conditional travel permit after consulting with her grandmother and other family members. "Through tears, at three o'clock in the morning, we all decided as a family that I could not go until I was a free, American United States Congresswoman coming there, not only to see my grandmother but to talk to Palestinian and Israeli organizations that believed that my grandmother deserves human dignity as much as anyone else does," she said. The decision by Netanyahu's government to deny entry to two sitting members of Congress prompted withering criticism from Democrats, who said the move could damage the typical bipartisan support among U.S. lawmakers for Israel. "Denying visit to duly elected members of Congress is not consistent with being an ally," Omar said. "And denying millions of people freedom of movement or expression or self determination is not consistent with being a democracy."
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib
- August 19, 2021 – In Afghanistan, high-profile women in sports were urged to wipe their social media presence and some were advised to burn their uniforms as supporters scramble to protect them from the Taliban. Speaking from Copenhagen, Khalida Popal, former captain of the Afghanistan women’s football (soccer) team, said female players should take urgent steps to remove all trace of their sporting history. “Today I’m calling them and telling them, take down their names, remove their identities, take down their photos for their safety. Even I’m telling them to burn down or get rid of your national team uniform,” she told Reuters. “And that is painful for me, for someone as an activist who stood up and did everything possible to achieve and earn that identity as a women’s national team player. To earn that badge on the chest, to have the right to play and represent our country, how much we were proud.” A source close to the country’s cycling federation echoed the advice, saying female members had been told to stay at home and avoid posting on social media at all cost. The speed with which the Taliban took over control of Afghanistan ended any chance the women might have had to flee, the source added. “Everything changed in 48 hours. Nobody was able to escape. If it [had been] a week or something, we would have sent them to neighbouring countries but it all happened on the same day, the airport is closed, everywhere you see terrorists with guns.” Just four days after the invasion of Kabul by the Taliban, only women wearing the burqa, which covers them from head to the ground with only a mesh screen in front of the eyes so the wearer can see, were on the streets in Kabul, the nation’s capital, and all were accompanied by a male guardian. The Talban requires the burqa and a male guardian for all Afghan women whenever they are outside the home.
Khalida Popal
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- August 20, 1630 – Maria van Oosterwijck born, Dutch ‘Golden Age’ painter, specializing in richly detailed flower paintings and still lifes, often with allegorical themes; one of the very few women professional painters in the 1600s. Born near Delft, she did her early work there, but moved to Amsterdam in the 1670s. Her studio was opposite painter Willem van Aelst’s workshop. He courted her, but she turned down his marriage proposal. She remained single, but raised her orphaned nephew. Van Oosterwijck picked an excellent agent in Amsterdam to market her work outside the Netherlands, and counted among her patrons Louis XIV of France, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, Elector of Saxony Augustus II the Strong, William III of England, and the King of Poland. In spite of her skill and widespread popularity, she was denied membership in the painters’ guild, because women weren’t allowed to join. She taught her servant Geertgen Wyntges, also known as Geertje Pieters, to mix her paints, and trained her as a painter too. After van Oosterwijck died, Wyntges lived independently, supporting herself as a painter. Arnold Houbraken, an artist better known for his biographies of Dutch Golden Age painters, wrote about her, but described her as an amateur painter, overlooking the large sums paid for her work by high-profile collectors, including European royalty.
Vanitas still-life by Maria van Oosterwijck
- August 20, 1908 – Jeanne Machin Stern born, French screenwriter and translator who went to Germany as an au pair and French teacher, where she met Kurt Stern. In 1932, they married in Paris, went to Spain in 1934, then to Mexico in 1942, where they took part in the Free Germany Movement. They returned to Germany in 1947. She is known for Unbändiges Spanien, Das Leben beginnt, Stronger Than the Night, and Das Verurteile Dorf.
- August 20, 1919 – Noni Jabavu born as Helen Nontando Jabavu, one of the first Black South African women writers and journalists, and one of the earliest Black South African women to publish autobiographies, The Ochre People and Drawn in Colour. She was a radio personality for the BBC, worked as a film technician, as a semi-skilled engineer, and as an oxyacetylene welder of bomber engine parts during WWII.
- August 20, 1936 – Míriam Colón born, American actress on Broadway and on television, who played Mama Montana in the film Scarface. In the 1966, she founded and was the director of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in New York City. She was honored in 1993 with an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater, and President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2014. She died at age 80 from a pulmonary infection in 2017.
Míriam Colón
- August 20, 1946 – Connie Chung born, American television journalist, second woman to co-anchor a network evening news program, on CBS. During her nearly 50 year career, she worked for NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC.
- August 20, 1955 – Agnes Chan born in Hong Kong, Chinese singer; television and radio presenter in Japan; Doctor of Philosophy, and professor at Japanese universities; essayist and novelist, noted for her series, We All Are People Who Live on the Earth. Since 1988, Chan has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
- August 20, 1955 – Janet Royall born, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, British Labour Co-operative Party politician and academic; Member of the House of Lords since 2004; Privy Council member (2008-2009).
- August 20, 1958 – Patricia Rozema born, Canadian film director-producer-writer; I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Mansfield Park, When Night Is Falling, and Into the Forest.
- August 20, 1961 – Amanda S. Berry born, OBE; CEO of BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts - 2000-2022); BAFTA’s Director of Development and Events (1988-2000); Scottish Television Enterprises (1990-1997); London Weekend Television (LWT – 1989).
- August 20, 1974 – Amy Adams born, American actress and producer, winner of two Golden Globes, six nominations for Academy Awards, and seven BAFTAs (British Academy Film Awards). She was executive producer on the TV mini-series Sharp Objects in 2018. Works with underprivileged students at New York City's Ghetto Film School; is a supporter of the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that helps LGBT teens; has raised money for the brain cancer charities Snog and Headrush; and participated in a fundraiser to help sexually abused children. During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, she and Jennifer Garner launched #SaveWithStories to help parents deal with stress, and raise funds for children’s education online during the school closures.
- August 20, 1988 – Sarah R. Lotfi born, American filmmaker, noted for films inspired by historical figures and events, including the short Tudor Rose, and the feature-length films The Last Bogatyr and Menschen.
- August 20, 2015 – Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou, president of the Greek Court of Cassation, and Greece’s most senior judge, briefly became the nation’s first woman prime minister, from August 27 to September 21, 2015, after Alexis Tsipras resigned over the latest German economic bailout proposal for the beleaguered nation.
- August 20, 2019 – In El Salvador, Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz is freed for a second time, after being tried again for the charge of murder because she gave birth in a toilet to a stillborn baby. Hernández always maintained her innocence, insisting that she didn’t realize she was pregnant after being raped at age 17, and that she lost consciousness during the birth. The judge in this trial concurred with the judge who handled her previous appeal that there was insufficient evidence to convict. “Thank God, justice was served,” said Hernández outside the courthouse, surrounded by jubilant supporters, after the verdict was handed down. “I thank all of you who have supported me and thank everyone from around the world who has shown support.” In the last decade, 41 Salvadoran women have been freed because of dogged campaigning by both domestic and international human rights groups, but least 16 women are in jail serving up to 35 year sentences, and four more women are facing trial.
- August 20, 2020 – Aspiring mathematician Vitoria Mario is Portuguese but has lived in London for four years. She was awarded two A*s and an A in her A levels, and wanted to study at Warwick University. She was ineligible for government funding and the relatives she was living with since her father’s death couldn’t afford to support her. So she started a GoFundMe page, with a goal of raising £24,000 for accommodation, £3,000 for equipment and £13,000 for general living costs including food, transport, gas, and electricity. She wrote, “Though my story is not unique, my dream of becoming a mathematician is not only a chance at social mobility for my family and I, but to inspire people who have been in similar positions to aspire to be the best version of themselves and strive for their dreams despite gender/racial inequality, immigration issues and financial barriers.” A number of donations came in, but she was far from reaching her goal, until U.S. pop star Taylor Swift made a contribution of £23,373, writing: “Vitoria, I came across your story online and am so inspired by your drive and dedication to turning your dreams into reality. I want to gift you the rest of your goal amount. Good luck with everything you do! Love, Taylor.” Mario said she hadn’t spoken to Swift but was keen to thank her because “she actually made my dream come true. I feel like at some points I was worrying too much about the money, what I have to do, if I have to look for a job, and now I can just do more maths, prepare myself for uni, so I can just be really prepared when it comes.” In 2023, Mario became a summer intern at Bank of America.
Vitoria Mario and Taylor Swift
- August 20, 2021 – Reem Alsalem of Jordan began a three-year term as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences. She holds a Masters in International Relations from the American University in Cairo, and a Masters in Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She is an independent consultant on gender issues, the rights of refugees and migrants, transitional justice and humanitarian response. Alsalem has consulted extensively for United Nations departments, agencies and programmes such as UN-Women, OHCHR, UNICEF and IOM, as well as for non-governmental organizations, think tanks and academia. She worked for UNHCR in 13 countries, planning, implementing, and monitoring programs to protect survivors of gender-based violence.
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- August 21, 1861 – Mary Lizzie Macomber born, American artist in the Pre-Raphaelite style. A large part of her work was lost in a fire at her studio in 1913.
- August 21, 1893 – Lili Boulanger born, French composer, first woman to win the Prix de Rome with her composition Faust et Hélène.
- August 21, 1897 – Constance McLaughlin Green born, American historian and author; Pulitzer Prize for History for Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878.
- August 21, 1916 – Consuelo Velázquez born, Mexican concert pianist, and singer-songwriter, best known for “Bésame Mucho.” She was elected as a member of the Mexican Congress, served as president of the Society of Authors and Composers of Mexico (SACM), and was vice-president of the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC).
- August 21, 1929 – Marie Severin born, American illustrator and comic book artist for Marvel Comics and EC Comics; Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame inductee.
- August 21, 1945 – Celia Brayfield born, English novelist, non-fiction writer, and cultural commentator; she wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times before the birth of her daughter in 1980, when she began work on her first book, a non-fiction work entitled Glitter: the Truth About Fame.
- August 21, 1951 – Yana Bland (née Mintoff) born, Maltese Labour politician, economist, and educator; she worked as a teacher in the United Kingdom, where she was active in the Socialist Workers Party. On her return to Malta, she was one of the founders of the Association of Women of the Mediterranean Region. She was an editor on four non-fiction books of collected works, Militarism in the Mediterranean, Health in the Mediterranean, Nobody Can Imagine Our Longing: Refugees and Immigrants in the Mediterranean, and In Search of Peace. In 1998, she was a founder and superintendent of the Katherine Anne Porter School in Wimberly, near Austin, Texas. She returned to Malta in 2012 to help her ailing father.
- August 21, 1962 – Sister Dr Bernadette Porter born, British Roman Catholic nun, educator, and academic administrator. She held several posts at Roehampton University before serving as Vice Chancellor (1999-2004). She was appointed CBE in 2005, and is a member of the Reform Club, the first gentlemen’s club in London to accept women as equal members (since 1981).
- August 21, 1968 – Laura Trevelyan born, BBC World News America anchor/correspondent based in New York City; BBC United Nations correspondent (2006-2009). Author of A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World, and The Winchester: The Gun That Built An American Dynasty. Trevelyan became a U.S. citizen in 2016.
- August 21, 1975 – Alicia Witt born, American actress, singer-songwriter, producer, and pianist. She was “discovered” as a child by director David Lynch, and appeared in several of his projects. She played the daughter in the TV series Cybill (1995-1998), and appeared on the London stage in Piano/Forte. Her music albums include Live at Rockwood, Revisionary History, and 15,000 Days. In 2022, she went public with her diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer.
- August 21, 1998 – The paperback version of Kathryn Cullen duPont’s Encyclopedia of Women’s History in America is published. She is also the author of the biography Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Women’s Liberty; Women’s Rights on Trial; and Global Issues: Human Trafficking.
- August 21, 2008 – Swaziland Women’s Protest: Hundreds of women protested in the capital of Swaziland against a shopping trip to Europe and the Middle East by nine of the king’s wives. As one of the poorest countries in the world, the protesters believed the money could be spent in a better way.
- August 21, 2019 – In the UK, anti-abortion activists lost a court of appeal challenge to an Ealing council’s decision to ban protesters from gathering outside a Marie Stopes clinic in west London. Judges dismissed an appeal against a ruling that the restrictions imposed by the council outside the local clinic were justified. The council’s public spaces protection order (PSPO) was the first to create a buffer zone around a clinic in the UK, which it imposed in April 2018 after reports of “intimidation, harassment and distress” by Good Counsel Network (GCN) activists, who try to dissuade women from getting abortions. The GCN lawyers argued the ban interfered with their rights under the European convention on human rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and freedom of assembly and association, and that PSPO was designed to protect local residents from antisocial behaviour, but clinic users were “one-off or occasional” visitors to the area. Ealing council argued that some who had abortions at the clinic many years ago were still “significantly affected by their encounters with the activists.” The authority’s QC said the council received a petition signed by more than 3,500 people urging it to take action. The Master of the Rolls, Sir Terence Etherton, Lady Justice King, and Lady Justice Nicola Davies unanimously dismissed GCN’s appeal, upholding an earlier decision in favour of Ealing by the high court. Julian Bell, leader of the Ealing council, said: “We’re delighted the court of appeal has decided to keep our safe zone in place to protect clinic users and local people from harassment and intimidation. Since we introduced the zone in April 2018, it has been working well and we have seen a dramatic reduction in activities having a detrimental effect and there has been a significant improvement to the quality of lives of local people. We hope today’s judgment will provide encouragement for other councils facing similar issues, but at the end of the day, this is a national issue that deserves a national solution. I’d call on the home secretary to introduce Ealing-style safe zones across the country so other communities and visitors can also be protected.”
Marie Stopes Clinic in Ealing
- August 21, 2019 – Police in Madrid arrested a 53-year-old Colombian man accused of filming the intimate parts of over 500 women without their consent while they travelled on the Metro. The accused made the videos, a practice known as upskirting, using a mobile phone concealed in a backpack. Police say he then uploaded at least 283 of these videos on to pornographic sites where they were viewed millions of times. Police have identified 555 victims, some of them underage. The man is alleged to have been filming on a daily basis since at least the summer of 2018 when he began publishing the videos, operating near local railway stations and supermarkets. He apparently followed his victims and even introduced himself in an effort to get closer and obtain better-quality images. Police caught the man in the act while filming in the Metro. A laptop and three hard drives were found at his home containing hundreds of videos. The accused’s own site had 3,519 subscribers and his videos had been viewed over 1m times. In Spain, upskirting is categorised as sexual abuse and is also punishable with prison.
Gina Martin, who campaigned to make upskirting illegal, holds copy of the bill she fought for
- August 21, 2020 – Since 2000, Nepal had made significant gains in the number of women giving birth in clinics and hospitals, contributing to major decreases in maternal and neonatal mortality. Between 2000-2019, the number of institutional births more than quadrupled, while maternal mortality declined by 76 percent, and newborn mortality declined by 62 percent. But according to a report published in the UK medical journal The Lancet, during Nepal’s four-month COVID-19 lockdown, the number of births in clinics and hospitals fell by over 50%, while the rate of neonatal deaths more than tripled, from 13 to 40 per 1,000 live births. Stillbirths and pre-term births also increased. “Services for women were shut down [during the lockdown] and those doctors were moved to serve Covid patients,” explained Dr Lhamo Sherpa, an epidemiologist and medical doctor, adding that women were “sent away by the hospitals, saying ‘we do not want to take in cases.’” The lockdown was aimed at providing authorities time to bolster the capacity of health care facilities. By 2022, the rate was declining – below 25 deaths per 1000 live births, still much higher than the pre-pandemic rate.
Health clinic in Nepal
- August 21, 2021 – The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325 in 2000, a groundbreaking initiative to change perception of ‘gender’ as being a social issue, rather than a necessary part of the process to create peace, security, and prosperity, but women’s groups are frustrated with the slow progress being made. Between 1992 and 2019, women served as only 6% of mediators, 6% of signatories, and 13% of negotiators globally. The COVID-19 pandemic shone a harsh light on the full extent of gender inequality, and increased the urgency of fostering gender-inclusive approaches to build sustainable peace. Empowering women leaders to participate in peacebuilding is increasingly crucial. Women participants in peace processes often represent broader and more diverse constituencies, ensuring a range of views and interests are represented and peace processes are fully democratized. Digital technology shows promise for increasing women’s participation. Amera Malek, a Syrian activist familiar with digital technologies and their use to enhance women’s voices and gather support, said: “We see that women are more likely to participate in online discussions because they can do so anonymously and flexibly, balancing their care burdens. Yet, we must ensure these methods are underpinned by robust gender analysis. We must continue to leverage the huge potential of digital tools for constituency-building while ensuring that existing discrepancies in accessing digital tools do not further inequalities.”
Amera Malek
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- August 22, 1762 – Ann Smith Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s sister-in-law, becomes the first American woman newspaper editor, for The Newport Mercury.
- August 22, 1848 – Emma Smith DeVoe born, a leading suffragist in the early 20th century, led a successful campaign to win the right to vote for women in Washington state. DeVoe supported woman suffrage from childhood, but when she moved to Tacoma, Washington, with her husband in 1905, she found a near-defunct Washington Equal Suffrage Association, and revitalized it. Her campaign strategy became known as the ‘Washington Method.’ She urged her sister workers to be “good natured and cheerful,” recruit more women, and engage voters one-on-one. She organized a statewide canvass to determine how every voter stood on the question of suffrage. Her volunteers sent out mass mailings of penny postcards, and put up posters. DeVoe urged labor and temperance organizations to support the suffrage movement quietly, to avoid alienating big business and the brewers. She even distributed a cookbook throughout the state to prove suffragists did not want to change women’s traditional role as homemakers – but it had “Votes for Women” on the back cover. The voters approved the amendment by almost 64%. After this victory, she helped campaigns in other states, teaching the Washington Method, and also organized the National Council of Women Voters, the first national organization of voting women, which studied issues to educate voters on a non-partisan basis. It held itself apart from party politics, working for equality of opportunity for all, and for the protection of children and families. The NCWV eventually merged with the National League of Women Voters.
- August 22, 1861 – Mary Elizabeth Wood born, librarian and missionary to China, founder of the first library school in China.
- August 22, 1868 – Maud Powell born, American violinist, first American violinist to achieve international success; awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in January 2014.
- August 22, 1881 – Agnes Pelton born in Germany, American symbolist painter dubbed the ‘Desert Transcendentalist.’ Her father died in 1881, and she and her mother moved to the Netherlands and then Switzerland before arriving in New York in 1888, where her mother ran the Pelton School of Music in Brooklyn for 30 years. In poor health as a child, Agnes was educated at home by her mother, then studied at the Pratt Institute (1895-1900). After graduating, she studied landscapes with one of her instructors, Arthur Wesley Dow, and worked as his assistant at his summer school. Dow also taught Georgia O’Keeffe. Her first exhibition in 1912 attracted Walt Kuhn’s attention, who invited her to exhibit two paintings at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, the first large exhibition of modern art in the U.S., a landmark in American art history. The show later traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Copley Society of Art in Boston. Pelton visited art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico, in 1919, and also visited several Pueblo communities in the American Southwest. Her work changed significantly. After her mother died in 1921, she gave up her studio in New York, and traveled to Hawaii, Beirut, Syria, Georgia, and California. In 1932, she settled in Cathedral City, California, and painted the desert, which enthralled her, but also incorporated her spiritual and philosophical beliefs in her work. In 1938, Pelton was a co-founder and first president of the Transcendental Painting Group. She died in Cathedral City at age 79 in 1961.
‘Swimmer in Yellow’ and ‘The Primal Wing’ — by Agnes Pelton
- August 22, 1893 – Dorothy Parker born, American poet, author, screenwriter, and critic, known for her satirical wit; member of the famed New York literary group, the Algonquin Round Table; nominated twice for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, as co-author of the 1937 version of A Star is Born, and co-author for 1947’s Smash-up. She won the O. Henry Award in 1929 for “Big Blonde.” In her will she left her literary estate to Martin Luther King Jr., a man she had never met, but greatly admired. Upon his death, his family donated the bequest to the NAACP. After Parker died in 1967, her ashes were unclaimed for 17 years, and spent several years in her attorney’s filing cabinet. In 1988, the NAACP asked for them, and placed them in a memorial garden at its Baltimore headquarters, under a plaque which reads, “Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, 'Excuse my dust'. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.”
- August 22, 1900 – Lisy Fischer born in Britain, Swiss pianist and child prodigy from a talented Jewish family. She gave her first piano recital in Geneva at age 11, then studied in Paris and Berlin. As a teenager, Fischer gave concerts and appeared as a soloist in Germany and Switzerland, and was awarded the Professor Gustav Hollaender Medal in 1920. Many of her concerts were aired on Swiss Radio. In her later years, after the death of her husband, Ernest Simson, she lived in England with her daughter, and died at age 98.
- August 22, 1902 – Leni Riefenstahl born, Nazi film producer-director, noted for Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) and Olympia, two of the most technically innovative and effective propaganda films ever made. She was arrested after WWII and classified as a “fellow traveler and Nazi sympathizer” and detained in Allied prison camps (1945-1948), which ended her directing career. She then spent much of her life taking still photographs, publishing books on the Nuba peoples of Sudan, and underwater photography.
- August 22, 1918 – Mary McGrory born, American journalist and columnist, won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the Watergate scandal. A fierce opponent of the Viet Nam War, and her name was on Richard Nixon’s infamous enemies list. Her career as a journalist began in 1947 at the Washington Star. She rose to prominence because of her coverage of the McCarthy hearings in 1954, in which she likened McCarthy to a neighborhood bully. She covered both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy extensively, and was part of the press corps that traveled with RFK during his 1968 presidential campaign, which ended when he was assassinated in Los Angeles. The day after the Star went out of business in 1981, she went to work for The Washington Post. In 1995, she was honored with The Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Speech.
- August 22, 1921 – Sotiria Bellou born, Greek singer and performer, known for rebetiko style music. She was also a member of the Greek Resistance against the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. Caught by the Nazis, she was tortured, and imprisoned. By 1944, she was a member of the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS), supporting the leftists in their clashes with the right-leaning Greek government and its allies. She was caught at least once and kept in detention. Extreme Rightists never forgave her for supporting the leftists, and later six members of the royalist group X showed up at a club where she was performing with other musicians, demanding she sing a famous right wing song. When she refused, they beat her, called her insulting names, and threatened to kill her. Not one of the men onstage with her or in the audience came to her defense. Bellou made many recordings from the 1950s into the 1970s, but she died, impoverished, of throat cancer at age 78 in 1997.
- August 22, 1922 – Theoni V. Aldredge born in Greece, American costume designer; winner of three Tony Awards (and nominated for 11 more), an Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 1975 Oscar for Best Costume Design for The Great Gatsby.
- August 22, 1925 – Honor Blackman born, English actress known for TV roles on The Avengers (1962-1964) and The Upper Hand (1990-1996), and as Pussy Galore in the Bond film Goldfinger. She also worked onstage, including her 2006 one-woman stage show, Word of Honor. Politically, she was a liberal republican (against having a monarchy). She declined a CBE in 2002, feeling that it would be hypocritical, given her views on the monarchy, to accept. She said of Margaret Thatcher, “She was a powerful figure, but she did damn all for empowering women. She didn’t surround herself with any women whatsoever, or encourage women to come into politics or do anything in particular. She could have been a quite wonderful role model.” Blackman died at age 94 in April 2020.
- August 22, 1935 – Annie Proulx born, American journalist and author, won the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for the novel Postcards.
- August 22, 1949 – Diana Nyad born, American long-distance swimmer, author, journalist, and motivational speaker. She broke records, including a 45-year old record for circumnavigating Manhattan Island, and a non-stop distance record, swimming from Bimini to Florida without a wetsuit in 1979, which still stands. After four failed attempts, on August 31, 2013, at age 64, she began her fifth attempt to swim 110 miles from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida. About 53 hours later, she reached Key West on September 2, 2013. She wrote four books: Other Shores; Basic Training for Women; Boss of Me: The Keyshawn Johnson Story; and Find a Way: One Wild and Precious Life. Nyad also contributes to The New York Times, Newsweek, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She has spoken frankly about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, and considers it a motivating factor in her determination while swimming. Nyad is openly lesbian and an atheist.
- August 22, 1950 – Althea Gibson becomes the first black tennis player accepted at a U.S. national competition.
- August 22, 1959 – Pia Gjellerup born, Danish solicitor and Social Democrat politician; Director of the Danish National Centre for Public Sector Innovation; Member of Folketinget (Parliament) since 1987.
- August 22, 1973 – Kristen Wiig born, American comedian, writer, actress and producer; joined the improvisational comedy group, The Groundlings, in the early 2000s. She was a cast member of Saturday Night Live in 2005, and appeared in the films Knocked Up and Paul. She co-wrote the screenplay and starred in the 2011 hit comedy film Bridesmaids, and was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actress and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
- August 22, 1986 – Kerr-McGee agrees to pay the estate of whistleblower Karen Silkwood $1.36 million to settle her nuclear contamination lawsuit, after going through appeals for 10 years.
- August 22, 2018 – In the UK, research found girls achieving top grades in science and maths at the GCSE examinations, taken at the end of compulsory education (year 11), are less likely to continue to a higher level with such subjects, including physics, because they are affected by low confidence, an absence of peers in the classroom, and what society considers “feminine.” As hundreds of thousands of pupils await the results of their GCSE exams, a study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, suggests that only dramatic intervention will change girls’ low take-up of physics and maths at more advanced levels. The IFS study notes girls have long outperformed boys at GCSE level, including in the science, technology, and maths (subjects known collectively as STEM), but fewer girls go on to take maths and physics at A-level, and fewer continue with those subjects at a higher education level. Girls are therefore missing out on potentially highly paid careers. Women with maths degrees earn 13% more than other women graduates five years after university; women with degrees in economics, which require high levels of maths ability, earn nearly 20% more. A pilot program even offered high-scoring girls financial scholarships in return for studying physics or maths A-levels, but the scholarships made little difference. Physicist Jess Wade and Chemist Claire Murray campaign to debunk myths about girls, “This isn’t because of ability – girls outperform boys at GCSE and A-level – or enthusiasm, but because we exist in a world that tells children that girls and boys are good at different things. We meet too many girls who, despite being brilliant, are not confident, and are unsure of their own potential to become scientists.”
Jess Wade and Claire Murray
- August 22, 2020 – A CDC summary of reports from 13 U.S. states covering the period from March 1, 2020 to August 21, 2020, of maternal and birth outcomes of hospitalized pregnant women with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 reveals that of the 598 women recorded who contracted COVID-19 while pregnant, 55% were asymptomatic at admission to the hospital; severe illness occurred among pregnant women symptomatic when admitted, including intensive care unit admissions (16%), mechanical ventilation (8%), and death (1%). None of the women who died were asymptomatic at admission. 87% of the women were in their third trimester at admission. Pregnancy losses occurred for 2% of pregnancies completed during COVID-19-associated hospitalizations, and were experienced by both symptomatic and asymptomatic women. 28% of the women were age 15-24 and 25% of this group were symptomatic at admission. 53% were age 25-24, and 53% of them were symptomatic at admission. 19% were age 35-49, and 22% of them were symptomatic at admission.
- August 22, 2021 – French President Emmanuel Macron announced Josephine Baker will be entered into the Panthéon mausoleum in November, 2021, the first Black woman to be remembered in the hallowed Parisian monument. Baker, the famed American-born dancer, singer, and actress, became a sensation in Paris as a headliner at the Folies Bergère in the 1920s and 1930s, then renounced her U.S. citizenship when she married French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. During WWII, she was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, as an "honorable correspondent." She socialized with the Germans, Vichy bureaucrats, and high-ranking Japanese and Italian officials to gather information. She and her entourage went to French colonies in North Africa, and made tours of Spain. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Croix de Guere, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. When she died in 1975, she became the only American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral.
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- August 23, 1838 – The first class to graduate from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary receive their diplomas. It became Mount Holyoke College in 1888.
- August 23, 1843 – Lillie Hitchcock Coit born, ‘Firebelle Lil’ a wealthy socialite fascinated by firefighting, became an honorary member of San Francisco’s Engine Company No. 5, often riding along to fires, sometimes scandalously wearing trousers. She left one-third of her estate to the City of San Francisco, which used the bequest to build the landmark Coit Tower, and to place a statue of three firefighters in Washington Square Park.
- August 23, 1847 – Sarah Frances Whiting born, American physicist, astronomer, and first professor of physics at Wellesley College (1876-1916); She explored the newest techniques being applied to astronomy, and was the first director of Wellesley’s Whitin Observatory. One of her students was Annie Jump Cannon, one of the most effective Harvard “computers, the women who worked on the project to map and define every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of around 9. Whiting also wrote numerous articles for Popular Astronomy, and became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1883.
- August 23, 1900 – Malvina Reynolds born, American folk/blues singer-songwriter and political activist; her parents were Jewish immigrants, and socialist peace activists. Her best-known songs are “Little Boxes” and “What Have They Done to the Rain.” Reynolds sang frequently at events for liberal causes. She opposed nuclear weapons, campaigned for civil rights, but also wrote several songs for children, including “Morningtown Ride.” She later contributed several songs and materials to Sesame Street, and made occasional appearances on the show. She earned a doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley (1938), and later returned to UC-Berkeley to study music theory. Reynolds was an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press, which was founded in 1972.
- August 23, 1902 – Fannie Farmer opens Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston Massachusetts.
- August 23, 1908 – Hannah Frank born in Glasgow to Russian Jewish immigrants, Scottish artist and sculptor; she studied painting at Glasgow University, then studied clay modeling and sculpting at the Glasgow School of Art. She often donated pieces to fundraisers for Jewish organizations in Glasgow, and was a member of the Glasgow branch of Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work was exhibited by the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute, and the Royal Academy in London.
- August 23, 1911 – Betty Robinson born, American athlete and Olympic champion; in 1928, at age 16, in her second race she equaled the women’s world record running 100 meters, but it wasn’t officially recognized because it was deemed ‘wind-aided.’ At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, only her third 100 meter competition, she again equaled the world record, winning gold. She was the first Olympic champion in the women’s 100 meters event, since only a few events for women were in the 1924 Paris Olympics, and the inclusion of “strenuous” events for women like the 100 meters were still heavily disputed. With the American 4×100 meters relay team, Robinson earned a silver team medal. In 1931, Robinson nearly died in a plane crash near Oak Forest, Illinois, so severely injured the man who found her thought she was dead, and took her to the undertaker, where she was found to be still alive, and sent to the local infirmary, which had very limited facilities. She did survive, but spent six months in a wheelchair. It was another two years before she could walk normally. She missed the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Robinson did make the American team in time for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but because she was unable to kneel for the 100 meters start, she took part only in the 4 X 100 meters relay. The German women’s team was heavily favored to win, but their baton dropped in a handoff, and Robinson took the lead, handing off to Helen Stephens for the final lap, and the Americans took the gold. She retired from competition after the Berlin Olympics, and became an official for athletic events. She died at age 87, suffering from cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Betty Robinson before the plane crash
- August 23, 1918 – Anna Mani born, Indian physicist and meteorologist. Graduated with a B.Sc. Honors degree in physics and chemistry in 1939, then won a research scholarship at the Indian Institute of Science. In 1945, she went to Imperial College, London, where she specialised in meteorological instruments. Returning to India in 1948, she joined the meteorology department of the University of Pune. Mani set up a network of stations to measure solar radiation (1957-1958), and a small workshop to manufacture instruments to measure wind speed and solar energy. She also developed an apparatus to measure ozone. Mani published numerous papers on solar radiation, ozone, and wind energy measurements. She was Deputy Director General of the Indian Meteorological Department (1969-1976).
- August 23, 1922 – Nazik Al-Malaika born to a feminist poet mother and academic father; Iraqi poet, one of the most influential women poets in Iraq. In her second book of poetry, Sparks and Ashes, she was the first Arabic poet to use free verse. Her poems covered nationalism, social and feminist issues, honour killings and alienation. She left Iraq with her husband and family in 1970 after the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party came to power, moving to Kuwait, until it was invaded by Saddam Hussein in 1990, and then to Egypt, where she lived until her death in Cairo. Her books of poetry include And the sea changes its colour, Bottom of the Wave, and The Night’s Lover.
- August 23, 1941 – Onora O’Neill born, Baroness O’Neill of Bengrave, philosopher, academic, and member of the House of Lords; President of the British Academy (2005-2009); Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge (1992-2006); founding President of the British Philosophical Association (BPA); author of works on political philosophy, ethics, international justice, bioethics, the importance of trust, and consent and respect for autonomy in a just society.
- August 23, 1944 – Antonia C. Novello born, American physician and public health administrator; joined the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in 1979, then was appointed as Surgeon General of the United States (1990-1993), the first woman and first Hispanic Surgeon General. Novello later served as Commissioner of Health for the State of New York (1999- 2006).
- August 23, 1954 – Halimah Yacob born, Singapore Independent politician; President of Singapore; Speaker of the Parliament of Singapore (2013-2017); Member of Parliament (2001-2017).
- August 23, 1956 – Valgerd Svarstad Haugland born, Norwegian teacher, politician, and civil servant. Governor of Oslo and Viken since 2019; leader of the Christian Democratic Party (1995-2004).
- August 23, 1958 – Roberta Rudnick born, American earth scientist and professor of geology at University of California, Santa Barbara; world expert on the continental crust and lithosphere; fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and member of the National Academy of Sciences; editor-in-chief of Chemical Geology (2000-2010); awarded the 2012 Dana Medal by the Mineralogical Society of America.
- August 23, 1960 – Helen Rees Leahy born, UK Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester. Previously a curator and museum director for over 12 years, she organised numerous exhibitions of fine art and design. Leahy’s written work covers national identity, art collecting, the art market, art criticism, practices of individual and institutional collecting in both historical and contemporary contexts, and issues of patronage, display and interpretation. Noted for Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing and the four-volume The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, which she co-authored with Ruth B. Phillips.
- August 23, 1971 – Gretchen Whitmer born, Democratic politician; Governor of Michigan since January 2019; Minority Leader of the Michigan Senate (2011-2015); Member of the Michigan Senate, 23rd district (2006-2015); Member of the Michigan House of Representatives (2001-2006).
- August 23, 1986 – Mallory McMorrow born, Democratic politician; member of the Michigan state senate since January 2019. On April 19, 2022, she made a remarkable speech blasting Lana Theis, a Republican state senator who accused McMorrow by name of grooming and sexualizing children in a Theis fundraising email, because of McMorrow's opposition to legislation restricting the discussion of gender and sexuality in schools. The email’s subject line “Groomers outraged by my invocation,” referenced Theis’ self-serving “prayer” for the safety of children from pedophiles to introduce a proposed bill to ban discussion of gender and sexuality in schools, like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. McMorrow and other Democrats walked out in disgust during her invocation. McMorrow declared, “Hate wins when people like me stand by and let it happen. I won't.”
- August 23, 2018 – Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen sentenced to five years in prison in Iran, was given a three-day furlough, taking her and her family by surprise. She was briefly reunited with her four-year-old daughter, Gabriella. The Iranian move came ahead of critical decisions by the European Union on the extent to which it will resist U.S. sanctions designed to curb European investment in Iran, including the purchase of Iranian oil. In March 2020, she and 85,000 other Iranian prisoners were temporarily released due to the coronavirus pandemic. She was required to wear an ankle tag, effectively putting her under house arrest at her parents’ home in Tehran. In April 2021, she was given an additional one-year sentence, on top of the original five-year sentence. Her husband maintains she "was imprisoned as leverage for a debt owed by the UK over its failure to deliver tanks to Iran in 1979.” Her legal team asked the UN working group on arbitrary detention to comment on using Nazanin as diplomatic leverage and acknowledge that her treatment is "tantamount to torture" in discussion with authorities in both countries.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
with her daughter
- August 23, 2020 – To determine where women get the most equal treatment in American society, WalletHub compared the 50 U.S. states in three categories: education/health, political empowerment, and workplace environment. They ranked Hawaii number one overall, followed by Maine, Nevada, and New Mexico. WalletHub rated Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah as the bottom four. The problem with their rating system was that a bad rating or good rating in a single category could drastically affect a state’s overall ranking. In Ms. Magazine, a 2020 report from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security was very different, with Hawaii ranked tenth, Maine ninth, and Nevada wasn’t in either the top twelve or the bottom twelve. New Mexico was rated 39th. Ms. rated Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana as the bottom four.
- August 23, 2020 – Signs featuring Kamala Harris appeared all over Chennai, the village where her grandfather was born, in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu. Harris boosted her Indian fanbase when she used the Tamil word chithis (an affectionate word for ‘aunties’) during her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for U.S. vice president. She said her mother had “raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage. Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chithis.” She is the first candidate of Indian descent to be on a U.S. presidential ticket. Most of her Tamil family had traveled to Washington DC for her swearing-in as a U.S. Senator in 2017.
- August 23, 2021 – In the aftermath of August 14 earthquake that struck Haiti, Human Rights Watch expressed concerns about possible human rights violations amid the chaos and shortages. “The basic medical needs are so great that there is a risk that respect for human rights will be seen as an optional, unaffordable luxury, but we’ve been down that road before, and it left women and girls open to violence, abuse, and preventable deaths,” said Amanda Klasing, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Given the vast knowledge of what went wrong, it would be intolerable and inhumane to once again forget and ignore human rights in this response effort.” After the 201o Haitian earthquake, lack of safe conditions in the camps increased incidents of sexual violence, but it was nearly impossible to get post-rape care. Some women reported trading sex for food. In the area hardest hit by the 2021 quake, four medical facilities were destroyed, and many others were damaged, leaving many of the injured, and pregnant women, with little or no medical help.
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- August 24, 1552 – Lavinia Fontana born, Italian painter of the Bolognese Mannerist school; considered the first woman professional artist; she supported the family, while her husband took care of the house and kids. Fontana was among the first women artists to depict nude women, in spite of the art academy barring women from viewing any nude body, a crucial part of an artist’s training. Art historians have long debated whether family members modeled for her.
- August 24, 1556 – Sophie Brahe born, Danish horticulturalist, genealogist, and student of chemistry and medicine; assisted her brother, astronomer Tycho Brahe, with observing and recording. She also traced the genealogy of Danish noble families, publishing the first extensive version of Det Kongelige Bibliotek in 1626, and made later additions. It is still considered a major source of early history on Danish nobility.
- August 24, 1862 – Zonia Baber, born as Mary Arizona Baber, American geographer, geologist, activist, and teacher, who developed teaching methods for geology. After earning a teaching certificate, she worked as a private school principal (1886-1888), then became an instructor and head of the Geography Department (1890-1899) at Cook County Normal School (now Chicago State University). Baber designed a school desk specifically for use by students studying geography and other sciences. She was an associate professor and head of geography and geology in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago (1901-1902), and was principal of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She continued her own studies, earning her Bachelor of Science in 1904 from the University of Chicago. As a teacher, she focused on field work and first-hand experience. She chaired a committee of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to review textbooks, then recommend eliminating outdated or inappropriate phrases and concepts to stop the perpetuation of prejudice. In 1898, she co-founded the Geographic Society of Chicago, served a term as its President, and was active in the society for 50 years. Baber was an anti-imperialist, a feminist and suffragist, and a member of the executive committee of the Chicago branch of the NAACP. In 1926, she traveled with a WILPF delegation to Puerto Rico, advocating for extending suffrage to Puerto Rican women. Co-author with Wallace Atwood of Geography: The Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study.
- August 24, 1904 – Ida Cook born, English civil servant, novelist under the name Mary Burchell, and Jewish rescuer. Funded mainly by her writing, she and her sister, Mary Louise Cook, helped 29 Jews escape from the Nazis during the late 1930s. The Cook sisters also used their love of opera as a cover for making numerous trips into Germany to smuggle valuables out (hidden amongst their going-to-the-opera finery, which they sewed themselves) for Jewish families, after Jews were severely restricted by law in what money and valuables they could take with them when leaving Germany. ‘Mary Burchell’ was known for her romance novels, but as Ida Cook, she published We Followed Our Stars, the story of the sisters’ rescue operation. In 1965, the Cook sisters were honored as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem in Israel.
Ida and Mary Cook — 1926
- August 24, 1919 – Tosia Altman born, Polish Jewish courier and smuggler for Hashomer Hatzair, a secular Socialist Zionist youth movement, and for the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), during the WWII German occupation of Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As a courier, she passed herself off as a Polish gentile using false papers, and risked her life to visit ghettos, first to organize underground education and later to warn them of the impending mass extermination of Jews. After formation of the ŻOB, she was their liaison with the Home Army, smuggling weapons and explosives into the Warsaw Ghetto, and establishing a ŻOB group in the Kraków Ghetto. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, she was a courier between bunkers, and was one of only six to escape from the command bunker when the Germans discovered it, in spite of head and leg wounds. Altman was captured two weeks later, when the factory she was hiding in caught fire. Severely burned, she was handed over to the Gestapo, and died two days later, at age 23.
- August 24, 1926 – Nancy Spero born, American visual artist, anti-war and feminist activist, noted for epic-scale works, including a linear mosaic in NY subway walls at Lincoln Center station, and collage on paper; member of the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists; founding member of A.I.R. Gallery (Artists in Residence).
Images from the ‘Artemis, Acrobats, Divas, and Dancers’ linear mosaic by Nancy Spero
- August 24, 1929 – Betty Dodson born, American sex educator, artist and author, pioneer in women’s sexual liberation; noted for Bodysex Basics, Orgasms for Two, and Sex for One.
- August 24, 1932 – Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly nonstop across the U.S., from Los Angeles California to Newark New Jersey in just over 19 hours.
- August 24, 1937 – Susan Sheehan born, American author; won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for her landmark book on mental illness and the mental-health system, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
- August 24, 1942 – Karen Uhlenbeck born, American mathematician and a founder of modern geometric analysis. Currently a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University and a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study. She held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair at the University of Texas at Austin (1988-1996). In 2019, she was the first woman to be awarded the Abel Prize, widely viewed as the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize, for work which “led to some of the most dramatic advances in mathematics in the last 40 years.” Her research “inspired a generation of mathematicians,” according to François Labourie of the University of Côte d’Azur in France. “She wanders around and finds new things that nobody has found before.” Author of Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World. Also in 2019, she won the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, for her impact on geometric topology and analysis, and for her mentorship of young people and women in mathematics.
- August 24, 1950 – Edith Spurlock Sampson becomes the first African-American U.S. delegate to the U.N., serving until 1953. She was a lawyer and judge, and one of the first black members of the National Association of Women Lawyers.
- August 24, 1952 – Marion Bloem born, Indonesian-Dutch writer and filmmaker; author of Geen gewoon Indisch meisje (No Ordinary Indo Girl) and as director of the feature film Ver van familie (Far from Family).
- August 24, 1959 – Meg Munn born, Chair of the British Council’s Society Advisory Group (2017-2021); international consultant on governance, including parliamentary processes, political party development, gender mainstreaming and women in leadership, working with organizations, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women. Labour Member of UK Parliament (2001-2015) and advocate for women in STEM and other non-traditional careers.
- August 24, 1965 – Marlee Matlin born, American actress, author, and deaf activist. Played Sarah Norman in the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God, winning an Academy Award for Best Actress, the only deaf winner to date. She lost all hearing in her right ear and 80% of the hearing in her left ear at the age of 18 months due to illness and fevers. In her autobiography I'll Scream Later, she suggests that her hearing loss may have been due to a genetically malformed cochlea. The only member of her family who is deaf, she made her stage debut at age seven, as Dorothy in an International Center on Deafness and the Arts (ICODA) children's theatre production of The Wizard of Oz. Henry Winkler discovered her during one of her ICODA theater performances, leading to her casting in the film of Children of a Lesser God. She appeared in the TV movies Bridge to Silence and Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story, and on The West Wing, My Name is Earl, and as a series regular on Picket Fences and Quantico. Author of the novels Deaf Child Crossing, Nobody’s Perfect. Matlin is a member of the Red Cross Celebrity Cabinet, and a prominent member of the National Association of the Deaf.
- August 24, 1972 – Ava DuVernay born, American producer, director, screenwriter, and film distributor; first African American woman to win the Sundance Film Festival directing award, in 2012 for Middle of Nowhere; director of the feature film Selma, which was nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture in 2014. She directed the 2016 documentary 13th, about the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the U.S., and creator and producer of the TV series, Queen Sugar (2016-2022).
- August 24, 2020– On Mother’s Day in the Middle East in 2019, the bullet-ridden body of her son was sent home to Janna Ezat. Her son, Hussein Al-Umari, was 35 years old when he and 50 other Muslims at prayer at Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, were killed in an attack by an Australian terrorist, a self-professed white supremacist. As people ran for their lives or lay dead on the floor, Al Umari rushed towards the shooter shouting at him to stop. On this day, a year and a half later, Janna Ezat came face-to-face for the first time with her son’s killer at his trial. She had written down what she wanted to say, but instead, she spoke directly to him: “I have decided to forgive you, Mr Tarrant, because I don’t have hate, I don’t have revenge. The damage is done. Hussein will never be here.” The terrorist had sat impassively behind glass, listening to testimony by bereaved relatives or survivors only a few feet away from where he was sitting. Janna Ezat, looking directly in his eyes, continued, “I have only one choice: to forgive you.” He nodded his head, the only acknowledgment he gave to any of the witnesses. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, the first terrorism conviction in New Zealand’s history. The shootings prompted New Zealand to pass stricter gun laws and buy back certain weapons from owners. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, "Today I hope is the last where we have any cause to hear or utter the name of the terrorist."
Hussein Al Umari — and his mother Janna Ezat at the trial of his killer
- August 24, 2021 – The League of Women Voters, in partnership with Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, Voces del La Frontera, and three individual voters, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin challenging Wisconsin’s state legislative map, which the 2020 Census revealed to have unequally populated districts. The suit asks the court to strike down the current maps as unconstitutional and implement new maps, given the likelihood the legislature and governor will be unable to agree on new maps. “It is imperative that the Census 2020 data is transformed into fair, nonpartisan maps,” says Debra Cronmiller, League of Women Voters of Wisconsin's executive director. “Our legislators must draw fair maps that represent everyone – no matter their race, background, zip code, or income – to ensure a representative government. For over 100 years the League has defended voters, and the fight for fair maps is an extension of that mission. We are proud to stand with our partners in this important fight.”
Debra Cronmiller
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Sources
- www.onthisday.com/...
- Women Trailblazers of California: Pioneers to the Present, © 2012 by Gloria G. Harris and Hannah S. Cohen — The History Press
- todayinsci.com
- A Book of Days for the Literary Year, edited by Neal T. Jones
- The Music-Lover’s Birthday Book, Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Thanks to WineRev — www.dailykos.com/…
- The Guardian newspaper — Top Stories and International sections
- www.unwomen.org/…
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The Feminist Cats Read Entries from
Charlotte Forten’s Journal, at age 16
May 25, 1854. Did not intend to write this evening, but have just heard of something that is worth recording;—something which must ever rouse in the mind of every true friend of liberty and humanity, feelings of the deepest indignation and sorrow. Another fugitive from bondage has been arrested [Anthony Burns *]; a poor man, who for two short months has trod the soil and breathed the air of the “Old Bay State,” was arrested like a criminal in the streets of her capital, and is now kept strictly guarded,—a double police force is required, the military are in readiness; and all this done to prevent a man, whom God has created in his own image, from regaining that freedom with which, he, in common with every human being, is endowed. I can only hope and pray most earnestly that Boston will not again disgrace herself by sending him back to a bondage worse than death; or rather that she will redeem herself from the disgrace which his arrest alone has brought upon her. . . .
May 26, 1854. Had a conversation with Miss [Mary] Shepard about slavery; she is, as I thought, thoroughly opposed to it, but does not agree with me in thinking that the churches and ministers are generally supporters of the infamous system; I believe it firmly. Mr. Barnes, one of the most prominent of the Philadelphia clergy, who does not profess to be an abolitionist, has declared his belief that ‘the American church is the bulwark of slavery.’ Words cannot express all that I feel; all that is felt by the friends of Freedom, when thinking of this great obstacle to the removal of slavery from our land. Alas! that it should be so.—I was much disappointed in not seeing the eclipse, which, it was expected would be the most entire that has taken place for years; but the weather was rainy, and the sky obscured by clouds; so after spending half the afternoon on the roof of the house in eager expectation, I saw nothing; heard since that the sun made his appearance for a minute or two, but I was not fortunate enough to catch even that momentary glimpse of him. . . .
May 30, 1854. Rose very early and was busy until nine o’clock; then, at Mrs. Putnam’s urgent request, went to keep store for her while she went to Boston to attend the [New England] Anti-Slavery Convention. I was very anxious to go, and will certainly do so to-morrow; the arrest of the alleged fugitive will give additional interest to the meetings, I should think. His trial is still going on and I can scarcely think of anything else; read again today as most suitable to my feelings and to the times, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” by Elizabeth B. Browning; how powerfully it is written! how earnestly and touchingly does the writer portray the bitter anguish of the poor fugitive as she thinks over all the wrongs and sufferings that she has endured, and of the sin to which tyrants have driven her but which they alone must answer for! It seems as if no one could read this poem without having his sympathies roused to the utmost in behalf of the oppressed.—After a long conversation with my friends on their return, on this all-absorbing subject, we separated for the night, and I went to bed, weary and sad.
(excerpt from “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written in 1850)
I am not mad : I am black.
I see you staring at my face —
I know you staring, shrinking back,
Ye are born of the Washington-race,
And this land is the free America,
And this mark on my wrist — (I prove what I say)
Ropes tied me up here to the flogging-place.
* Anthony Burns, a “slave preacher” frequently hired out by his masters, had secretly learned to read and write. In 1853, he escaped and reached the free state of Massachusetts. He was working in Boston, when he was recaptured in 1854 and tried under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. His capture and trial generated wide-scale public outrage in the North and increased support for abolition. Federal troops were called in to prevent interference getting him aboard a ship that returned him to Virginia. He was sold to a new owner, David McDaniel, in North Carolina, who sold Burns in 1855 to Bostonians who had raised the money to purchase his freedom. McDaniel insisted on keeping the sale to Northerners secret, fearing retaliation by his neighbors. Burns reached Boston in March, 1855, and was later enrolled at Oberlin College with a scholarship.
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For those of you who want to dive deeper,
the extended list of this week’s
Women Trailblazers and Events
in Women’s History is here: