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“I have to say that the traditional role
is kind of a myth. I think the traditional
Mexican woman is a fierce woman.”
– Sandra Cisneros, author of
The House on Mango Street
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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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“If we're not protecting our women
and we're not protecting our girls
and we're not protecting the most
vulnerable people in this society,
who are we as a country?”
– Deb Haaland, first Native
American Cabinet Secretary
in U.S. history
___________________________
“My parents tried very hard to make
sure I had access to everything, and
consequently I grew up thinking I
could have access to everything.”
– Haben Girma, author of
Haben: The Deafblind Woman
Who Conquered Harvard Law
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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 and catch up
on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Note: All images are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- December 17, 1706 – Émilie du Châtelet born, French natural philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and author. She took to mathematics and the sciences, being exposed to the ideas of the distinguished guests of her aristocratic parents. She was interested in the philosophies of Newton and Leibniz, and dressed as a man to enter the cafes where the scientific discussions of the time were carried on. Voltaire was her lover. Châtelet's major work was a translation of Newton's Principia, begun in 1745. When the complete work was published posthumously in 1759, Voltaire wrote the preface. For many years it was the only translation of the Principia into French. She died in 1749, at age 42, a few days after giving birth to her daughter.
- December 17, 1734 – Dona Maria I born, the first undisputed Queen regnant of Portugal (1777-1816), and the first monarch of Brazil (1815-1816), after her court moved from Portugal to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars, and the colony was elevated to the Kingdom of Brazil. She was called A Louca (the Mad) because of her mental deterioration, which began in 1786, but was made worse by her grief over the death of her husband that same year, and the death from smallpox of her 27-year-old son, the heir apparent, in 1788. Then her confessor died in 1791. By 1792, she was declared insane by Francis Willis, the same physician who attended King George III of England. Her eldest surviving son, John, took over as Prince Regent, until her death in 1816, when he became John VI, King of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. However, she is an admired figure in Brazil, because so many of the national institutions and organizations which later became the foundation of Brazil as an independent country were started during the first years of the Kingdom of Brazil.
- December 17, 1760 – Deborah Sampson Gannett born, American woman who disguised herself as a man in order to fight in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, using the name Robert Shurtlieff. She was aided in carrying out her deception by her height, 5’ 9” inches, in an age when the average height of a man was around 5’7” and most women were around 5’ tall. Sampson joined the Light Infantry Company of the 4th Massachusetts Regiment in 1782. During her first battle that July, she was wounded with a cut to her head and two musket balls in her thigh. At the field hospital, a doctor attended the cut, but she left the field hospital before they could remove the musket balls. Afraid of discovery, she removed one of the balls herself with a pen knife, but left the other one in because it was too deep. Her leg never fully healed, and she had the musket ball in her leg for the rest of her life. The war was virtually over after the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, even though the peace treaty wasn’t signed until September 1783, so she was reassigned, and spent several months working as a servant for General John Paterson. In all, she served 17 months, before she contracted a fever, and was taken to a hospital, where Dr. Barnabus Binney discovered she was a woman. But he kept her secret while she was ill by taking her to his home, where his wife and daughters took care of her. When she had recovered, Dr. Binney asked Sampson to deliver a note to General Paterson, which she correctly assumed would reveal her gender. In other cases, women pretending to be men to serve in the army were reprimanded, but Paterson gave her a discharge, a note with some advice, and enough money to travel home. She was honorably discharged at West Point, New York, on October 25, 1783.
- December 17, 1853 – Harriet Taylor Upton born, she was converted to the suffrage cause in 1890 by Susan B. Anthony, and became treasurer of National American Woman Suffrage Association. She testified in Congress, managed suffrage campaigns and the ratification drive in Ohio. Upton became the first woman vice chair of Republican National Committee in 1920.
- December 17, 1884 – Alison Uttley born as Alice Jane Taylor, prolific English author, mostly of children’s books, noted for her Little Grey Rabbit series, and a pioneering time slip children’s novel, A Traveller in Time.
- December 17, 1900 – Dame Mary Cartwright born, British mathematician; the first woman to earn a first in mathematics at Oxford; a pioneer in what is now called Chaos Theory. Her mathematical theorem, now known as Cartwright's theorem, gives an estimate for the maximum modulus of an analytic function that takes the same value no more than p times in the unit disk. In 1936, Cartwright became director of studies in mathematics at Girton College, and in 1938 she began work on a new project. The Radio Research Board of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research produced a memorandum regarding certain differential equations which came out of modelling radio and radar work. They asked the London Mathematical Society if they could help find a mathematician who could work on these problems, and Cartwright became interested in this memorandum. The dynamics lying behind the problems were unfamiliar to Cartwright, so she approached J.E. Littlewood for help with this aspect. Their discoveries are now considered typical of “the butterfly effect,” and have greatly influenced the direction that the modern theory of dynamical systems has taken. In 1945, Cartwright simplified Charles Hermite's elementary proof of the irrationality of π. In 1947, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. She wasn’t the first woman to be elected to the Society, but she was the first woman mathematician. Cartwright was appointed Mistress of Girton College in 1948. From 1957 to 1960 she was president of the Cambridge Association of University Women. After retiring from Girton, Cartwright was a visiting professor at Brown University (1968-1969) and at Claremont Graduate School (1969-1970). She lived to the age of 97.
- December 17, 1913 – Sister Mary Kenneth Keller born; American Roman Catholic religious sister, educator, pioneer in computer science, and author of textbooks on the subject. She and Barbara Huberman were the first American women to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. Keller was head of the computer science department at Clark College, a Catholic women’s school, and was an advocate for women in the computing field.
- December 17, 1916 – Penelope Fitzgerald born, historical novelist, biographer, and essayist; 1979 Book Prize for her novel Offshore, and the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Blue Flower, an historical novel which was her final work.
- December 17, 1928 – Marilyn Beck born. American print journalist, syndicated columnist, and author; her 1960 interview with serial kidnapper-rapist Caryl Chessman on death row at San Quentin shortly before his execution helped launch her early career; in 1970, she was named as Sheila Graham’s successor, covering Hollywood for the North American Newspaper Alliance; her column moved to the New York Times in 1972.
- December 17, 1930 – Dorothy Rowe born, Australian psychologist and author, with a specialty in depression; Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison, Beyond Fear.
- December 17, 1940 – María Elena Velasco born, one of Mexico’s few major women filmmakers as both a producer and director; she was also an actress, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter. She made her directorial debut with El coyote emplumado (The Feathered Coyote), and won an Ariel Award (Mexico’s equivalent to an Oscar) in 2004 for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film Huapango (Huapango is a Mexican folk dance).
- December 17, 1945 – Jacqueline Wilson born, British children’s author; noted for Tracy Beaker series; won the Smarties Prize, and was the fourth British Children’s Laureate (2005-2007).
- December 17, 1966 – Kristiina Ojuland born, Estonian politician; representative of Estonia to the Council of Europe (2009-2014); chair of the European Affairs Committee of the Riigikogu (2004-2007); Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs (2002-2005). vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (1999-2002)
- December 17, 1969 – Laurie Holden born, American-Canadian actress, producer, and human rights activist. Known for playing Marita on The X-Files (1996-2002), Andrea in The Walking Dead (2010-2013, 2020), and Renee in The Americans (2017-2018). Her first film role was Marie Wilder in the 1980 television miniseries The Martian Chronicles. She was an executive producer on the 2013 film Honeytrap. Holden is a founding board member of the Canadian Somaly Mam Foundation, which campaigns against human trafficking, and an advisory board member of the Somaly Mam Foundation in the U.S. In 2014, she worked with Operation Underground Railroad, a volunteer organization that aims to hunt down and arrest child sex traffickers. The group aided authorities in Cartagena, Colombia, in breaking up a sex-trafficking ring that used drugs to force underage boys and girls into prostitution. The operation resulted in the arrests of 12 people and the rescue of 55 sex-trafficking victims, one just 11 years old.
- December 17, 1993 – Judith Rodin is appointed as the first woman president of an Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania. During her tenure (1994-2004), the school rose in the rankings of top national research universities from sixteenth in 1994 to fourth in 2002.
- December 17, 2003 – International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers is established. Originally started as a memorial and vigil for the victims of the Green River Killer in Seattle, Washington. It has since evolved into an international day to call attention to hate crimes committed against sex workers, and the social stigma, discrimination, and indifference of societies and law enforcement, which so often allow these crimes to go unpunished. A red umbrella was adopted as the symbol for the sex workers’ rights movement in 2005. It was first used in Venice, Italy, in 2001, for a Red Umbrellas March by sex workers there protesting inhumane work conditions and human rights violations.
- December 17, 2019 – The memoir of American deafblind lawyer and activist Haben Girma, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, is out, and getting rave reviews. The daughter of African refugees who fled the 30-year war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, she became an advocate after she started at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. The cafeteria only had the menu written on a board. “I asked the cafeteria manager to provide something that I as a deafblind student could access,” she says. “Blindness wasn’t the problem: the format was the problem.” But she says the manager refused, because the cafeteria was too busy. It had a massive impact on her life. “For the first few months I tolerated eating food without knowing what it was and told myself that at least I was being fed. It was frustrating, especially as a vegetarian.” She researched her rights. “Eventually I was able to tell the manager that the Americans with Disabilities Act gave me the right to an accessible menu. The manager started emailing me the choices, immediately.” When another blind student arrived the following year, they found an accessible menu. The experience set her on a course to become a leading disability rights advocate, lawyer, and author. Now her assistant types a message into a wireless keyboard connected to a device that translates it into a Braille display, and she responds in a high-pitch speaking tone. Girma developed the combination of keyboard and Braille describer herself in 2010, when she became Harvard law school’s first deafblind student. “Stories influence the organizations we design, the products we build, the futures we imagine for ourselves,” she tells the audience. “As the daughter of refugees, and as a disabled black woman, lots of stories say my life doesn’t matter. I had to learn to resist those stories. If you face a challenge, it’s an opportunity to come up with new solutions. Disability drives innovation.”
- December 17, 2020 – The news that President Joe Biden had nominated Deb Haaland, New Mexico’s congressional representative, as the next Secretary of the Interior brought positive response from environmental activists and wilderness preservationists like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. The NDN (Native American) Collective issued a statement, “We are excited by Rep. Haaland’s appointment and look forward to having a representative who has insight into Indigenous issues and priorities, so Land Back organizers can uplift our policy solutions and help fuel systematic change that benefits all people and the planet.” Haaland is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo. She and Sharice Davids of Kansas, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, became the first two Native American women to be elected to Congress in 2018. In spite of Republican opposition, Haaland was confirmed, and took office on March 16, 2021. She is the first Native American Cabinet Secretary in U.S. history.
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- December 18, 1626 (O.S. December 8) – Kristina ( also spelled Christina) born, Queen of Sweden, succeeded her father Gustavus Adolphus upon his death at the Battle of Lützen in 1632, when she was six years old, but didn’t begin to rule the Swedish Empire until she reached her majority at age 18. She argued for peace in the Thirty Years' War, which was achieved in 1648. Kristina was educated as a male heir to the throne would be, and was considered as one of the most learned women of the 17th century. She surrounded herself with books, manuscripts, paintings, and sculptures. Her interest in religion, philosophy, mathematics, and alchemy attracted many scientists to Stockholm. In addition to Swedish, she spoke seven other languages. Kristina wanted the city to become the "Athens of the North," and she was to be its “Minerva.” She caused one scandal when she decided not to marry, and another in 1654 when she abdicated her throne and converted to Catholicism. Her financial extravagance brought the state to the verge of bankruptcy, and the resulting economic hardship caused public unrest after ten years of her rule. At the age of 28, she relinquished the throne to her cousin Charles Gustav, and moved to Rome. Pope Alexander VII described Christina as "a queen without a realm, a Christian without faith, and a woman without shame." Regardless, she was a useful symbol of the Counter Reformation, and was a leading patron of many Baroque artists, composers, and musicians. She was the guest of five consecutive popes, and upon her death at age 62 in 1689, became one of the few women buried in the Vatican grotto. Her unconventional lifestyle and masculine dress have been featured in countless novels, plays, operas, and films.
- December 18, 1814 – Josephine White Griffing born, American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. She wrote articles for The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and was a lecturer for the Western Anti-Slavery Society, and for the Women’s Loyal National League, a feminist organization campaigning for outlawing slavery in every state. She also was an active member and a lecturer for the Ohio Women’s Rights Association. At the end of the U.S. Civil War, she moved to Washington DC, where she lobbied Congress for more direct aid for former enslaved men and women, which was influential in Congress establishing the Freedman’s Bureau, where she worked as an assistant to the assistant commissioner and as an agent, helping freedmen find employment, and setting up industrial schools for freedwomen so they could learn marketable skills. But she was often in conflict with the men in charge of the bureau on how best to aid the freedpeople of Washington. Griffing argued that the freedpeople required direct aid, such as food, clothes, and fuel, and that the Bureau's main goals should be to provide material aid for those living in Washington. This aid, according to Griffing, was necessary for the freedpeople to become financially stable, and once that occurred, they could obtain jobs and support themselves. The male leaders supported the idea of self-reliance, that freedmen should sign labor contracts as quickly as possible, and not depend on the bureau for assistance. Griffing openly spoke out about the lack of direct aid, claiming that 20,000 freedpeople in Washington, D.C. were suffering for lack of rations and supplies and that the Bureau men would not help them. The agents of the Bureau denied her statement, despite evidence supporting her argument. By November 1865, the Bureau’s Commissioner revoked Griffing's appointment due to these conflicts. Griffing continued to help freed people find jobs, using her contacts to connect them with work in the North. In 1866, she was a co-founder of the American Equal Rights Association, which promoted suffrage for all people regardless of race or gender, and served as its first vice president. By 1867, she was back working for the bureau, this time as an agent for the Capitol Hill and Navy Yard districts. When the Freedmen’s Bureau ran out of funding in late 1869, she continued her work through the National Freedmen’s Aid Association of the District of Columbia until her death in 1872 at age 57.
- December 18, 1847 – Augusta Holmès born, Irish-French composer, whose early works were published under the pseudonym Hermann Zenta; she also wrote the libretto for her opera La Montagne Noire (The Black Mountain).
- December 18, 1849 – Henrietta Muir Edwards born, one of Canada’s “Famous Five” who fought and won the battle for legal recognition of women as persons and citizens. During WWI, she became the first woman in Canada to serve on an advisory committee to the Canadian government, formed to suggest ways of increasing the effectiveness of wartime conservation measures. She was the chair of the National Council of Women of Canada’s committee for Laws Governing Women and Children for 35 years, where she campaigned for recognition of women’s dower and matrimonial property rights. She also co-founded a Working Girl’s Association in Montreal to provide meals, reading rooms and study classes, which became one of the first YWCAs in Canada, and published the periodical Working Women of Canada. Edwards was the author of the authoritative Legal Status of Canadian Women (1908). In 1962, the Canadian government recognized Edwards as a Person of National Historic Significance, and in 1997, recognized the “Persons Case” as a Canadian Historic Event. In 2009, the Canadian Senate voted to name the “Famous Five” as Canada’s first “honorary senators.”
- December 18, 1909 – Yvonne Cormeau born in Shanghai, China, to a Belgian consular official and a Scottish mother. In 1940, her husband was with her in London after being wounded in France when their home was hit by a bomb. He was killed. She was saved by a bathtub which fell over her head and protected her. But her injuries caused her to lose their unborn child. She then sent their two-year-old daughter to the country to keep her safe, and as soon as she was able, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1941 as an administrator. She was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) early in 1943, was trained, and sent to France as a wireless operator for the Wheelwright network in southwestern France in August, 1943 until France was liberated from the Nazi Occupation in September, 1944. Cormeau was praised for the quality and quantity of her wireless transmissions. SOE cryptographer Leo Marks said that in more than 400 transmissions Cormeau never made a single mistake. She also survived an unusually long time – wireless operators were vulnerable to detection and capture by the German occupiers. Cormeau was wounded in the leg during a German attack in 1944 on the town she was in, but escaped with her wireless. The dress she was wearing and her bloodstained briefcase are on permanent display in the Imperial War Museum in London. She was a recipient of the Order of the British Empire from the United Kingdom and the Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre from France. After the war, she was reunited with her daughter, and worked as a translator in the SOE section at the Foreign Office. She died at age 88 in 1997.
- December 18, 1922 – Esther Lederberg born, American microbiologist; pioneer in bacterial genetics. Her notable contributions include the discovery of the bacterial virus λ; the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction, the development of replica plating, and the discovery of the bacterial fertility factor F (F plasmid). She also founded and directed the Plasmid Reference Center in 1976 at Stanford University, where she maintained, named, and distributed plasmids of many types, including those coding for antibiotic resistance, heavy metal resistance, virulence, conjugation, colicins, transposons, and other factors. Now known as the Lederberg Plasmid Collection, it was later transferred to Dr. Greg Phillips at Iowa State University. In spite of her outstanding work, she faced gender discrimination, including being excluded from writing a chapter in the 1966 book Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, a commemoration of molecular biology. According to the science historian Prina Abir-Am, her exclusion was "incomprehensible" because of her important discoveries in bacteriophage genetics. She was often overshadowed by her more famous husband, Joshua Lederberg, and some of her work was attributed to him. As her husband began his tenure as head of the genetics department at Stanford in 1959, she and two other women petitioned the dean of the medical school to remedy the lack of women faculty. She was eventually appointed to an untenured faculty position as Research Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. When the Lederbergs divorced in 1968, she had to fight to stay employed at Stanford. In 1974 as a Senior Scientist, she was forced to transition to a position as Adjunct Professor of Medical Microbiology, effectively a drop in position. This short-term appointment was renewed on a rolling basis, dependent on her securing grant funding.
- December 18, 1929 – In Montlhéry, France, Hellé Delangle Nice became famous as a woman motor racing driver, when she won the Journée Féminine at Autodrome de Montlhéry, averaging 120.5 mph in a 2-litre supercharged Bugatti. In her fastest lap, she reached 123.53 mph. She went on to race for Bugatti in her trademark bright blue car, and made a significant income from several product endorsements, including Esso Oil and Lucky Strike cigarettes.
- December 18, 1931 – Alison Plowden born in India, English historian, biographer, BCC scriptwriter and non-fiction author of works on the Tudor, English Civil War and Victorian periods, including The Young Elizabeth; Tudor Women; The Young Victoria; Women All on Fire: Women of the English Civil War; In a Free Republic - Life in Cromwell's England; and The Winter Queen.
- December 18, 1937 – Nancy A. Ryles born, American Republican politician; Oregon State Senator (1983-1987). She worked for the passage in 1981 of a bill mandating public kindergartens in Oregon, which had been introduced originally by Democrat Betty Roberts, who was the first woman to serve in both Oregon state houses, and the first woman Oregon State Senator. Ryles also campaigned for aid in dying legislation in the 1980s, which failed to pass, but laid the groundwork for passage of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act in 1994. Ryles was the first woman to serve on the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, from 1987 until her death from cancer at age 52; the Nancy Ryles Scholarship Fund was set up to honor her at Portland State University.
- December 18, 1941 – Joan Wallach Scott born, American historian and author, authority on modern French history, but has also made contributions in gender history and intellectual history; Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her 1986 foundational article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” published in the American Historical Review, is one of the most widely read and cited articles by English-speaking historians in the field of gender history; her books include Gender and the Politics of History, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Men; and The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth Century City. She is a founding editor of the journal History of the Present, and has been honored with several awards, including the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, and the Hans Sigrist Award for Outstanding Research in Gender Studies.
- December 18, 1942 – Lenore Blum born, American mathematician; founding head of the Mills College Mathematics and Computer Science Department; awarded the first Letts-Villard Chair at Mills in 1979; currently at Carnegie Mellon. Known for the Blum-Blum-Shub pseudorandom number generator, the Blum-Shub-Smale machine, and her contributions to the theory of real number computation. She is an advocate for increasing the number of women in science and mathematics, and founded the Women@SCS program at CMU, which has provided both mentoring and outreach opportunities for women in computer science. The program increased the proportion of women in the CMU undergraduate computer science program to nearly 50%. But Blum resigned from CMU, effective August 2019, after a change in management structure at Project Olympus, a business incubator program which she started, led to sexist treatment of her, and the exclusion of other women from Olympus activities. Blum was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1979, and as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012. She became a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class in 2017.
- December 18, 1950 – Gillian Armstrong born, Australian director-producer-screenwriter; best known for My Brilliant Career, the first feature-length film directed by an Australian woman in 46 years; Mrs. Soffel; The Last Days of Chez Nous; and the 1994 film version of Little Women. Her 2006 documentary, Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst, an Australian designer, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
- December 18, 1958 – Julia Wolfe born, American composer; she won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Anthracite Fields.
- December 18, 1961 – Leila Steinberg born, American music manager and marketer, writer, poet, and founder of AIM4TheHeART, a non-profit organization helping at-risk youth with literacy and writing workshops.
- December 18, 1970 – Divorce becomes legal in Italy, but requires a five-year legal separation first.
- December 18, 1971 – Noriko Matsueda born, Japanese composer, best known for her scores for video games, including Front Mission 2, and her collaboration with Takahito Eguchi on Final Fantasy X-2.
- December 18, 2013 – In the UK, following a report from the Royal College of Midwives which identified over 66,000 victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) in England and Wales, which also warned that another 24,000 girls under the age of 15 were at risk, the Home Affairs Select Committee has launched a major inquiry. FGM has been a criminal offence in the UK since 2003, but there has not been a single prosecution since its enactment. A petition from campaigner Leyla Hussein states that the battle to eliminate FGM is failing because "multi-agency guidelines are not statutory, implementation at local authority and NHS level is disjointed, funding is minimal, and nobody is monitoring or holding anyone to account." It garnered more than 94,000 signatures. Efua Dorkenoo, head of Equality Now's FGM policy and a long-time campaigner, hailed the news, "This is a significant move as it is the first time we have ever seen FGM addressed at the very highest level."
- December 18, 2018 – Nevada becomes the first U.S. state with a majority of women in the state legislature. In 2019, women are in 32 of the 63 seats in the state’s Assembly and Senate. In addition, half of Nevada’s representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives are also women.
- December 18, 2018 – Les Moonves was the chief executive of CBS who was forced to resign after more than a dozen accusations of sexual misconduct were reported by the New Yorker and the New York Times. He also allegedly destroyed evidence and misled investigators in an effort to protect his reputation and $120 million severance deal, according to the draft of a report lawyers prepared for the CBS board, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Moonves was once one of the media’s most influential executives, but he was forced to step down in September because of accusations of harassment, sexual assault, retaliation against accusers, and attempts to suppress allegations. Lawyers hired by the network said Moonves was “evasive and untruthful at times,” and “deliberately lied about and minimized the extent of his sexual misconduct,” and concluded that his actions would justify denying him his lucrative severance package. The board announced they had fired him for cause, and also voted to deny Moonves his severance package.
- December 18, 2019 – Uber reached a settlement in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's investigation into complaints about the ride-hailing company's workplace culture. The EEOC said it "found reasonable cause to believe that Uber permitted a culture of sexual harassment and retaliation against individuals who complained about such harassment." Uber said that under its settlement with the agency it would establish a $4.4 million fund to cover payments to current and former employees subjected to sexual harassment at work. It also agreed to three years of monitoring to make sure it changes its ways. More than 20 employees have been fired for their alleged improprieties since a former employee triggered scrutiny of Uber with an essay describing the problems. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took over in 2017 promising to "do the right thing."
- December 18, 2020 – Shoko Arai, the only woman on the 12-member assembly in Kusatsu, Japan, accused mayor Nobutada Kuroiwas and other prominent local men of driving her out of office after she went public in 2019 with allegations that Kuroiwa sexually assaulted her in his office in 2015. He denied her claim. Arai, who had been a member of the assembly since 2011, was expelled from the assembly on December 8, 2020, after residents voted overwhelmingly for her removal. “Since I made my accusation, I have been punished in the council and subjected to a storm of criticism,” Arai said at a press conference. Arai’s case highlighted the way authorities in Japan deal with allegations of sexual violence. According to a 2017 government survey, only 4% of women who have been sexually assaulted come forward. Arai said her ordeal had proved Japan also needed to address its low rate of female representation in politics, especially at local level. “Why do you think the #MeToo movement doesn’t seem to be catching on in Japan?” she said. “It is because we live in a male-dominated society that creates an atmosphere in which it is difficult for women to speak out. Instead, they are crushed. That is exactly what happened to me,” she said, and claimed the recall vote was rigged, “Kusatsu is a tourist town, and most of the council members are the presidents of hotels or ryokan inns, and many of the residents are their employees. How could people possibly refuse to sign a petition for a recall vote when they are asked by their boss or employer? ... It is a small town and would have been easy to find out who refused to sign the petition or who voted for me to remain in my seat.”
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- December 19, 1587 – Duchess Dorothea Sophia of Saxe-Altenburg born, elected Princess-Abbess of Quedlinburg, a position of prestige and influence, in 1618, with the approval of Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. Unlike her predecessors, Princess-Abbess Dorothea Sophia frequently had disagreements with John George I, Elector of Saxony. Dorothea Sophia prohibited her clergy to deny absolution to a person who made a genuine and contrite confession. However, if the same parishioner repeated the sin, they were to face increasingly severe chastisement and, finally, a referral to the consistory (a church disciplinary body). She proscribed that these parishioners would not be able to serve as godparents, nor be buried according to tradition or within consecrated ground. She also took measures to prevent secret engagements, declaring that every engagement had to be witnessed by three men and publicly announced.
- December 19, 1820 – Mary Livermore born, American journalist, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist; she worked for the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War in Chicago, as a nurse and an organizer, including helping with the great 1863 Chicago fair, which raised nearly $100,000 to aid Union soldiers and the war effort; after the war, she was the founding editor and contributor of The Agitator, a newspaper which merged with The Woman’s Journal when she moved to Boston, supporting the women’s suffrage and temperance movements. She also appeared on the lecture circuit, traveling 25,000 miles (40,000 km) a year, and speaking five nights a week for five months of the year. Livermore wrote Thirty Years Too Late; What Shall We Do with Our Daughters?; and My Story of the War.
- December 19, 1829 – Jane Cunningham Croly born in England; American journalist, cookbook author, and feminist; also used ‘Jennie June’ as a pen-name. She wrote columns on the arts, fashion, cooking, and in favor of womens’ rights, and women working outside the home, in leading newspapers and magazines in New York, and was one of the pioneers of syndicated women’s columns. In March, 1868, she founded Sorosis, the first professional women’s club in the U.S., after she and other women writers were excluded from the New York Press Club’s honorary dinner for author Charles Dickens because women were not allowed to be members or attend club sponsored events. (The New England Woman’s Club was the second U.S. womens’ club, founded in Boston in May, 1868.) She was the editor (1862-1887) of Demorest’s Magazine, and the founding editor in 1889 of Woman’s Cycle (renamed New Cycle 1893-1896), both publications for women. She died at the age of 72.
- December 19, 1831 – Bernice Pauahi Pākī born, became Ke Ali’i (Princess) Pauahi Bishop of the Royal Family of the Kingdom of Hawaii, well-known philanthropist. At her death, her estate was the largest private landownership in the Hawaiian Islands, about 9% of Hawaii’s total area. The revenues from her estate were designated to fund the Kamehameha Schools, established in 1887 according to the instructions in Pauahi’s will.
- December 19, 1836 – Maria Louise Sanford born, American educator, professor of history at Swarthmore College from 1871 to 1880, one of the first women professors in the country.
- December 19, 1865 – Minnie Maddern Fiske born, ‘Mrs. Fiske’ a leading American actress who spearheaded the fight against the Theatrical Syndicate which controlled booking of all U.S. top theatrical attractions from 1896 to 1910. Fiske introduced American audiences to Henrik Ibsen’s plays, beginning with Nora in A Doll’s House. Though she was a highly successful actress, she died poverty-stricken because of her fight against the Theatrical Syndicate. The Syndicate banned her from all the first-class theatres, and she was often reduced to performing in churches and skating rinks. Fiske was also a well-known animal welfare advocate, who used her popularity to highlight the plight of endangered birds, like the snowy and great egrets, being slaughtered for their plumage, which was then used to decorate women’s hats. She also raised awareness of the cruelties of fur trapping, and ill-treatment of cattle. Mark Twain wrote the story "A Horse's Tale" at her request to combat bullfighting in Spain.
- December 19, 1875 – Mileva Marić born, Serbian mathematician; the only woman among Albert Einstein’s fellow students at Zürich's Polytechnic, and the second woman to finish a full program of study at the Department of Mathematics and Physics; she became Einstein’s first wife; their first child, a daughter, died in infancy, and one of their two sons was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Recent scholarship suggests that she contributed substantially to Einstein’s early work.
- December 19, 1875 – Grace M. Bareis born, American mathematician; first person to earn a doctorate degree in mathematics from Ohio State University in 1909; a founding member of the Mathematical Association of America; Ohio State has awarded the annual “Grace M. Bareis Mathematical Prize” since 1949.
- December 19, 1895 – Ingeborg Refling Hagen born, Norwegian author, poet, teacher, and anti-fascist activist who feigned insanity to get out of prison after she was arrested for opposing the Nazi regime in 1942.
- December 19, 1906 – Esther Peterson born, American consumer and women’s advocate, Special Assistant to the President for Consumer Affairs, Director of the Office of Consumer Affairs.
- December 19, 1908 – Anne Anastasi born, American psychologist, often called the "test guru," for her pioneering development of psychometrics, the measurement and understanding of psychological traits. Her seminal work, Psychological Testing (1954), remains a classic text in the subject. In the book, she drew attention to the ways in which trait development is influenced by education and heredity. She explored how variables in the measurement of those traits include differences in training, culture, and language. In 1972, she became the first woman to be elected president of the American Psychological Association in half a century. For her accomplishments, she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1987.
- December 19, 1915 – Édith Piaf born, French singer-songwriter-actress; best-known for "La Vie en rose,” “Non, je ne regrette rien,” and "Hymne à l'amour." After WWII, she was accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the German occupation, but her secretary Andrée Biggard, a member of the Résistance, revealed that she performed several times at prisoner of war camps in Germany in order to help get a number of prisoners out.
- December 19, 1916 – Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann born, German political scientist; noted for her model of the Spiral of Silence, detailed in The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. The model is an explanation of how perceived public opinion can influence individual opinions or actions; co-founder of a public opinion research organization—the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, which is now one of the best known and most prestigious polling organizations in Germany; president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (1978-1980); honored with the Great Cross of Merit (1976).
- December 19, 1919 – Sally Ann Lilienthal born, founder of Ploughshares in 1981, raised fifty million dollars in grants to promote peace, and to reduce and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons.
- December 19, 1924 – Cicely Tyson born, remarkable actress and civil rights activist; among the highlights of her long career are: Sounder (1972 - Golden Globe winner); The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974 – Emmy winner) and The Help (2011); recipient in 2016 of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She gave her last film performance in Fall from Grace, made in late 2018. She was promoting her memoir, Just as I Am, only two days before she died at age 96 in January, 2021.
- December 19, 1928 – Eve Bunting born in Northern Ireland, prolific American author; Coffin on a Case won 1993 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile from the Mystery Writers of America.
- December 19, 1932 – Lola Hendricks born, corresponding secretary for Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (1956-1963); worked on campaigns to integrate Birmingham’s city parks and public libraries. She assisted Wyatt Walker in planning the early stages of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's involvement in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, especially the department store boycotts. In 1963, Hendricks went to work for the newly integrated Birmingham office of the Social Security Administration. She was hired originally as a filer, but was promoted to unit clerk before moving to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission where she became a supervisor. She left in 1983 to care for her mother. In 1988 she rejoined the Social Security Administration where she worked until reaching retirement. She continued to volunteer at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and in the mid 1990s she assisted the Birmingham Historical Society in researching movement churches and landmarks for National Register of Historic Places status.
- December 19, 1932 – Pratibha Patil born, Indian politician who became the only woman to serve as President of India (2007-2012). Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister. Patil previously served as Governor of Rajasthan (2004-2007). She was a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha (1985-2004), and of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly (1962-1985).
- December 19, 1949 – Orna Berry born, Israeli scientist; first woman Chief Scientist and head of industrial research and development for the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour (1996-2000).
- December 19, 1950 – Eleanor J. Hill born, American attorney; Department of Defense Inspector General (1995-1999); awarded the DOD Distinguished Service Medal; in 2010, she began serving on The Constitution Project’s Guantanamo Task Force to investigate detainee treatment.
- December 19, 1959 – Lisa Wilkinson born, Australian television journalist and presenter; host of the Network Ten news-current affairs and interview show The Project.
- December 19, 1968 – Kristina Keneally born, Australian Labor politician; Senator for New South Wales since February, 2018; Premier of New South Wales, and Leader of the Labor Party in New South Wales (2009-2011); Member of the New South Wales Parliament for Heffron (2003-2012).
- December 19, 1969 – Aziza Mustafa Zadeh born, Azerbaijani composer-performer, known for her fusion of jazz and Azerbaijani mugam.
- December 19, 1972 – Alyssa Milano born, American actress and liberal activist; in the late 1980s, she spent six hours making friendship bracelets with Ryan White, a schoolboy ostracized for having AIDS, and appeared with him on the Phil Donahue Show, kissing him to show she would not catch the disease from casual contact with him; she had been a national spokesperson and U.S Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, a supporter of PETA and the inaugural Ambassador for the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, to which she has donated $250,000 USD to help mobilize resources toward controlling and eliminating these diseases, and has raised over $75,000 for Charity: water, a nonprofit which funds potable drinking water projects in developing nations. She was an outspoken critic of the Trump Administration, has been active in get-out-the vote efforts, and helped relaunch the #MeToo Movement in 2017 with a post on her Twitter account encouraging survivors to post #MeToo as a status update to show the prevalence of sexual harassment and sex crimes against women.
- December 19, 1983 – Bridget Phillipson born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for Houghton and Sunderland South since 2010. She was previously a manager (2007-2010) of Wearside Women in Need, a charity refuge for women affected by domestic violence.
- December 19, 2012 – Park Geun-hye is elected, the first woman president (2013-2017) of South Korea.
- December 19, 2016 – American Express announced it was giving women and men 20 weeks of fully-paid leave after welcoming a child through birth, adoption, or surrogacy. It’s also offering employees benefits worth up to $35,000 for adoption and surrogacy events as well as $35,000 for infertility treatment—including advanced reproductive technology procedures—through its health plan. Under the company’s old plan, primary caregivers could take six weeks of paid leave and secondary caregivers received two weeks off. Its surrogacy and adoption benefits previously stood at $10,000 and reproductive services and infertility treatments were capped at $20,000. U.S.-based regular full-time and part-time employees are eligible for the new benefits after working for AmEx for one year. The policy became effective January 1, 2017.
- December 19, 2017 – Comedian and actor T.J. Miller was accused of violently sexually assaulting his former girlfriend while the two attended George Washington University. "We started to fool around, and very early in that, he put his hands around my throat and closed them, and I couldn't breathe," the woman, who asked not to be named, told The Daily Beast. "I was genuinely terrified ... I had certainly not entered into any agreement that I would be choked." She said the incident additionally escalated into further sexual violence. Two of her roommates at the time told the Beast they recalled the alleged incident. Miller denied the allegations, claiming the woman "is now using the current climate to bandwagon and launch these false accusations again."
- December 19, 2018 – In California, a 5-month-old girl who traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border with the Central American migrant caravan was hospitalized with pneumonia after she spent five days in freezing government cells known as hieleras, or “iceboxes.” Agents at the immigration prison in California where she was being held reportedly refused to seek medical attention for the girl after her mother notified them she was ill. This comes as public outrage is growing over the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín from Guatemala, who died in U.S. custody after she was detained at the U.S.-Mexico border earlier in December.
- December 19, 2020 – In Pakistan, filming started on the new series of Conversations With Kanwal, in which presenter Kanwal Ahmed, 31, sheds light on issues that are rarely talked about within families, let alone in the public arena. The show was saved by its determined fans. Kanwal Ahmed had launched a women-only forum in 2013 called Soul Sisters Pakistan (SSP), where members could discuss taboo subjects like domestic violence or femicide without fear of retribution. It also gave women the freedom to talk about anything from sex and relationships to Netflix and cooking tips. Pakistan is such a religiously and socially conservative nation that posting a selfie can result in a so-called “honour killing.” SSP became a lifeline for its members, who dubbed themselves “Soulies.” The idea for the forum came about when Ahmed was working as a bridal make-up artist and found herself often dishing out advice to young women on everything from sex to handling in-laws. “Many women don’t have anywhere to get information about sex and relationships and for many, their first experience of both may be on their wedding night,” said Ahmed. “It’s considered an act of shame to talk about something as intimate as sex. It’s ironic, because the word marriage is on everyone’s mind when a girl turns 18, but sex, body rights, contraception are hardly ever discussed with her. We grow up with biology books stapled to hide the reproduction section.” SSP now has more than 250,000 very active and vocal members, the majority aged between 18 and 35. It was important to Ahmed that SSP should be an inclusive space for women of all backgrounds, including religious minorities, but any platform that unites such a diverse range of women will face controversy. Many conservatives have accused Ahmed of promoting “promiscuity” and “wild behavior.” In 2018, Ahmed was selected as a community leader by Facebook, in recognition of her efforts to use the social network to help others. She used their grant to launch Conversations with Kanwal on YouTube. “I wanted the things we championed for in the group to be talked about outside of it too … It was empowering for women to watch these stories and know they were not alone.” While the grant sustained the series for two seasons, it wasn’t enough to keep the show going, but despite hitting 30 million views – matched only by the most popular soap operas – and most mainstream channels refused to touch the format because it was deemed too controversial, while others found it too hard-hitting and wanted Ahmed to add a “beauty segment,” or comedy skit. So Ahmed launched a Kickstarter campaign through SSP. Donations flooded in, from a few rupees to thousands. In less than a week, fans raised over five million rupees ($66,337 USD), a remarkable achievement since the majority of SSP fans live in Pakistan, where fewer than 30% of women are employed, and most are financially dependent on their husbands or fathers. “Many women either open a joint account with a male counterpart or only deal in cash, which is why it’s such a big deal,” said Ahmed. “It truly is a show that is powered by the people.”
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- December 20, 1812 – Laura M. Hawley Thurston born, American poet and educator who used the pen name Viola; many of her poems were published in the Louisville Journal; after graduating from Brace’s Female Seminary, she taught in Connecticut and Pennsylvania before becoming the assistant to John Brace at her alma mater, until 1837, when she was hired as the principal of the Academy at New Albany, Indiana. She married in 1839, and resigned her position at the Academy, but continued to be a frequent contributor to western newspapers as “Viola,” and earned a growing reputation as an outstanding writer. But in 1842, she died at the age of 30.
- December 20, 1861 – Ivana Kobilca born, the most prominent Slovene woman painter, who painted mostly in oils in the realist style, noted for her portraits and other figurative works.
- December 20, 1865 – Elsie de Wolfe born, a pioneer and the most famous name in American interior design from the early 1900s into the 1930s, influencing the change from dark and cluttered Victorian interiors to a lighter and brighter color palette, more open space in furniture placement, with window coverings which allow much more natural light into a room. Electrical lighting had made Victorian décor seem claustrophobic, and de Wolfe offered interiors which took advantage of the brighter lighting, making rooms look larger, and also easier to clean.
- December 20, 1898 – Irene Dunne born, actor-singer, nominated five times for Academy Awards. In 1985, awarded for Lifetime Achievement at the Kennedy Center Honors. Appointed in 1957 as an alternate U.S. delegate to the United Nations in recognition of her interest in international affairs, and was a devout Catholic who devoted her retirement years to civic and philanthropic causes, including founding the Irene Dunne Guild, which raised over $20 million USD for St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, CA, and continues to give ongoing support the hospital. In 1965, she became the first woman elected to the board of directors of Technicolor.
- December 20, 1904 – Yevgenia Ginzburg born, Russian journalist and author who was accused of being a Trotskyite and served an 18 year sentence, mostly in a harsh Kolyma valley camp in the Gulag; she was recommended by Anton Walter, an exiled German doctor, for a nursing position, which probably saved her life; they were later married; her many vigorous appeals to authorities finally got her case reconsidered after the death of Joseph Stalin; her memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind, was smuggled out of the USSR, and published in Italy and Germany.
- December 20, 1911 – Hortense Calisher born, American novelist and memoirist; second woman president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987).
- December 20, 1917 – Elizabeth Devereux-Rochester born, American educated by an English governess and at a school in England; after her parents divorced in the 1930s, she lived with her mother in Paris. When the Germans invaded France in 1941, she became a driver for the French Red Cross. She then worked with a group aiding Jews to get into Switzerland, and became its leader, going back into France to lead downed allied pilots across the Swiss border until that route had to be closed. She then established a new escape route across the Pyrenees into Spain. She joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in early 1943, and went through training. In October, 1943, she went back into France with Richard Heslop, who organized the Marksman circuit. Heslop described her: "She did not walk, she strode ... you automatically expected to see a couple of Labradors at her heels ... She stuck out like a sore thumb." But, he added, “She did a fine job for she had guts and imagination." By the spring of 1944, Heslop reluctantly requested that Devereaux-Rochester be recalled by the SOE to England, because he and the French leaders feared the Germans would capture her because she so obviously wasn’t French, and that would endanger the entire network. She left the Marksman circuit, but didn't return to England and instead went to Paris to see her mother. She was arrested in March, 1944, in Paris. She was released from the French gaol and put in a Prisoner of War camp where she stayed until liberation. Following the war she lived in Paris and worked in advertising for the Vel d'Hiv, an indoor bicycle racing stadium. In the late 1950s, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and lived her last years in Brittany.
- December 20, 1922 – Beverly Pepper born, American sculptor, noted for her monumental works.
- December 20, 1924 – Judy LaMarsh born, Canadian politician, author, and broadcaster; second woman federal Cabinet Minister; campaigned for the Canada Pension Plan and Medicare; A Very Political Lady.
- December 20, 1929 – Polly Welts Kaufman born, American historian, teacher and activist for equality, noted for her many books on women’s history, including National Parks and the Woman’s Voice; Women Teachers On the Frontier; and Apron Full of Gold. After graduating from Brown University in 1951, she was asked in her interview for a high school teaching job in Rhode Island if she was married or going to be married, then told to look elsewhere for employment when she said “Yes.” Kaufman was a civil rights activist for school desegregation, and ran a program insuring that for the first time, over 100 public schools had books by African American authors and books on black history. She taught women’s history for over 20 years, at the University of Massachusetts Boston and at the University of Southern Maine.
- December 20, 1933 – Jean Carnahan born, American Democratic politician; Senator from Missouri (2001-2002), appointed to fill her husband’s Senate seat after his death, the first woman U.S. senator for Missouri.
- December 20, 1948 – Carol Smart born, British feminist sociologist, criminologist, and author: Women, Crime and Criminology (1976) remains a key feminist critique of the field.
- December 20, 1951 – Kate Atkinson born, English author; her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Book of the Year Prize; Life After Life, winner of the 2013 Costa Novel Award; and A God in Ruins, which won the 2015 Costa Novel Award; also noted for her Jackson Brodie private detective series.
- December 20, 1951 – Nuala O’Loan born, Baroness O’Loan; Northern Irish public servant and columnist; member of the House of Lords as of 2009; the first Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (1999-2007). She is a columnist with The Irish Catholic weekly newspaper, and resigned from the Medical Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association (BMA) over that watchdog group’s support for the extension of Britain’s abortion law to Northern Ireland.
- December 20, 1951 – Marta Russell born, American author, graphic artist, and disability rights activist; diagnosed as an infant with cerebral palsy; Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (1998) and in 2016, reissued in a Kindle edition.
- December 20, 1954 – Sandra Cisneros born, Latina American author, The House on Mango Street, and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories; recipient of 2015 National Medal of Arts, and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
- December 20, 1960 – Nalo Hopkinson born in Jamaica, Canadian speculative fiction author and editor; Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, Skin Folk, The New Moon’s Arms and Salt Roads, winner of 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction.
- December 20, 1972 – Sarah Jones born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Croydon Central since 2017; she was previously head of campaigns at the housing charity Shelter.
- December 20, 1973 – Maarja Kangro born, Estonian poet, librettist, short story writer and translator.
- December 20, 1991 – A Missouri court sentenced the Palestinian militant Zein Isa and his wife Maria to death for the “honor killing” of their 16-year-old daughter Palestina Isa. Palestina was born in 1972 in Brazil, her mother’s homeland, the youngest of seven children. The family moved around a lot, eventually settling in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1986, where Palestina attended junior high school and middle school. As she became increasingly “Americanized” her family disapproved, and her father wanted to arrange a marriage for her. When she started a romantic relationship with an African-American in 1989, both her parents were furious. Her father made phone calls in which he said she had damaged the honor of the family and needed to die, but he was a member of the Abu Nidal Organization, which was plotting to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, and the FBI had bugged the Zein home on a FISA order because of his suspected terrorist activities. In November, 1989, her mother held Palestina while her father stabbed her multiple times in the chest. The FBI agents were not at the surveillance unit when the killing took place, but they had a recording of her murder on an audio cassette. The FBI stated that they believed the father’s previous threats were empty ones. The father died in prison in 1997, of complications of diabetes while on death row, but the mother’s sentence was commuted life imprisonment without parole, and she died in prison in 2014.
- December 20, 2017 – In commemoration of the United Nations International Human Solidarity Day, UN Women’s HeForShe movement issues an urgent call for men around the world to stand together in solidarity with each other and with women, to end sexual harassment.
- December 20, 2018 – A New York judge rejected a motion to dismiss the sexual assault case against former film producer Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced movie mogul was arrested in May on six criminal charges over the alleged sexual assault of three women. His lawyers had challenged the reliability of his accusers and the conduct of investigators for months, but the judge rejected the dismissal motions in under 10 minutes. One woman's charges were dropped in October due to emails that were not shared with a grand jury, but the other five charges from two women remain and were allowed to move forward. Despite the ruling, Weinstein's lawyer said that he is still confident that Weinstein will be "completely exonerated" when the case goes to trial. The trial was set to begin in January, 2020. In February, 2020, Weinstein was found guilty of rape in the third degree, and a criminal sex act in the first degree. He was acquitted on three other charges.
- December 20, 2019 – The 36-year-old man who was the first to be convicted under Rotterdam’s street harassment laws, passed in 2017, was cleared by a court of appeal on the grounds that he has a right to freedom of expression. He had approached two women, making kissing gestures as he called out: “Hey, beautiful ladies. Where are you going?” He then added: “Where are you from? Come to the South Side.” He then chased after the women, calling: “Hey baby, are you leaving now? Stay with me for a little longer.” The incident was witnessed by two street wardens. Under the law, there is no need for the victim to make a complaint. The man subsequently admitted to his behavior. He was prosecuted under the law, often referred to as “the catcalling ban,” brought in by Rotterdam city council as part of a crackdown after an increase in the number of incidences of street harassment. The subdistrict court acquitted him for his comments but he was fined for blowing kisses at the women. The law states it is forbidden to jeer at someone else or others on or along the road or in a building accessible to the public, or to harass another person or others with offensive language, gestures, sounds or behavior. Amsterdam, the capital, introduced a similar bylaw. However, the court of appeal in The Hague found that the man should not have been convicted for any of his behavior, for which he had been ordered to pay a €170 fine or spend three nights in jail. The court acquitted him for both comments and actions and argued there was “no reason to distinguish between purely verbal expressions, verbal expressions supported by gestures or behaviors, or mere opinions expressed by gestures or other behaviors.” It also said the scope of the bylaw was “very large” and it was not clear the statements and gestures were “evidently offensive and that the persons to whom they are addressed are thereby harassed.” The court’s ruling added: “In the Netherlands there is a multicultural society and in, among other things, the municipality of Rotterdam there is a strong multicultural community life in which not everyone has a good command of the Dutch language or is familiar with culturally determined behavior ... Citizens who, for whatever reason, cannot (sufficiently) express themselves through (the Dutch) language, must be able to (partly) use gestures.” The court found that such interference in the right to freedom of expression under article 10 of the European convention of human rights had not been justified. (Editorial comment: Didn’t both courts miss the point where freedom of expression ends and harassment begins? The moment he chased after the women, it stopped being a “freedom of expression” debate and became harassment.)
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- December 21, 1860 – Henrietta Szold born, American immigrant to Palestine, founder of Hadassah, co-founder of Ihud; she helped run Youth Aliyah, an organization that rescued Jewish children from Nazi Europe.
- December 21, 1866 – Maud Gonne born in England; who became an Irish nationalist, political activist, and suffragette. She campaigned for Home Rule and later for the Irish Republic; was a founding member of the Social Credit Party, a heavily Catholic group, which sought to reform Ireland’s financial and economic system through intervention by the new Irish government. She was known as the inspiration for most of the romantic poetry by major Irish poet William Butler Yeats who fell in love with her, but she did not return his feelings. In 1903, she married John McBride in Paris, but it was a disastrous marriage. By 1905, she wanted divorce, which the French courts would not grant, but she stayed in Paris, and founded L'Irlande libre, a newspaper in French advocating for a free Ireland. McBride returned to Ireland, where he was executed in May 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising. After his death, she returned to Ireland, turned down a proposal from Yeats, and was arrested in 1918 and imprisoned in England for six months. In 1921, she began working with the Irish White Cross for the relief of victims of the ongoing violence over Irish independence. She headed up a delegation called the Women's Peace Committee, which attempted to stop the indiscriminate shooting of civilians. She also set up the Women’s Prisoner’s Defence League, working for prisoner’s rights and supporting families wanting news of inmates. In 1922, her home was ransacked by soldiers of the Free State Army, and she was arrested in 1923 on charges of painting banners for seditious demonstrations and preparing anti-government literature. After 20 days in custody, she was released, but women continued to be arrested, and some went on hunger strikes. Maud Gonne MacBride published her autobiography in 1938, titled A Servant of the Queen, a reference to both a vision she had of the Irish queen of old, Kathleen Ni Houlihan and an ironic title considering her Irish Nationalism and rejection of the British monarchy. She was a confirmed anti-Masonic and anti-Semite, and even the Holocaust did not elicit her sympathy. Maud Gonne died at age 86 in 1953 in a suburb of Dublin.
- December 21, 1879 – World premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark – with a tacked-on “happy” ending.
- December 21, 1884 – María Cadilla Colón de Martínez born, Puerto Rican writer, educator, women’s rights activist, and one of the first Puerto Rican women to earn a doctorate, from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in 1933; taught history and literature at the University of Puerto Rico, and collected Puerto Rico’s folklore; wrote La Campesina de Puerto Rico (The Farmwoman of Puerto Rico), and Hitos de la Raza (Milestones of the Race).
- December 21, 1892 – Dame Rebecca West born, English journalist who covered the Nuremberg trials, and novelist, The Return of the Soldier.
- December 21, 1899 – Marie and Pierre Curie discover the radioactive element radium.
- December 21, 1905 – Käte Fenchel born, German Jewish mathematician, noted for her work on non-abelian groups; because of gender discrimination, she was not allowed at first to study pure mathematics at the University of Bern, and had to enroll in mathematics education classes. When Adolf Hitler came to power, she lost her job. Newly married to Werner Fenchel, another mathematician and also a Jew, she fled with him to Denmark, and when the Nazis invaded there, to Sweden. They returned to Denmark after the war.
- December 21, 1916 – Emma Tenayuca born, Mexican-America labor organizer and civil rights activist. During the Great Depression, she led a series of strikes by women workers in Texas. She was 17 when she became involved in her first strike, with workers at a cigar company. The women were beaten and arrested by police. She tried working more traditional labor unions like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, but decided they were not responsive to the needs of the marginalized people in her Tejano community, so she organized a more radically leftist coalition called the Workers Alliance, and joined the Communist Party. In 1938, she led a strike which grew to include 12,000 pecan shellers in the San Antonio area after the bosses announced they were going lower the already pathetic wages the women earned. The action ended in a compromise, but most of the workers would lose their jobs to mechanization within a few years. Her affiliation with the Communist Party made her a target of death threats, and she left San Antonio, moving first to Houston, and then to San Francisco, where she became disillusioned with the Communist Party and left it in 1946, then became a teacher. She returned to San Antonio in the 1960s, and died there at age 82 in July 1999.
- December 21, 1919 – Emma Goldman, American anarchist, feminist, and labor activist, known as “Red Emma,” is deported to Russia, after serving two years in prison for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the WWI U.S. military draft.
- December 21, 1920 – Adele Goldstine born, American mathematician and computer programmer; wrote the manual for ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer, and worked on the project to program ENIAC to perform fifty different stored instructions.
- December 21, 1921 – Alicia Alonso born, Cuban ballerina and choreographer, founded the Cuban National Ballet.
- December 21, 1922 – Cécile DeWitt-Morette born, French mathematician and physicist; founder of the summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps; attendees at the school included over 20 students who went on to be Nobel Laureates.
- December 21, 1937 – Jane Fonda born, actor, producer, author, and political activist; notable for her opposition to the Vietnam war, and fundraising for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the Indochina Peace Campaign. She has spoken openly about being raped, and also being fired because she refused to sleep with the boss, and is an active supporter of V Day. In 2001, she founded the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health, aimed at preventing teen pregnancy.
- December 21, 1959 – Florence Griffith Joyner (“Flo-Jo”) born, Olympic track and field champion, won three gold medals and one silver at 1988 Summer games; dubbed “World’s Fastest Woman.”
- December 21, 1960 – Sherry Rehman born, Pakistani politician and diplomat; since 2015, representative of Sindh in the Senate of Pakistan; Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. (2011-2013); Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan (2007-2011).
- December 21, 1975 – Paloma Herrera born, Argentine ballet dancer, and choreographer; artistic director of the 'Ballet Estable del Teatro Colón' since 2017; she was a principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre (1995-2015).
- December 21, 2018 – The Supreme Court issued a statement that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is recovering after undergoing surgery to remove two malignant growths in her lungs. The two nodules were found during tests taken when Ginsburg was hospitalized in November after breaking two of her ribs in a fall, and an evaluation determined that they were malignant. Doctors did not plan for any further treatment after this surgery. Ginsburg had previously survived cancer twice.
- December 21, 2019 – A study in the Journal of Women’s Health shows that men introducing women speakers are significantly less likely to use a professional title like doctor than they do for male speakers. Analyzing professional events at which medical doctors discussed their expertise, Dr. Julia Files and her colleagues found that men introduced male doctors by their professional titles 72 percent of the time, but did the same for women only 49 percent of the time. Women, in contrast, used professional titles the majority of the time when introducing both male and female speakers. “It is very important to acknowledge the impact language has on career advancement, especially in women,” said Files, an internist who led the study after being addressed by her first name by a discussion moderator who referred to her three male co-panelists as “Dr.” The research authors endorsed “addressing all women, irrespective of the industry, by the highest title they have achieved.” This also happens in the media. For example, Lauren Sanchez was a TV news anchor for years, co-hosting Fox’s “Good Day LA” from 2011 to 2017. She is a licensed helicopter pilot who founded her own aerial film company and consulted on Christopher Nolan’s film “Dunkirk.” But if you read about the 49-year-old today, you likely see her identity reduced to one word: mistress. After reports of her romantic relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos became public, multiple news outlets, including The Associated Press and New York Post, described her with that one word. As Emily Peck explained in HuffPost, the term is sexist because it is “meant to suggest that a woman is subordinate to the man with whom she’s having a relationship. The word also implies that her behavior is immoral.” And its usage does not go the other way: You are not likely to see stories introducing Bezos as Sanchez’s paramour.
- December 21, 2020 – Assam is a state in northeastern India known for its tea plantations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many women tea pluckers and factory workers have found themselves stuck at home with abusive partners, cut off from any services or support networks – except for the Jugnu Clubs. Jugnu means firefly, and the self-empowerment groups, supported by UNWomen, have become one of the few places that Assam women can turn during the pandemic. Club members have sheltered women fleeing from their homes, helped them file complaints with the police, and gone with women to support them when they speak to their husbands and the men’s families in the presence of police. Under more normal circumstances, the clubs provide a safe space for women and girls to share their experience and concerns. Members also do public education through skits during festivals, community meetings, and film screenings; and they make recommendations for improving workplace safety on the tea plantations. Argentina Matavel Piccin, UNFPA (UN Population Fund) Representative in India said, “Beneath COVID-19 is the shadow pandemic of gender-based violence. With restricted mobility and limited access to essential services, the rise in violence is often hidden. We must deal with both of these crises.” UN Women has now developed a Global Women’s Safety Framework in Rural Spaces, using the experience gained from working in Assam’s tea sector.
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- December 22, 1853 – Teresa Carreño born, Venezuelan singer, composer, conductor, and pianist. Over the course of her 54-year concert career, she became an internationally renowned virtuoso pianist, and was often referred to as the "Valkyrie of the Piano." Carreño composed approximately 75 works for solo piano, voice and piano, choir and orchestra, and instrumental ensemble. Her composition Kleiner Walzer (Mi Teresita), composed for her daughter Teresita, was one of her most popular pieces during her lifetime, and she often performed it as an encore at her own concerts.
- December 22, 1853 – Sarada Devi born, Indian mystic and spiritual consort of Saradamani Mukhopadhyay; she became the leader of the Ramakrishna movement after his death, and paved the way for future generations of Indian women to take up the monastic life. Followers of the Ramakrishna movement and many devotees around the world see Sri Maa Sarada Devi as an incarnation of the Adi Parashakti (Absolute Truth, also called the Divine Mother).
- December 22, 1868 – Käthe Paulus born, German exhibition parachute jumper and inventor of the first collapsible parachute in 1910. Previous parachutes were not able to fit rolled up in a casing on the back of the aeronaut. She also invented the ‘drag chute’ – a breakaway system where a small parachute opens to pull out the main parachute. Paulus was an avid aeronaut herself and logged over 510 balloon flights and over 165 parachute jumps in her lifetime. She was the first German to be a professional air pilot, and the first German woman aerial acrobat. She completed her last balloon jump at age 63 in 1931.
- December 22, 1907 – Dame Peggy Ashcroft born, English actress and leading player of the British theatre, whose career spanned over 60 years. She performed with the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the National Theatre, playing in everything from Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. In her later years, she appeared on television and in films, and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1856. Ashcroft died from a stroke at age 83 in 1991, and is commemorated with a memorial plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
- December 22, 1912 – “Lady Bird” Claudia Johnson born, American who was the U.S. First Lady (1963-1969). She was the first First Lady to set up an office in the White House and employ her own press secretary. She an advocate for beautifying the nation’s highways, and preserving the native wildflowers. Johnson said, “Where flowers bloom, so does hope.” She was also involved in environmentalism, conservation, and anti-pollution, and was instrumental in passage of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act. Lady Bird Johnson was a major champion of the federal Head Start program from its inception until her death. She also served on the University of Texas Board of Regents, the National Parks Service Advisory Board, and was the first woman to serve on the National Geographic Society’s Board of Trustees. With Helen Hayes, she co-founded the National Wildflower Center in 1982, which works to preserve and reintroduce native plants in the landscape. She died at age 94 in 2007.
- December 22, 1926 – Roberta Leigh born as Rita Lewin, British author of children’s stories, science fiction, romance novels, and murder mysteries; also an artist, composer, and television producer. She was a screenwriter for Space Patrol and Paul Starr, two marionette space adventure series during the 1960s, and The Solarnauts, a live-action science fiction series.
- December 22, 1938 – Marjorie Courtney-Latimer and Prof. J.L.B. Smith of Rhodes University identify the first coelacanth found after it had been thought to be extinct for 50 million years.
- December 22, 1939 – Gloria Jacobs, aged 17, became the first woman to hold a world pistol record when her shooting earned 299 out of a possible 300 points. She went on to set a total of 13 world records.
- December 22, 1944 – Dame Mary Archer born, British chemist and scientist, who specializes in solar power conversion; chair of the British National Energy Foundation (1988-2000); she is the current president of the UK Solar Energy Society (UK-ISES). In 2020, she was installed as Chancellor of the University of Buckingham in Buckinghamshire, England.
- December 22, 1945 – Frances Lannon born, British historian and academic specializing in Spanish history; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE – 2016); known for The Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939; Women and Images of Women in the Spanish Civil War; and Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: the Catholic Church in Spain 1875-1975.
- December 22, 1945 – Diane Sawyer born, American TV journalist; CBS reporter and correspondent (1978-1981); 60 Minutes correspondent (1984-1989); co-anchor of Good Morning America (1999-2009) and Primetime newsmagazine (1989-1998 and since 2000). She won a 2009 Peabody Award for "A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains." Sawyer was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1997.
- December 22, 1952 – Sandra Kalniete born, Latvian politician and diplomat, Member of the European Parliament for Latvia since 2009; European Commissioner for Agriculture and Fisheries (2004); Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs (2002-2004).
- December 22, 1957 – Carole James born, Canadian politician and public administrator; Deputy Premier of British Columbia (2017-2020); Member of the British Columbia Legislative Assembly for Victoria-Beacon Hill (2005-2020); Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia (2005-2011); Leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party (2003-2011). She announced in March, 2020, that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and would not run in the next provincial election.
- December 22, 1976 – Aya Takano born, Japanese Superflat and Manga artist, science fiction essayist; known for her female figures, which are often androgynous, and shown floating through alternate realities.
- December 22, 2012 – Hundreds of men accused of sexual violence towards women have been allowed to stand in Indian elections in the last five years, including more than 30 charged with rape. The figures were released in Delhi by the Association for Democratic Reforms, a respected thinktank, and were based on court records and electoral declarations filed by the candidates. Although most of the men concerned were contesting state elections, the report found dozens of men, facing criminal investigations for assault, "outraging the modesty of a woman," and other charges, had been selected by major parties to campaign for seats in the national assembly. The news came as demonstrations across India continued following the gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi. Six men were arrested for the attack. The victim, who sustained severe intestinal injuries, was in critical condition in hospital. It was reported that she had regained consciousness but was extremely weak. The attack has dominated the news agenda in India all week, unleashing a wave of anger and shock directed largely at police officials as well as senior politicians, including Delhi's chief minister, Sheila Dikshit. A crowd marched to the residence of the president, Pranab Mukherjee. Protesters and the media have criticised the use of a tenth of Delhi's 80,000 police officers to protect the capital's top officials, politicians, and diplomats. In India, the number of armed officers deployed is often taken as an indicator of an individual's power and influence. "It is outrageous. They are guarding people who don't need to be guarded while the vulnerable are being left alone," said Ayesha Malik, 31, a housewife who joined the protest.
- December 22, 2015 – Women told their stories at the International Solidarity and Innovative Financing Forum for Post-2015 Agenda, hosted in Tbilisi by the government of Georgia, a platform for sharing of good practices and lessons learned in implementing Sustainable Development Goals through innovative financing. Georgian Mariam Buchukuri, Head of Shida Qartli Community Fund for Peace and Development, told her story about the successful social mobilization work by UN Women among conflict-affected women in the village of Tirdznisi, “Women in our village negotiated with local authorities [for an] allocation of funds to repair the road. It was important to us: Our kids walked to school sometimes in mud, elderly have problems to walk out of the house alone. The entire village — men and women alike — gave their hands to build it.”
- December 22, 2019 – Fallon Sherrock, the first woman to defeat a man at the PDC World Darts Championship, says she has been overwhelmed by the “incredible” response to her historic achievement, including a post on Twitter by Tennis groundbreaker Billie Jean King with the hashtag #Gamechanger. “I haven’t had time to process the first game, let alone this game. Then the fact that all these people are tweeting me, especially Billie Jean King. Oh my god, I never thought someone like that would be contacting me or congratulating me or anything like that. I mean, this is me. I’m just a normal person. This stuff doesn’t happen to me, but it’s incredible and I’m loving it.”
- December 22, 2020 – Boohoo, one of Britain’s best-known fast fashion brands, had already faced damaging fallout from the discovery of poor working conditions in at least 18 factories in Leicester run by its suppliers. Third-party audits revealed several could not prove they were paying minimum wage to their workers – some workers seemed to be paid only £3-£4 an hour ($4-$5.40 USD) – and uncovered inadequate health and safety policies, fire safety issues, missing or expired “right to work” documents, non-payment of furlough money and no records of holiday pay. A new report shows that Pakistani workers, the majority of them women, at companies with contracts with Boohoo are working for as little as 10,000 PKR (about $62 USD) a month, well below Pakistan’s legal minimum of 17,500 PKR ($99 USD) a month. Documentary, video, and photographic evidence also appears to support claims of potential safety issues. In the rush to produce clothes for the western market, insiders claimed workers would sometimes have to do 24-hour shifts. Workers who were interviewed alleged: some are paid the legal minimum wage, but others earn far less and receive no receipt or payslip to record their income; workers are often ordered to work extra-long shifts without full overtime pay; some factories have no running water for days at a time; piles of fabric stacked up in walkways or near boilers pose a fire hazard. A Boohoo tracksuit with a “made in Pakistan” label was selling online for £30 ($41 USD) at the time of the report on conditions in the Pakistani factories connected with Boohoo.
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- December 23, 583 – Yohl Ik’nal is crowned as the first recorded female ruler of the Mayan city-state of Palenque, one of only a few Mayan women to have a full royal title.
- December 23, 1657 – Hannah Duston born, colonial Massachusetts Puritan woman who was taken captive with her newborn daughter during a raid by Abenaki warriors. Her child was killed on the forced march. She and two other captives freed themselves by killing and scalping their captors before escaping by canoe.
- December 23, 1815 – The novel Emma by Jane Austen is first published.
- December 23, 1828 – Matilde Wesendonck born, German poet and author; the words of five of her verses were the basis of Richard Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, which he completed in 1858.
- December 23, 1860 – Harriet Monroe born, American editor, scholar, literary and art critic, and poet; in 1912, she became the founding publisher and editor of Poetry magazine, which was highly influential in the development of modern American poetry. She remained its editor until her death at age 75, when she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while climbing Machu Picchu in Peru.
- December 23, 1867 – “Madam C. J.” Sara Walker born, American businesswoman, inventor, and philanthropist; considered the first black woman millionaire. She invented a metal heating comb and conditioner for straightening hair, then made her fortune with a hugely successful marketing campaign for the hair and beauty products she developed for black women. After she started her business in 1910, in Indianapolis, Indiana, she opened part of her company operations in New York City. She established a chain of beauty parlors throughout the U.S. and the Caribbean. About 5,000 African American agents were earning commissions by selling her products in 1910, and by 1919 the number of agents had risen to 25,000.
- December 23, 1895 – Nola Luxford born in New Zealand, American broadcaster and actress; during the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, she was the pioneering writer-broadcaster of a daily radio programme for audiences in Australia and New Zealand. During WWII, she founded the ANZAC Club of New York, and through her wartime broadcasts, she became known as the “Angel of the ANZACS.” As an actress, several of her silent films are now lost, so she is best-known for her role as Rose, the murder victim in 1935’s Kind Lady, which starred Basil Rathbone and Aline MacMahon.
- December 23, 1900 – Marie Bell born as Marie-Jeanne Bellon, French classical tragedian, comic actor, and stage director. She was the director of the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris from 1962 until her death in 1985, and this theatre now bears her name. During the German Occupation of France (1940–1944), she participated in the French resistance as one of nine directors of the Front national du theatre.
- December 23, 1912 – Anna Jane Harrison born, American organic chemist, first woman president of the American Chemical Society. She was a chemistry professor at Mount Holyoke College (1945-1989); noted for research on ultraviolet spectroscopy. She helped increase public understanding of science and technology, and was an active supporter of women in science. During WWII, she conducted secret research on toxic smoke, which led to the creation of smoke-detecting field kits for the U.S. Army. Harrison’s post-war research focused on organic compounds and their interaction with light. She served on the National Board of Science (1972-1978), and as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1983.
- December 23, 1919 – By Act of British Parliament and Royal Assent, the Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919 amended the laws disqualifying a person on account of sex or marriage from public function or vocation, and lifting the bans on women in civil service, serving on juries, and from higher education.
- December 23, 1920 – Alice Parker, an African-American inventor, patented a natural gas furnace which became the basis for modern heating systems.
- December 23, 1922 – Micheline Ostermeyer born, French athlete and concert pianist. She won gold medals at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London in the shot put and discus throw, and a bronze medal in the high jump. Ostermeyer retired from sports in 1950 to concentrate on her career in music. She toured as a concert pianist for 15 years, then took a teaching job until she retired in the 1980s. Ostermeyer next gave a series of concerts in France and Switzerland before her death at age 78 in 2001.
- December 23, 1939 – Nancy Graves born, American sculptor, painter, and printmaker; elected to the National Academy of Design (1992); she died of ovarian cancer in 1995.
- December 23, 1943 – Queen Silvia of Sweden born; in 2011 she became the longest-serving queen in Swedish history; noted for establishing Mentor International in 1994, in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO), in the fields of international youth development and prevention of substance abuse. She was the co-founder of the World Childhood Foundation in 1999, inspired by her work as Patron of the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children held in Stockholm. The queen has also been involved in the Global Child Forum, and founded Stiftelsen Silviahemmet in 1996, which was part of her efforts to help dementia sufferers. Silviahemmet is a foundation and a school, which offers nurses training and entire unit training certification, combined with broad-based training in practical dementia care for caregivers.
- December 23, 1955 – Carol Ann Duffy born, Scottish poet and playwright; she is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to be appointed as Britain's Poet Laureate (2009-2019).
- December 23, 1963 – Donna Tartt born, American novelist; won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch.
- December 23, 1979 – Megan Mayhew Bergman born, American short story writer, and columnist for The Guardian newspaper; noted for her story collections, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, and Almost Famous Women.
- December 23, 1981 – Hiro Fujiwara born, Japanese manga artist, known for her series, Kaichō wa Maid-sama! (The class president is a maid! 2005-2013).
- December 23, 1989 – Liis Koger born, Estonian painter and poet; she had her first major solo exhibition in 2012 at Camponeschi in Rome, Italy.
- December 23, 2014 – A three-judge panel of the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a North Carolina abortion law is unconstitutional. The 2011 law required all women seeking abortion to first undergo ultrasounds, with the fetal image displayed and described to them in detail by a doctor. In the 37-page opinion, the panel wrote, “The First Amendment not only protects against prohibitions of speech, but also against regulations that compel speech.” The law “forces physicians to say things they otherwise would not say. Moreover, the statement compelled here is ideological; it conveys a particular opinion. The state freely admits that the purpose . . . is to convince women seeking abortions to change their minds or reassess their decisions.”
- December 23, 2018 – Maria do Rosário, a member of the Brazil’s national congress, was told during an argument in 2003 by Jair Bolsonaro, also a congress member at the time, “I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it,” before he pushed her in the chest. As Bolsonaro has risen from the periphery of Brazilian politics to win election as president of Brazil, the incident has been retold in countless news articles and replayed on primetime broadcasts around the world. The insult is seen as the quintessential example of the offensive language that Bolsonaro has used against women, gay people, Afro-Brazilians, and indigenous people. “I really lament that this is what I’m known for,” said do Rosário in an interview. Recently re-elected to her fifth term in Brazil’s lower house, do Rosário, age 52, is a veteran member of the leftwing Workers’ party who has steered legislation on equal pay and tougher punishments for femicide. “I’m behind numerous human rights laws in Brazil, but this is what people remember. Bolsonaro has taken that away from me,” she said. As Brazil braced for Bolsonaro’s inauguration in 2019, she feared that dark times were looming for human rights and women’s rights in the country. “It’s extremely worrying that a man who looks at rape as something women can deserve is now president,” she said. “People emulate his violent, disrespectful ways.” Bolsonaro’s rise has coincided with – and fuelled – a growing backlash against feminism in Brazil, and activists fear that rights and protection for women who are victims of domestic abuse and rape will be diminished under the Bolsonaro administration.
- December 23, 2019 – In France, two 16-year-old boys have been charged with the rape of a teenage girl and remanded in custody outside Paris. When the video of the alleged attack was flagged to French government services dealing with illegal content online, the police posted a message on Twitter asking the public not to share the images. The boys were quickly identified online. One voluntarily went to a police station in the Essonne area, south of Paris, and the other was arrested shortly after. They were questioned by police over the weekend and charged with rape as well as making and sharing violent and degrading images. “They are teenagers but that is not an excuse,” the equalities minister, Marlène Schiappa, told Le Parisien newspaper. “Respect for women must apply to all ages and all parts of the republic.” Schiappa denounced what she called a “despicable video” and warned that social networks were not doing enough to deal with such content. “As soon as I heard about this, I immediately contacted Twitter to get this taken down,” she said. But she added that even after she had contacted Twitter, copies of the images were still circulating. “That social network is not up to it, criminals know that, that’s why they use it.”
- December 23, 2020 – In the UK, an investigation was launched into the death of Annelise Sanderson, an 18-year-old woman at Styal prison in Cheshire, who died in custody on December 22. It was the eighth death in a UK women’s prison in 2020. Since the publication of the Corston review in 2007 following a spate of deaths in women’s prisons, a total of 118 women have died in prison. The report, a sweeping review of the British criminal justice system by Baroness Jean Corston, called for radical changes in the way the offences of women were regarded by the system. Some of the report’s key recommendations have never been implemented. Deborah Coles, director of the charity Inquest, said: “This is a deeply tragic yet preventable death of a young woman in prison. The Corston review was set up after a pattern of deaths in Styal. The persistence and repetition of the same issues reveals a glaring and shameful failure of government to enact recommended changes. The pandemic is now exacerbating isolation and mental ill health within prisons and we have seen a worrying increase in women’s self-harm. Fundamentally, to prevent deaths and harm we must ... invest in specialist services in the community.”
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- December 24, 1520 – Märta Eriksdotter Leijonhufvud born, dubbed Kung Märta (King Martha); sister of Queen Margaret Leijonhufvud and sister-in-law of King Gustav I of Sweden. Martha and Svante Stensson Sture were married in 1538 at Nyköping Castle. He was head of the most powerful family in Sweden after the royal family. She bore at least fifteen children, of which ten became adults. Sture was frequently absent on official missions, including serving as governor of Livonia, so Märta took over running the castle and the estates, exerting her authority in the justice system and appointing local officials. The royal children were placed in her care when her sister the queen died in 1551, until the king’s remarriage in 1552. Gustav died in 1560. In 1561, the new king, Eric XIV of Sweden, introduced the new title of count in Sweden, and her husband was created one of Sweden's first three counts, making Märta the first countess in Sweden. King Eric, however, feared that the Sture family had designs on the throne. In 1565, Marta’s son Nils, a diplomat and soldier, was accused of treason. He was acquitted by the court, but the case created hostility toward the King, who then had Svante Sture and his sons Nils and Erik imprisoned, along with several other noblemen. When Märta tried to see the King on their behalf, she was held under guard, along with her sister-in-law. Märta appealed to Karin Månsdotter, the King’s mistress and later his wife, who pleaded with the King to spare the prisoners. But the King seemed to have a fit of madness, and stabbed Nils Sture to death, then ordered all the other prisoners except one to be killed, including Märta’s husband and her son Eric. A settlement was negotiated with the families of the murdered men, and compensation was made in the form of silver bricks. But in 1568, when King Eric remanded the return of these bricks to pay for his wedding to Karin Månsdotter, Märta had the ‘blood silver’ melted down to finance the deposing of Eric XIV, and put her nephew, John III of Sweden, on the throne.
- December 24, 1634 – Mariana of Austria born, Queen consort of Spain (1649-1665). When her husband died in 1665, she was appointed regent for her 3-year-old son Charles II, and due to his ill health remained an influential figure until her death in 1696. During her regency, she was engaged in a struggle with her son’s illegitimate half-brother, John of Austria the Younger, leader of one of the factions trying to oust Charles, and she also faced Spain’s grave financial difficulties, caused by almost a century of continuous war. The financial crisis was made even worse by the ‘Little Ice Age’ – a period of cold and wet weather that affected all of Europe. Between 1692 and 1699, between 5% and 10% of Europe’s population starved to death. Charles came of age in 1675, but Mariana reinstated the regency in 1677 as his health worsened. John gained control in 1678, but died in 1679, and Mariana took back control until her death in 1696.
- December 24, 1731 – Julie von Bondeli born, Swiss intellectual who hosted a scientific salon that became the center of cultural life in Bern; as a child, she was given a comprehensive education in languages, mathematics, and philosophy, very rare for a girl in her time; she corresponded regularly with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Sophie von La Roche.
- December 24, 1843 – Lydia Koidula born, Estonian poet and writer; as a respectable young lady, she had to publish her work anonymously or under a pen name in her father’s newspaper. It was the first Estonian language newspaper allowed by the Russian Empire; her use of vernacular Estonian in her poetry had a major impact on Estonian letters.
- December 24, 1869 – Henriette Roland Holst born, Dutch poet, non-fiction writer, socialist, and activist for workers’ rights; active in the Social-Democratic Party (SDP) which became the Communist Party of the Netherlands; she was part of the Dutch Resistance during WWII.
- December 24, 1877 – Sigrid Schauman born, Finnish artist and art critic; after her husband died, she worked for the newspaper Dagens Press nearly 30 years, publishing over 1500 art reviews, interviews, and travel reports.
- December 24, 1895 – Noel Streatfeild born, English children’s author; best known for her book Ballet Shoes, the first of her Shoes series.
- December 24, 1895 – Marguerite Williams born, American geologist; first African American to earn a doctorate in geology in the U.S., from the Catholic University of America; she was the chair of the Geology Department of Miner Teacher’s College (1923-1933).
- December 24, 1900 – Hawayo Hiromi Takata born, Japanese-American master of Reiki, who helped introduce the spiritual practice to Westerners; she formed the American Reiki Association with Dr. Barbara Weber Ray, later renamed the Radiance Technique Association.
- December 24, 1903 – Ava H. Pauling born, American human rights activist; she campaigned for women’s rights, racial equality, international peace, and particularly against nuclear proliferation; married to Linus Pauling. She volunteered for the American Civil Liberties Union in opposing the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, giving employment to one of the released internees, in spite of criticism, Ava Pauling served as the national vice president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), helping to organize the “Women’s Peace March” in Europe.
- December 24, 1904 – Mary Bingham born, Bingham newspaper empire matriarch, philanthropist. and civic leader. She died suddenly in Louisville KY, on April 18, 1995, at age 90, while delivering a speech at a fundraising dinner in her honor to support the Louisville Free Public Library.
- December 24, 1906 – Anna Neethling Pohl born, South African actress, film producer, and the first woman broadcaster for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC); she helped to found the Cape Afrikaans Theatrical Society, the volksteater in Pretoria, and the National Drama Organisation. Pohl also wrote under the pen names Niehausvor and Wynand du Preez, and translated seven of Shakespeare’s dramas into Afrikaans.
- December 24, 1920 – Yevgeniya Rudneva born, Russian astronomer who worked at the Moscow Solar department of the Astronomical-Geodesical Society of the USSR before WWII. She was the head navigator of the 46th Guards Night Bomber regiment during WWII. Runeva flew 645 night combat missions before her plane was shot down in 1944.
- December 24, 1927 – Mary Higgins Clark born, prolific American author of suspense and mystery novels; dubbed "The Queen of Suspense."
- December 24, 1943 – Tarja Halonen born, Finnish Social Democratic politician; first woman elected as President of Finland (2000-2012); Minister of Foreign Affairs (1995-2000); Minister of Justice (1990-1991); Member of Parliament for Helsinki (1979-2000).
- December 24, 1950 – Libby Larsen born, American contemporary orchestral composer; co-founder of the American Composers Forum. She won the 1993 Grammy Award as producer of the Best Classical Vocal Performance. Larsen served as the first Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the Library of Congress (2003-2004).
- December 24, 1951 – Marsha Gomez born, artist and activist; she used pottery and sculpture from her Choctaw ancestry to teach and to demand rights for indigenous women of many cultures, achieved NGO (non-governmental organization consultant) status for indigenous women in the United Nations; she was the co-founder in 1988 of the Foundation for a Compassionate Society.
- December 24, 1954 – Helen M. Jones born, British Labour politician; Chair of the Petitions Committee (2015-2019); Vice-Chamberlain of the Household (2009-2010); Member of Parliament for Warrington North (1997-2019).
- December 24, 1961 – Mary Barra born, Chair and CEO of General Motors Company since 2014; the first woman CEO of a major global automaker; GM Executive Vice President of Global Product Development (2011-2014); Vice President in various departments (2008-2011).
- December 24, 1963 – Caroline Aherne born, English comedian, writer, and actress; best known for performing as an acerbic chat show host on the talk show spoof, The Mrs Merton Show (1993-1998), and in The Royle Family (1998-2000 and 2006-2012), which she also co-wrote. She won BAFTA awards for both series. Aherne wrote Dossa and Joe, which appeared on BBC Two in 2002, and she made guest appearances on other programmes. She died of cancer at age 52 in 2016.
- December 24, 1963 – Naja Marie Aidt born, Greenlander poet and writer who writes in the Danish Language
- December 24, 1973 – Stephenie Meyer born, American novelist and film producer, best known for her young adult Twilight fantasy vampire quartet, with 100 million copies sold.
- December 24, 1983 – Irina Krush born in Odessa, American chess Grandmaster since 2013. Her family emigrated to the U.S when she was 5 years old. Krush has won the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship 8 times, beginning when she was age 14, making her the youngest U.S. Women’s Chess Champion.
- December 24, 2014 – In 2013, Asmaa Hamdy, a dentistry student, was sentenced to five years in jail for protesting against the removal of Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi. To pass the time in prison, she began knitting woolen handbags, then marketed them as “Made in Prison” through Facebook. By the end of 2014, her family said she had made about 50 bags at £6 each, and in a recent letter to them suggested she might abandon dentistry for full-time design. But, her fiancé says, money is not her main goal. “It’s just to deliver a message,” says Ibrahim Ragab. “Even if you’re jailing us, you can’t stop us: our souls are free. Whatever happens, prison won’t stop our imagination. As Asmaa is always saying, we’re beyond breaking point.”
- December 24, 2018 – Martha Érika Alonso, the first woman elected as Governor of the Mexican state of Puebla, was killed in a helicopter crash, after only 10 days in office. Her husband, and other members of the National Action Party (PAN), were also killed. A 2020 report by the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation concluded that the helicopter “should not have flown” because of a preexisting problem with a stability system on the helicopter that both the operator and the maintenance crew knew about.
- December 24, 2019 – The American Bar Association’s Defenders Program called for the release of Saudi Arabian women’s rights activists: Israa Al-Ghomgham, detained since December 2015, who was tried in February, 2019, but had not received her verdict. It was later announced to be eight years of imprisonment. Loujain al-Hathloul, a leader in the struggle to win the right to drive for Saudi women, was detained in May 2018. In February, 2021, she was released from prison, with a suspended sentence, which could be reinstated if she speaks out, along with a five-year travel ban. Nouf Abdulaziz, also detained since May 2018, was released in 2021, with a 5-year travel ban. Samar Badawi, detained since July 2018, was released in June, 2021. Nassima al-Sada, arrested in July, 2018, was released in June, 2021, but restricted by a 5-year travel ban. In December, 2020, al-Hathoul was sentenced to five years, eight months in prison, some of it time already served. Maya’a al-Zahrani was tried and sentenced at the same time as al-Hathloul, with the same restrictions. In March, 2021, a court rejected an appeal by al-Hathloul of her restrictions, and upheld her sentencing.
- December 24, 2020 – The Boston Fire Department started a workshop just for women firefighters, led by women instructors. There’s special training to help them learn to use their lower center of gravity and flexibility to their advantage, and a cognitive performance specialist to get them to recognize and change the doubting “self-talk” that can hold them back in performing. Six percent of career firefighters in the United States are women. In Boston, it's only 1%. Boston's fire commissioner hopes to continue these workshops just for women, and find ways to encourage more women to apply for the job.
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The Feminist Cats and the Radical Feminist Reindeer
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