WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from March 1 through through March 16.
March is National Women’s History Month, and it’s crammed with historic events and scores of trailblazing women.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
This Week in the War on Women
just posted, so be sure to go there next and catch up
on the latest dispatches from the frontlines
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Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
Early March – Women Trailblazers and Events in OUR History
- March 1, 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village MA, beginning the Salem witch trials
- March 1, 1781 – Javiera Carrera born, Chilean activist in the War of Independence, credited with sewing the first national flag, called the “Mother of Chile”
- March 1,1864 - Rebecca Lee Crumpler born, first black American woman to get a medical degree
- March 1, 1890 – Theresa Bernstein-Meyerowitz born in Poland, American Jewish artist and writer; co-founder of the Society of Independent Artists
- March 1, 1893 – Mercedes de Acosta born, American author, poet, and playwright; women’s rights activist and advocate for vegetarianism; her uncloseted lesbianism was very daring for the times; she had relationships with a number of stars from both Hollywood and Broadway, including Alla Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne, and Greta Garbo
- March 1, 1918 – Gladys Spellman born, American teacher and Democratic politician, appointed in 1967 to President Lyndon Johnson’s Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Affairs; U.S. Congressional Representative from Maryland (1975-1981)
- March 1, 1933 – Merlie Evers-Williams born, civil rights activist and author, wife of Medgar Evers, who worked for decades to bring his killer to justice; first woman to head the NAACP (1995-1998)
- March 1, 1941 – Maaja Ranniku born, Estonian Chess Master
- March 1, 1945 – Nancy Woodhull born, editor of USA Today (1975-90), advocated for women in public and private sector leadership positions; founded “Women, Men and Media,” a research/outreach project with Betty Friedan (1988)
- March 1, 1952 – Nevada Barr born, American mystery novelist, noted for her national parks mystery series featuring Anna Pigeon
- March 1, 1956 – Dalia Grybauskaitė Lithuanian politician; first woman President of Lithuania, elected in 2009, and re-elected in 2014, the first Lithuanian President reelected for a consecutive second term; previously Minister of Finance and European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget (2004 - 2009)
- March 1, 1978 – Women’s History Week is first observed in Sonoma County, California, (see March 8)
- March 1, 1987 – Congress passes a resolution permanently designating March as National Women’s History Month
- March 2, 1831 – Metta Fuller Victor born, American author; “dime novel” pioneer
- March 2, 1860 – Susanna M. Salter born, first American woman elected as a mayor, of Argonia Kansas; active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
- March 2, 1873 – Inez Haynes Irwin born, American author and feminist, Author’s Guild president
- March 2, 1887 – Elizabeth Morrissey born, public school/college educator, concentrated on labor issues like unemployment insurance in American Trade Unions, pressed women’s groups involvement in social issues
- March 2, 1903 – NYC’s Martha Washington Hotel opens, with 416 rooms; first hotel exclusively for women
- March 2, 1922 – Frances Spence born, a pioneer in computer programming; one of the original programmers for the ENIAC, the first digital computer; inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997
- March 2, 1961 – Simone M. Young born, Australian conductor; first female conductor at the Vienna State Opera (1993); the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway (1998-2002), Opera Australia in Sydney (2001-2003); Hamburg State Opera (2005-2015)
- March 2, 1986 – Corazon Aquino is sworn into office as president of the Philippines; her first public declaration restores the civil rights of the citizens of her country
- March 3, 1678 – Madeleine Jarret born, called Madeleine de Verchères, Canadian leader; as a 14-year-old girl led a fight against Iroquois warriors attacking Fort Verchères
- March 3, 1887 – Anne Sullivan arrives at the Alabama home of Capt. and Mrs. Arthur H. Keller to become the teacher of their blind and deaf 6-year-old daughter, Helen
- March 3, 1893 – Hanya Holm born in Germany, modern dance pioneer, emigrated to U.S.in 1931, taught dancing in many states, choreographed ballets, including “Metropolitan Daily” (1938), the first ballet televised in the U.S.; also choreographed for theatre, movies and opera
- March 3, 1893 – Beatrice Wood born, American illustrator and potter
- March 3, 1902 – Isabel Bishop born, artist, after sampling various styles settled on young, generally lower-middle class office workers as subjects, focus of retrospective at Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), honored with Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award by President Carter (1979)
- March 3, 1913 – The Suffrage Procession, led by Inez Millholland on a white horse, is the first suffragist parade in Washington DC. Organized by the suffrage strategist Alice Paul and her committee, which includes Lucy Burns, for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thousands of suffragists march down Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration ". . . in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded," according to the official program
- March 3, 1913 – Margaret Bonds born, American pianist and composer
- March 3, 1917 – Sameera Moussa born, one of the first Egyptian nuclear scientists, her work makes medical use of nuclear technology affordable; organizer of the first Atomic Energy for Peace Conference
- March 3, 1938 - Patricia MacLachlan born, American children’s author; won the 1986 Newbery Medal for Sarah, Plain and Tall
- March 3, 1943 – Myra Sadker born, studied and researched sex roles in children’s literature, wrote texts to challenge sexism in education of girls because it short-changed their ambitions, co-authored Sexism in School and Society (1973)
- March 3, 1949 – Bonnie J. Dunbar born, American engineer, academic, and astronaut
- March 3, 1962 – Jackie Joyner-Kersee born, one of the world’s greatest female athletes, records in the long jump (1988) and the heptathlon (1986), won 3 gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronze medals in 4 Olympic games
- March 3, 2005 – Margaret Wilson is elected as Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, beginning a period lasting until August 23, 2006 where all the highest political offices, including Elizabeth II as Head of State, are occupied by women, making New Zealand the first country with all women in positions of highest power
- March 4, 1781 – Rebecca Gratz born, Jewish American educator and philanthropist; co-founder of the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances in 1801, which aided widows and orphans after the American Revolutionary War, and later, the War of 1812; also helped found the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum in 1815, and served on its board for the next 40 years; 1838 to 1864, became superintendent and president of the first Hebrew Sunday School in America; 1819, co-founder of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society; her advocacy helped establish a Jewish foster home, the Fuel Society and the Sewing Society; Gratz College founded in her memory
March 4, 1815 – Myrtilla Miner born, American educator and abolitionist, she would establish the Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington DC before the Civil War, in spite of threats and vandalism, even arson; her school will merge with other schools to become the University of the District of Columbia
- March 4, 1881 – Eliza Ballou Garfield becomes the first mother of a U.S. President to live in the executive mansion
- March 4, 1891 – Lois W. born, American activist, co-founder of Al-Anon
- March 4, 1889 – Pearl White born, American silent film star; a former circus bareback rider, she was one of the first women of “action” in the movies, who did the majority of her own stunts in serial films, most notably in The Perils of Pauline; unlike the usual screaming-in-terror-and-fainting heroines, she was plucky and resourceful; but when a spinal injury from a stunt gone wrong led to drug and alcohol abuse, her career plummeted, and she died of a “liver ailment” at age 49
- March 4, 1899 – Elizabeth Wood born, taught English at Vassar (1922-26); involved in social welfare in FDR’s Public Works Administration in 1934, where her plans to create housing that included play areas and racial diversity were undercut when residents were not involved in planning; becomes the first executive secretary of the newly created Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) in 1937
- March 4, 1913 – Marguerite Taos Amrouche born, Algerian author and singer, one of the first Algerian women to publish a novel in French, collected and interpreted Kabylie Berber songs
- March 4, 1914 – Barbara Newhall Follett born, American child prodigy who began writing poetry at age four, published her first novel, The House Without Windows, when she was 12, and The Voyage of the Norman D. when she was 14; but in 1928, her father abandons the family for another woman; devastated, she’s unable to write for several years, she and her mother fall on hard times during the Depression; at 16, she works as a secretary, but begins writing again, including the novel Lost Island, and later a travelogue called Travel Without a Donkey; she marries at 19, but after six years, she discovers her husband is unfaithful; according to a statement made by the husband, they quarreled, and she left their apartment with $30 in her pocket. But he doesn’t report her missing for two weeks, “waiting for her to return”; though suspicious of foul play, the police turn up no evidence in their investigation, and what happened to her is still a mystery
- March 4, 1917 – Jeannette Rankin (R-MT) takes her seat as the first female member of Congress; an avowed Pacifist, she votes against both World Wars, casts the only vote against America declaring war against Japan after Pearl Harbor
- March 4, 1931 – Alice Rivlin born, American economist and politician: Congressional Bidget Office Director (1975-1983); White House Office of Management and Budget Director (1994-1996); Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve System (1996-1999)
- March 4, 1932 – Miriam Makeba born, South African singer, civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, who helped popularize African music around the world
- March 4, 1933 – Frances Perkins becomes Secretary of Labor, the first woman member of the United States Cabinet
- March 4, 1942 – Lynn Sherr born, American broadcast journalist, correspondent for the TV news magazine 20/20; feminist activist, honored in 1989 and again in 1992 with the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award “for exceptional coverage of reproductive rights”
- March 4, 1946 – Patricia Kennealy-Morrison born, American scifi/fantasy and mystery author of The Keltiad, and the Rennie Stride mystery series; as editor-in-chief of Jazz & Pop magazine in the late 1960s, she was one of the first women rock critics
- March 4, 1954 – Irina Ratushinskaya born, Russian writer and poet, Soviet dissident who was sent first to a labor camp in 1983, then prison, including a year in solitary confinement, before her release in 1986; Grey is the Colour of Hope is a memoir of her incarceration
- March 4, 1983 – Bertha Wilson appointed as first woman judge on Canada’s Supreme Court
- March 4, 1998 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that federal law banning on-the-job sexual harassment still applies when both parties are the same sex
- March 5, 1852 – Lady Augusta Gregory born, Irish writer, folklorist and playwright; co-founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and a leader of the Irish Literary Revival
- March 5, 1871 – Rosa Luxemburg born, Polish-Russian economist, philosopher, feminist and anti-war activist; co-founder of Spartakusbund (the Spartacus League), which started as an anti-war group, and its newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag); she’s captured and murdered by Freikorps troops during the Spartacist uprising of 1919, which began as a general strike
- March 5, 1882 – Dora Marsden born, English radical feminist, literary modernist journal editor of The Freewoman and The Egoist
- March 5, 1885 – Louise Pearce born, one of the foremost pathologists of the early 20th century, co-discoverer of a cure for trypanosomiasis (African sleeping sickness) in 1919, awarded the Order of the Crown of Belgium
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March 5, 1900 – Lilli Jahn born, German-Jewish physician; in 1943, after she had separated from her husband and moved Kassel from Immenhausen, she is denounced for an improper name card by her doorbell – Jewish women required by the Nazis to add ‘Sara’ to their name, and all Jews forbidden to use the title Doctor. She is arrested, interrogated and sent to the Breitenau labor camp, while her underage children are left on their own; the letters she smuggles out to her children are later published by them, but she’s deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and dies there, the exact date unknown
- March 5, 1931 – Geraldyn (Jerrie) Cobb born, record-setting aviator, first woman to pass the qualifying exams for astronaut training (1959) but not allowed to train because of her gender
- March 5, 1935 – Letizia Battaglia born, Italian photojournalist, notable for her work documenting the Sicilian Mafia; a member of the Green Party, she served on the city council of Palermo (1985-1991) and as a Deputy at the Sicilian Regional Assembly (1991-1996); a feminist, she co-founded Mezzocielo (Half-the-Sky), a women’s journal
- March 5, 1938 – Lynn Margulis born, American biologist and theorist on Symbiogenesis, the evolution of eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus)
- March 5, 1953 – Katarina Frostenson born, a leading Swedish poet
- March 5, 1998 – Air Force Lt. Col. Eileen Collins is announced as the leader of Columbia’s crew on a mission to launch a large X-ray telescope, the first woman to command a space shuttle
- March 6, 1791 – Anna Claypoole Peale born, American painter, known for portrait miniatures and still life paintings
- March 6, 1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning born, English poet
- March 6, 1863 – Carrie Belle Kearney born, teacher, author, suffragist, temperance reformer, and white racist; first woman elected to the Mississippi State Senate
- March 6,1882 – Sarah Wambaugh born, American political scientist, one of the world’s leading authorities on plebiscites, adviser to various commissions including the U.N. Plebiscite Commission to Jammu and Kashmir
- March 6, 1886 – First nursing journal, The Nightingale, is published, edited by Sarah Post M.D.
- March 6, 1924 – Sarah Caldwell born, American theatre impresario, founder-conductor-artistic director of the Opera Company of Boston
- March 6, 1937 – Valentina Tereshkova born, Russian cosmonaut, engineer, and General-major in the Soviet Air Force, first woman to fly in space piloting Vostok 6; politically active after the collapse of the USSR,seen as a heroine in post-Soviet Russia
- March 6, 1941 – Dame Marilyn Strathern born, Welsh anthropologist, work with natives of Papua New Guinea. and the UKon reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization; co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception; Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge(1993-2008); Mistress of Girton College (1998-2009)
- March 6, 1941 – Dame Kiri Te Kanawa born, New Zealand soprano and opera star
- March 6, 1947 – Jean Seaton born, English historian and academic; Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster; Official Historian of the BBC;Director of the Orwell Prize (for political writing, three prizes awarded annually: one each for outstanding Book, Journalism, and Exposing Britain’s social evils) – her commentary on Orwell for BBC radio:
- March 6, 1953 – Carolyn Porco born,American astronomer; planetary scientist known for work on the outer solar system, leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission to Saturn; expert on planetary rings and Saturn’s moon Enceladus; awarded the 2008 Isaac Asimov Science Award, 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award for photographic work, and 2010 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Communication of Science to the Public
- March 6, 1960 – Switzerland finally grants women the right to vote in municipal elections
- March 6, 2016 – Honduran President Juan Hernández asks UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad Al-Hussein to assist in the investigation of the murder of Berta Cáceres, an environmental activist and indigenous leader. She was the coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, for spearheading “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam” at the Río Gualcarque” in Western Honduras. The river is sacred to the Lenca people, the largest indigenous group in Honduras, who depend on Río Gualcarque for their subsistence living
- March 7, 203 – Vibia Perpetua, daughter of a prominent Carthaginian family and a Christian convert, becomes the first diarist noted in history when she keeps a record of her time waiting in a Roman prison under sentence of death, with her pregnant slave Felicitas. She records her thoughts, her dreams and nightmares, and an argument with her father, who wants her to renounce her faith
- March 7, 1873 – Madame Sul-Te-Wan born as Nellie Crawford to parents who were freed slaves; American stage, screen and television actor; performances from Intolerance to Carmen Jones, The Buccaneer and the TV series Medic, her career spanned over 50 years; she was the first African American actor to sign a film contract, and the first to be a featured performer
- March 7, 1875 – Mary Teresa Norton born, American politician, labor and women’s rights advocate, first female Democrat to serve in the US House of Representatives, representing New Jersey’s 13th District (1933-1951)
- March 7, 1893 – Lorena A. Hickok, American journalist and author, New York Daily Mirror and AP reporter, one of the few women to have a byline in the 1920s, becoming nationally known; numerous interviews with Eleanor Roosevelt leads to close friendship – ‘Hick’ encourages the First Lady to write her “My Day” newspaper column – during Depression, Hickok works as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s chief investigator
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March 7, 1894 – Ana María O’Neill born, Puerto Rican scholar and women’s rights activist; first woman professor in the field of Commerce at the University of Puerto Rico (1929-1951); author of Ética Para la Era Atómica (Ethics for the Atomic Age)
- March 7, 1906 – Finland grants women the right to vote
- March 7, 1908 – Cincinnati’s Mayor Leopold Markbreit announces before the city council that “Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles”
- March 7, 1917 – Betty Holberton born, one of the six original programmers of ENIAC; inventor of breakpoints in computer debugging; recipient of the 1997 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award and the 1997 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, for developing the sort-merge generator
- March 7, 1920 – Katherine Siva Saubell born, Native American scholar, Cahuilla tribal leader, author, and activist committed to preserving Cahuilla history, culture, especially the Cahuilla language; one of the last fluent speakers of the Cahuilla language, Saubel worked with linguists and anthropologists on a Cahuilla dictionary and grammar book, historical accounts, and studies of medicinal plants used in traditional Cahuilla medicine; in 1964, she helped launch the Malki Museum, the first nonprofit museum founded and managed by Native Americans on a reservation
- March 7, 1922 – Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya born, Russian mathematician, known for her work in partial differential equations and fluid dynamics
- March 7, 1938 – Janet Guthrie born, pioneering woman auto racer, first woman to compete in Indianapolis 500 and Daytona 500, both in 1977
- March 7, 1940 – Hannah Wilke born, artist, focused on works that celebrated female sexual pleasures; later documents ravages of treatment of aggressive cancer while dying
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March 7, 1945 – Elizabeth Moon born, American sci-fi/fantasy author and newspaper columnist;The Speed of Dark won the 2003 Nebula Award and the 2007 Robert A. Heinlein Award for hard science/technical fiction that inspires space exploration
- March 7, 1954 – Eva Brunne born, first openly lesbian Church of Sweden priest to be elected as bishop and first bishop living in registered homosexual partnership; Bishop of Stockholm since 2009
- March 7, 1964 – Wanda Sykes born, African American comedian, writer and actor; activist for LGBTQ rights, in support of at-risk and runaway teens, and against chaining dogs
- March 7, 1978 – Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus born, Brazilian psychologist, writer and anti-discrimination activist, advocate for human rights for all races and sexual orientations
- March 7, 2010 – Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win an Academy Award for best director for her Iraq War film “The Hurt Locker,” which won six Oscars, including best picture
- March 8, 1695 (?) – Anne Bonny born as Anne McCormac in Ireland; moves to London where her father William dresses her as a boy called “Andy” – moves to the Colonies where William makes good as a merchant; Anne marries part-time pirate James Bonny and is disowned; moves to Nassau, the ‘Republic of Pirates’ – sometime around 1718, Anne dumps James for pirate Captain “Calico Jack” Rackham – in 1720, their ship is captured, they’re tried, and sentenced to hang – Anne gets a stay because she is pregnant – there’s no record of either her execution or release – one story claims her father ransomed her, married her off to a Jamaican commissioner, with her name changed to Annabele, and she had 8 children, outlived her husband and died at age 88
- March 8, 1839 – Josephine G. Cochran born, American inventor of first commercially successful automatic dishwasher, she constructed it with mechanic George Butters; receives her patent in 1886, and attracts much attention when she shows her invention at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago
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March 8, 1892 – Juana de Ibarbourou born, Uruguayan feminist poet who uses nature imagery and eroticism; at 17, she publishes Derechos femeninos (women’s rights), a prose work
- March 8, 1894 – Dorothy Ainsworth born, American women’s physical education pioneer, believed that sports are healthy and develop the values, skills, and character required in a democratic society; chaired U.S. Joint Council on International Affairs in Health, Physical Education and Recreation (1950-57)
- March 8, 1896 – Charlotte Whitton born, Canadian feminist, journalist and Progressive Conservative politician; first woman mayor of Ottawa (1951-1956 and 1960-1964)
- March 8, 1902 – Louise Beavers, African American film and television actor, who struggled to overcome the stereotypical roles in which she was cast; spoke in support of political candidates she believed would help advance the civil rights cause
- March 8, 1907 – The British House of Commons turns down a woman suffrage bill. Women had not been explicitly banned from voting in national elections in Great Britain until the 1832 Reform Act; in 1851, the Sheffield Female Political Association brought a petition in support of enfranchising women to the House of Lords, but suffrage didn’t become a national movement until the 1870s; in 1880, women freeholders on the Isle of Man got the vote; by 1903, there was a majority of support for suffrage in parliament, but the ruling Liberal Party refused to allow a vote on the issue; some British women over the age of 30 who were property owners and/or married got the vote in 1918; the Representation of the People Act in 1928 finally extended the franchise to British women on the same basis as British men
- March 8, 1909 – Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Shilling born, British aeronautical engineer, motorcycle and auto racer; at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, invents ‘Miss Shilling’s orifice,’ fixing a serious problem with the WWII Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in Hawker Hurricanes and some Spitfire fighters that lost power or even completely cut-out during certain maneuvers while in combat
- March 8, 1910 – At the Second International Conference of Women in Copenhagen, German Socialist Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin, head of the Women’s Office for the German Social Democratic Party, inspired by the events in America, propose an International Women’s Day (the first Woman’s Day was launched on February 28, 1909, in the U.S.; Charlotte Perkins Gilman addressed a crowd in New York City, proclaiming, “It is true that a woman’s duty is centered in her home and motherhood but home should mean the whole country and not be confined to three or four rooms of a city or a state.”)
- March 8, 1911 – International Women’s Day is celebrated for the first time
- March 8, 1915 – Selma Fraiberg born, pursued groundbreaking studies of infant psychiatry and normal child development, directed the Child Development Project at Wayne State University (1952-58), wrote “The Magic Years” (1959), a classic translated into 10 languages
- March 8, 1939 – Lynn Seymour born in Canada as Berta Lynn Springbett; ballerina and choreographer; Royal Ballet. and prima ballerina at the Berlin Opera Ballet; sometimes partnered with Rudolf Nureyev; artistic director of Munich State Ballet (1978-1980)and Greek National Ballet (2006-2007)
- March 8, 1945 – Sylvia Wiegand born in South Africa, American mathematician in the fields of commutative algebra, and history of mathematics; president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1997-2000)
- March 8, 1947 – Carole Bayer Sager, American singer-songwriter, painter and author; winner of an Oscar, a Grammy and two Golden G
lobes; They’re Playing Our Song: A Memoir
- March 8, 1972 – Lena Kyoung Ran Sundström, born in South Korea, found on orphanage steps, adopted by her Swedish family; journalist, columnist, author and documentary maker; her book on Denmark’s tough immigration policy, Världens lyckligaste folk, became her first documentary film
- March 8, 1978 – In California, a modest proposal by the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women is the seed from which National Women’s History Month grows. In 1978, they initiated a “Women’s History Week” celebration, choosing the week of March 8th, International Women’s Day. Local activities met with enthusiastic response, and dozens of schools planned special programs. Over one hundred community women participated by doing special presentations in classrooms throughout the county, and the first annual “Real Woman” Essay Contest drew hundreds of entries. The finale for this Women’s History Week was a celebratory parade and program held in the center of downtown Santa Rosa, California. In 1979, Molly Murphy MacGregor, one of the Sonoma organizers, spoke of their success at the Women’s History Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, chaired by noted historian Gerda Lerner, who had invited national leaders of organizations for women and girls to a conference. When the participants learned about the impact of Sonoma County’s Women’s History Week celebration, they decided to start similar celebrations within their own organizations, communities, and school districts. They also agreed to support an effort to secure a “National Women’s History Week,” which has since expanded into the Women’s History Month we celebrate now
- March 8, 1998 – Girls Write Now Day is launched by Girls Write Now Inc, a NYC mentoring program which matches inner city high school girls with professional women writers and media makers; their exceptional success rate means almost all of the girls in the program will graduate from high school and go on to college, over half of them with awards and scholarships
- March 8, 2014 – National Catholic Sisters Week is established to raise awareness of Catholic sisters’ contributions
- March 8, 2017 – ‘A Day Without a Woman’ strike in protest against policies that are sexist, racist, and heterocentric. Thousands of women across the globe in 400 cities and over 50 countries participated, particularly in Poland, either by not going to work or not shopping (except at women-owned-and-run businesses), and/or wearing red to show solidarity. There were 1,000 NYC demonstrators outside Trump Tower, and four women were arrested for obstruction of traffic in front of the Trump International Hotel. Also large demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and many schools in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Washington DC were closed because so many teachers took the day off. Providence RI’s municipal court also closed because so many women employees weren’t at work
- March 9, 1885 — Tamara Karsavina born, Russian prima ballerina, a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later of the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev
- March 9, 1892 – Vita Sackville-West born, English novelist-poet-journalist; All Passion Spent
- March 9, 1900 – German women petition Reichstag for right to take university entrance exams
- March 9, 1910 – Sue Lee born, labor organizer in San Francisco, led 15-week strike against National Dollar Stores garment factory for better wages and working conditions. Her story featured in Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco
- March 9, 1928 – Graciela Olivarez born, Chicana activist, 1st woman and 1st Latina graduate from Notre Dame Law School, one of the first two women on the board of Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) — the Graciela Olivarez Award is presented annually by the Notre Dame Hispanic Law Students Association
- March 9, 1936 – Glenda Jackson born, British two-time Academy-Award-winning actor, who turned to politics, becoming a Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate (1992-2010), later reconfigured as Hampstead and Kilburn(2010-2015)
- March 9, 1951 – Helen Zille born, South African politician, since 2009, Premier of the West Cape province, and member of the its Provincial Parliament; Democratic Alliance leader (2007-2015); mayor of Cape Town (2006-2009); member of the anti-apartheid groups Black Sash, a non-violent white women’s resistance organization, and the End Conscription Campaign (allied with the United Democratic Front); her home became a safe house for political activists during the 1986 State of Emergency; she was forced for a short time into hiding with her 2-year-old son; later, she was part of the South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project and the Cape Town Peace Committee, but then got into hot water for saying that the legacy of infrastructure and institutions left behind was a positive aspect of colonialism
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March 9, 1957 – Mona Sahlin born, Swedish Social Democratic politician, the first woman to chair the party (2007-2011); member of the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, elected in 1982 as the youngest member at that time, she served from 1982 to 1991, then represented Stockholm County from 2002 to 2011; chair of the European Council Against Racism (1997-1998)
- March 9, 1989 – The U.S. Senate rejects John Tower, 53-47, President Bush’s choice for Secretary of Defense, first rejection in 30 years, amid misconduct allegations, including problems with drinking and women, and possible conflicts of interest. Nancy Kassebaum, the lone Republican who votes against Tower, says: ''If we are going to have a strong defense force, which consists of both men and women, we are going to have to insure fairness. I am not confident that Senator Tower would give these issues the priority they demand or would demonstrate the necessary sensitivity to their seriousness.''
- March 9, 1990 - Dr. Antonia Novello sworn in as first female and Hispanic U.S. Surgeon General
- March 10, 1841 – Ina Coolbrith, American poet, author, librarian, first California Poet Laureate
- March 10, 1844 – Marie Euphrosyne Spartali born, daughter of a Greek merchant family living in Britain, notable Pre-Raphaelite painter; when she married an American journalist, they traveled frequently to Florence and Rome, and to America, which influenced her work
- March 10, 1847 – Kate Sheppard born, leading member of the New Zealand Women’s Suffrage movement; New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant women the vote in 1893; Kate Sheppard is depicted on New Zealand’s ten-dollar note
- March 10, 1850 – Hallie Quinn Brown born, African-American educator, author and activist, founder of the Colored Woman’s League of Washington, D.C. which merges with the National Association of Colored Women in 1894
- March 10, 1867 – Lillian D. Wald born, nurse, suffragist, humanitarian and author, human rights and women’s rights activist, founder of the Henry Street Settlement house in New York City, involved in the founding of the NAACP and the Women’s Trade Union League, also campaigned for U.S. pure food laws
- March 10, 1876 – Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington born, American sculptor, known for animal sculptures especially horses, first woman artist elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
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March 10, 1881 – Jessie Boswell born, English post-impressionist painter and designer who spent most of her working life in Italy, and became an Italian citizen
- March 10, 1903 – Clare Booth Luce born, American author, playwright and politician, wrote “The Women” (1936), a scathing portrayal of rich society women, member of Congress (R-CT, 1942-1946), criticized international aid and opposed Communism; ambassador to Italy (1953-1956), the highest diplomatic post held by a woman to that time
- March 10, 1914 – At London’s National Gallery, suffragette Mary Richardson slashes Diego Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ with a meat cleaver: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians.” Emmeline Pankhurst and other members of the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), while serving sentences for their activities, go on hunger strikes to protest the horrible conditions at Holloway Prison; the government begins violent force-feedings to prevent them from dying as martyrs
- March 10, 1924 – In Radice v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a New York statute “prohibiting employment of women in restaurants in large cities (cities of the first and second class) between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. held not an arbitrary and undue interference with the liberty of contract of the women and their employers, but justifiable as a health measure” – in spite of being unable to say “whether this kind of work is so substantially and especially detrimental to the health and welfare of women” or not; held not to deny equal protection under the law “either (a) because it applies only to first and second class cities, or (b) because it does not apply to women employed in restaurants as singers and performers, to attendants in ladies' cloak rooms and parlors and those employed in hotel dining rooms and kitchens, or in lunchrooms or restaurants conducted by employers solely for the benefit of their employees” – “To be violative of the Equal Protection Clause, the inequality produced by a statute must be actually and palpably unreasonable and arbitrary” – makes me wonder what they would have considered unreasonable and arbitrary!
- March 10, 1924 – Judith B. Jones born, American cookbook author, and book editor at Alfred A. Knopf; notable for rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile, and championing Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking; retired as a senior editor and vice president at Knopf
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March 10, 1933 – Elizabeth Azcona Cranwell born, Argentine poet, author, translator, literary critic for La Nación newspaper
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March 10, 1944 – Gail North-Saunders born, Bahamian historian, archivist, and author; established the Bahamian National Archives and was its first director (1971-2004); Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People
- March 10, 1961 – Laurel Salton Clark born, American physician, U.S. Navy Captain, NASA astronaut; dies in Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; posthumously awarded Space Medal of Honor
- March 10, 1990 — By Senate Joint Resolution 256, Harriet Tubman Day is proclaimed on the anniversary of her death on March 10, 1913
- March 10, 1993 — Dr. David Gunn is shot to death by an anti-abortion terrorist during an anti-abortion protest outside the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic. Don Treshman, national director of ‘Rescue America,’ the group staging the protest, said after the murder, “While Gunn’s death is unfortunate, it’s also true that quite a number of babies’ lives will be saved.” Death threats, vandalism and arson at abortion clinics increased dramatically during the 1990s; while new laws are passed to protect abortion clinics and Pro-choice advocates successfully sue anti-abortion groups under existing racketeering laws, the number of doctors providing abortion services plummets. Dr. Gunn had a wife and two children
- March 11, 1818 — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel, Frankenstein; or The modern Prometheus, is published
- March 11, 1843 – Pearl Rivers born as Eliza Jane Poitevent Holbrook Nicholson, southern American author, journalist and poet
- March 11, 1854 – Jane Meade Welch born, American journalist, music critic, and lecturer-author on American history; first woman in Buffalo NY to be a professional journalist; the first American woman to lecture at Cambridge University
- March 11, 1893 – Wanda Gág born, American artist, illustrator and author; noted for writing and illustrating the children’s book Millions of Cats, which won the 1928 Newbery award, and is the oldest American picture book still in print; her 1927 article, These Modern Women: A Hotbed of Feminists, published in The Nation; illustrated covers for the leftist magazines The New Masses and The Liberator
- March 11, 1896 - Lady Dorothy Mills, British novelist, memoirist, and traveller; believed to be the first ‘white woman’ to visit Timbuktu
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March 11, 1900 – Hanna Bergas born, German Jewish teacher; under the Nazi regime, she was fired from her job and barred from teaching in public schools; she was hired to work in a private school, and moved with the school’s founder, Anna Essinger, and most of the school’s staff to Kent, England in 1939, where the school was re-established. Bergas and three others from the school ran a reception camp at the seaside town of Dovercourt for mostly Jewish, unaccompanied refugee children in the Kindertransports, helping the children to adjust to life in a new country
- March 11, 1903 – Dorothy Schiff born, first female newspaper publisher in New York (tabloid New York Post), supported FDR, credited with Nelson Rockefeller’s victory as New York Governor, sold the Post for estimated $30 million to the infamous Rupert Murdock in 1976
- March 11, 1904 – Hilde Bruch born, escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933 to England and then America, pioneer and leading expert in eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa
- March 11, 1921 – Charlotte Friend born, microbiologist, in 1950s at Sloan-Kettering Institute discovered a link between defective maturation and tumor growth in mice, discoveries that were critical in establishing the role of viruses in some cancers
- March 11, 1922 – Vinette J. Carroll born, director and actress, first African American woman to direct a show on Broadway in 1972, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, nominated for 4 Tony Awards, including her nomination for Best Director of a Musical; nominated again for a Best Director Tony for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God in 1976
- March 11, 1925 – Margaret Oakley Dayhoff born, American physical chemist and pioneer in bioinformatics; professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, and research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she developed the application of mathematics and computational methods to biochemisty, including the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases; tools to interrogate the databases, and one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM); develops one-letter code for amino acids, an attempt to reduce data file size describing amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing
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March 11, 1927 – Freda Meissner-Blau born, Austrian politician, founder of the Austrian Green Party, and a leading figure in the Austrian Anti-Nuclear and environmental movements
- March 11, 1949 – Griselda Pollock born in South Africa; after a childhood in Canada, she moved to Britain in her teens, and went on to be a highly influential cultural analyst and scholar of modern and contemporary art, and a respected feminist theorist in art history and gender studies
- March 11, 1959 – Lorraine Hansberry’s drama A Raisin in the Sun opens at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theatre
- March 11, 1993 – Janet Reno unanimously confirmed as 1st woman U.S. Attorney General – sworn in on March 12
- March 11, 2006 – Michelle Bachelet Jeria is elected as first female president of Chile
- March 12, 1862 – Jane A. Delano born, American nurse and educator, who insists on the use of mosquito netting in Florida in 1887 to prevent the spread of yellow fever before doctors know mosquitos are carriers; serving as chair of the Red Cross national committee on nursing service and superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps (1909-12), she institutes the Red Cross Nursing Service as a reserve for the Army corps, so 8,000 nurses are ready for overseas duty when the U.S. enters WWI – she oversees mobilization of 20,000 nurses, plus nurses’ aides and other workers. In 1918, she becomes director of the wartime Department of Nursing, supplying nurses to the army, navy and Red Cross. The influenza epidemic that swept Europe and America in 1918-19 greatly increased demands on Delano and the Red Cross – exhausted, she fell ill and died in France on a European inspection tour in 1919 – in her spare time, Delano had served three terms as president of the American Nurses Association (1900–12) and one as president of the Board of Directors of the American Journal of Nursing (1908–11), and co-authored with Isabel McIsaac, the American Red Cross Textbook on Elementary Hygiene and Home Care of the Sick (1913)
- March 12, 1864 – Alice Tegnér born, Swedish, music educator, poet and composer, especially of children’s songs
- March 12, 1877 – Annette Abbott Adams born, American lawyer and judge, first woman to serve as Assistant U.S. Attorney General
- March 12, 1884 – Mississippi authorizes the first state-supported college for women, Mississippi Industrial Institute and College
- March 12, 1903 – Der Wald, a one-act opera written by Dame Ethel Smyth, was performed at the Metropolitan Opera, the only opera by a woman to be performed there
- March 12, 1907 – Dorrit Hoffleit born, American senior research astronomer at Yale University, works on variable stars, astrometry, spectroscopy, meteors, and the Bright Star Catalog, and mentors generations of young women and men in astronomy
- March 12, 1908 – Rita Angus born, a leading artist of New Zealand, known for portraits and landscapes; her iconic 1936 painting Cass is voted New Zealand’s most-loved painting in a 2006 poll
- March 12, 1912 – Juliette Gordon Low assembles 18 girls together in Savannah, Georgia, for the first Girl Scout meeting
- March 12, 1918 – Elaine DeKooning born; artist and art critic, her portraits and other art work have gained acclaim after being overshadowed by her husband William
- March 12, 1923 – Clara Fraser born, American feminist and socialist political organizer; leader of the Freedom Socialist Party in 1966, and co-founder of Radical Women in 1967. Hired in 1973 by publicly-owned utility Seattle City Light to run a hiring/training program for female electrical workers, she was fired in 1974, and filed a discrimination complaint documenting political bias and pervasive sexism. After a 7-year battle, she won a ruling affirming workers’ right to speak out against management and organize on their own behalf; reinstated in her former job at City Light, just as renewed furor arose over discrimination against women in non-traditional trades. Fraser joined with women and pro-affirmative action male employees to form the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL)
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March 12, 1929 – Mary Lee Woods born, English mathematician and computer programmer; during WWII, worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern; worked at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia (1947-1951); in 1951, joined the Ferranti International team that developed programs for University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers
- March 12, 1929 – Lupe Anguiano born, Mexican-American civil rights activist, advocate for women’s rights, the rights of the poor, and protection of the environment; she was a member of Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters (1949-1964) but left the church after joining picket lines and protesting a proposed law to reverse the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, aimed at stopping racial discrimination by landlords; worked for and in consultation with government agencies and legislative bodies, as well as Cesar Chavez, and as a national organizer for the United Farm Workers; founder of National Women’s Employment and Education, and founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, which has helped hundreds of women gain education and work skills enabling them to get off welfare; advocate for the California Coastal Protection Network
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March 12, 1936 – Virginia Hamilton born, African American children’s author; won a National Book Award for Children’s Books, and the 1975 Newbery Award for M.C. Higgins, the Great; and in 1992, the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for lifetime achievement in children’s literature
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March 12, 1968 – Tammy Duckworth born in Thailand, Thai-American Democratic politician; Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs Director (2006-2008); U.S. Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2009-2011); first disabled woman elected to Congress, and first Asian American elected to U.S. Congress from Illinois (2013-2017); elected U.S. Senator (D-IL) in 2017; during Iraq War, served as a U.S Army helicopter pilot, and lost both her legs, the first female double amputee from that war
- March 12, 1994 – The Church of England ordains its first women priests
- March 13, 1892 – Janet Flanner born, journalist, wrote a weekly letter for the New Yorker from France under the name “Genet” (Frenchified “Janet”) for 50 years except during the Nazi occupation, was made a knight of the Legion d’Honneur (1948)
- March 13, 1898 – La Meri born, one of the world’s greatest ethnological dancers from 1924 to the 1970s, danced with Anna Pavlova, learned native dances all over the world, lectured, wrote, founded the Ethnologic Dance Theater
- March 13, 1908 – Myrtle Bachelder born, American chemist and Women’s Army Corps officer; worked on the WWII Manhattan Project, commanding a WAC detachment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; she was responsible for analysis of the spectroscopy of uranium isotopes at Los Alamos, to ensure the purity of the sub-critical material in the world’s first atomic bombs; in 1945, she opposed a bill in Congress which would have maintained military control over nuclear research; in 1947, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission declassified 270 secret documents, including records of Bachelder’s contributions to the success of the Manhattan Project; at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Metals, she worked as a research chemist, on a wide variety of projects, from developing methods to purify the rare elements tellurium and indium, to analyzing the chemical composition of brass cannons found on sunken ships in the Aegean Sea, and analyzing for NASA the chemistry of Moon rocks brought back from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972; in the 1980s, she supported nuclear arms control, but said of the work at Los Alamos during WWII, “One cannot pull that activity out of that time, set it down in the 1980s, and pass judgment.”
- March 13, 1911 – Dorothy M. Tangney born, Australian teacher and Labor Party politician; first woman member of the Australian Senate (1943-1968), the longest serving woman until Kathy Sullivan surpassed her record in 2001; advocate for social reform, federal support for education, and establishing Australian National University, as a research university
- March 13, 1916 – Lindy Boggs born, American politician, US House of Representatives (D-LA 1973-1991), Ambassador to the Vatican (1997-2001), first woman to preside over a major party convention (1976 Democratic National Convention)
- March 13, 1918 – Women are scheduled for the first time to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York due to a shortage of men because of WWI
- March 13, 1928 – Ellen Raskin born, American children’s author-illustrator; won the 1979 Newbery Medal for The Westing Game
- March 13, 1941 – Donella Meadows born, pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher and writer, lead author of The Limits to Growth and Thinking in Systems: a Primer
- March 13, 1942 – Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps becomes the first woman colonel in the U.S. Army
- March 13, 1944 – Susan Gerbi born, biochemist, helped devise a method to map the start site of DNA replication, researched the role of hormones in certain cancers
- March 13, 1953 – Dame Nicola V. Davies born in Wales, became a Queen’s Counsel in 1992; served as Presiding Judge of the Wales Circuit(2014-2017); judge of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales
- March 13, 1954 – Valerie A. Amos, Baroness Amos, born in British Guiana (now Guyana), British Labour politician; United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (2010-2015); British High Commissioner to Australia (2009-2010); Leader of the House of Lords/Lord President of the Council (2003-2007); Member of the House of Lords (1997-2010)
- March 13, 1964 – Kitty Genovesse is raped and stabbed to death in New York City; neighbors hear her screams for help, but no one calls the police
- March 13, 1986 – Susan Butcher wins the first of three consecutive, and four total, Alaskan Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races
- March 14, 1489 – Caterina Cornaro, last Queen of Cyprus, goes into exile, after being forced to abdicate, and sell to the Republic of Venice the administration of Cyprus
- March 14, 1815 – Josephine Lang born, German composer
- March 14, 1833 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor born, dentist and women’s rights advocate, first American woman to graduate from dental school
- March 14, 1835 – Isabella Mayson Beeton born, author, cookery columnist and journalist, “Mrs. Beeton,” known for her 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
- March 14, 1851 – Anna C. Maxwell born, American nurse, served as superintendent for several nursing schools, was involved in nursing in both the Spanish-American War and WWI, awarded the Medaille de l’Hygiene Publique by the French government for her work in WWI, one of the first women buried at Arlington National Cemetery
- March 14, 1868 – Emily Murphy born, Canadian jurist, author, and activist, first female magistrate in Canada, one of the ‘Famous Five’ whose Persons Case establishes Canadian women as ‘persons’ under the law
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March 14, 1887 – Sylvia Beach born, American ex-pat proprietor of the famous English-language bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare & Company, a gathering place for ‘Lost Generation’ Americans, like Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald; original publisher of James Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses
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March 14, 1894 – Osa Leighty Johnson born, American documentary filmmaker, author and adventurer; with her husband, Martin, studies wildlife and peoples in East and Central Africa, South Pacific Islanders and aborigines of British North Borneo, creates feature films like Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, Trailing Wild African Animals. Osa’s Four Years in Paradise,and Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson; her autobiography, I Married Adventure, was the best-selling non-fiction book of 1940; after her husband’s death, her show, The Big Game Hunt, debuts in 1952, the first TV wildlife series; The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum is in Chanute KS, her hometown
- March 14, 1902 – Margaret Hickey born, president of National Federation of Business and Professional Women (1944-46), represented the BPW at UN Conference in San Francisco (1945), chaired the Women’s Advisory Committee (1942) and served on and/or chaired many government groups, but never had policy-making opportunity
- March 14, 1921 – Ada Louise Huxtable, author, architecture critic and preservationist, won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970
- March 14, 1923 – Diane Arbus born, unique American photographer, noted for photographing marginalized people; the first American photographer whose work was displayed at the influential Venice Biennale
- March 14, 1948 – New laws are proposed allowing British women married to foreigners to automatically retain their citizenship; only the status of women who choose to formally renounce their British citizenship would change
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March 14, 1960 – Heidi B. Hammel born, American planetary astronomer; vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which operates world-class astronomical observatories like the the National Solar Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope; she is the interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in October 2018; 2002 recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for communication enhancing the public’s understanding of planetary science
- March 15, 1838 – Alice Cunningham Fletcher born, American ethnologist, studied and documented American Indian culture
- March 15, 1868 – Lida Gustava Heymann born, German women’s rights activist, with her partner Anita Augspurg co-founds the movement to abolish prostitution in Germany; the Society for Women’s Suffrage; the newspaper Women in the State; a co-educational high school; and professional associations for women
- March 15, 1880 – Hattie Carnegie born in Austria, American fashion designer/entrepreneur for both couture and ready-to-wear lines, designs Women’s Army Corps uniform; Congressional Medal of Freedom for the WAC uniform design and other charitable and patriotic contributions
- March 15, 1896 – Marion Cuthbert born, helped found the National Association of College Women to fight discrimination in higher education (1932), wrote pioneering dissertation, “Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate” (1942), secretary of National Board of YWCA, member of NAACP, also numerous peace and human rights boards
- March 15, 1900 – In Paris, Sarah Bernhardt stars in the premiere of Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon
- March 15, 1905 – Margaret Webster, theater actress, director and producer with citizenship and successful careers in both the UK and the US, known for her Shakespearean productions, including a groundbreaking Othello (1943) with Paul Robeson and Jose Ferrer
- March 15, 1907 – In Finland, women win their first seats in the Finnish Parliament, taking their seats on May 23
- March 15, 1921 – Madelyn Pugh born, American screenwriter and producer, I Love Lucy
- March 15, 1930 – Wilma L. Vaught born, Brigadier General in U.S. Air Force, first woman to deploy with an Air Force bomber unit, inductee into National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Army Women’s Foundation Hall of Fame
- March 15, 1933 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg born, American lawyer, professor, and the second woman appointed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1993); courtroom advocate for fair treatment of women, co-founder of Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first U.S. law journal to focus exclusively on women's rights (1970); taught at Columbia Law School (1972-1980), becoming Columbia’s first female tenured professor; worked on the ACLU Women’s Rights Project cases involving discriminatory labor laws
- March 15, 1939 – Julie Tullis born, British mountaineer and filmmaker
- March 16, 1750 – Caroline Herschel born, German-English astronomer, discoverer of several comets, 1st woman to be paid for her contribution to science, 1st to be awarded a Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal (1828), and one of the two first women to be named Royal Astronomical Society Honorary Members (1835, with Mary Somerville)
- March 16, 1799 – Anna Children Atkins born, English botanist and pioneering photographer; in Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, she records all the specimens of algae found in the British Isles, also created Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns – they are the first sustained demonstrations that photography could be scientifically useful
- March 16, 1822 – Rosa Bonheur born, French painter and sculptor, the most famous and successful woman artist of her day. Women were only reluctantly educated as artists, so her success helped to open doors for women artists that followed her
- March 16, 1846 - Rebecca Cole born, second Black American woman to become a physician; opens the Women’s Directory Center in Philadelphia with Charlotte Abbey (1873) to provide legal and medical services to poor women and children; appointed superintendent of the Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington DC (1899); continued to practice medicine for 50 years
- March 16, 1883 – Ethel Anderson born in England, Australian author, poet, art critic and painter; founded the Turramurra Wall Painters Union in New South Wales
- March 16, 1900 – Eveline Burns British-born American economist, technical expert; helped design social security, served on National Resources Planning Board (1939-43), wrote “The American Social Security System” (1949), the standard text in this field; Columbia Professor of Social Work
- March 16, 1925 – Mary Hinkson born, African American dancer and choreographer; member of the Martha Graham Dance Company (1953-1973); also appeared at the New York City Opera, and worked with Alvin Ailey; taught at the Juilliard School of Music, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Ailey School
- March 16, 1943 – Ursula Goodenough born, educator and author, professor of Biology where she engages in research on eukaryotic algae; author of best-selling book Sacred Depths of Nature, and presenter of her programs Religious Naturalism and Epic of Evolution in venues around the world, including a Mind and Life dialogue with the Dalai Lama in 2002
- March 16, 1946 – Mary Kaldor born, English economist and academic; Professor of Governance at the London School of economics; key figure in development of cosmopolitan democracy, which advocates policy decisions being made by those affected, avoiding a single hierarchical form of authority, in a kind of global governance without world government; founding member of European Nuclear Disarmament and the European Council on Foreign Relations; author of Global civil society: an answer to war
- March 16, 2003 – Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American woman involved with the International Solidarity Movement, is killed trying to prevent a Palestinian home from being destroyed by a bulldozer in Rafah
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