June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in the U.S.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton proclaimed the first “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month,” to commemorate the uprising on June 28, 1969, at NYC’s Stonewall Inn that became the catalyst for the modern LGTBQ civil rights movement in America. In 2016, President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn and Christopher Park in Greenwich Village as the Stonewall National Monument.
Early June’s Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- June 16, 1644 – Princess Henrietta of England born, Duchess of Orléans, instrumental in negotiating the Secret Treaty of Dover
- June 16, 1738 – Mary Katherine Goddard born, American publisher; in 1774, she and her widowed mother took over as publishers of the Providence Gazette newspaper; in 1775, she became the first American woman postmaster, in Baltimore; in 1777, was the first printer to offer copies of the Declaration of Independence, commissioned by Congress, which included the signer’s names (now called the Goddard Broadside);opened a bookstore in Baltimore in 1789, almost certainly the first woman-owned-and- operated bookstore in the U.S.
- June 16, 1892 – Jennie Grossinger born in Galicia, came to America at age eight, highly successful hotelier and philanthropist, ran the family’s elegant resort, Grossinger’s, in the Catskills, the first resort to use artificial snow (1952), and successfully circumvented the anti-Jewish restrictive covenants
- June 16, 1895 – India Edwards born, Democratic Party political activist, served as Vice Chairman of the DNC from 1950 to 1956
- June 16, 1899 – Helen Traubel born, American dramatic soprano, known for her Wagnerian roles, especially Brünnhilde and Isolde
- June 16, 1902 – Barbara McClintock born, biologist, pioneer in cytogenetics field, discovered transposons, ‘jumping genes,’ awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1983
- June 16, 1911 — Ginger Rogers born, American actor and dancer, screen partner of Fred Astaire; 1941 Best Actress Oscar for Kitty Foyle
- June 16, 1915 – Lucy Davidowicz born, Polish refugee, historian, prominent scholar of Jewish history and the Holocaust
- June 16, 1915 – Foundation of the British Women’s Institute (the W.I.), the largest U.K. women’s volunteer organization
- June 16, 1917 – Katharine Graham born, American publisher, first woman publisher of a major American newspaper as the leader of her family’s newspaper, The Washington Post, after her husband’s suicide in 1963, formally assuming the title of president by 1967, and publisher (1969-1979), then chair of the board (1973-1991); recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her memoir Personal History
- June 16, 1920 – Isabelle Holland born, Swiss-American author, known for books for both adults and children; two of her novels were made into movies, Bump in the Night and The Man Without a Face
- June 16, 1938 – Joyce Carol Oates born, American author of over 40 novels, as well as plays, novellas, short stories and poetry; 1969 National Book Award for them, and a 2010 National Humanities Medal
- June 16, 1946 – Karen Dunnell born, British medical sociologist and civil servant; National Statistician and CEO of the UK Office for National Statistics (2005-2009); also inaugural CEO of the UK Statistics Authority in 2008; Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours
- June 16, 1955 – Grete Faremo born, Norwegian politician, civil servant and lawyer; current Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services since 2014; Norwegian Minister of Justice (1992-1996 and 2011-2013, when she oversaw a major overhaul of the nation’s emergency system and other reforms); Minister of Defence (2009-2011); Minister of International Aid (1990-1992); Minister of Petroleum and Energy (1996); Member of the Norwegian Parliament (1993-1997)
- June 16, 1957 – Leeona Dorrian born, Lady Dorrian since 2005; incumbent Lord Justice Clerk, beginning in 2016, the second most senior judicial post in Scotland, and the first woman to serve in this position; Senator of the College of Justice (2005-2012), promoted to the Inner House, the senior section of the Court of Session of the Supreme Civil Court of Scotland, in 2012
- June 16, 1963 – Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkovane becomes the first woman in space when she pilots Vostok 6
- June 16, 1969 – Sharmishta Chakrabarti born in London to Bengali parents; feminist, advocate for civil liberties and human rights; created a life peer as Baroness Chakrabarti in 2016; British Labour Party politician; Lord Temporal (non-clergy) Member of the House of Lords since 2016; in 2018, it was announced that she would be sworn as a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom
- June 16, 2016 – Pilot and astronaut Liu Yang becomes the first Chinese woman in space as a crew member of the Shenzhou 9 mission
- June 16, 2016 – Jo Cox, Labour Member of British Parliament, known for her work on women's issues and opposition to Britain leaving the European Union, is shot and stabbed to death by a far-right extremist as she leaves a meeting with constituents. The killer also stabs an unarmed man from the crowd who tries to stop him, but the man survives
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- June 17, 1610 – Birgitte Thott born, Danish scholar, writer, and early feminist who was an advocate for educating women; fluent and literate in her main area of study, Latin, and several other languages, including English, French, German and Hebrew; notable for her translations of published works into Danish, especially her 1,000-page translation of the Philologus of Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, which was the first in Danish, and added new words to the Danish language
- June 17, 1865 – Susette La Flesche Picotte born, of the Omaha tribe, first Native American physician (1889), fought tuberculosis and alcoholism on the reservation, campaigned for land rights and a reservation hospital (1913), later named for her
- June 17, 1873 – Susan B. Anthony’s trial begins; she is charged with voting illegally in Rochester, New York on November 5, 1872
- June 17, 1900 – Evelyn Graham Irons born, Scottish journalist who wrote mostly for the Evening Standard; she was one of the first WWII newspaperwomen to arrive in Paris after it was liberated, and the first woman journalist to reach Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest after its capture; she was the first woman war correspondent to be decorated with the French Croix de Guerre; she was also the first woman to receive the British Royal Humane Society’s Stanhope Medal in 1935 for courageously rescuing a woman from drowning at Tresaith Beach, Cardiganshire; in 1952, she was sent to cover the U.S. presidential election, and stayed on in New York; in 1954, she broke the news embargo on the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jaobo Arbenz Guzmán, by hiring a mule to ride to Chiquimula, while other journalists, forbidden to cross the border, waited in a bar in Honduras. So she was the first reporter to reach the Provisional Government’s headquarters; an editor for a rival paper sent his reporter a telegram ordering him to “offget arse onget donkey”
- June 17, 1903 – Ruth Graves Wakefield born, inventor of the Toll House Cookie, the first chocolate chip cookie, at the Toll House Inn near Whitman MA in the 1930s
- June 17, 1908 –Trude Weiss-Rosmarin born, editor, writer, co-founder of the School of the Jewish Woman (1933), publisher of the “Jewish Spectator” (1936)
- June 17, 1943 – Chantal Mouffe born, Belgian political theorist, best known for co-authoring Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics with Ernesto Laclau, a post-Marxist redefining of Leftist politics, and her controversial book, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically
- June 17, 1948 – Jacqueline Jones born, American social historian; author of works on race, slavery, class and economics (including feminist economics); she is a MacArthur Fellow and won the 1986 Bancroft Prize for her second book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, which combines traditional historical sources with feminist scholarship; followed by The Dispossessed, America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present, which continues her themes
- June 17, 1951 – Starhawk born Miriam Simos, American writer, activist and theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism; her book The Spiral Dance was an inspiration of the Goddess movement
- June 17, 1952 – Estelle Morris born, Baroness Morris of Yardley; British Labour Party politician and former inner-city Humanities teacher; Warwick District Council member (1979-1991); Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley (1992-2005); Minister of State for Schools (1998-2001); Secretary of State for Education and Skills (2001-2002); Minister of State for the Arts (2003-2005); after stepping down from government, she became President of the National Children’s Bureau in 2005
- June 17, 1959 – Carol E. Anderson born, African American historian, academic and author; professor of African American Studies at Emory University; noted for Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960, and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
- June 17, 1971 – Mildred Fox born, Irish Independent politician; Teachta Dála of the Dáil Éireann (member of the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland’s Parliament) for Wicklow (1995-2007); also Wicklow County Council member (1995-2003)
- June 17, 2008 – Hundreds of same-sex couples got married across California on the first full day that gay marriage became legal by order of the state’s highest court. (California voters banned gay marriage in November, overturned later by the California Supreme Court)
- June 17, 2015 – Loretta Lynch sworn in as Attorney General of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, using a Bible which once belonged to Frederick Douglass
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- June 18, 1811 – Frances Sargent Osgood born, American poet, very popular during her day; exchanges poems with Edgar Allen Poe
- June 18, 1862 – Carolyn Wells born, American author and poet; known for light verse and limericks
- June 18, 1865 – Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm born, American ornithologist and folklorist
- June 18, 1873 – United States v. Susan B. Anthony: Susan B. Anthony, stalwart suffragist, is on trial for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Her position is that the 14th Amendment, intended to give male former slaves U.S. citizenship, including the right to vote, should also apply to women, because it says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Since it says all ‘citizens’ and all ‘persons’ and does not specify gender, she contends it should apply to female citizens and persons as well. The Rochester Union and Advertisereditorialized: “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon…” Susan B. Anthony and 7 or 8 other women had registered and cast their ballots, after she threatened to sue the election inspectors if they refused to allow the women to vote. A Rochester Democrat named Sylvester Lewis files a complaint charging Anthony with registering and voting illegally. U.S. Commissioner William C. Storrs, acting on his complaint, issues a warrant for her arrest, for violating section 19 of an act of Congress called the Enforcement Act, which carries a maximum penalty of $500 or three years imprisonment. Anthony is arrested. Prior to her trial, she and her supporters write hundreds of letters, and she goes on tour in Monroe County NY, making a speech called “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” which causes such a stir that the prosecutor is able to get a change of venue to Ontario County, where Anthony promptly begins another speaking tour. On the day of the trial, the courtroom is filled to capacity. When her attorney calls her to the witness stand, the district attorney’s objection that “She is not a competent as a witness on her own behalf” is sustained by the judge. Immediately after the two-hour closing argument of defense council, the judge takes a paper out of his pocket, and reads, “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law. Assuming that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote, that fact constitutes no defense if in truth she had not the right. She voluntarily gave a vote which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of the law. Upon this evidence I suppose there is no question for the jury and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty.” So the jury is not allowed to decide the case. Her attorney argues for a new trial on the grounds that Anthony has been denied a trial by jury, but the judge denies the motion. Before sentencing, the judge asks, “Does the prisoner have anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?” To which Anthony responds, “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.” The judge interrupts, “The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.” But Anthony persists, even as the judge pounds his gavel and repeatedly orders her to sit down, until she has said everything she intended to say, then sits down, only to be told to rise for sentencing. She is fined $100 and the cost of the prosecution. Anthony refuses to pay even “a dollar of the unjust penalty.” The judge, in a move to preclude any appeal to a higher court, responds, “Madam, the Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.” American women have to fight another 47 years before the 19th Amendment is ratified, recognizing us as citizens and persons with the right to vote
- June 18, 1913 – Sylvia Porter born, economist, New York Post syndicated finance columnist and author, Money and You and How to Make Money in Government Bonds
- June 18, 1913 – Françoise Loranger born, French Canadian playwright, radio producer and feminist; left school at age 15 because there was no public education for girls in Québec in 1928; by 17, she was writing short stories for Revue Populaire magazine; began writing radio scripts in 1938; published her first novel, Mathieu, in 1949; in the 1950s and 60s, she wrote scripts for television dramas, and a theatrical play, Une maison … un jour in 1965; her play, Encore cinq minutes, won the 1967 Governor General’s award for French Drama
- June 18, 1915 – Alice T. Schafer born, American mathematician; in 1932, she was the only woman with a mathematics major at the University of Richmond in Virginia, where women were not allowed in the campus library. She still won the department’s James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year, and completed her BA in mathematics in 1936. Worked for the next three years as a secondary school teacher to save enough money for graduate school, which she attended at the University of Chicago. Her field of study was differential geometry of curves and implications of the singular point of a curve; Duke Mathematical Journal from Duke University Press published her initial work in 1944, and the American Journal of Mathematics published her next phase in 1948. After teaching at several other schools, she became a full professor at Wellesley College in 1962, where she designed special classes for students who had difficulties with math, then expanded to helping high school students. Schafer was a founding member of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971, and served as its second president (1973-1974). Upon her retirement from Wellesley in 1980, she continued to teach at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, until her second retirement in 1996; elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985, and honored with an Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America in 1998
- June 18, 1928 – Amelia Earhart’s flight arrives in South Wales, making her the first woman to travel in an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean, as a passenger in a plane piloted by Wilmer Stultz with Lou Gordon as mechanic
- June 18, 1941 – Delia Smith born, English cook, cookery columnist, author, and television presenter on her programmes Family Fare and How to Cook, and a frequent guest on other shows, until her retirement from television in 2013. Her 1971 best-seller How to Cheat at Cooking, reissued in an updated version in 2008, became a best-seller for the second time. Smith’s influence on household cooking in Britain is dubbed the “Delia Effect” since ingredients or cookware she uses on a show would sell out the following day
- June 18, 1942 – Pat Hutchins born, English illustrator, children’s book author and presenter on 45 episodes of the British children’s television series Rosie and Jim; her book, The Wind Blew, was awarded the 1974 Kate Greenaway Medal by the Library Association for best children’s book illustrations
- June 18, 1948 – Sherry Turkle born, American academic and author in the field of human-technology interaction; professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Her books, The Second Self, and Life on the Screen, discuss computers as part of our social and psychological lives and how they affect the way we view ourselves
- June 18, 1960 – Barbara Broccoli born, American film producer, notable for her work on the James Bond franchise, and staging musical theatre versions of successful films
- June 18, 1962 – Lisa Randall born, American theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology; professor of science on the physics faculty at Harvard; contributor to the Randall-Sundrum model, a five-dimensional warped geometry theory, which she co-published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum; honored with the 2007 Lilienfeld Prize and the 2012 Andrew Germant Award. Her controverisal Dark Matter Disk Model posits that 66 million years ago, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, superheating the atmosphere which killed three-quarters of life on Earth. She is the author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
- June 18, 1964 – Patti Webster born, American entertainment publicist for notable recording artists, actors and athletes, such as Alisha Keys, Usher, Halle Berry and Chris Paul; author of It Happened in Church: Stories of Humor from the Pulpit to the Pews (2008); member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences; Webster died of cancer in 2013 at age 49
- June 18, 1972 – Anu Tali born, Estonian conductor; Music Director of the Sarasota Orchestra in Florida (2013 until 2019); honored with the Cultural Award of Estonia in 2003
- June 18, 1983 – Sally Ride becomes the first American woman astronaut as a crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.
- June 18, 1983 – Mona Mahmudnizhad, a 17-year-old Iranian Bahá’í, is the youngest of 10 Bahá’í women sentenced to death and hanged in Shiraz, Iran because of their Bahá’í Faith. The official charges against Mahmudnizhad range from “misleading children and youth” because she taught children expelled from school for their beliefs, to being a “Zionist” because the Bahá’í World Centre is located in Israel
- June 18, 2013 – Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori is elected as the first woman presiding bishop for the Episcopal Church, U.S. arm of the global Anglican Communion
- June 18, 2013 – Russia passes a law banning same-sex couples, singles, and unmarried couples from countries where same-sex marriage is legal from adopting Russian children. Single Russians may adopt, but adopting couples must be married. In 2012, Russia had banned all adoptions by Americans; an estimated 600,000 Russian orphans remained in their care system in 2013
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- June 19, 1833 – Mary Tenney Gray born, American suffragist, editorial writer, club-woman, and philanthropist; on editorial staff of the New York Teacher, the Leavenworth Home Record (dedicated to the welfare and elevation of women), and the Kansas Farmer; a contributor or correspondent to leading magazines and newspapers in Kansas; in 1859, lobbied for voting rights for women to be included in the state constitution at the Wyandotte Convention, but was unsuccessful; became a leader in women’s clubs formed for education, art, literary and philanthropic purposes. Co-founder and first president of the Social Science Club of Kansas and Western Missouri, a state-wide association of most of the local clubs in the area, the first of its kind in what was then the West, holding conventions where women could hear speakers and combine the efforts of their organizations; she read papers at the conventions, and at many other state gatherings, such as her paper, “Women and Kansas City’s Development.” After her death, the Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs dedicated a monument to her memory in Kansas City
- June 19, 1843 – Mary Sibbet Copley Thaw born, American philanthropist and charity worker who funded archaeology research, including supporting the work of women archaeologists like Alice Fletcher and Zelia Nuttall; founded the Thaw Fellowship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
- June 19, 1854 – Eleanor Norcross born, American painter of portraits, still lifes and interiors who lived and worked in Paris for most of her adult life; she was an art collector, and systematic documenter whose collection was part of her bequest to found the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts
- June 19, 1856 – Elisabeth Marbury born, pioneering American theatrical and literary agent whose clients included Oscar Wilde, James M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Edmond Rostand, dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, and children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
- June 19, 1881 – Maginel Wright Enright born, American graphic artist, and children’s author and illustrator, who illustrated some of L. Frank Baum’s earliest books, well before his Oz series, which he often wrote under pen names; also designed high-fashion shoes for Capezio, and magazine covers for McClure’s and Ladies’ Home Journal
- June 19, 1883 – Gladys Mills Phipps born, American thoroughbred racehorse owner-breeder, founder of the Phipps family horseracing dynasty, dubbed “First Lady of the Turf”
- June 19, 1885 – Adela Pankhurst born, British suffragette, daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, head of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU); but after she moved to Australia in 1913, she broke with her mother’s policy of supporting the WWI British war effort, and made anti-war and anti-conscription speeches
- June 19, 1888 – Hilda Worthington Smith born, labor educator and social worker, first Director of Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry (1921)
- June 19, 1900 – Laura Hobson born, American novelist and short story writer; best known for her novel Gentlemen’s Agreement
- June 19, 1903 – Mary Callery born, American artist known for her Modern and Abstract Expressionist sculpture; part of the New York art movement from the 1940s through the 1960s; also a collector in 1930s Paris of work by Picasso, Duchamps, Alexander Calder, Matisse and other leading artists; commissioned in the 1960s to create a sculpture for the top of the proscenium arch at the Met (Metropolitan Opera House) in Manhattan
- June 19, 1922 – Marilyn P. Johnson born, U.S. diplomat; after serving in the U.S. Navy during WWII, she taught English as a foreign language in schools in Cameroon and Mali; joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1964, and worked in Bamako, Mali, Tunis, Tunisia and Niger in cultural affairs and public affairs; Deputy Assistant Director of the Information Centers Program (1971-1974); after two years learning Russian, she was assigned as the cultural affairs officer in Moscow (1976-1978); U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Togo (1978-1981)
- June 19, 1940 – Shirley Muldowney born, race car driver, first woman to receive a National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) license to drive a Top Fuel dragster, won NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980, and 1982, becoming first person to win two and then three Top Fuel titles
- June 19, 1942 – Merata Mita born, New Zealand filmmaker and key figure in the growth of the Māori film industry; first Māori woman to solely write and direct a dramatic feature film, Mauri, in 1988, after making the landmark documentary films Bastion Point: Day 507 in 1980, and Patu! in 1983
- June 19, 1945 – Aung San Suu Kyi born, Burmese/Myanmar politician and activist, Chair of National League for Democracy, recipient of Rafto Prize, Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and the Nobel Peace Prize
- June 19, 1955 – Mary Schapiro born, first woman permanent appointee as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, 2009-2012); Chair and CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, 2006-2009); National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD, 1996-2005); Chair of Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1994-1996)
- June 19, 1957 – Anna Lindh born, Swedish Social Democratic politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1998-2003); Chair of the Council of the European Union (2001); Minister for the Environment (1994-1996); Member of the Riksdag (Parliament, 1982-1985 and 1998-2003); she was assassinated in September 2003, stabbed to death by a man born in Sweden to Serbian parents, who was found to be mentally ill
- June 19, 1957 – Jean Rabe born, American author of scifi and fantasy tie-in books and stories for game and movies, such as Dragonlance, and Star Wars; editor of numerous anthologies
- June 19, 2015 – International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict is proclaimed by the UN General Assembly, commemorating the adoption in 2008 of Resolution 1820, “to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, including by ending impunity and by ensuring the protection of civilians, in particular women and girls, during and after armed conflicts, in accordance with the obligations States have undertaken under international humanitarian law and international human rights law”
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- June 20, 1786 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore born, French poet and novelist; an orphan by 16, she became an actress and singer, at the Paris Opéra-Comique and other theatres, but retired from the stage in 1823; in 1819,became a founder of French romantic poetry when she published her first poetic work, Élégies et Romances, followed in 1821 by her narrative Veillées des Antilles, and five more volumes of poetry between 1825 and 1860 (the last one published posthumously). She is the only woman writer included in the notable Les Poètes maudits anthology published by Paul Verlaine in 1884
- June 20, 1837 – Queen Victoria succeeds to the British throne, and reigns for 63 years and 7 months
- June 20, 1884 – Mary R. Calvert born, American astronomical computer and astrophotographer; began working at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin for her uncle, astronomer Edward E.Barnard, as an assistant and human computer in 1905; when Barnard died in 1923, she became curator of the Yerkes photographic plate collection and a high-level assistant, until her retirement in 1946; co-author, with Frank Elmore Ross, of Atlas of the Northern Milky Way, published in 1934
- June 20, 1893 – Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother. No one else is charged with the crime
- June 20, 1895 – Carolyn Willard Baldwin receives the first ever PhD in Science awarded to a woman by an American university, from Cornell University, graduating third in her class; Baldwin had previously been the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Mechanics at the University of California
- June 20, 1897 – Elisabeth Hauptmann born, German writer, co-author of The Threepenny Opera
- June 20, 1905 – Lillian Hellman born, playwright “The Children’s Hour”(1934), “The Little Foxes” (1939) and “Toys in the Attic” (1960); blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952
- June 20, 1910 – Josephine Johnson born, American author, won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Now in November
- June 20, 1911 – Gail Patrick born, American actor and executive producer, noted for producing the Perry Mason television series
- June 20, 1914 – Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky born, Israeli poet; awarded the Brenner Prize, the Bialik Prize for Literature, and the Wertheim Prize
- June 20, 1914 – Muazzez İlmiye Çığ born, Turkish archaeologist, Assyriologist and author, specialist in the Sumerian civilization, notable for her painstaking research and success in deciphering cuneiform tablets; advocate for secularism and women’s rights in Turkey; her 2005 book, Bereket Kültü ve Mabet Fahişeliği (Cult of Fertility and Holy Prostitution), caused a storm of controversy because her research into the history of the khimar, the headscarf worn by Islamic women, revealed it did not originate in the Muslim world, but was worn 5,000 years ago by Sumerian priestesses who initiated young men into sex. She and her publisher were charged with “inciting hatred based on religious differences.” She testified at the first hearing in 2006: “I am a woman of science . . . I never insulted anyone.” The charges were dismissed, and she and her publisher were acquitted, in less than half an hour
- June 20, 1917 – Helena Rasiowa born, Polish mathematician, her work on algebraic logic continues to be highly influential; during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, her family’s home and all its contents, including all her notes and the only copy of her Master’s thesis were burned; she rewrote the thesis, and got her Masters in 1945, then her Doctorate in 1950
- June 20, 1921 – Alice Robertson (R-Oklahoma) becomes first woman to chair the House of Representatives
- June 20, 1921 – Edith Windsor born, American LGBT rights activist and IBM technology manager, who was honored by the National Computing Conference in 1987 as a pioneer in operating systems. She and her partner were legally married in Toronto Canada in 2007, after being registered domestic partners in New York since 1993; when her wife died in 2009, Windsor was the executor and sole beneficiary. As a spouse, she should have qualified for a spousal deduction, and paid no federal estate taxes. Windsor was forced to pay $363,053.00 to the IRS because the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) specified in Section 3 that the term “spouse” only applied to marriages between a man and a woman. She filed a lawsuit against the federal government, United States v. Windsor; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act as violating due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment, considered a landmark legal victory for the U.S. same-sex marriage movement
- June 20, 1930 – Magdalena Abakanowicz born, Polish sculptor, fiber artist and educator
- June 20, 1933 – Claire Tomalin born, English author and biographer of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, the actress Mrs. Jordan, and Mary Wollstonecraft; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft both won the Whitbread Book Award
- June 20, 1938 – Joan Kirner born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Victoria (1990-1992); Deputy Premier of Victoria (1989-1990); member of the Parliament of Victoria (1988-1994)
- June 20, 1951 – Sheila McLean born, distinguished Scottish legal scholar and author; the first appointee as an International Bar Association Professor of Law and Ethics in Medicine, and director of the Institute of Law and Medical Ethics at the University of Glasgow; book review editor for Medical Law International, a quarterly law review; UK Adviser to the European branch of the World Health Organization on revision of its ‘Health for All’ policy; member of the UNESCO Biomedical Ethics Committee
- June 20, 1988 – U.S. Supreme Court upholds a law making it illegal for private clubs to discriminate against women and minorities
- June 20, 2016 – Virginia Raggi is elected as Rome’s first female Mayor (and youngest at age 37); Rome City Council member (2013-2016)
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- June 21, 1734 – Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave in New France, is put to death, convicted of setting a fire that destroyed much of Old Montreal. Today there is no consensus on her guilt or innocence, but her testimony provides valuable insight into the condition of slavery in Canada at the time
- June 21, 1846 – Marian Adams-Acton born, Scottish non-fiction writer (mostly about dogs and travel), playwright, and children’s author; often under pen name “Jeanie Hering”
- June 21, 1870 – Clara Immerwahr born, German chemist of Jewish descent; first woman to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry in Germany (magna cum laude); a women’s rights advocate who was frustrated with the limitations marriage to chemist Fritz Haber placed on her; unable to work outside the home, she contributed to her husband’s work without recognition, and translated some of his papers into English; during WWI, she disapproved of Haber’s work on chemical weapons, including the first mass use of poison gas, at the second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, speaking out against the research as a “perversion of the ideals of science.” Shortly after he returned from Belgium, she committed suicide, using his military pistol to shoot herself in the chest, and died in her 13 year-old son Hermann’s arms. Haber left the next day to stage the first gas attack against the Russians on the Eastern Front
- June 21, 1883 – Daisy Turner born, American storyteller, noted for oral recording of her family history traced back to Africa and England; at age 103, she’s featured in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary reciting a poem
- June 21, 1906 – Grete Sultan born, German-American pianist; gave her last recital at Merkin Concert Hall in New York at the age of 90
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- June 21, 1912 – Mary McCarthy born, author and critic, her novel The Group remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for almost two years
- June 21, 1918 – Josephine Webb born, pioneering American woman electrical engineer, holder of two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, nicknamed “switchgear.” In 1942, she worked for Westinghouse as a Design Engineer on the electrical grids for the Coulee, Hoover and Boulder Dams. In 1946, while working as Director of Development for Alden Products, she designed an 18 inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. Co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband Herbert, another electrical engineer, specializing in electrical-electronic measurement instrumentation, communications applications and photographic test devices
- June 21, 1931 – Margaret Heckler born, American politician, member of the United States House of Representatives, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Ambassador to Ireland
- June 31, 1935 – Françoise Sagan born, French novelist, playwright and screenwriter; Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), Un certain sourire (A Certain Smile), Château en Suède (Château in Sweden) and La Chamade; (That Mad Ache)
- June 21, 1942 – Marjorie Margolies born, American journalist, Democratic politician, academic, and women’s rights activist; U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania (1993-1995); Director/Deputy Chair of the U.S. delegation to the UN’s 4th World Conference on Women (1995); Founder and Chair of Women’s Campaign International (WCI), which provides advocacy training for women throughout the world; adjunct professor at Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania; The Girls in the Newsroom, and co-author of They Came to Stay
- June 21, 1943 – Diane Marleau born, Canadian Liberal politician, Member of the Canadian House of Commons for Sudbury (1988-2008); Minister for International Cooperation (1997-1999); Minister of Public Works (1996-1997); Minister of National Health and Welfare (1993-1996)
- June 21, 1946 – Kate Hoey born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Vauxhall since 1989; Minister for Sport (1999-2001)
- June 21, 1947 – Shirin Ebadi born, Iranian lawyer, judge, and human rights activist, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize
- June 21,1950 – Anne Carson born, Canadian poet, essayist, translator and Classics professor; won the 1996 Lannan Literary Award, the 1997 Pushcart Prize, and the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos
- June 21, 1951 –Lenore Manderson born, Australian medical anthropologist; early research in the field of Tropical Health led to her becoming a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences; her later research concerns social history, public health and anthropology, studying the effects of inequality, social exclusion and marginality on health and public health policy; professor at Monash University since 2005
- June 21,1953 – Benazir Bhutto born, Pakistani stateswoman and politician, first woman Prime Minister of Pakistan in two non-consecutive terms (1988-1990 and 1993-1996); assassinated in 2007; an al-Queda spokeman claimed his organization had carried out the killing, but a subsequent UN investigation identified the Pakistani Taliban as likely perpetrators, but never proven conclusively
- June 21, 1957 – Ellen Fairclough is sworn in as Canada’s first woman Cabinet Minister
- June 21, 1965 – Lana Wachowski born as Lawrence, with sibling Lily (also a trans woman, formerly Andrew), a writing and film directing team, creators of The Matrix films, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending
- June 21, 2001 – Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is the first Hispanic woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp
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- June 22, 1427 – Lucrezia Tornabuoni born, Italian political advisor to her husband Piero Cosimo de’ Medici and her son, Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent,’ during their de facto rule of Florence and the Florentine Republic; supported convents, widows and orphans, and was a patron of the arts, especially poets; author of religious stories, plays and poetry
- June 22, 1813 – Laura Secord walks 20 miles to warn Canadian troops of an impending American attack. Canada was aligned with Great Britain in the War of 1812.
- June 22, 1844 – Harriett Stone Lothrop born, used pseudonym Margaret Sidney, American author of the Five Little Peppers series
- June 22, 1869 – Caroline O’Day born, American politician, third woman and first female Democrat, elected to Congress from New York (1935-1943); co-sponsor of Wagner-O’Day Act, predecessor to the expanded Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act, requiring all federal agencies to purchase specified supplies and services from nonprofit agencies employing people with significant disabilities, such as blindness, since 2006 called AbilityOne
- June 22, 1906 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh born, author, Gift From the Sea, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, first American woman to earn a first-class glider pilot’s license (1930); married to Charles Lindbergh
- June 22, 1909 – Katherine Dunham born, author, educator and activist, combined African movement and classical ballet; directed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company for almost 30 years; called the “matriarch and queen mother of black dance”
- June 22, 1914 – Mei Zhi born, Chinese author and essayist; joined the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in 1932; she and her husband Hu Fen were arrested in 1955 for “counter-revolutionary activities” – her “crime” was that she had transcribed one of her husband’s books. She was in prison until 1961 when her mother died. Her husband wasn’t released in 1965, and they both remained under surveillance by the Public Security Department. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, they were sent to a prison camp that produced tea. Hu was imprisoned, fell ill, and she was taken to the prison to nurse him. In 1979, Mei was “rehabilitated” and then given permission to take Hu to Beijing for treatment of his increasing mental illness, where he died in 1985. She wrote memoirs of his imprisonment, and published collections of children’s stories. She joined the China Writer’s Association in 1982, which offered some protection of writer’s rights, but also enforced “acceptable literary norms”
- June 22, 1918 – Dame Cicely Saunders born, English nurse, social worker, physician and writer; notable for her role in the birth of the hospice movement, highlighting palliative care, especially pain management; founded a charity to promote research in improving the care and treatment of patients with progressive illnesses
- June 22, 1921 – Barbara Vucanovich born, American politician, first woman to represent Nevada in U. S. House of Representatives (R-NV, 1983-1997), advocate for breast-cancer awareness
- June 22, 1929 – Rose Kushner born, journalist, challenged practice of radical mastectomy in the 1970s
- June 22, 1933 – Dianne Feinstein, American politician, San Francisco Mayor (1978-1988); U. S. Senator (D-CA, 1992 to present); first and to date only woman to chair Senate Rules Committee (2007–2009) and the Select Committee on Intelligence (2009- 2015)
- June 22, 1939 – Ada E. Yonath born, Israeli scientist and crystallographer; pioneering work on structure of the ribosome was rewarded by a 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz ; director of Center for Biomolecular Structure at the Weizmann Institute of Science
- June 22, 1940 – Joan Busfield born, British sociologist, psychologist and author; President of the British Sociological Association (2003-2005); noted for research on mental disorders; Managing madness: changing ideas and practice, Men, women, and madness: understanding gender and mental disorder, and Mental Illness
- June 22, 1940 – Dame Esther Rantzen born, English journalist and presenter of That’s Life! (1973-1994); founder of the child protection charity ChildLine in 1986, and The Silver Line, to combat loneliness, in 2012
- June 22, 1946 – Sheila Hollins, Baroness Hollins, British professor of psychiatry, specialist in learning disability; President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2005-2008);crossbench Life Peer in the House of Lords since 2010; President of the British Medical Association (2012-2013)
- June 22, 1947 – Octavia E. Butler born, African American scifi author; multiple winner of Hugo and Nebula awards; Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild, Speech Sounds; inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010
- June 22, 1949 – Meryl Streep born, American actress, nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards, and winner of three Oscars; known for supporting liberal political causes and gender equality
- June 22, 1949 – Elizabeth Warren born, American Democratic politician; U.S Senator from Massachusetts since 2013; FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion (2006-2010); Law School professor whose research and analysis established her expertise in bankruptcy and commercial law; among other universities, she taught at Harvard Law School (1992 and 1995-2011)
- June 22, 1953 – Cyndi Lauper born, American singer-songwriter and LGBTQ activist
- June 22, 1972 – Wangechi Mutu born in Kenya, Kenyan-American artist and sculptor
- June 22, 1974 – Jo Cox born, British Labour Member of Parliament (2015-2016); assassinated on June 16, 2016, shot and stabbed to death by a far-right extremist; supporter of aid to refugees from war in the Middle East, and advocate for Britain to remain in the European Union; worked for Oxfam (2001-2015) rising to head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam GB
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- June 23, 1826 – Anne McDowell born, editor, journalist, publisher of Woman’s Advocate
- June 23, 1879 – Huda Sha’arawi born, pioneering Egyptian feminist leader and nationalist; she spent her childhood secluded in a harem, then at age thirteen was given in marriage to her cousin, but they separated, and she had the opportunity to learn from female teachers to read the Quran, and studied Islamic subjects. She wrote poetry in Arabic and French. Sha’arawi resented the restriction of women to the house or harem, and organized lectures for women-only audiences. Many of the women from wealthy families who attended were in a public place for the first time in their lives. Sha’arawi raised money to help poor Egyptian women, and founded a school for girls, where the emphasis was on academic subjects. After WWI, she helped organize the largest demonstration by women against British rule. Sha-awarwi decided to stop wearing her veil in public after her husband’s death in 1922. By the 1930s, most of the women in Egypt had followed her example. She was one of the founders of Mubarrat Muhammad Ali, a women’s social service organization in 1909, and the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914. In 1923, she founded and was the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, publisher of the feminist magazine L’Egyptienne
- June 23, 1889 – Anna Akhmatova born, pseudonym for Russian poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, one of the most acclaimed writers in Russian literature, noted for remaining in the Soviet Union and writing about the terrors of living under Stalinism
- June 23, 1889 – Verena Holmes born, English mechanical engineer and inventor, specializing in marine and locomotive engines, and both diesel and internal combustion engines; in 1924, she became first woman elected to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (but wasn’t made a full member until the 1940s), and an associate member of the Institution of Marine Engineers; a strong supporter of women in engineering, she was an early member of the Women’s Engineering Society, and its president in 1931, the same year she was admitted to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers; her patents include the Holmes and Wingfield pneumo-thorax apparatus for treating patients with tuberculosis, a surgeon’s headlamp, a poppet valve for steam locomotives, and rotary valves for internal combustion engines, and several other patents medical devices and engine components; during WWII, she worked on navel weaponry and trained women for munitions work, serving as headquarter technical officer with the Ministry of Labour (1940-1944). In 1946, founded the firm of Holmes and Leather, which employed only women, and published a booklet, Training and Opportunities for Women in Engineering. International Women in Engineering Day coincides with her birthday
- June 23, 1900 – Blanche W. Noyes born, American pioneering woman aviator, one of the first ten women to earn a pilot’s license (1929), and the first woman licensed pilot in Ohio; two months after she got her license, she entered the inaugural Women’s Air Derby, one of 20 competitors vying to fly from Santa Monica CA to Cleveland OH; her plane caught fire in mid-air near Pecos TX, and she damaged her landing gear when she set down, but put out the fire, made repairs, and continued to race, coming in fourth in the heavy class; in 1936, the first year women were allowed to compete against men, she was co-pilot to Louise Thaden, and they won the Bendix Trophy Race, setting a world record of 14 hours, 55 minutes flying from New York City to Los Angeles CA in a Beechwood C17R Staggerwing plane. Also in 1936, she became part of a team of women pilots working on a WPA project to aid aerial navigation by painting the name of the nearest town at 15-mile intervals on prominent buildings or clear ground, but with the U.S. entry into WWII in 1941, they had to black out the roughly 13,000 sites they had marked. After the war, she became head of the air marking division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and oversaw restoring and adding navigational aids, the only woman for several years who was allowed to fly a government plane
- June 23, 1915 – Frances Gabe born, American artist and inventor, noted for designing and building the ‘Self-Cleaning House’ for which she was granted a patent for the overall concept, and 25 additional patents for individual inventions she incorporated into the design; Erma Bombeck jestingly declared in her column that Frances Gabe’s likeness should be added to Mount Rushmore
- June 23, 1918 – Madeleine Parent born, Canadian labour leader and feminist, advocate for aboriginal rights, known for work in establishing the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union and the Confederation of Canadian Unions
- June 23, 1921 – Jeanne M. Holm born, first Air Force Major General (1973)
- June 23, 1923 – Giuseppina Tuissi born, Italian communist and WWII partisan, part of the 52ndBrigata Garibaldi “Luigi Clerici.” Worked with ‘Captain Neri’ (Luigi Canali). She was arrested and tortured during interrogation by the Gestapo in January 1945, but released in March, and stayed in the partisan struggle. Both she and ‘Neri’ were there for the arrest and execution of Benito Mussolini in April. She was accused by a regional commander of the Garibaldi Brigades of revealing names of partisans during torture, and detained, told that Luigi Canali had been executed by a partisan tribunal, but she was released. She went to Milan in May 1945, with Canali’s sister, to find out more about Luigi’s death. Unable to get answers to her questions, she continued to investigate, even after she was threatened. She disappeared on June 23, 1945, her 22nd birthday. Her presumed murder is still unsolved
- June 23, 1926 – Magda Herzberger born, Romanian Jewish author, poet, composer and Holocaust survivor, noted for her autobiography, Survival, and her composition, Requiem, in honor of the victims of the Holocaust
- June 23, 1940 – Wilma Rudolph born, track and field athlete, first woman runner to win 3 gold medals in a single Olympics (Rome 1960)
- June 23, 1943 – Ellyn Kaschak born, American clinical psychologist, a founder of the field of feminist psychology; author of Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience, and editor of the academic journal, Women & Therapy
- June 23, 1951 – Michèle Mouton born, French Group B Rally driver who competed in the World Rally Championship for the Audi factory team, winning four victories. She was runner-up in the Drivers’ World Championship in 1982; first president of the Women and Motor Sport Commission of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA)
- June 23, 1960 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves use of Searle’s combined oral contraceptive pill, Enovid, for use as a contraceptive. It was previously approved for treatment of menstrual disorders in 1957.
- June 23, 1972 – Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is signed by President Nixon, one of the most important legislation initiatives passed for women and girls since women won the vote in 1920. Title IX guarantees equal access and equal opportunity for females and males in almost all aspects of our educational systems
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- June 24, 1314 (? year uncertain) – Philippa of Hainault born in France, became Queen of England as the wife of Edward III; acted as regent in 1346 when her husband went to war in France. She is credited with persuading Edward to spare the Burghers of Calais when the besieged city was forced by starvation to surrender; Edward said he would spare the people if six of the city’s leaders would give themselves up to him, demanding they walk out wearing nooses around their necks, and carrying the keys to the city. Philippa asked Edward to be merciful, saying their deaths would be a bad omen for her unborn child, Thomas of Windsor (who only lived a year, in spite of Edward’s mercy)
- June 24, 1831 – Rebecca Harding Davis born, American author and journalist; advocate for marginalized groups in society including blacks, Native Americans, women, immigrants and the working class; author of novella, Life in the Iron Mills
- June 24, 1867 – Ruth Randall Edström born, American women’s rights and peace activist; she moved to Europe after marrying Sigfrid Edström, a Swedish engineer, and they lived in first in Switzerland, and then in Sweden. She was one of the organizers of the third peace conference in The Hague, and participated in the International Women’s Congress of 1915
- June 24, 1880 – Agnes Nestor born, American labor leader, politician, suffragist and social reformer, known for her roles in the International Glove Workers Union and the Women’s Trade Union League
- June 24, 1893 – Suzanne LaFollette born, journalist, author, Concerning Women (1926) editor, radical libertarian feminist, managing editor of The Freeman (1950-53) and The National Review (1955-59)
- June 24, 1912 – Mary Wesley born, best-selling English novelist, whose family did not approve of her books. Her brother called what she wrote "filth" and her sister strongly objected to The Camomile Lawn, claiming that some of the characters were based on their parents. Wesley identified the appalling grandparents in Harnessing Peacocks as the nearest she came to a portrait of her parents
- June 24, 1914 – Pearl Witherington born, British secret agent, fought in occupied France as a Special Operations Executive member, a leader in a guerrilla band of French resistance fighters; recommended for the Military Cross, but denied it because she was a woman.
- June 24, 1916 – Mary Pickford signs a 2-year million dollar contract as an independent producer-performer with Paramount Pictures, which also entitled her to a cut of her films’ profits, the first million dollar contract in Hollywood history, making Pickford Tinseltown’s highest paid star
- June 24, 1917 – Lucy Jarvis born, American television producer; she was a food editor at McCall’s magazine who left to raise her two children; then as a volunteer for the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT), she produced the documentary, Passport to Freedom, and began working for radio and television organizations, including Pathé News. Worked on a public affairs radio program with Martha Rountree in 1957. In 1959, became associate producer on NBC’s The Nation’s Future, and its producer in 1961. Jarvis produced documentaries, including The Kremlin (1963 – in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis), The Louvre: A Golden Prison (1964) which won a Peabody Award, and six Emmys, and What Price Health (1973), which won a Hillman Prize. She left NBC in 1976 to produce several Barbara Walters specials for ABC, then launched her own production company, and produced shows on Broadway, including Sophisticated Ladies (1988)
- June 24, 1918 – Mildred Ladner Thompson born, American journalist, one of the first women reporters at The Wall Street Journal
- June 24, 1923 – Margaret Olley born, Australian painter, known for still-life paintings, recipient of the Mosman Art Prize
- June 24, 1929 – Carolyn Shoemaker born, American astronomer and comet hunter; she was a 51-year-old “empty-nester” when she started her career, as a field assistant to her husband Gene; she discovered 32 comets, over 800 asteroids, and was co-discoverer of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
- June 24, 1937 – Anita Desai born in the Garhwal Kingdom, Indian novelist and Emerita Professor of Humanities at MIT; won the 1978 Sahitya Akademi Award and the Holtby Memorial Prize for Fire on the Mountain, and the 1983 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for Village by the Sea. Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Feasting, Fasting were shortlisted for the Booker Prize
- June 24, 1941 – Julia Kristeva born in Bulgaria, French psychoanalyst, sociologist, philosopher, author, feminist and human rights activist; noted for development of the concept of abjection, process of separating one’s self from another, everything from a child developing a separate identify from a parent, to an abused woman separating her sense of self from her abuser; founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize
- June 24, 1943 – Birgit Grodal born, Danish economist and academic, who worked on micro-economic theory, mathematical economics and general equilibrium theory; elected as president of the European Economic Association, but died before she took office; author noted for A Second Remark on the Core of an Atomless Economy (1972), and Existence of Approximate Cores with Incomplete Preferences (1976)
- June 24, 1944 – Kathryn Lasky born, American author of children’s fiction, including historical novels in the Dear America series; also writes adult fiction, sometimes under the pen name E.L. Swann
- June 24, 1950 – Mercedes Lackey born, American fantasy novelist; many of her books are set on the world of Velgarth, with interlinked stories
- June 24, 1952 – Dianna Melrose born in Zimbabwe, British diplomat; British High Commissioner to Tanzania (2013-2016); British Ambassador to Cuba (2008-2012); Department for International Development (2002-2006) Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2000-2002 and 2006-2008)
- June 24, 1960 – Dame Elish Angiolini born, Scottish lawyer; Lord Advocate of Scotland (2006-2011); Solicitor General (2001-2006); was the first woman, first Procurator Fiscal (public prosecutor) and first solicitor to hold either post. Currently Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and Chancellor of University of the West of Scotland
- June 24, 1964 – Kate Parminter born, Baroness Parminter of Godalming; British Liberal Democrat Life Peer in the House of Lords since 2010; Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords since 2015; Liberal Democrats Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Spokesperson (2015-2017); Chief Executive of the Campaign to Project Rural England (1998-2004)
- June 24, 2010 – Julia Gillard becomes Australia’s first female Prime Minister; the first woman to become Deputy Prime Minister, Prime Minister
and leader of a major party in Australia
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- June 25, 1678 – Venetian Elena Cornaro Piscopia is the first woman awarded a doctorate of philosophy when she graduates from the University of Padua
- June 25, 1874 – Rose O’Neill born, American cartoonist, illustrator, writer and feminist; the first published American woman cartoonist (True magazine, 1896); creator of the popular comic strip Kewpies (debut 1909); she was the highest-paid woman illustrator of her day. Kewpies also became dolls, in several versions, first manufactured in 1912
- June 25, 1881 – Crystal Eastman born, American lawyer, women’s suffragist and writer
- June 25, 1898 – Kay Sage born, American Surrealist artist and poet
- June 25, 1900 – Zinaïda Aksentieva born, Ukrainian-Soviet astronomer, worked on mapping gravity and tidal deformation of the earth; Director of the Poltava Observatory (1951-1969)
- June 25, 1903 – Madame Marie Curie announces her discovery of radium
- June 25, 1910 – The United States Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes”. The ambiguous language of “immorality” allowed it to be used to criminalize consensual sexual behavior (amended since to apply to transport for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts)
- June 25, 1921 – Celia Franca born in England, daughter of Polish immigrants; English Canada dancer-choreographer; founder and first artistic director (1951-1975) of the National Ballet of Canada
- June 25, 1923 – Dorothy Gilman born, author, Mrs. Pollifax mystery series
- June 25, 1926 – Dame Margaret Anstee born, British diplomat, served at the UN from 1952 to 1993; in 1987 became the first woman Under-Secretary-General; first woman to head a peacekeeping mission, in Angola (1992-1993)
- June 25, 1926 – Ingeborg Bachmann born, Austrian poet, radio scriptwriter, prose author and short story writer
- June 25, 1934 – Beatriz Sheridan born, Mexican director and actress, pioneer of Mexican telenovelas, and prominent figure in Mexican theatre
- June 25, 1947 – The Diary of Anne Frank is first published in the Netherlands
- June 25, 1951 – Eva Bayer-Fluckiger born, Swiss mathematician and professor, worked on topology, algebra number theory, lattices, quadratic forms and Galois cohomology
- June 25, 1952 – Kristina Abelli Elander born, Swedish painter, creator of large-scale room installations, and figures in ceramics and textiles
- June 25, 1954 – Sonia Sotomayor born, lawyer and judge, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
- June 25, 1970 – Ariel Gore, author and editor-publisher of Hip Mama, an alternate press publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood
- June 25, 1974 – Nisha Ganatra born in Canada of Indian subcontinent ancestry, film director, producer, screenwriter and actress, best known for her films Chutney Popcorn and Cosmopolitan
- June 25, 1993 – Kim Campbell is chosen as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and becomes the first female Prime Minister of Canada
- June 25, 1993 – Tansu Çiller took office as the first woman Prime Minister of Turkey
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- June 26, 1699 – Madame Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin born, prominent Parisian salonnière, host to influential Philosophes and Encyclopédistes of the French Enlightenment
- June 26, 1767 – Sarah Pierce born, American educator, founder of the Litchfield Female Academy, one of the oldest schools for girls in U.S., famous attendees include Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
- June 26, 1892 – Pearl S. Buck born, American author, 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature; noted for The Good Earth
- June 26, 1893 – Dorothy Fuldheim born, American print and television journalist and news anchor; began career as a reporter for The Cleveland Press newspaper; in 1947, she became a pioneer in television news at age 54, joining the staff of Cleveland’s WEWS-TV, then the only TV station between New York and Chicago; first American woman anchor on a TV news broadcast; first U.S. woman to host her own show, as well as first U.S. woman to have a TV news analysis program, Highlights of the News; conducted interviews with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler prior to WWII
- June 26, 1902 – Antonia Brico born, Dutch-American conductor, first woman to conduct Berlin Philharmonic (1930) and N.Y. Philharmonic (1938). Founder-conductor of the Women’s Symphony Orchestra (1934-39). When male musicians were admitted, it became the Brico Symphony Orchestra. Principle conductor of Boulder Philharmonic (1958-63)
- June 26, 1911 – “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias born, multi-talented athlete, outstanding in basketball, track and field, swimming, golf, and billiards, winner of 10 major women’s golf championships.
- June 26, 1915 – Charlotte Zolotow born, American children’s author, poet, editor and children’s book publisher; her best-known children’s book is When the Wind Stops
- June 26, 1916 – Virginia Satir born, pioneering American family therapist and author; Conjoint Family Therapy, Peoplemaking, and The New Peoplemaking; co-founder of the Mental Health Research Institute (MRI), which offered the first formal family therapy training program – Satir was the Training Director; she believed that the “presenting issue” was seldom the real problem, but how people coped with the issue created the problem; organized two groups to help individuals finf mental health workers, and connect with others suffering from similar issues; noted for developing the Virginia Satir Change Process Model, using clinical studies, often used by management and organizational consultants to define how change impacts organizations
- June 26, 1921 – Violette Szabo born, WWII French-British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent; on her second mission into occupied France, she was captured by the German army, interrogated, tortured and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where she was executed. Posthumous recipient of the George Cross, the UK’s second highest award “for acts of the greatest heroism or for most conspicuous courage in circumstance of extreme danger” while not under direct fire by the enemy
- June 26, 1922 – Carolyn Sherif born, social psychologist, pioneer researcher in group psychology, self-system, and gender identity
- June 26, 1932 – Dame Margarite Pindling born, Lady Pindling, Governor-General of the Bahamas since 2014; named Dame Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007
- June 26, 1934 – Edith Pearlman born, American short story and non-fiction writer; awarded 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for “Binocular Vision,” and the 2008 Pushcart Prize for “Door Psalm”
- June 26, 1936 – Nancy Willard born, American novelist, poet and children’s book author/and sometimes illustrator; won 1982 Newberry Medal for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn
- June 26, 1946 – Candace Pert born, American neuroscientist and internationally recognized pharmacologist who discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain, and author; worked for the National Institute of Mental Health (1975-1987); Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch (1983-1987), the first woman section chief at the NIMH; founded and directed a private biotech lab in 1987; Molecules Of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel
- June 26, 1948 – Shirley Jackson’s now-classic short story “The Lottery” is published in The New Yorker magazine causing cancelled subscriptions and prompting hate mail
- June 26, 1949 – Mary Styles Harris born, American biologist and geneticist; founder, president and genetics consultant of Harris & Associates, Ltd.
- June 26, 1956 – Catherine Samba-Panza born, lawyer and non-partisan politician; interim President of the Central African Republic (2014-2016), first woman to serve as president of the country; Mayor of Bangui (2013-2014), C.A.R.’s capital
- June 26, 1996 – U.S. Supreme Court orders the Virginia Military Institute to admit women or forgo state funding support
- June 26, 1997 – J.K. Rowling’s first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is published in the U.K.
- June 26, 2003 – U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, strikes down state bans on gay sex
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- June 26, 2013 – U.S Supreme Court rules that married same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits and that same-sex marriages are valid in California, two major victories for the LGBTQ rights movement
- June 26, 2015 – In Obergefell et al v Hodges, Director, Ohio Department of Health,and other similar cases, U.S. Supreme Court makes a 5-4 ruling that states cannot ban same-sex marriage – now celebrated as Same Sex Marriage Day
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- June 27, 1693 – "The Ladies' Mercury" published by John Dunton in London, the first women's magazine. It contained a "question and answer" column that became known as a "problem page"
- June 27, 1817 – Louise von François born, German writer, best known for her historical novel, Die letzte Reckenburgerin (The Last Lady of Reckenburg)
- June 27, 1869 – Emma Goldman born in Russia, American labor leader, writer, lecturer, women’s rights advocate and anarchist; played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in the early 20th century; she was repeatedly jailed for illegally distributing birth control information; founder of the anarchist journal, Mother Earth, in 1906; she was part of a failed conspiracy to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick, then served two years in prison for “conspiring to induce persons” not to register for the draft in 1917, after which she was deported with hundreds of others to Russia; initially, she supported the October Revolution, but became disillusioned with the Soviet Union, and denounced the government’s violent repression of free speech. She moved around after that, living in England, Canada and France, and going to Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; her two-volume autobiography, Living My Life, was published in the 1930s
- June 27, 1869 – ‘Kate Carew’ pen name of Mary Williams who was born this day; caricaturist and writer who worked for the New York World; she was sent to Europe in 1911 to write and illustrate a series, “Kate Carew Abroad” for which she did about 500 interviews of notables like Pablo Picasso, John Galsworthy, George Moore, Émile Zola, and Lady Sackville-West. Back in the U.S. in 1912, she spent several days with Abdu’l-Bahá, head of the Bahá’í faith at the time, during his visit to America. She did caricatures of Woodrow Wilson, Mark Twain, Ethel Barrymore and many others. Her work also appeared in the British literary journal, The Tatler, and the London Strand
- June 27, 1880 – Helen Keller born, two years later, illness makes her blind and deaf; first blind and deaf person to earn a bachelor of arts degree; a member of the Socialist Party of America, she campaigned for women’s suffrage, labor rights, for socialism and against militarism; advocate for the disabled, lecturer and author, Three Days to See
- June 27, 1885 – Guilhermina Suggia born, Portuguese cellist, internationally renowned, student of Pablo Casals, bequeathed her Stradivarius cello to the Royal Academy of Music in London to fund a scholarship for cellists
- June 27, 1885 – Antoinette Perry born, American actress, director, producer and co-founder and chair of the board of the American Theater Wing; the Antoinette Perry Awards, commonly known as the Tony Awards, were established in her honor
- June 27, 1906 – Catherine Cookson born, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1993), English best-selling historical romance and fiction author. She left school at fourteen, worked in domestic service and as a laundress, then ran a boarding house; after marrying at age 34, she suffered a series of miscarriages, and it was discovered that she had a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which causes bleeding and anemia. She had a mental breakdown, and took up writing to help her cope with depression during her recovery. Her nearly 100 novels have sold over 123 million copies, and been translated into 123 languages. Cookson’s charitable trust has provided major funding for medical research, and supports charitable and artistic organizations
- June 27, 1914 – Helena Benitez born, Filipina politician, women’s equal rights activist, academic and administrator of the Philippine Women’s University (private university co-founded by her mother); Member of the Philippines Senate from 1967 until it was closed under martial law in 1972, then in the Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) from 1978 to 1984 (it was abolished in 1986); founder of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company in 1956, which was designated as the Philippines national folk dance company in 1998
- June 27, 1914 – Margaret Ekpo born, leading Nigerian women’s rights activist and social mobilizer, helped push the movement beyond ethnic solidarity; at age 20, her hope of advanced training as a teacher was delayed when her father died; she taught in elementary schools, then married a doctor, Udo Ekpo, in 1938. In 1946, she was able to study abroad in Dublin Ireland, earning a diploma in domestic science, then founded a Domestic Science and Sewing Institute in Aba, a Nigerian commercial, textile and handicraft center. By 1945, her husband was frustrated by British colonial dismissive treatment of Nigerian doctors and other professionals, but as a civil servant he couldn’t go to meetings where resistance was forming against the wide-spread discriminatory policies, so Margaret Ekpo went to a political rally, and discovered she was the only woman there. By 1950, she had organized a market women’s association, unionizing Aba market women, but soon expanded the fight to civil and economic rights for all Nigerian women; Ekpo joined the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NGNC) which was fighting for independence, and protested with others the massacre of over 20 anti-colonial miners striking at Enugu coal mine. The NGNC nominated her to the regional House of Chiefs. In 1954, she started the Aba Township Women’s Association, making it an effective political pressure group; by 1955, women voters in a citywide election outnumbered men. After Nigeria became independent and formed the First Republic, Ekpo was elected to the Eastern Regional House of Assembly in 1961, but a military coup overthrew the First Republic in 1966, and her activism was curtailed. She died at age 92
- June 27, 1915 – Grace Lee Boggs born, American author, feminist and social activist; she published her most recent book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, in 2011 at the age of 95
- June 27, 1924 – Lena Jones Wade Springs, women’s rights activist, becomes first woman placed in nomination for U.S. Vice President at 1924 Democratic National Convention, where she was serving as chair of the convention’s Credentials Committee
- June 27, 1936 – Lucille Clifton born, American author, poet and educator, Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979-1985); her work celebrates her African-American heritage and chronicles her experiences as a woman
- June 27, 1944 – Angela King born, a leader of the British environmental movement, co-founder of Common Ground with Sue Clifford and Roger Deakin, which links nature with the Arts in campaigns to encourage people to make positive investments in preserving their local environments. King was the first Friends of the Earth Wildlife Campaigner in Britain, and a consultant to the Nature Conservancy Council; co-author with Sue Clifford of England in Particular, a celebration of the distinctive character and charm of its little-known places, now being lost to corporate, political and media uniformity
- June 27, 1951 – Mary McAleese born, Irish Fianna Fáil/Independent politician; she is pro-choice and a founding member of the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, which caused criticism of her as a Catholic by members of the Catholic hierarchy. McAleese is the second woman President of Ireland (1997-2011), and first woman to succeed another woman president, President of Ireland Mary Robinson. McAleese was a graduate in Law, appointed in 1975 as Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1987, she became Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 1994, she was the first female Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University. She built her political career as a member of delegations and committees rather than as an elected official. Her theme as President of Ireland was ‘Building Bridges.’ She worked for social equality and inclusion, continuing the reconciliation process. Member of the Council of Women World Leaders
- June 27, 1953 – Alice McDermott born, American author and academic; her novels That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her book Charming Billy won the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction, and a 1999 American Book Award
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- June 28, 1778 – Mary "Molly Pitcher" Hays McCauley, wife of an American artilleryman, carried water to soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth. Legend says she took her husband's place at his gun after he was overcome with heat.
- June 28, 1876 – Clara Maass born, American nurse, served as a contract nurse for the United States Army during the Spanish-American War and in the Philippines; she then went to Cuba to assist in the research into yellow fever, where she volunteered to be infected, and died
- June 28, 1891 – Esther Forbes born, American author and historian, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, and the Newbery Award for Johnny Tremain
- June 28, 1894 – Dame Anne Loughlin born, British labor activist, organizer and journalist, member and organizer for the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers
- June 28, 1906 – Maria Goeppert-Mayer born in Germany, American physicist; 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics; second woman to win the prize in physics after Marie Curie, for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus
- June 28, 1907 – Yvonne Sylvain born, first Haitian woman doctor; first woman accepted into the University of Haiti Medical School, earning her medical degree in 1940; specialist in obstetrics and gynecology at Port-au-Prince General Hospital, who campaigned for improved medical access for the poor; member of Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale, campaigning for women’s suffrage (won in 1950), and for civic, social, and economic equality for Haitian women
- June 28, 1917 – Katherine Rawls born, American athlete and Olympian; national champion in swimming and diving; during WWII, a pilot in the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron
- June 28, 1934 – Bette Greene born, American author; known for Summer of My German Soldier, and her Newbery Honor Book Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe
- June 28, 1946 – Gilda Radner born, comedian, original cast member of “Saturday Night Live,” the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program at Cedars-Sinai founded in her memory
- June 28, 1947 – Laura Tyson born, American economist, author and columnist; first woman Dean of the London Business School (2002-2006); Chair of the U.S. National Council of Economic Advisors (1995-1996); Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (1993-1995); served on the Council on Foreign Relations (1987-2016)
- June 28, 1948 – Deborah Moggach born, English novelist and screenwriter; noted for her novels Tulip Fever and These Foolish Things, the basis for the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and her screenplay for the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice
- June 28, 1956 – Amira Hass born, Israeli journalist, columnist and author, recognized for her reporting on Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza; her reporting and criticism have caused her trouble with both the Israeli government and Hamas
- June 28, 1958 – Donna F. Edwards born, American Democratic politician; first African-American woman Representative from Maryland in the U.S. House (2008-2017); she ran unsuccessfully to replace retiring Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski in 2016
- June 28, 1969 – The Stonewall Rebellion, sparked by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, NYC, which led to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the U.S. On June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago on the Stonewall anniversary. The Stonewall is now listed as a National Historic Landmark.
- June 28, 1976 – The first official woman cadets arrived at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs CO; an unheralded “test group” had begun training months before to see how “a small number of women would fit into a masculine situation and how those women would retain their femininity,” according to Air Force General James McCarthy, years later when the story came out
- June 28, 2000 – U.S. Supreme Court declared a Nebraska law outlawing "partial birth abortions" was unconstitutional. 30 other states had similar laws at the time
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- June 29, 1835 – Celia Thaxter born, American poet and short story writer; she was married at sixteen. During a period of separation from her husband, she returned to her father’s hotel, the Appledore House, in the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine in 1861, where she was the hotel’s hostess, welcoming notable literary figures of the day like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam. Her first book of poems, Driftwood, was published in 1879, when she also reunited with her husband, moving into a house they had built at Kittery Point, Maine. She died suddenly in 1894, while on a visit to Appledore House; noted for Among the Isles of Shoals, several poetry collections, and her account of “A Memorable Murder” that happened when she was present on nearby Smuttynose Island
- June 29, 1858 – Julia Lathrop born, American social reformer, activist and civil servant; met Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at school, later worked with them and others at Hull House; first woman member appointed to Illinois State Board of Charities, where she advocated for improving social services, and introduced reforms like appointing women doctors to positions in state hospitals, and moving the insane out of state workhouses. She was appointed by President Taft as the first woman to head a United States federal bureau, as first bureau chief of the newly formed United States Children’s Bureau (1912-1922), where she directed research into child labor, infant mortality, maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, mothers’ pensions and illegitimacy, and not only created child welfare policy but implemented it, one of the earliest opportunities for an American woman to have a active role in government policy-making and creation of regulations
- June 29, 1893 – Helen Hokinson born, American cartoonist, created 68 covers and over 1800 cartoons while on the staff of The New Yorker
- June 29, 1897 – Kazue Togasaki born, survivor of 1906 San Francisco earthquake, physician who pioneered a place in American medicine for women of Japanese ancestry, one of the few physicians ( general practitioner and obstetrician) allowed to practice medicine in the Japanese Interment Camps during World War II
- June 29, 1899 – Margaret Byrd Rawson born, educator and researcher, identified and treated reading disorders including dyslexia
- June 29, 1900 – Margaret Grierson born, archivist, professor, founder and first director of the Sophia Smith Collection, a women’s history archive, at Smith College
- June 29, 1920 – Nicole Russell born, Duchess of Bedford, author and producer, one of the first female television producers in France
- June 29, 1927 – Marie Thérèse Killens born, Canadian Liberal Party member of the House of Commons of Canada (1979-1988)
- June 29, 1929 – Oriana Fallaci born, Italian journalist and author, known for her coverage of war and revolution, and her book Interview with History containing interviews with many world leaders
- June 29, 1930 – Viola Léger born in America, Canadian actress and Canadian Liberal Party Senator (2001-2005); Officer of the Order of Canada (1989); Governor General’s Performing Arts Award (2013)
- June 29, 1942 – Charlotte Bingham born, English novelist and television scriptwriter; known mainly for historical romance novels, and scripts for the series Upstairs, Downstairs
- June 29, 1945 – Chandrika Kumaratunga born, Sri Lankan politician; inaugural Chair of the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation since 2015; first woman President of Sri Lanka (1994-2005); Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (1994); Sri Lanka Freedom Party leader (1994-2006); Member of Parliament (1994); Chief Minister of the Western Province (1993-1994)
- June 29, 1949 – Anne Veneman born, American lawyer and Republican public servant; Executive Director of UNICEF (2005-2010); first woman appointed as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (2001-2005), after previously serving as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture (1991-1993); Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity Programs (1989-1991); Associate Administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (1986-1989)
- June 29, 1966 – Twenty women pack into Betty Friedan’s hotel room in Washington D.C. during the EEOC Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women. Friedan writes ‘N.O.W.’ on a paper napkin, and they form the National Organization for Women, with an initial budget of $135.00
- June 29, 1974 – Isabel Perón is sworn in as first female President of Argentina (1974-1976), after the death of her husband, Juan Peron
- June 29, 1992 – U.S. Supreme Court is divided in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, upholding part of Roe v Wade, but overturning its trimester framework which completely banned the states from regulating abortion in the first trimester, and limited regulations in the second trimester to those which would protect a woman’s health. They redraw the lines of increasing state interest, and weaken the 14th Amendment protection, replacing it with the “undue burden” standard: “An undue burden exists and therefore a provision of law is invalid if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” This has opened the flood gates of state regulations and legislation which have to be challenged one by one, burdening the federal courts, costing millions in states’ budget dollars to defend, and usually ending with a finding against the state’s legislation
- June 29, 2016 – U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter lifts Pentagon’s ban on transgendered people serving in the U.S. armed forces
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- June 30, 1868 – Mabel Cratty born, American social worker, educator and General Secretary of the National Board of the Y.W.C.A. (1906-1928); also a member of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (CCCW); worked as teacher, then a high school principal in Ohio (1890-1904)
- June 30, 1883 – Dorothy Tilly born, civil rights activist, worked to reform southern race relations
- June 30, 1899 – Margaret Byrd Rawson born, educator and researcher, identified and treated reading disorders including dyslexia
- June 30, 1912 – María Luisa Dehesa Gómez Farías born, Mexican architect who worked for almost 50 years for the Public Works Department in the Federal District of Mexico City, primarily designing housing, both single-family and apartment buildings; the first Mexican woman to graduate with a degree in architecture; joint winner with Mexico’s first woman civil engineer, Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza, of the Ruth Rivera Prize for their contributions to the city
- June 30, 1917 – Lena Horne born, singer. actress, civil rights activist, first African American woman to sign long-term Hollywood contract, fought for contractual guarantees that African Americans could attend her shows, Worked with Eleanor Roosevelt for passage of anti-lynching laws. During WWII, U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, so she appeared before a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing black soldiers had been seated in the back rows, she walked off the stage to where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. Blacklisted in 1950s for her affiliations with “communist-backed” groups. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, just days before Evers was assassinated. She spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women
- June 30, 1920 – Eleanor Ross Taylor born, American poet; published six collections of poetry between 1960 and 2009; won the 1998 Shelley Memorial Award, the 2010 William Carlos Williams Ward for her book Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems 1960-2008, and the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement
- June 30, 1933 – Joan Murrell Owens born, African-American marine biologist, noted for her research on corals at the Smithsonian Institution; before getting her doctorate in marine biology, she designed programs for teaching English to educationally disadvantaged students, which was a model for the Upward Bound program of the U.S. Department of Education
- June 30, 1936 – Assia Djebar born, pseudonym of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, Algerian author, translator, feminist and filmmaker, one of North Africa’s most influential writers, 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, (for body of work), Yourcenar Prize, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
- June 30, 1936 – Margaret Mitchell’s sweeping romance novel, Gone With the Wind, is published; it sells 176,000 copies in 1936; by the end of 1938, over 1 million copies are sold
- June 30, 1940 – Patricia “Pat” Schroeder born, American politician, first woman to represent Colorado in U.S. House of Representatives, serving 12 terms. First woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee. A tireless advocate on work-family issues, she was a prime mover behind the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the 1985 Military Family Act
- June 30, 1961 – Lynne G. Jolitz born, American computer scientist and programmer; pioneer in open source operating systems with 386BSD; co-founder of several Silicon Valley start-up companies with her husband; noted authority on operating systems and networking, and holds patents in internet technologies and semiconductor memory innovations; author of numerous technical papers and articles
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- June 30, 1966 – The National Organization for Women, which will become the largest U.S. feminist organization, begins organizing, led by Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Pauli Murray, Gloria Steinem and two dozen other women
- June 30, 1967 – Victoria Kaspi born in the U.S., American-Canadian astrophysicist whose research primarily concerns neutron stars and pulsars; Professor of Astrophysics at McGill University since 1999; Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research; in 2016, she became the first woman to be honored with the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, and also appointed as a companion of the Order of Canada
- June 30, 1986 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults; the Supreme Court explicitly overturned Bowers in 2003 in its decision in Lawrence v. Texas, that adult consensual sexual intimacy in one’s home is a vital interest in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment