Welcome to WOW2 — Late March!
WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from March 17 through March 31.
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.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists over the past three years that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages keep getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!
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For the entire previous LATE MARCH list as of 2018, click HERE:
www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Late March 2019 page are only the NEW people and events, or additional information, found since last year.
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
has posted, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Let’s Celebrate! March is WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH in the U.S.A.
And hats off to this month’s extraordinary Librarians: Zoia Horn (Early March -March 14), who went to jail to defend freedom of speech and the right to privacy; Ernestine Rose (March 19) a pioneer in branch library outreach to the surrounding community, and providing books that reflect their culture and history; and Clara Breed (March 19) who helped Japanese-American children interned in camps during WWII and campaigned for their right to an education.
Librarians are on the front lines of the battle against censorship, and have aided millions of patrons in their pursuits of self-education, research projects, or finding just the right book for their leisure enjoyment. Too often the efforts of librarians are under-valued, or overlooked, so the next time you check out some books, or renew your library card, please thank the librarian who helps you.
Late March’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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- March 17, 1665 – Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre born into a family of master musicians instrument-makers, French harpsichord player and composer; noted for the 1687 publication of Premier livre de pièces de clavessin (First Book of Harpsichord Pieces), one of the few harpsichord collections printed in France in the 17th Century, and Céphale et Procris, based on the Greek myth of Cephalus and Procris, a married couple tricked and tormented by the Gods, until Cephalus, a hunter, accidently kills his wife, who is hiding in the forest. It is the first opera written by a Frenchwoman to be produced
- March 17, 1849 – Cornelia M. Clapp born, notable American zoologist-marine biologist; earned the first and second Ph.B. awarded to an American woman, at the University of Chicago; made studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole; as an instructor, whose students learned by doing and going out of doors, she influenced generations of students, and encouraged many young women to pursue careers in science; noted for The Lateral Line System of Batrachus Tau
- March 17, 1873 – Margaret Bondfield born, British Labour politician and feminist, first woman Cabinet minister in the United Kingdom, one of the first three Labour Party women to be Members of Parliament
- March 17, 1877 – Edith New born, English suffragette; she left her teaching career shortly after 1900 to work as an organizer and campaigner for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and in January, 1908, chained herself to the railings of 10 Downing Street shouting “Votes for Women!” to help create a diversion for other protesters to sneak past the railings before being arrested. In June, 1908, she and Mary Leigh were the first two suffragettes to use vandalism as a tactic, breaking two windows at 10 Downing Street. They were arrested and sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison. Edith New staged a hunger strike while at Holloway. When New and Leigh were released from prison, a parade was held in their honor, with suffragettes pulling them in a carriage through the streets. She continued to address crowds until 1911, when she returned to teaching, in Lewisham, a small town southeast of London
- March 17, 1917 – Loretta Perfectus Walsh is the first woman to join the U.S. Navy (USN Reserve), and first woman to officially join the military in a role other than a nurse
- March 17, 1921 – Dr Marie Stopes opens Britain’s first birth control clinic, in London
- March 17, 1961 – Dana Morosini Reeve born, American actress-singer and activist for people with disabilities. She was married to Christopher Reeve from 1992 until his death in 2004. In 2005, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, even though she had never smoked. She died in March, 2006
- March 17, 1962 – ‘Ank’ Anna Bijleveld born, Dutch civil servant and politician; Minister of Defence since 2017; King’s Commissioner (2011-2017) of Overijssel, an eastern province of the Netherlands; State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations (2007-2010); Mayor of Hof van Twente (2001-2007); Member of the Netherlands House of Representatives (2010-2011)
- March 17, 1969 – Golda Meir, whose father moved their family to Milwaukee from the Ukraine when she was 8 years old, is sworn in as the first female and fourth premier of Israel
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- March 18, 1827 – Janet Burnside Soga born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a family in the weaving and clothing trades who were members of the Hutchesontown Relief Church. She defied convention by marrying Tiyo Soga in 1857, a black South African studying for the ministry at the Presbyterian Church College in Edinburgh, who became the first black minister ordained to the Christian ministry. She went with him to South Africa after their marriage, and they founded a mission at Mgwali, living in poor huts while raising money to build the church. The foundation stone was laid in 1861. Between 1858 and 1870, she gave birth to five sons and three daughters, but their second son was stillborn. After the family moved to a new mission station at Tutura, her husband died in 1871. She first moved with the children to Emgali, where Tiyo’s aged mother was living, then later moved the family to Dollar, Scotland, where the children were educated at the Dollar Academy. All but one daughter returned to South Africa after completing their education. Janet Soga died in Glasgow in 1903
- March 18, 1863 – Women riot in Salisbury North Carolina, protesting the shortages of flour and salt in the Confederacy during the American Civil War
- March 18, 1870 – Agnes Sime Baxter born, Canadian mathematician; in 1891, along with her bachelor’s degree from Dalhousie University, she received the Sir William Young Medal for highest standing in mathematics and mathematical physics; and completed her master’s degree in 1892, then held a fellowship at Cornell University (1892-1894); she became the second Canadian woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics
- March 18, 1875 – Margaret Foley born, labor organizer, suffragist, and social worker, she was an out-spoken suffrage activist who would loudly confront anti-suffrage speakers. She made a solo balloon flight over Lawrence, Massachusetts, tossing suffrage literature from the basket in 1910
- March 18, 1927 – Lillian Vernon born as Lili Menasche in the Weimar Republic, American businesswoman and philanthropist after her Jewish family fled from Nazi Germany in 1937. She became an American citizen in 1942, and took her new last name from Mount Vernon; at age 24, she founded the Vernon Specialties Company in 1951, a mail order service, which started with personalized handbags and belts, which became the Lillian Vernon Catalog in 1956, and then the Lillian Vernon Corporation in 1965. When her company went public in 1987, it was the first company founded by a woman to be traded on the American Stock Exchange. In 1997, she was appointed by President Bill Clinton as chair of the White House National Business Women’s Council. Vernon sold her company in 2003. She was a strong supporter of the Democratic Party, Emily’s List, and the Women’s Campaign Fund. Vernon also made a donation to New York University to fund the Lillian Vernon Writers House in West Village, known for its readings and salons, and for hosting classes, workshops, and master classes with visiting writers. She has also been a major donor for many civic organizations and charities, through the Lillian Vernon Foundation, which has continued after her death in 2015
- March 18, 1933 – Unita Z. Blackwell born, civil rights activist and politician; project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration drives; in 1965, she filed suit, Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, after the principal suspended over 300 black children, including her son, for wearing SNCC pins which showed black and white hands clasping; in the suit, she also asked the school district to desegregate their schools per Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the U.S. District Court ruled that students wearing the pins was disruptive, but the school district must desegregate, and the ruling was upheld on appeal, leading to one of the first desegregation plans in Mississippi; in 1976, she was elected mayor of Mayerville, Mississippi, and held the office until 2001, the first African American woman to be a mayor in the state of Mississippi
- March 18, 1935 – Frances Luella Welsing born, American Afrocentrist psychiatrist; her 1970 essay, The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy) was her analysis of the origins of what she called white supremacy culture. Author of The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, in which her contention that homosexuality among African Americans was a ploy by white males to decrease the black population, her description of white people as genetically defective descendants of albino mutants, and her attribution of AIDS and crack cocaine as “chemical and biological warfare” by whites were highly controversial
- March 18, 1947 – Deborah Lipstadt born, American historian; Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lipstadt is the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory; History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier; and The Eichmann Trial
- March 18, 1950 – Linda Partridge born, British geneticist whose field is the biology and genetics of aging and age-related diseases; founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Aging; a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1996, and elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2004
- March 18, 1971 – Kitty Ussher born, British economist, Labour politician, and current Managing Director of Tooley Street Research since 2013. She is also an associate with several London-based think tanks. During her political career, she was: Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (2009); Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (2008-2009); Economic Secretary to the Treasury (2007-2008); Member of Parliament for Burnley (2005-2010). In 2009, resigned her ministerial position after allegations surfaced that she changed the designation of her “main” home for capital gains tax purposes to reduce her tax bill. She denied any wrongdoing, but voluntarily paid the £3,420 in question to HM Revenue and Customs
- March 18, 1973 – Luci Christian born, American ADR script writer and voice actress for English versions of Japanese anime series and movies
- March 18, 1979 – American feminist Kate Millet travels in Iran with Canadian journalist Sophie Keir, under the auspices of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom, an organization Millet helped found seven years earlier, concerned for the rights of Iranian women. Under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the government had abolished coeducational schools, revoked a law allowing wives to divorce their husbands, and warned working women to return to the veil in public or lose their jobs. “I was there as a friend,” Millet explains. “There was never a question of me organizing anything. I don’t even speak Farsi.” On March 8, a small rally planned for International Women’s Day at the gates of Tehran University, unexpectedly attracts thousands of women, surging into the streets. More demonstrations follow, one filling Tehran’s Freedom Square with 20,000 women; some men tried to attack the women with knives and acid, while other men linked arms struggling to form a protective barrier. Iranian authorities arrest Millet and Keir on March 17, refusing to say what charges against them are, and holding them overnight under armed guard at the immigration center, awaiting deportation. The next day, they are put on a plane, but not told where they were going. After takeoff, their passports are returned, but stamped as barred from entering Iran again. The flight’s destination turned out to be Paris. This was the largest women’s uprising in Iran’s history, but it was swiftly crushed by the new regime
- March 18, 1985 – ‘Bia’ Ana Beatriz born, Brazilian racing driver; first woman to win a race in the Indy Lights series, at Nashville Superspeedway in 2008, then won her second Indy Lights race in 2009 at Iowa Speedway
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- March 19, 1844 – Minna Canth born, Finnish author, playwright and women’s rights activist; known for The Pastor’s Family and The Worker’s Wife; she has been honored in Finland on her birthday since 2007, which is also the country’s Social Equality Day
- March 19, 1880 – Ernestine Rose born, American librarian, named for the 19th century feminist Ernestine Polowsky Rose. While studying at the New York State Library School, she had a summer job at the Lower East Side branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), working with Russian-Jewish immigrants to help them adjust to a new country without trying to ‘Americanize’ them. During WWI, she served as director of hospital libraries for the American Library Association (ALA). She worked as the head librarian (1915-1917) at the NYPL Seward Park Branch, and encouraged her staff to become well versed in the Jewish, Yiddish and Russian customs and culture of the surrounding community. In 1920, she became the branch librarian at Harlem’s 135th Street Branch, and hired four new librarians, all African-American, to help her turn the library into a community center, encouraging community groups to hold meetings at the library, and held reading and organized story hours, free public lectures, exhibitions of Black artists and sculptors, and created a reference collection of Black Literature. In 1922, she worked with Franklin Hopper, Central Branch’s chief of circulation, the National Urban League and the American Association for Adult Education to secure a combined $15,000 grant from the Rosenwald Fund and the Carnegie Corporation to form the Harlem Committee. The committee used the funds to develop cultural programs with well-known speakers, vocational programs at the YWCA and the Urban League, as well as social programs within the Harlem community. In 1926, the committee oversaw the purchase of the Arthur A. Schomburg collection for the Division of Negro Literature and History, which later became the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. The collection of over 5,000 volumes, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, and several thousand pamphlets, showcased African American history and culture. Schomberg was hired as the first head of the collection. In 1933, Rose worked with the Works Progress Administration on a writers’ project for the library. Worked for the NY Public Library until her retirement in 1942
Rose’s retirement ceremony in 1942. She is flanked by Claude Barnett (left), founder of the Associated Negro Press, and Laurence Reddick, curator of the Schomburg Collection
- March 19, 1906 – Clara Breed born, American librarian and activist in San Diego, California, who supported Japanese American children, many she knew from her work, while they were interned in camps during WWII. When several children came by the library to turn in their library cards before being sent to the camps and to say goodbye to her, she gave them stamped, self-addressed postcards so they could write to her and tell her what they needed. She not only sent them books, but often sent items like soap and toothpaste as well. Even though many of the children were sent to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, she visited them multiple times, and received over 250 post cards and letters from the children. She wrote letters to many members of Congress, and published articles about the unfair treatment of the children and other Japanese Americans, including “Americans with the Wrong Ancestors” for a magazine in 1943. Breed wrote letters for college-age students requesting they be allowed to attend colleges in the Midwest. She worked for the San Diego Public Library system for over 40 years. She began in 1928 as the children’s librarian at the East San Diego Branch, was named as acting city librarian in 1945, then became city librarian in 1946, and held the position for the next 25 years. She oversaw the expansion of the library system, adding several branches and was the driving force behind the opening of a new main library in 1955. She also established the Serra Cooperative Library System, which allowed patrons to borrow books through their local branch from libraries throughout San Diego and Imperial Counties. The letters and artifacts from her former pen pals are now part of the permanent collection of the Japanese American National Museum, which featured them in an exhibit called “Dear Miss Breed: Letters from Camp”
- March 19, 1931 – Emma Andijewska born, modern surrealist Ukrainian author, and painter; suffers serious illness during WWII living in Germany, then France; family moves to New York, 1957; she becomes an American citizen, marries a Ukrainian writer, returns to Munich
- March 19, 1933 – Renée Taylor born, American actress, playwright and screenwriter; co-author with her husband Joseph Bologna of the Broadway and movie hit Lovers and Other Strangers, and the film Made for Each Other, in which they starred
- March 19, 1935 – Nancy Malone born, American actress, director and producer; made the transition from actress to successful television producer and director; was the first woman vice-president of television at 20th Century Fox (1976); board member of The Alliance of Women Directors; won an Emmy Award for producing Bob Hope: The First 90 Years (1993)
- March 19, 1942 – Heather M. Robertson born, Canadian journalist, novelist and non-fiction writer; Reservations are for Indians, Grass Roots, Walking into Wilderness, and Willie, A Romance, which won the Books In Canada Best First Novel Award. She was a founding member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Professional Writers Association of Canada; launched the Robertson v. Thomson Corp. class action suit regarding freelancers’ retention of electronic rights to their work
- March 19, 1947 – Glenn Close born, American actress, singer, producer, activist and philanthropist; winner of three Tonys, three Golden Globes and a seven-time nominee for Academy Awards for acting, currently holding the record for the living actor with most Oscar nominations without a win. She is a strong supporter of Democratic candidates for Congress and the presidency, an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, and has campaigned for gay marriage, women’s rights and mental health. She was part of a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues which raised $250,000 for prevention of violence toward women, and she volunteered to produce a documentary for Puppies Behind Bars, which provides service dogs for wounded war veterans. Her sister has bipolar disorder, so Close volunteers at NYC’s Fountain House, a facility to help people suffering from mental illness, and she founded and chairs BringChange2Mind, a campaign to end the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness. In 2016, she donated $75,000 to the Mental-Health Association of Central Florida to fund counseling and other assistance for victims of the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando
- March 19, 1960 – Eliane Elias born, Brazilian jazz singer, composer-arranger, and pianist; multiple Grammy winner
- March 19, 1963 – Mary Scheer born, American comedian, voice actress, screenwriter and producer; one of the original cast members of MADtv
- March 19, 2008 – Certified Nurses Day is created by a collaboration of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) and the American Nurses Association (ANA); now an official National Day by Congressional proclamation
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- March 20, 1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is published, and becomes the best-selling novel of the 19th century
- March 20, 1879 – Maud Menten born, Canadian physician and biochemist, known for the Michaelis-Menten equation
- March 20, 1888 – Amanda Clement born, first woman paid to umpire a baseball game, serving as an umpire for semi-professional games in the American Midwest on a regular basis for six years (1904-1910), earning $15 to $25 per game, then continued occasionally umpiring into her forties. Clement was first hired as a teenager when she came to watch her brother play, and the umpire hired for the game didn’t show up. She was an accomplished athlete in baseball, basketball, sprinting, hurdles, shot put, gymnastics and tennis. She later used the money she earned as an umpire to pay for her college education. Because of her reputation for fair calls and being unsusceptible to bribery, baseball marketers listed her by name as the umpire at the games they were touting to bring in crowds. She wrote an editorial for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1906 declaring that women made better umpires than men, in part because the men would not speak abusively to women umpires. A devout Congregationalist, she refused to umpire on Sundays, and often stayed at the homes of clergy while umpiring on the road. After college and regular umpiring, she taught physical education at the University of Wyoming, and other schools in North and South Dakota, then managed the YWCA in La Crosse, Wisconsin. In 1929, she returned to South Dakota to take care of her ailing mother, until her mother’s death in 1934. Clement then became a social worker for 25 years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota before retiring in 1966
- March 20, 1890 – The General Federation of Womans’ Clubs is founded
- March 20, 1900 – Amelia Chopitea Villa born, Bolivia’s first woman physician and its first graduate the field of pediatrics, becoming a surgeon, specializing in gynecology and pediatrics; represented Bolivia at the 1929 Congress of the Association internationale des femmes-médecins (Medical Women’s International Association) in Paris; her sister Ella becomes Bolivia’s second woman doctor
- March 20, 1925 – Romana Acosta Bañuelos born, first Hispanic U.S. Treasurer of the United States, (1971-1974); businesswoman, owner of a multimillion-dollar business, Ramona’s Mexican Food Products, Inc
- March 20, 1935 – Bettye Washington Greene born, first African American woman chemist to work as a professional at the Dow Chemical Company, researching latex and polymers; there are several patents under her name related to advances in latex and polymers
- March 20, 1961 – Ingrid Arndt-Brauer born, German Social Democratic Party politician; member of the Bundestag since 1999, noted for working on the gender equality and municipal policy committees; member of the Kreistag, district parliament of Steinfurt (1994-1997)
- March 20, 1969 – Yvette Cooper born, British Labour politician and economist; Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee since 2016; Secretary of State for Work and Pensions 2009-2010; Chief Secretary to the Treasury (2008-2009); Minister of State for Housing and Planning (2005-2008); Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Regeneration and Regional Development (2003-2005); Parliamentary Secretary to the Lord Chancellor’s Department (2002-2003); Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health (1999-2002); Member of Parliament for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford since 1997
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- March 21, 1557 – Anne Dacre Howard born, Countess of Arundel, poet; in 1582, converts to Roman Catholicism, placed under house arrest on Queen Elizabeth I’s orders; after her release in 1584, influences her husband, Philip Howard, to also convert; he tries to escape to France, but is caught and held prisoner in the Tower of London; Anne is forbidden to live in London; Philip dies in the Tower in 1595; Anne, unable to claim his possessions because of Philip’s imprisonment, resorts to selling her land to pay debts and support her children
- March 21, 1866 – Antonia Maury born, American astronomer, one of the “Harvard computers,” a group of skilled women workers who processed astronomical data; Maury developed a catalog of stellar spectra, and published a spectroscopic analysis of the binary star Beta Lyrae (1933)
- March 21, 1887 – Clarice Beckett born, Australian Tonalist painter; she died at age 48, from pneumonia, after painting the wild sea off Beaumaris, near Melbourne, during a big storm in 1935
- March 21, 1904 – Jehane Benoît born, French Canadian culinary author, commentator, journalist, and broadcaster. After studying at the Sorbonne and the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, she started her own cooking school, Fumet de la Vieille France, in Montreal. She also opened one of Canada’s first vegetarian restaurants “The Salad Bar” in 1935. Author of over 30 cookbooks, including the Encyclopedia of Canadian Cuisine, and appeared regularly on Canadian’s television’s newsmagazine series, Take 30
- March 21, 1923 – Nirmala Srivastava born, Indian founder of Sahaja Yoga, a self-awareness meditation movement, and activist for Indian Independence, who was jailed in 1942 during the Quit India Movement
- March 21, 1937 – Ann Clwyd born, Welsh Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for the Cynon Valley since 1984; advocate for human rights and international women’s rights; member of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service (1976-1979); helped pass the Female Genital Mutilation Bill in 1985, which bans Female Circumcision in the UK and prohibits parents sending/taking their daughters abroad for the procedure
- March 21, 1962 – Kathy Greenwood born, Canadian comedian and scriptwriter; performer and writer in the Toronto branch of Second City (1988-1992); was a regular cast member of the Canadian television drama Wind at My Back (1996-2001); member of the sketch comedy quintet, Women Fully Clothed
- March 21, 1966 – Moa Matthis born, Swedish author and literary critic; she writes articles for the Stockholm daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (The Day’s News), from a feminist point of view
- March 21, 1973 – Ananda Lewis born, African American television host and social activist; host of the talk show The Ananda Lewis Show in 2001, which unfortunately never recovered from debuting the day before 9-11; worked on The Insider 2004-2005; then she left show business, in part because of a series of problems with stalkers, and is now a carpenter and home renovator; she’s volunteered as a mentor for Youth at Risk, and as a spokesperson for the Humane Society and Reading is Fundamental
- March 21, 1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win the World Figure Skating Championships, and the first black athlete to win a medal in the Winter Olympics (1988); she later became an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip and knee replacement, but lost of most of her savings in two divorces and the financial failure of her medical practice in the dying coal-mining town of Richlands, Virginia, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She sold her Olympic Bronze Medal to help pay some of her debts, but was reported as of February 2018 to still be living precariously
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- March 22, 1615 – Katherine Boyle Jones born, Vicountess of Ranelagh, Irish scientific and political philosopher; member of the Hartlib Circle, a correspondence network which discussed and influenced issues of agricultural and scientific innovation, developments in mathematics and medicine, and educational reform, and the Great Tew Circle, a group concerned with literary and religious matters; her correspondence with her brother, chemist Robert Boyle, shows she had considerable impact on his work, and her notebooks show the results of her researches in medicine and chemistry
- March 22, 1808 – Caroline Sheridan Norton born, English author and social reformer. At 19, she married George Chapple Norton, barrister, M.P. for Guildford, and the younger brother of Lord Grantley, but he was jealous and possessive, often drunk and violent, and was mentally and physically abusive to her, which escalated as he became less and less successful as a barrister, and debts began to mount. But Caroline became a major society hostess, and it was her influence which secured for her husband the position of Metropolitan Police Magistrate in 1831. She wrote prose and poetry for solace and to earn money, publishing her poetry collections, The Sorrows of Rosalie and The Undying One, and two novels, which were well received, before she left her husband in 1836. Norton sued her close friend, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, for ‘criminal conversation’ (a euphemism for adultery). The jury threw out the claim, but the scandal almost brought down the government, and Caroline was unable to get a divorce. She was also barred from seeing her children, who by English Law belonged to the father, and they were kept hidden from her by Norton. She at first lived on the income from her earnings as an author, but Norton successfully argued in court that as her husband, all her earnings were legally his. With no support from Norton, and her earnings confiscated, Caroline turned the law to her advantage by running up bills in her husband’s name, and telling the creditors to sue him if they wished to be paid. She became passionately involved in the campaigns to pass the Custody of Infants Act 1839, and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. When Parliament was debating reforming the divorce laws in 1855, she submitted to the members a detailed account of her marriage, and described the difficulties women faced under the existing laws. An English wife did not have the right to leave her husband. Not only could he sue her for restitution of “conjugal rights,” he could enter any house where she was staying and carry her off by force. If the husband sued for divorce the wife could not defend herself, or be represented by an attorney, or be considered a party to a suit between her husband and her supposed lover for “damages.” Only a man could divorce his wife on grounds of infidelity; a wife could not divorce her husband on those grounds, so matter how profligate he might be. Her intense campaigning was a substantial factor in the passage of these acts, and influenced passage of the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, because her story was widely known by Members of Parliament. These combined acts gave British wives a limited but separate legal identity from their husbands for the first time. Caroline Norton was not in favor of women getting the vote, and never espoused women’s equality. She simply wanted to earn her own living, and the right to be with her children
Caroline Sheridan Norton, 1860 watercolour by Emma Fergusson
- March 22, 1882 – In the U.S., the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act is signed into law, making polygamy a felony. The act also prohibited “bigamous” or “unlawful cohabitation” making them a misdemeanor, removing the need to prove that actual marriages had occurred. It also made it illegal for polygamists or cohabitants to vote, hold public office, or serve on juries
- March 22, 1899 – Ruth Page born, began ballet in 1919, first American to be accepted into the Ballets Russes, first masterwork as choreographer was Frankie and Johnny (1938); she combined opera and ballet in a school for young dancers
- March 22, 1920 – Katsuko Saruhashi born, Japanese geochemist, pioneer in measuring carbon dioxide levels in seawater, showing the evidence in seawater and the atmosphere of the dangers of radioactive fallout; after graduating from the Imperial Women’s College of Science in 1943, she went to work in the Geochemical Laboratory of the Meteorological Research Institute; in 1950, she began studying CO2 levels in seawater, having to develop her own measuring techniques for this new study; after the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests in 1954, the Japanese government asked the Geochemical Laboratory to analyze and monitor radioactivity in seawater and rainfall; Sarushashi’s study showed the radioactivity reached Japan in 18 months, and traces spread throughout the Pacific by 1969; her research was some of the earliest proving that effects of fallout could spread over the entire globe, not just the immediate area of the blast; by the 1970s, she was studying acid rain
- March 22, 1972 – U.S. Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification; it is ratified by 35 states, but falls three states short of the required 2/3 majority in order to become a Constitutional amendment
- March 22, 1972 – In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the U.S. Supreme Court rules unmarried persons have the right to possess contraceptives
- March 22, 1976 – Reese Witherspoon born as Laura Reese Witherspoon, American actress, producer and supporter of women and children’s advocacy groups. Winner of an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and two Golden Globes. In 2016, Hello Sunshine was launched, Witherspoon’s joint venture with Otter Media to produce woman-character-driven films and television stories. She is a long-time supporter of Save the Children, and member of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund. She went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as part of a 2006 CDF project to publicize the ongoing needs of the hurricane’s survivors. She is the honorary chair of the Avon Foundation, which supports breast cancer research and prevention of domestic violence
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- March 23, 1614 – Jahanara Begum born, princess of the Mughal Empire, eldest and favorite daughter of her father, Shah Jahan. She became the Padshah Begum (First Lady) when her mother died, chosen over her father’s three other wives, and has been called “the most powerful woman in the empire” during her father’s reign because of her influence with him. When Shah Jhan became ill in 1657, there was a war of succession between her four brothers. She sided with Dara Shikoh, eldest son and heir-apparent, but he lost to Aurangzeb, who then besieged Shah Jahan in the Agra Fort, cutting off the water supply, which forced the Shah’s surrender, and he was kept imprisoned at the fort, where Jahanara nursed him until his death in 1666. After their father’s death, she reconciled with Aurangzeb, who gave her the title of Empress of Princesses, and she was once again Padshah Begum. She used this privileged position to urge her brother to ease his strict regulation of public life in accordance with his conservative religious beliefs and argued against his decision in 1679 to restore the poll tax on non-Muslims, which she warned would alienate his Hindu subjects. Upon her death in 1681, Aurangzeb gave her the posthumous title of Sahibat-uz-Zamani (Mistress of the Age)
- March 23, 1882 – ‘Emmy’ Noether born in Germany, American mathematician and physicist, made landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Noether’s Theorem explains connection between symmetry and conservation laws. Completed her dissertation in 1907, but is excluded from any academic positions because she is a woman, so she works for 7 years without pay at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen. In 1915, David Hilbert invites her to join the University of Göttingen world-renowned mathematics department, but the philosophical faculty objects, and she spends 4 years lecturing under Hilbert’s name. Her habilitation is finally approved in 1919, as a Privatdozent. In 1933, when the Nazi government dismisses Jews from university positions, she moves to the U.S., taking a position at Bryn Mawr College, funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. She also lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but comments she is unwelcomed at the “men’s university, where nothing female is admitted.”
- March 23, 1884 – Florence Ellinwood Allen born, American judge; the first woman to serve on a state supreme court and one of the first two women to serve as United States federal judges. In 2005, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame
- March 23, 1924 – Olga Kennard born, British scientist in crystallography; Director of the Cambridge Chrystallographic Data Centre (1965-1997); Fellow of the Royal Society since 1987
- March 23, 1950 – Ahdaf Soueif born, Egyptian novelist, political and cultural commentator; most of her work is written in English, noted for her novels In the Eye of the Sun, and The Map of Love, and her non-fiction writing about Egyptian history and politics, and the Palestinians. Soueif is a contributor to the British newspaper, The Guardian. She founded and was first chair of the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008. Her sister is the mathematician and human/women’s rights activist, Laila Soueif
- March 23, 1976 – Smiriti Malhotra born, Indian politician, former actress and television producer. Minister for Textiles since 2016; Minister of Information and Broadcasting (2017-2018); Minister of Human Resource Development (2014-2016); Member of Rajya Sabha (Parliament) for Gujarat since 2011; Vice President of Bharatiya Janata Party since 2011
- March 23, 1981 – U.S. Supreme Court rules that states can require, with some exceptions, parental notification when teenage girls seek abortions
- March 23, 1984 – In South Africa, Dorothy Nomzansi Nyembe, ANC Women’s League activist and member of the Federation of South African Women, is released from prison, after serving a 15 year sentence for harbouring members of the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation)
- March 23, 1989 – Ayesha Curry born, Canadian-American television cooking show host and cookbook author; in 2016, she became host of Ayesha’s Home Kitchen on the Food Network, and published The Seasoned Life. Her company, Little Lights of Mine, has its own brand of olive oil, and donates 10% of the oil’s sales to the charity No Kid Hungry
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- March 24, 1826 – Matilda Joslyn Gage born, American abolitionist, suffragist and women’s rights speaker, freethinker and author of many articles and books, including Woman’s Rights Catechism, Woman as Inventor and Woman, Church and State; founder and first president (1890-1989) of the Woman’s National Liberal Union
- March 24, 1855 – Olive Schreiner born, South African author, anti-war activist, free thinker, and feminist; best known for her novel The Story of an African Farm, published under the pen name ‘Ralph Iron’ in 1883, and dealing not only with the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier, but also with agnosticism, the professional aspirations of women, existential independence, and individualism. She also wrote A Track to the Water’s Edge, Thoughts on South Africa, and From Man To Man Or Perhaps Only, published after her death, with the ending only sketched out, which begins with white women’s confinement to domesticity in late 19th century South Africa and England, but expands to include black women and girls as the central character struggles to re-create herself and educate her children against the racism and sexism of the time
- March 24, 1921 – The 1921 Women’s Olympiad begins in Monte Carlo, the first international women’s sports event. Since women were being excluded from international sports competitions, Alice Milliat of France founded the Federation Feminine Sportive de France in 1917. She went on to organize the 1921 games; five nations took part – France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway and Switzerland, competing in ten track and field events, and several other sports. The IOC objected to FSFI’s use of the word ‘Olympiad’ in the title of their championships. FSFI agreed to drop the word in exchange for the IOC holding ten events for women in the 1928 Olympic Games, but the IOC only included five women’s events in the 1928 games
- March 24, 1947 – Chris O. Gregoire born, American lawyer and Democratic politician; second woman Governor of Washington state (2005-2013); Washington State Attorney General (1993-2005); cancer survivor; advocate for healthcare, biomedical research and life sciences
- March 24, 1953 – Anita L. Allen born, African American Professor of Law and Vice Provost for Faculty at University of Pennsylvania Law School; senior fellow in former bioethics department of UP’s Perelman School of Medicine; collaborating faculty member in Africana studies and women’s studies; appointed in 2010 to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
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- March 25, 1347 – Catherine of Siena born, Italian tertiary (associate) of the Dominican Order, scholastic philosopher, theologian and mystic; canonized in 1461, declared the patron saint of Rome in 1866; she is one of the most influential writers in Catholicism, the first of only four women to be honored as a doctor of the Church
- March 25, 1760 – Louisa Finch born, Countess of Aylesford, English naturalist and botanical illustrator, noted for studies and paintings of plants, algae, and fungi. She painted over 2,800 botanical watercolours for correspondence with botanists like Englishman William Withering and the Scot George Don. She made the first records of about 30 plants in Warwickshire, and amassed an extensive collection of minerals, now part of the collection at the Natural History Museum in London
Louisa Finch and her 1792 watercolour of Touch-me-not
- March 25, 1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers, 123 of them women and girls. On the 8th through the 10th floors of the building, the doors to the exits and stairwells had been locked by the employers to prevent workers taking unauthorized breaks or stealing. Frances Perkins, who would become the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet as Secretary of Labor, was a witness: “People had just begun to jump as we got there. They had been holding on until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. They began to jump. The window was too crowded and they would jump and they hit the sidewalk. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed.”
- March 25, 1925 – Kishori Sinha born, Indian politician, social activist and advocate for women’s empowerment. Member of Parliament for Vaishali (1980-1989), the first woman elected to represent this district; member of the All India Women’s Council, and active in Upliftment of Women. She had a special interest in the rights of minorities and the poor
- March 25, 1934 – Gloria Steinem born, American journalist, feminist and women’s rights activist: the founding editor of Ms. Magazine, helped found National Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Action Alliance, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women
- March 25, 1958 – Åsa-Britt Torstensson born, Swedish Centre Party politician; member of the Riksdag (Swedish legislature) for Västra Götaland from 1998-2002, Minister for Infrastructure (2006-2010), the returned to the Riksdag (2010-2014)
- March 25, 1985 – Natalia Anciso born, American Chincana-Tejana contemporary artist noted for visual and installation art
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- March 26, 1824 – Julie-Victoire Daubié born, French feminist, author, scholar and journalist; the first woman to graduate from a French university. After the death of their father when she was a toddler, her brother helped her study Latin, Greek, German, history, and geography. In 1844, she earned a teacher’s certificate of ability, and studied zoology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris with the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Despite her exceptional education for a girl from a poor family, and no French laws explicitly barring women from attending university, her applications for admittance were rejected by numerous French universities. She continued studying while working as a governess. In 1859, the Imperial Academy of Science and Fine Letters of Lyon held an essay competition. Daubié wrote a nearly-300-page work, “The Poor Woman in the 19th Century. Female Conditions and Resources,” detailing professional and academic exclusion for women, wage inequality, and other travails. The essay took first prize, and the academy gave her admittance. In 1861, she was the first woman to present herself at the baccalaureate exams, and became the first female baccalaureate in France. She was 37-years-old. After graduation, she continued to write about the conditions faced by women, and set up an embroidery shop, which was run by her niece. In 1871, at Lyon she became the first woman literature graduate. She died at age 50 of tuberculosis
- March 26, 1907 – Mahadevi Verma born, one of the four major Hindi poets of the Chhayavaad Neo-romantic movement in modern Hindi literature, author, illustrator, Indian freedom fighter and educator. She was the first head mistress of Allahabad (Prayag) Mahila Vidyapeeth in 1933, a private Hindi cultural and literary for girls, and was later its chancellor. Several of her works are now included in the Hindu core syllabus
- March 26, 1942 – First women prisoners arrive at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland, sent from the camps at Ravensbruck in Germany and Pored in Slovakia
- March 26, 1942 – Erica Jong born, American author and poet; Fear of Flying
- March 26, 1966 – Lillian Greenwood born, British Labour politician; Chair of the Transport Select Committee since 2017; Member of Parliament for Nottingham South since 2010
- March 26, 1974 – Gaura Devi leads a group of 27 women of Reni village of the Garhwal Himalayas, to prevent the cutting of trees; they resort to hugging the trees to protect them and give rise to the Chipko Movement in India
- March 26, 1980 – Margaret Brennan born, American journalist; current moderator of the CBS program Face the Nation since 2018; CBS White House correspondent, covered Washington (2012-2018); anchor of InBusiness with Margaret Brennan (2009-2012) for Bloomberg Television; worked at CNBC as a producer and researcher for Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street (2002-2009)
- March 26, 1985 – Keira Knightly born, English stage and film actress; came to worldwide prominence in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, after making a breakthrough co-starring in the 2002 independent film Bend It Like Beckham. In 2008, she was the face of an Amnesty International campaign to support human rights, marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She has also traveled to Ethiopia on behalf of Comic Relief, and to South Sudan on behalf of Oxfam. She has campaigned for women’ rights, against domestic violence, and was a signatory on Amnesty International’s letter to Prime Minister David Cameron as part of their campaign for women’s rights in Afghanistan. She was one of the celebrities in a video from the United Nations refugee agency to raise awareness of the global refugee crisis
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- March 27, 1824 – Virginia L. Minor born, American suffragist, co-founded the Woman’s Suffrage Association of Missouri; she attempted to register to vote in 1872, basing her claim on the 14th Amendment like Susan B. Anthony and others, which grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” including former slaves; when she is turned away, she and her husband, an attorney who completely supports her cause, file suit against the state of Missouri, which they lose, but the case is widely reported in the newspapers, bringing more attention to the woman’s suffrage campaign
- March 27, 1866 – President Andrew Johnson vetoes the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but his veto is overridden by Congress and the bill passes into law on April 9; it is the first U.S. federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law, mainly intended to protect the civil rights of males of African descent born in or brought to America, in the wake of the American Civil War, a precursor to the 14th Amendment – the words ‘persons’ and ‘citizens’ would not include women of any color for some time to come
- March 27, 1883 – Marie Under born, Estonian poet, nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature eight times; a founder of the Estonian Writers’ Union (1922)
- March 27, 1899 – Gloria Swanson born, American silent film star, who also produced her films The Love of Sunya (1927) and Sadie Thompson (1928). She was one of the actresses who were the first nominees in 1929 for an Academy Award for Best Actress, but lost to Janet Gaynor. Her career declined in the 1930s, and she moved to New York City in 1938, then founded Multiprises, a company to make inventions, but designed to rescue Jewish scientists and inventors, helping many escape from the Nazis. Today, she is most remembered for her performance as Norma Desmond in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, for which she won a Golden Globe as Best Actress, Motion Picture Drama and nominated for an Academy Award
Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, and in the title role of Sadie Thompson
- March 27, 1904 – Union organizer, ‘hell-raiser’ and public speaker ‘Mother’ Jones is ordered by Colorado state authorities to leave the state, accused of “stirring up” the striking coal miners
- March 27, 1911 – Veronika Tushnova born, Soviet poet and member of the Soviet Union of Writers, and became a medical doctor at her father’s insistence. She worked in military hospitals during WWII, but found little satisfaction in medicine. Published her first works in 1944 and 1945, but noted for her later more lyrical collections, Memory of the Heart and One Hundred Hours of Happiness. Her poem They don’t renounce loving became the lyrics of a song
- March 27, 1915 – Mary Mallon, ‘Typhoid Mary,’ a cook whose employers kept falling ill with Typhoid fever and dying; she was the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the U.S. On this day, she is put in quarantine for a second time, where she remains until her death, after she refuses to allow removal of her gall bladder, the site of live typhoid bacteria in her body
- March 27, 1924 – Margaret K. Butler born, American mathematician and early computer software programmer. Principle creator, then director (1972-1991) of the National Energy Software Center at the Argonne National Laboratory, and the first woman fellow of the American Nuclear Society. She began her career in 1944 as a statistician at the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, and also taught math at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Graduate School, then joined the U.S. Army Air Force. After the war, she worked in the Naval Reactors Division of Argonne National Laboratory, making calculations for physicists designing a prototype submarine reactor, then later worked on AVIDAC, an early computer developed at the Reactor Engineering Division. In the 1950s Butler wrote software, reactor applications, mathematical subroutines, and utilities for three other Argonne computers, the ORACLE, GEORGE, and UNIVAC. From the late 1950s to early 1960s she led Argonne’s Applied Mathematics Division’s Application Programming
- March 27, 1927 – Sylvia Thomas Anderson born, English producer and screenwriter, best known for her collaboration with her husband Gerry Anderson on their 1950s and 1960s television series, Stingray, Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds
- March 27, 1950 – Julia Alvarez born, Dominican-American poet, novelist and essayist; known for her novels, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, her poetry collections Homecoming and The Woman I Kept to Myself, and her essay compilation, Something to Declare. Honored with many awards, including 1974’s Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2009 Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature
- March 27, 1955 – Susan Neiman born, American philosopher, academic, cultural commentator and essayist; anti-war activist during the Vietnam War before earning her Ph.D. from Harvard, and studied at the Free University of Berlin. Noted for her memoir Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, and The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant
- March 27, 1976 – Roberta Anastase born, Romanian Democratic Liberal Party politician; President of Chamber of Deputies of Romania (2008-2012); became a member of the EU Parliament (2007-2009) with the accession of Romania to the European Union
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March 28, 1613 – Borjigit Bumbutai born, of the Khorchin Mongol Borjigit clan, one of the five consorts of Emperor Hong Taiji of the Qing dynasty; during the reign of her grandson, the Kangxi Emperor, whom she had raised after his mother died, she had significant influence in the imperial court and was respected for her political wisdom and insight. Honored as Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang
- March 28, 1708 – Hannah Glasse born, English cookery author; noted for The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a bestseller which was originally published anonymously but remained in print well into the 19th century. It contained the first known curry recipe written in English. She also coined the name Yorkshire pudding. Her other books, The Servants’ Directory, and The Compleat Confectioner, were not as successful, and her dressmaking enterprise after her husband died ran deeply into debt. She went bankrupt in 1754 and was forced to sell the copyright of The Art of Cookery to a booksellers’ syndicate, which held the rights for the next fifty years
- March 28, 1743 – Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova born, Russian courtier, academic, author and art patron; major figure of the Russian Enlightenment, and part of the coup d’etat that put Empress Catherine the Great on the throne in 1762. She was the first woman in the world to head a national academy of sciences and helped to found the Russian Academy, where she oversaw the compilation of a Russian dictionary. She wrote dramas, edited a monthly magazine, and also maintained a voluminous correspondence with notable figures of the day, including British actor-manager David Garrick and Benjamin Franklin, who invited her to become the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society – she was also the only woman member for its first 80 years
- March 28, 1886 – Clara Lemlich born, American labor organizer, leader of the Uprising of 20,000, the shirtwaist workers strike in New York’s garment industry in 1909
- March 28, 1895 – Ángela Ruiz Robles born, Spanish teacher and inventor; wanting to lighten the weight of textbooks carried by her students, she made a device out of a series of text and illustrations on reels, all under a sheet of magnifying glass with a light for reading in the dark, with spoken descriptions of each topic, mechanical precursor to the electronic book
- March 28, 1906 – Dorothy Knowles born in South Africa, British academic and expert on French theatre, author of French Drama of Inter-War Years 1918-39 and The Censor, the Drama and the Film, which was against censorship; also a pioneer and champion in British women’s fencing, and founder of the Liverpool University fencing club (1936)
- March 28, 1924 – Byrd Baylor born, American novelist, essayist, author of children’s books and text for picture books, including four Caldecott Honor books: The Desert is Theirs; Hawk, I’m Your Brother; When Clay Sings and The Way to Start a Day
- March 28, 1927 – Vina Mazumdar born, Indian academic, feminist and major figure in India’s women’s movement; pioneer in women’s studies programs in India; secretary of the first Committee on the Status of Women in India that brought out the first report on the condition of women in the country, Towards Equality (1974); founding director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), an autonomous organisation established in 1980, under the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR); Memories of a Rolling Stone
- March 28, 1927 – Marianne Fredriksson born, Swedish author and journalist; noted for The Book of Eve; Simon and the Oaks and According to Mary Magdalene
- March 28, 1959 – Laura Chinchilla born, Costa Rican politician; first woman President of Costa Rica (2010-2014); Vice President and Minister of Justice (2006-20o8); National Assembly Deputy for San José (2002-2006)
- March 28, 1971 – Christianne Meneses Jacobs born, Nicaraguan writer, publisher, editor and bi-lingual teacher; her family came to America when she was 17 years old. She was co-founder in 2005 with her husband of Iguana, a Spanish language educational magazine for children ages 7-12, which won the 2009 Multicultural Children’s Publication Award from the National Association for Multicultural Education, and ¡YO SÉ! (I Know!), a Spanish language children’s magazine featuring pop culture and young Latinos making a difference in society, which debuted in 2008
- March 28, 1977 – Lauren Weisberger, American author; best known for her 2003 bestseller, The Devil Wears Prada, largely based on her 10-month experience as an assistant to Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna Wintour
- March 28, 1986 – Lady Gaga born as Stefani Germanotta, American singer-songwriter, one of the best-selling music artists in history. Also known for her philanthropy and activism, including donating the proceeds from her January 2010 Radio City Music Hall concert as well as that day’s profits from her online store to the Haitian reconstruction relief fund, a total of $500,000, and donated $1.5 million from sales of a bracelet she designed to the Japan relief fund after the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. She is also a member of Artists Against Fracking, donated $1 million to the American Red Cross for victims of Hurricane Sandy, and has raised over $202 million to fight HIV and AIDS. Her music was banned by the Chinese government as the work of a ‘hostile foreign force’ after she appeared with the Dalai Lama at the 2016 U.S. Conference of Mayors to talk about the power of kindness and compassion
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- March 29, 1852 – Ohio makes it illegal for children under 18 and women to work more than a 10-hour workday
- March 29, 1903 – Vera M. Dean born, American political scientist and author, head of research for the Foreign Policy Association; “Is Democracy Possible in Africa?”
- March 29, 1923 – Betty Binns Fletcher born, American lawyer and federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (1979- 2012); one of the first women to become a partner in a major U.S law firm, and the second woman appointed to the Ninth Circuit bench; writes liberal opinions on employment discrimination, environmental protection and the death penalty; when her son is nominated for a judgeship on the Ninth Circuit, Conservative Republicans, led by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), claim a mother and son serving on the same court violates a 1911 federal anti-nepotism law; Judge Fletcher agrees to accept senior status in order clear the way for her son’s confirmation, which means she serves only part time, only on cases in her home city, Seattle, and does not handle death penalty cases – her original seat is filled by a Republican
Judge Betty Binns Fletcher, center, on first U.S. all-woman federal judicial
panel with Judge Dorothy Wright Nelson and Judge Judith Nelsen Keep
- March 29, 1929 – Sheila Kitzinger born, British social anthropologist, pregnancy and childbirth author; natural childbirth and breastfeeding advocate; National Childbirth Trust board member; taught midwifery at the University of West London, and lectured on the social anthropology of birth of breastfeeding; author of The Good Birth Guide, The Politics of Birth, and Rediscovering Birth
- March 29, 1951 – Tina Monzon-Palma born, Filipina broadcast journalist and anchorwoman; worked for GMA Networks (1976-1992), and was GMA’s first woman news presenter, then pioneered its Public Affairs department during her term as GMA News executive. After working at ABC-5 (1992-1997), she has been at ABS-CBN, heading a public service campaign against child abuse, and anchoring the news program The World Tonight
- March 29, 1961 – Amy Sedaris born, American comedian, writer and playwright; among numerous credits, appeared in the Comedy Central series, Strangers With Candy, and the 2010 movie, The Best and the Brightest. Co-author with her brother David Sedaris of the plays Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, Incident at Cobblers Knob, The Little Frieda Mysteries, and The Book of Liz. She is a supporter of PETA
- March 29, 1971 – Lara Logan born, South African media journalist and war correspondent. In 2011, she gave an interview on 60 Minutes about being sexually assaulted in Egypt by men in the crowd celebrating Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, after someone falsely shouted she was an Israeli Jew. Her clothes were ripped off, she was raped by their hands, then dragged along the square until a group of women camped by a fence closed ranks around her and the men with them threw water at the crowd until a group of soldiers arrived. Logan was Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for CBS News (2006-2018)
- March 29, 2014 – The first same-sex marriages are performed in England and Wales
Teresa Millward and Helen Brearley
married in Halifax, 3-29-2014
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- March 30, 1855 – Charlotte Johnson Baker born, first woman physician to practice medicine in San Diego, California; practiced obstetrics and gynecology at St. Joseph’s Hospital
- March 30, 1863 – Mary Whiton Calkins born, philosopher and psychologist, first woman president of the American Psychological Association. She graduated from Smith College, then worked as a tutor and later as a teacher in the Greek department of Wellesley College. When she was offered a position at Wellesley to teach psychology, a new subject for the college’s Philosophy Department, she accepted on the contingency that she would be able to study psychology for a year first. She was refused admittance to Harvard, which was the closest university to where she lived which offered classes in the subject, in spite of a letter sent by the president of Wellesley pleading her case. She decided to attend classes taught by Josiah Royce at the Harvard Annex, who suggested that she audit the Harvard classes taught by William James, but first both he and James had to persuade Harvard president Charles William Eliot to allow this, as he was opposed to a woman learning in the same room with men. She was not allowed to be a registered student. Calkins returned to Wellesley in 1891 and began her work as an instructor of psychology. She is noted for her research on dreams and memory, while she was teaching at Wellesley for forty years. She also set up the first women’s psychology lab there
- March 30, 1882 – Melanie Klein born in Austria, British psychoanalyst in the field of developmental psychology; she devised new techniques for working with children, and developed a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis. Though in agreement with Freud on most of his fundamental theories, her work directly with children led her to disagree with some of his ideas concerning children which came from his work with adult patients, including her belief that aggression was an important force in its own right in children, a theory with which Anna Freud strongly disagreed. Anna Freud’s influence remained largely predominant in the U.S., while some British analysts were more open to Klein’s ideas. She is one of the founders of the object relations theory, concerning an individual’s interaction with others, how those interactions are internalized, and how they affect an individual’s psychological framework
- March 30, 1917 – Els Aarne born, Estonian composer and pianist; noted for chamber music, but she also composed two symphonies
- March 30, 1949 – Liza Frulla born, Canadian Liberal politician and executive; Executive Director of the Institut de tourisme et d’hotellerie du Québec since 2015; Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women (2004-2006); Minister of Social Development of Canada (2003-2004); Member of the Canadian Parliament (2002-2006); Minister of Culture and Communications of Quebec (1990-1994); Member of the National Assembly of Quebec for Marguerite-Bourgeoys (1989-1998); worked in public affairs for the Montreal Olympics organizing committee (1974-1976)
- March 30, 1957 – Marie-Christine Kounja born, Chadian diplomat and first published Chadian woman author; First Secretary at the Chadian Embassy in Nigeria
- March 30, 2006 – American reporter Jill Carroll, a freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor, is released after an 82-day ordeal as a hostage in Iraq
Jill Carroll talks with U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, as she prepares to leave Iraq on U.S. Air Force transport – CSM photo
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- March 31, 1776 – Abigail Adams writes to her husband John who is helping to frame the Declaration of Independence and cautions: “…remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
- March 31, 1865 – Anandibai ‘Anandi’ Gopal Joshi born, the first Indian woman to become a physician. Though she was married at age nine to Gopalrao Joshi, a postal clerk who was twenty years older, she was fortunate that her husband was a believer in education for women, and encouraged her in her studies. She was only fourteen when her first child was born, but he only lived ten days because of the lack of medical care, which inspired her to become a physician. In 1880, Gopalrao wrote a letter to Royal Wilder, an American missionary, about his wife’s interest in studying medicine in the U.S. and inquiring about a suitable post for himself there. Wilder published the letter in his Princeton’s Missionary Review, where it was read by Theodicia Carpenter, who wrote to Anandi, the beginning of what became a close friendship. Anandi began to have health problems, and Gopalrao decided to send her to America on her own as soon as possible. The Thrinborns, an American couple who were doctors, suggested she apply to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. The orthodox Indian community censured her for wanting to go to college in the West, but she addressed them in a meeting in the hall at Serampore College, stressing the need for women doctors in India, saying that a Hindu woman doctor could better serve the needs of Hindu women. When her speech was publicized, contributions came in from all over India. In 1883, she travelled to New York by ship, chaperoned by 2 Englishwomen missionaries known by the Thornborns. Theodicia Carpenter welcomed her, and she stayed in Carpenter’s home while she was at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, beginning her training at age 19. The climate did was too cold, and the food was unfamiliar. She developed tuberculosis, but still graduated with an M.D. in 1886. Returning to India, the princely state of Kolapur appointed her as physician-in-charge of the female ward of the local Albert Edward Hospital. But in 1887, only a few months after her return, she died of tuberculosis at age 21. Her death was mourned throughout India
Anandibai Joshee, with Kei Okami from Japan (center) and Sabat Islambouli from Syria (right). All three completed their medical studies at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and each of them was the first woman from their respective countries to obtain a degree in Western medicine
- March 31, 1888 – National Council of Women of the U.S. is organized by Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Sojourner Truth, among others, the oldest non-sectarian women’s organization in the U.S.
- March 31, 1889 – Muriel Hazel Wright born, Choctaw Indian, teacher, historian, author, editor of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, quarterly journal of the Oklahoma Historical Society (1955-73), co-authored 4-volume history of Oklahoma, textbooks of Oklahoma history, and A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma (1951)
- March 31, 1934 – Kamala Suraiyya born, Indian author in Malayalam of short stories and her autobiography, while publishing poetry in English, often under the pen names; syndicated columnist who often wrote on women’s issues and politics
- March 31, 1942 – Ulla Hoffmann born, Swedish Vänsterpartiet (Left Party) politician; member of the Riksdag (1994-2006); she briefly served as interim leader of her party in 2003
- March 31, 1943 – Deirdre Clancy born, British costume designer for theatre, ballet, opera and film. Winner of two Olivier Awards for Best Costume Design in 1995 and 2005, and a BAFTA Award for her costumes for the 1997 movie Mrs. Brown. She is the author of several books on period costume, including Costume since 1945: Couture, street style and anti-fashion; Designing Costume for Stage and Screen; and co-author of Colonial America
- March 31, 1950 – Sandra Morgen born, American feminist anthropologist; director of the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society
- March 31, 1969 – Nyamko Sabuni born in Burundi, Swedish politician, member of the Liberal People’s Party; Minister for Gender Equality (2006-2013), the first person of African descent to be appointed as a Minister ; her outspoken opinions on genital mutilation, honor killings, against wearing of the hijab by girls under 15 and a statement that praying five times a day “limited opportunities” for Muslims, brought accusations of Islamophobia
- March 31, 1982 – Audrey Kawasaki born, Japanese-American artist based in Los Angeles; noted for her paintings of young women, often combining elements from Art Nouveau with Japanese Manga
- March 31, 1983 – Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother premieres in NYC; winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the original production ran for 380 performances on Broadway
- March 31, 1988 – Toni Morrison awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for her novel Beloved
- March 31, 2009 – International Transgender Day of Visibility is launched by Transgender activist Rachel Crandall of Michigan, now spearheaded by Trans Student Educational Resources
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