Welcome to WOW2 — Early July!
WOW2 is a sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events just from July 1 to July 12. Since I’ve broken the data limit on individual diaries, I’m trying splitting WOW2 into three posts this month. Next Saturday, July 20, I’ll post Mid-July, then on Saturday, July 27, Late July will post.
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 kept getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!
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.
Many thanks to libera nos — not only for volunteering to be the proofreader for WOW2, but for also contributing to the research. So he is now officially Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5.
For the entire previous EARLY JULY list as of 2018,
click HERE: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early JULY 2019 page are the new people and events, or additional information and visuals,
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
will post soon, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
NOTE: Today is my husband’s birthday, so I won’t be here to host (but I’ll probably check in later this evening.) Please DO comment — I’ll respond tomorrow, if not sooner.
Early July’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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- July 1, 1826 – Ellen Clark Sargent born, American woman suffragist and good friend of Susan B. Anthony, who moved across the country to California in 1852, and established the Nevada County Women’s Suffrage Association, the first in the state. Her husband, Aaron Sargent, elected as a U.S. Senator (Republican-California, 1873-1879) was the first Senator to speak for women’s suffrage on the Senate floor, and introduced in 1878 the bill with the twenty-nine words that would become the 19th Amendment, a bill that would be introduced unsuccessfully in every Senate session for the next 40 years. Ellen Clark Sargent was a founder of the Century Club, which helped elect women to local school boards, and she served on the boards of the California Equal Suffrage Association and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She worked tirelessly for women’s rights, and was the first president of the California Woman Suffrage Association. Clark Sargent died just days after a hard-fought CWSA campaign triumphantly won the vote for California women in 1911. On the day of her memorial service, for the first time in the state, flags were flown at half mast for a woman.
- July 1, 1834 – Deotyma born as Jadwiga Łuszczewska, Polish poet and novelist; noted for Sobieski pod Wiedniem (Sobieski Near Vienna).
- July 1, 1858 – Alice Barber Stephens born, American painter, engraver and illustrator.
- July 1, 1873 – Alice Guy-Blaché born, French filmmaker, pioneer in early cinema and narrative fiction films, one of the first women directors; founder and director of Solax Studios; her film A Fool and His Money, made in 1912, had an all-black cast.
- July 1, 1887 – Amber Reeves born, New Zealand- born British author, socialist and feminist; chose getting an education at Cambridge over a Court Presentation as a debutante; wrote four novels and four works of non-fiction with socialist and feminist themes; member of the Labour Party, and edited Womens Leader, a party publication.
- July 1, 1904 – Mary Steichen Calderone born, physician and sex educator, Medical Director of Planned Parenthood (1953-1964), principal founder and president of Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (1964).
- July 1, 1940 – Ela Gandhi born, South African peace activist; Member of the South African Parliament (1994-2004) aligned with the ANC (African National Congress); granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi.
- July 1, 1946 – Mireya Moscoso born, first woman elected President of Panama, presiding during the handover of the Panama Canal by the U.S.
- July 1, 2014 – Vice Admiral Michelle J. Howard is promoted to 4-star Admiral, the first woman to achieve the U.S. Navy’s highest rank.
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- July 2, 1575 – Elizabeth de Vere born, Countess of Derby; took over as Lord of Mann (1612-1627) from her husband, the first woman to rule as the Isle of Man’s head of state.
- July 2, 1865 – Lily Braun born as Amalie von Kretschmann, German feminist writer, journalist and a leader of the German feminists who believed in more gradual societal change. Braun was a member of the Social Democratic Party. She worked for the feminist newspaper Die Frauenbewegung (The Women’s Movement); advocate for women’s economic freedom and for replacing traditional and legal marriage with new types of personal relationships.
- July 2, 1876 – Harriet Brooks born, the first Canadian woman nuclear physicist, noted for her research on nuclear transmutations and radioactivity. She was one of the first people to discover radon, and did pioneering work in determining its atomic mass. She entered McGill University in 1894, shortly after McGill’s first women students graduated in 1888 with Bachelor of Arts degrees, but she was ineligible for a scholarship her first two years because she was a woman. Brooks graduated with first-class honours, and a B.A. in mathematics and natural philosophy in 1898. She went on to be the first woman to earn a master’s degree, in electromagnetism, from McGill. Her series of experiments to determine the nature of the radioactive emissions from thorium became one of the foundations for the development of nuclear science. In 1905, she accepted a position on the faculty of Barnard College in the U.S. In 1906, she became engaged, but broke it off when the college trustees insisted, over her objections and those of Margaret Maltby, head of the Barnard physics department, that a married woman could not remain on the faculty. She met Marie Curie later that year, and went to work as a member of Curie’s staff at the Institut du Radium in Paris. Though none of her research was published under her name, she was cited in articles published under the aegis of the Curie Institute. In 1907, she married McGill physics instructor Frank Pitcher, and ended both her career in physics and as an academic. She died in 1933 at the age of 57, of a ‘blood disorder’ – probably leukaemia caused by radiation exposure. The New York Times published her obituary, crediting her as the “discoverer of the recoil of a radioactive atom.”
- July 2, 1879 – Genevieve Cline born, American lawyer and judge, first woman named to the federal judiciary, advocate for consumer protection, women’s rights and suffrage.
- July 2, 1896 – Lydia Mei born, Estonian painter, known for watercolors and still-life paintings.
- July 2, 1918 – Frances Reed Elliot becomes the first African American woman accepted into the American Red Cross Nursing Service.
- July 2, 1922 – Eleanor Leacock born, cultural anthropologist, studied Native North Americans, and issues of gender and class, racism, and poverty. Her essay"Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems" has been very influential.
- July 2, 1923 – Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet, essayist and translator; won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1995 Herder Prize, and the 1991 Goethe Prize; called the woman “who mixed elegance of language with the fury of Beethoven.” When Wisława tried to get her first book published in 1949, it was deemed to “not meet socialist requirements.”
- July 2, 1943 – Ivi Eenmaa born, Estonian librarian and politician; head of the Estonian National Library (1993-1997); the first woman mayor of Tallinn (1997-1999); mayor of Võru (2005-2007); elected to the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) in 2007.
- July 2, 1947 – Ann Taylor born, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, British Labour politician; Minister of State for International Defence and Security (2008-2010); Chief Whip in the Commons and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (1998-2001); first woman Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Privy Council; Member of Parliament (1974-2005); became a Life Peer in 2005.
- July 2, 1950 – Dame Lynne Brindley born, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, since 2013; first woman Chief Executive of the British Library, the UK’s national library (2000-2012); Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
- July 2, 1951 – Sylvia Rivera born, American gay liberation and transgender rights activist of Venezuelan-Puerto Rican heritage; member of the Gay Activists Alliance, and co-founder with Marsha P. Johnson of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group dedicated to helping homeless gay youth, trans women, drag queens, and later AIDS patients who lost their homes. She struggled with substance abuse, and sometimes lived on the streets herself, especially after Marsha Johnson’s body was found floating in the Hudson River in 1992, ruled a suicide by police, but believed by Rivera and others to be a murder. Rivera died in 2002 from liver cancer.
- July 2, 1960 – Maria Lourdes Sereno born, Filipina lawyer and judge; appointed by Benigno Aquino III as de facto Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (2012-2018), the first woman and second youngest person to head the judiciary. She was removed from office in an 8-6 decision over a quo warranto petition (demand for one to show one’s right to authority) voiding her appointment in 2018, believed to be politically motivated as she has been an outspoken critic of Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines since 2016.
- July 2, 1979 – U.S. Mint releases an ill-conceived dollar coin meant to honor Susan B. Anthony.
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- July 3, 1790 – Nicolas de Condorcet publishes “De l’admission des femmes au droit de cité“(For the Admission to the Rights of Citizenship For Women) in which he strongly advocates for women’s suffrage in the new Republic as well as enlargement of basic political and social rights to include women; Condorcet identifies gender as a social construction based on perceived differences in sex and rejected biological determinism as an explanation of gender relations in society. He denounces patriarchal norms of oppression, present at every institutional level, and continuously subjugating and marginalising women, identifying education as crucial to the emancipation of individuals: ″I believe that all other differences between men and women are simply the result of education.″
- July 3, 1860 – Charlotte Perkins Gilman born, American feminist leader, sociologist, author, poet and social reform lecturer; best known for her subtly terrifying short-story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but her non-fiction works, such as Women and Economics, and The Home: Its Work and Influence, contributed much to feminist thought; from 1909-1916, Gilman single-handedly wrote and edited The Forerunner, a monthly magazine where many of her ideas first appeared. She produced 86 issues, each 28 pages long, for nearly 1,500 subscribers, from 1909 through 1916.
- July 3, 1908 – M.F.K. Fisher born as Mary Frances Kennedy, influential American food writer, author of 26 books, and a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin; founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library; Her books Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf are among her most popular works.
- July 3, 1926 – Rae Allen born as Raffaella Abruzzo, American actress and theatre director; won the 1971 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play as Fleur Stein in And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little. She played the mother of sisters Dottie and Kit (Geena Davis and Lori Petty) in A League of Their Own.
- July 3, 1938 – Jean Aitchison born, English linguist and academic; Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; noted for Socio-historical linguistics, and the relationship of language to the mind and to media.
- July 3, 1941 – Gloria Allred born, American women’s and civil rights attorney noted for taking high-profile and controversial cases, especially cases involving employment discrimination and sexual harassment.
- July 3, 1963 – Tracey Emin born, English contemporary artist.
- July 3, 1964 – Joanne Harris born, English author; best known for her novel Chocolat, which won the 2000 Creative Freedom Award and the 2001 Whittaker Gold Award.
- July 3, 1983 – Dorota Masłowska born, Polish writer, playwright, columnist and journalist; author of Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (Polish-Russian War under White-Red Flag) and Paw królowej (The Queen’s Peacock), which won the 2006 NIKE Literary Award.
- July 3, 1984 – U.S. Supreme Court rules Jaycees may be compelled by a state’s anti-discrimination law admit women members.
- July 3, 1996 – Women’s Day in Myanmar: The Myanmar National Committee for Women’s Affairs was formed, to ensure the security and development of all Myanmar women. They have a long way to go. The current Constitution, military-drafted in 2008, still includes references to women principally as mothers, and despite prohibiting gender discrimination in appointments to government posts, also states: “nothing in this section shall prevent appointment of men to positions that are naturally suitable for men only.”
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- July 4, 68 BC – Salonia Matidia born; her maternal uncle was Trajan, who thought highly of her intelligence and listened to her opinions; her daughter married Hadrian, who became Roman Emperor after Trajan; when Matidia died in 119, Hadrian delivered her funeral oration, deified her, and granted her a temple and altar in Rome itself, making her the first divinized Roman woman with a full-scale temple of her own, not shared with her husband.
- July 4, 1868 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt born, American astronomer; she discovered the relationship between luminosity and variables associated with Cepheid stars, stars which vary regularly in brightness in periods ranging from a few days to several months, during her study of hundreds of variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds. The Period-Luminosity relation is used by astronomers to calculate the distance between Earth and other galaxies.
- July 4, 1876 – Suffragists crash the Centennial Celebration in Independence Hall to present the Vice President with a declaration of the rights of women, chiefly written by Matilda Joslyn Gage. Outside the hall, Susan B. Anthony read the document aloud: “. . . we do rejoice in the success, thus far, of our experiment of self-government. Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the cornerstones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget, even at this glad hour, that while men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disenfranchisement.”
- July 4, 1898 – Dr. Pilar Barbosa de Rosario born, Puerto Rican historian, educator and political activist; daughter of Puerto Rican Senator Jose Barbosa, often called “the Father of the Puerto Rican Statehood Movement.” She earned her Doctorate in History at Clark University in Massachusetts, and returned home to become the first woman hired as a professor at University of Puerto Rico’s College of Liberal Arts; in 1929, she established the Department of History and Social Sciences, and was its director until 1943, but continued to teach until her retirement in 1967; she was very active in the statehood movement, following in her father’s footsteps, and served as a political advisor to members of the New Progressive Party, including Resident Commissioner and Governor Luis Fortuño (2009-2013); named by the Legislative Assembly as Official Historian of Puerto Rico in 1993. She lived to be 98 years old.
- July 4, 1900 – Belinda Boyd Dann, Australian, born as Quinlyn Warrakoo to a Nykina mother and an Irish cattle station manager; one of the “stolen generations,” taken away from her mother when she was 8 years old, and sent to Beagle Bay Mission in Western Australia, where her name was changed to Belinda Boyd. She married Mathias Dann in 1918. Although she remembered Warrakoo was her name, she did not know who she was or where she came from. After one of her grandsons told her story and her original name to a friend connected to the Nykina people, in 2007 Warrakoo met her 97-year-old brother for the first time, just weeks before he died, speaking the Nykina language again after almost a century. She died a few months later at age 107.
- July 4, 1900 – Nellie Mae Rowe born, Africa-American self-taught artist, now considered an important folk artist; her home and yard were her primary canvas, which she referred to as her ‘playhouse’; it was dismantled and torn down after her death in 1982, replaced by a hotel, which has a plaque identifying the site’s previous inhabitant.
- July 4, 1910 – “America the Beautiful” is published; lyrics from the poem “America” (title changed from “Pikes Peak” for publication) by Katherine Lee Bates, and music by Samuel A. Ward, originally written for a hymn called “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem” published in 1895.
- July 4, 1910 – Gloria Stuart born, American film and stage actress, visual artist, political and environmental activist; she made her first movie appearance in 1932, and played her last role in 2004, with a gap from 1945 to 1975, in which she left acting to become an artist working in several mediums, including painting, making fine prints and miniature books, and shaping Bonsai. In 1975, she started doing small parts on television and in movies, then was cast in 1996 as the older Rose in Titianic, five days after her 86th birthday. She was nominated for the 1997 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Stuart campaigned for an actors’ union, and was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. She helped form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, and was co-founder with Dorothy Parker of the League to Support the Spanish War Orphans. Became a long-time environmentalist: “I belong to every organization that has to do with saving the environment.” She lived to the age of 100.
- July 4, 1911 – Susanna Kok born in the Free State province of South Africa, medical missionary of the Dutch Reformed Church and authority on leprosy. Dr. Kok worked mainly in Mkar, Nigeria. She was the first to describe and study what came to be called Mkar disease (granuloma multiforme), a skin disease which is similar to leprosy, but doesn’t respond to treatment as leprosy does. She also worked on a study of nerve conduction in leprosy patients, and made nerve biopsies the standard procedure for diagnosing leprosy, replacing the less successful skin analysis that was used previously.
- July 4, 1916 – Sisters Adelina and Augusta Van Buren begin a successful transcontinental motorcycle tour. Addie and Gussie leave Brooklyn NY, and arrive in Los Angeles CA, on September 8, 1916. America was on the brink of entering WWI, and they proved that women could ride as well as men, so could serve as military dispatch riders, freeing up men for other tasks. They also hoped women serving in a military capacity would remove a primary argument against giving women the vote. They defied convention in dress, wearing military-style leggings and leather riding breeches.
- July 4, 1934 – Yvonne B. Miller born, American Democratic politician, civil rights activist and teacher; first African American woman to serve in both houses of the Virginia state legislature; first woman to chair a Virginia Senate committee; she died while in office as the longest-serving woman in the Virginia Senate at that time.
- July 4, 1937 – Queen Sonja of Norway born as a commoner; noted as a humanitarian activist, involved in Princess Märtha Louise’s Fund, which provides assistance to disabled children in Norway, and active in large-scale initiatives to raise funds for international refugees. Served as Vice President (1987-1990) of the Norwegian Red Cross, traveling with delegations to Botswana and Zimbabwe in 1989; Queen Sonja’s School Award, started in 2006, honors schools demonstrating “excellence in efforts to promote inclusion and equality.”
- July 4, 1951 – Kathleen Kennedy Townsend born, American attorney, Democratic politician; since 2010, chair of American Bridge, a non-profit which raises funds for Democratic candidates and causes; Lieutenant Governor of Maryland (1995-2003).
- July 4, 1963 – Sonia Pierre born, Dominican human rights advocate, worked to end Antihaitianismo, discrimination against persons of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic; recipient of Amnesty International’s 2003 Human Rights Ginetta Sagan Fund Award and the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; she grew up in a migrant workers’ camp, one of 12 children, whose father was an undocumented worker from Haiti. Her mother came with a temporary work permit in 1957. Pierre’s nationality was disputed by the Junta Central Electoral, which said her birth certificate was forged. She began her political activism at age 14, organizing a five-day protest by sugar cane workers for better living conditions and wages. She was arrested, but the workers’ demands were met. She became director of the Movement for Dominican Women of Haitian Descent (MUDHA). In 2005, she petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to hear the case of two ethnic Haitian children who were denied Dominican birth certificates, Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic, “upheld human rights laws prohibiting racial discrimination in access to nationality and citizenship.” The court also ordered the Dominican government to provide the birth certificates, but the Dominican Supreme Court later ruled that “Haitian workers were considered ‘in transit,’ and that their children were therefore not entitled to citizenship.”
- July 4, 1973 – Keiko Ihara born, Japanese race car driver, who has been racing internationally since 2000.
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- July 5, 1857 – Clara Zetkin born, German Marxist theorist and activist, women’s rights advocate. Went into exile in Paris when Bismarck banned socialist activity in Germany, and was part of organizing the Socialist International in 1889; she was a key organizer of the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, which endorsed the idea of an international day of action for women’s suffrage, now International Women’s Day; the Clara Zetkin Medal is awarded to honor women who are active in women’s rights.
- July 5, 1888 – Louise Freeland Jenkins born, American astronomer; compiles a catalogue of stars within 10 parsecs of the sun; editor, 3rd edition of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue; pursued research on trigonometric parallax of nearby stars, and variable stars.
- July 5, 1899 – Anna Arnold Hedgeman born, American civil rights leader, politician, and writer; first African American woman to hold a mayoral cabinet post in New York, YWCA executive director, executive secretary of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), assistant dean of women at Howard University.
- July 5, 1905 – Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau born, pioneering Haitian sociologist, a principle founder of the Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale (Women’s Social Action League), the first feminist organization in Haiti, and a regular contributor to La Voix des Femmes, the organization’s journal. After graduating in law at the University of Haiti (1933), she studied education and sociology at the University of Puerto Rico (1936-1938), and got her doctorate in sociology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (1941). Published Haïti et ses femmes: Une étude d’évolution culturelle (Haiti and its Women: A Study of Cultural Evolution) in 1957. Taught at Haiti’s Ethnology Institute (1941-1945), then at Fisk University. Haitian delegate to the Third Inter-American Conference on Education in 1937, and was part of a UN effort to arrange social services for Polish political prisoners in 1944; Advisor to the government of Togo on community development (1966-1968).
- July 5, 1920 – Mary Louise Hancock born, American politician and activist; New Hampshire state senator and the state’s first woman Planning Director, who later worked for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Known as the “Grand Dame” of New Hampshire politics, she was the recipient of a Robert Frost Award and the Susan B. Anthony Award. In 2000, New Hampshire’s governor proclaimed July 5 as Mary Louse Hancock Day.
- July 5, 1944 – Leni Björklund born, Swedish politician, the first woman Minister of Defence for Sweden (2002-2006); Secretary-General of the Church of Sweden (1999-2002).
- July 5, 1953 – Caryn Linda Navy born, American mathematician and computer scientist. Blind from retinopathy of prematurity; known for her work in set-theoretic topology and Braille technology; graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), honored with the AMITA Senior Academic Award from the Association of MIT Alumnae.
- July 5, 1958 – Veronica Guerin born, Irish journalist; switched careers in 1990 from accountancy, public relations and political campaign agent, to work as a reporter for the Sunday Business Post and Sunday Tribune; in 1994, she began writing about crime for the Sunday Independent, focusing on using her accounting skills to trace money from illegal drug transactions. She received death threats, including shots fired into her home in 1994, and a gunman who rang her doorbell, then as she opened the door, pushed his way in and shot her in the leg. She was beaten by drug kingpin John Gilligan when she confronted him about his lavish lifestyle with no source of income. She continued her investigations, and was honored with the 1995 International Press Freedom Award. In June, 1996, John Traynor, one of Gilligan’s lieutenants, was seeking a High Court order to prevent her from publishing a book about his involvement in organized crime, and she was scheduled to speak at a Freedom Forum conference in London on the topic of “Dying to Tell the Truth: Journalists at Risk.” Two days before she was to speak at the conference, Guerin was shot and killed while stopped at a traffic light by two men on a motorcycle, causing national outrage in Ireland. The investigation into her death identified the killers as members of Gilligan’s drug organization. Labour unions across Ireland called for a moment of silence in her memory, and Taoiseach (Ireland’s head of state) John Bruton attended her funeral. Within a week of her murder, the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), enacted the Proceeds of Crime Act 1996 and the Criminal Assets Bureau Act 1996, so that assets purchased with money obtained through crime could be seized by the government.
- July 5, 1968 – Susan Wojcicki born, Polish-American technology executive; CEO of You Tube since 2014; she was Google’s first marketing manager in 1999, then became Senior VP of Advertising & Commerce. She handled Google’s acquisition of You Tube in 2006, and then became You Tube’s CEO.
- July 5, 1969 – Jeji Kohan born, American television writer and producer; creator of the Showtime series Weeds (2005-2012), and the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019).
- July 5, 2019 – Marie Ponsot died, American poet born in 1921; essayist and translator; winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Bird Catcher. Among many other awards, she was honored with the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, given to a U.S. poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition."
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- July 6, 1387 – Blanche I of the House of Évreux,born, also called Blanche I of Navarre; Queen consort (1402-1409) of Sicily (1402-1415), and served as regent during her husband’s absence (1404-1405), then as Queen in her own right (1410-1415) after the death of his successor, during the years of unsettled succession, until Ferdinand I of Aragon was victorious, and Sicily was annexed to Aragon. She then returned to Navarre, and was sworn in as heir to the throne, and given allegiance by the lords. She was Queen regnant of Navarre from the death in 1425 of her father King Charles III until her own death in 1441.
- July 6, 1799 – Louisa Caroline Huggins Tuthill born, American author of books for children and young women, as well as non-fiction. Her husband died in 1825, leaving her a 29-year-old widow with four children, and she began to contribute anonymously to literary periodicals. Her writing first appeared under her own name in 1839, as contributor-editor of a collection entitled The Young Ladies’ Reader, which became very popular, and went through several editions. She followed this success with The Young Ladies Home, a collection of tales and essays to complete a young lady’s education after leaving school, which was also frequently reprinted. Her series of books for boys and girls between 1844 and 1850 were even more popular at the time. But her most enduring work has been History of Architecture from the Earliest Times (1848), the first history of architecture to be published in the U.S.
- July 6, 1823 – Sophie Adlersparre born, a pioneer of the 19th century Swedish women’s rights movement. She was the founder and editor of the first women’s magazine in Scandinavia, Home Review (Tidskrift för hemmet – 1859-1885); co-founder of Friends of Handicraft (Handarbetets vänner – 1874-1887); was editor-in-chief of the magazine Dagne (1886-1888), and a founder of the Fredrika Bremer Association (Fredrika-Bremer-förbundet) in 1884. She also wrote under the pen-name Esselde. Adlersparre one of the first two women to be a member of a state committee in Sweden, when she became a member of Flickskolekommittén, the Girls School Committee of 1885. She was not much concerned with woman suffrage – Swedish women gained partial suffrage, able to vote in municipal elections, in 1862. She campaigned for women’s access to education and the professions, so that they could be financially independent. She wrote: “Women need work, and work needs women.” In 1862, she began organizing evening classes for women to educate them as professionals, and in 1863, established a secretarial bureau which became a successful employment agency. In 1864, she petitioned the Swedish parliament to allow women to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts on equal terms with men. At the time, the Academy only allowed a few women to study there, under a special dispensation. Adlersparre’s petition led to a debate in parliament, and a reform later that year, which allowed women to study at the Academy on the same terms as men. In 1866, she co-founded the Stockholm Reading Parlor (Stockholms läsesalong), a free library for women. She was involved in successful campaigns for women’s access to university education, through legislation passed between 1870 and 1873, and state support for secondary schools for girls (1874).
- July 6, 1887 – Annette Kellerman born, Australian professional swimmer, one of the first women to wear a one-piece bathing suit, inspiring others to follow her example. As she put it, “I can’t swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothesline.”
- July 6, 1900 – Frederica Sagor Maas born as the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants, American screenwriter, memoirist and author; became a story editor at Universal Pictures’ New York office in 1918, and was head of the department by 1923. In 1924, she moved to Hollywood, and went to work for MGM writing scripts, usually assigned to work with other writers, but her co-authors often took credit for her work, and her contract was not renewed. After that, she and her husband Ernest Maas sometimes worked together and pitched scripts to Fox and Paramount, with hit-or-miss success. After they lost most of their money in the 1929 stock market crash, they moved back to New York, then back out to Hollywood, but their indifferent success combined with some of their best story ideas suddenly re-appearing with other names as the authors, made them change careers. She became an insurance broker, and he was a story editor and ghost writer until he died in 1986. Urged by film historian Kevin Brownlow, she published her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, at age 99, then lived to be 111.
- July 6, 1907 – Frida Kahlo born, Mexican surrealist painter, best-known for her self-portraits, considered emblematic of national and indigenous tradition.
- July 6, 1912 – Molly Yard born in China to Methodist missionaries, American feminist and social activist; after graduating from Swarthmore College, she worked on several Democratic candidates’ political campaigns, including Helen Gahagan Douglas’ run for the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon, who won by savaging Gahagan Douglas as a commie pinko, then she later led the Western Pennsylvania presidential campaigns for John F. Kennedy and George McGovern. She co-founded the liberal lobbying organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), joined the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1974, and was on its national staff by 1978, lobbying and fundraising for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification campaign in Washington. She a senior staff member on the NOW Political Action Committee (1978-1984), then NOW’s political director (1985-1987), defeating anti-choice referendums in Arkansas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Oregon. Yard became NOW president (1987- 1991), and was one of the banner-carriers for the March for Women’s Lives in 1989, which drew 600,000 marchers to Washington. She was honored with the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
- July 6, 1926 – Dorothy E. Smith born, Canadian sociologist, whose work covers women’s studies and feminist theory, family relationships, education and methodology; noted for developing institutional ethnology, a study of the social relations of actual people in everyday life (she described it as a “sociology for, not of the people”), and her contributions to the standpoint theory, the idea that hierarchies create ignorance at the top about social problems which those at the bottom understand from direct experience. Her research questioned the methods and theories of sociology up the 1970s, which she found were based on the male-dominated social structure, and overlooked women and minorities.
- July 6, 1937 – Bessie Emery Head, writer born in South Africa to a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal; her mother’s family claimed their daughter was mentally ill, and sent her away to give birth without the neighbors knowing. After her mother killed herself, she was raised by foster parents and later in a mission orphanage. Qualifying as a teacher, she taught briefly, then became a journalist for The Golden City Post and Drum magazine (1958-1959), joined the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1960, and married Harold Head in 1961. In 1964, she left South Africa with her son, and sought asylum in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (which is now Botswana); she settled in Serowe, where she would set most of her novels and short stories; after 15 years, she became a Botswana citizen. Noted for her novels When Rains Cloud Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power. She died from hepatitis at age 48, just as she was starting to be recognized as a writer.
- July 6, 1942 – Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.
- July 6, 1951 – Lorna Golding born; Jamaican businesswoman and National Labour Party member; after completing school at the New York Business Institute, she worked at the Office of British and Africa Affairs, and the United Kingdom and Supply delegation, a subsidiary of the British Consulate. She later worked for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) and with the Sierra Leone Mission to the United Nations. When her husband, Bruce Golding, became Prime Minister of Jamaica, she was First Lady of Jamaica (2007-2011).
- July 6, 1952 – Dame Hilary Mantel born, English author of historical fiction, short stories and memoirs; she won the Booker Prize twice: in 2009 for her novel Wolf Hall, and in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies. She is the first woman to receive the Booker Prize twice. Her 1983 short story, “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: 6 August 1983,” was controversial, and allies of Thatcher called for a police investigation, to which Mantel responded, her fictional murder “bringing in the police for an investigation was beyond anything I could have planned or hoped for, because it immediately exposes them to ridicule.”
- July 6, 1960 – Maria Wasiak born, Polish politician and civil servant; a founding member of the Democratic Union, then headed the regional branch of the Freedom Union party (1995-1997); deputy-voivode of the Radom Voivodeship (governmental administrative division); President of Polskie Koleje Państwowe (PKP – the Polish State Railways – 2011-2012); Minister of Infrastucture and Development of Poland (2014-2015).
- July 6, 1976 – Ioana Dumitriu born in Romania, Romanian-American mathematician and academic; her research work includes the theory of random matrices, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and game theory. She was the first woman to become a Putnam Fellow, for making one of the top five scores at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Award as the top woman in the contest in three successive years – 1995, 1996, and 1997 – a record she alone held for the next ten years, until it was equaled by Alison Miller. In 2012, she was one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.
- July 6, 1983 – U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, rules in Arizona Governing Comm. v. Norris that the longer life of women as a group compared with men as a group does not permit insurance companies, as part of employer-sponsored retirement plans, to pay lower monthly annuity benefits to women.
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- July 7, 1456 – Joan d’Arc is retried, and acquitted of heresy – 25 years after she was burned to death at the stake.
- July 7, 1831 – Jane Elizabeth Conklin born, American poet, religious writer and elocutionist; an early president of the Women’s Relief Corps of the Grand Army of the Republic, a women’s auxiliary group that sought to perpetuate the memory of the service of the Grand Army of the Republic during the American Civil War, and to honor the fallen of the GAR.
- July 7, 1851 – Lillien J. Martin born, American psychologist, author of over 12 books, including Salvaging Old Age, and Sweeping the Cobwebs; graduated from Vassar in 1880; refused admission to the University of Bonn because of her gender, she studied at the University of Göttingen (1894-1898). Martin taught psychology at Stanford University (1899-1916). In 1913, the University of Bonn awarded her an honorary doctorate. After she left Stanford, Martin became a consulting psychologist and psychopathologist in San Francisco, where she was the head of the world’s first mental health clinic specifically for elderly people and non-handicap children. She was president of the California Society for Mental Hygiene.
- July 7, 1861 – Nettie Stevens born, an early American geneticist; described the XY chromosome system in 1905, correcting and adding to the findings of Edmund Beecher Wilson, showing the significance of Y chromosomes in sex determination. After he made further experiments which confirmed her results, Wilson updated and reissued his earlier 1905 paper, with the new information, and acknowledging her discoveries, but many textbooks only credited Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan (her graduate course instructor, who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to chromosome research) with her discoveries. Wilson and Morgan were invited to speak at a conference to present their theories in 1906, but Stevens was not asked. She published about 40 papers before she died of breast cancer at age 50 in 1912. Thomas Hunt Morgan wrote an extensive obituary for the journal Science, “Her single-mindedness and devotion, combined with keen powers of observation; her thoughtfulness and patience, united to a well-balanced judgment, account, in part, for her remarkable accomplishment.”
- July 7, 1867 – Charlotte Anita Whitney, American social worker, Communist Labor Party organizer, pacifist and suffragist; defendant in the 1920 ‘Criminal Syndicalism’ trial, Whitney v. California, charged with being a member of an organization that was illegal under California law because of its association with the international Communist movement. Whitney’s conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court, but she was later pardoned by the Governor of California, and the Supreme Court explicitly overruled Whitney v. California in the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969.
- July 7, 1889 – Constance Nothard born, South African nursing sister who served with distinction in the South African Military Service during WWI, and was awarded the Croix de Recompense for her service in France. On 1961, Nothard received the first Gold Medal of the South African Nursing Association in recognition of distinguished and exceptional service in times of war and peace, and was also awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal by the International Red Cross. The Library at the South African Nursing Association headquarters in Pretoria is named the C.A. Nothard Library.
- July 7, 1905 – Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin born, French mathematician; the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France; expert in fluid dynamics and abstract algebra; author of textbooks on lattice theory and abstract algebra, and a history, Portraits of women mathematicians.
- July 7, 1915 – Margaret Walker born, African American novelist and poet, part of the Chicago Black Renaissance; noted for her poem For My People, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, making her the first black woman to win a U.S. national literary prize, and for her novel Jubilee.
- July 7, 1924 – Natalia Bekhtereva born, Russian neuroscientist and psychologist; founding director of the Institute for Human Brain, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where she did studies measuring the impulse activity of human neurons.
- July 7, 1929 – Helen Rodríguez Trías born, pediatrician, educator, Puerto Rican nationalist, and women’s rights activist. She joined the student faction of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party at the University of Puerto Rico (BA 1957, Medical Degree 1960). During her residency at University Hospital in San Juan, she established the first center for newborn care in Puerto Rico, where the death rate for newborns decreased 50% within the first three years. She was the first Hispanic president of the American Public Health Association. In the mid-1960s, when 65% of sterilization procedures in U.S. hospitals were performed on women of color, who were less than 7% of the overall population, she co-founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA), which became the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA). Rodríguez Trías was also a founding member of the Women’s Caucus of the American Public Health Association, and the recipient of the Presidential Citizen’s Medal. Her work helped to expand the range of public health services for women and children in minority and low-income populations around the world.
- July 7, 1944 – Glenys Kinnock born, Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, British teacher, Labour politician and human rights advocate; Lord Temporal Member of the House of Lords since 2009; Minister of State for Africa and the United Nations (2009-2010); Minister of State for Europe (2009); Member of the European Parliament for Wales (1999-2009); Member of the European Parliament for South Wales East (1994-1999). She is a patron and/or board member of a number of charitable organizations, including Womankind Worldwide, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, Freedom from Torture, and Snap Cymru, a Welsh children’s charity. Kinnock is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
- July 7, 1945 – Adele Goldberg born, American computer scientist, a member of the team that developed the programming language Smalltalk-80; she was also a developer of various object-oriented programming concepts and graphically based user interfaces; president of the Association for Computing Machinery (1984-1986), and co-recipient of the 1987 ACM Software Systems Award.
- July 7, 1949 – Shelley Duvall born, American actress, writer and producer; noted for producing and starring in Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-1987); supporter of animal welfare.
- July 7, 1965 – Mo Collins born as Maureen Collins, American comedian; noted her work on Mad TV (1998-2004), and her work as a voice actress. She was diagnosed in 2011 with gastrointestinal stromal tumor, a rare form of cancer, currently in remission, and has related her story to raise awareness of the disease.
- July 7, 1972 – Susan Lynn Roley and Joanne E. Pierce, the first two women FBI special agents, are sworn in. The first woman agent was Emma Hotchkiss Jentzer, who was hired by the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in 1911. J. Edgar Hoover, first and longest-serving director of the FBI (1924-1972), initiated a policy of not hiring women, and fired, or pressured to resign, women already working in any capacity other than low-level clerks and secretaries.
- July 7, 1980 – Sharia Law is instituted in Iran; women judges were removed first, but by early 1982, the entire pre-Revolutionary judiciary had been purged, their duties replaced by “Revolutionary Tribunals” set up in every town, but overseen by inexperienced and often incompetent judges, with no appeals. In 1982, a more regular court system was reinstated, but with male judges trained in Islamic law, and the Revolutionary Tribunals now handling cases of “national Security” and “anti-revolutionary” crimes.
- July 7, 1981 – Sandra Day O’Connor nominated to be first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
- July 7, 1986 – Anahit “Ana” Kasparian born, American political pundit, university lecturer and author; Raw Story columnist; best known for co-hosting and producing the online news show The Young Turks, and as a host on The Point at the TYT Network; outspoken critic of private and for-profit prisons; advocate for campaign finance reform, affordable housing, public education and free speech.
- July 7, 1992 – New York Court of Appeals overturns a conviction of two women for exposing their breasts in public; the court rules women have the same right as men to go topless in public.
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- July 8, 1593 – Artemisia Gentileschi born, Italian painter, one of the most accomplished painters of her generation, noted for painting strong or suffering women from myth; the first woman member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence.
- July 8, 1821 – Maria White Lowell, American poet and abolitionist, advocate for temperance and women’s rights. She was taught under a strict ascetic discipline at an Ursuline convent, until it was burned down during the Ursuline Convent Riots in 1834 during a wave of anti-Catholicism in New England. In 1839, she attended the first “conversation” organized by women’s rights activist Margaret Fuller, the same year her brother introduced her to his Harvard classmate, James Russell Lowell. They became engaged in 1840, but her father insisted that Lowell be gainfully employed before they were married. She and her mother spent the winter of 1843-1844 in Philadelphia, hoping its milder winter would help heal her lungs, already in the early stages of tuberculosis. She first met Quakers there, and her growing friendship with members of the congregation led to her more active opposition to slavery. After her marriage to Lowell in 1844, she joined the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and persuaded her husband to use his writing to further the anti-slavery cause. They moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as an editor on Pennsylvania’s Freeman, an antislavery weekly, but moved back to Massachusetts in 1845. Of her four children, born between 1845 and 1850, only her fourth child Mabel survived to adulthood, the others dying as infants. Maria White Lowell died in 1853, at the age of 32. Her husband privately printed her poems two years after her death.
- July 8, 1844 – Mary Bailey Lincoln born, American pioneer in domestic science, author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking.
- July 8, 1862 – Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor born, American labor organizer, communist, and a major figure in the socialist feminist movement. Bloor worked as a trade union organizer, and helped during industrial disputes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Ohio and New York. She organized strikes across a wide range of industries including miners, hatters, steelworkers, and needle-workers. In 1905, Bloor helped Upton Sinclair gather information on the Chicago stock yards. Her investigative reporting, under the pen-name ‘Mr. Richard Bloor’ eventually appeared in Sinclair’s best-selling book, The Jungle.
- July 8, 1867 – Käthe Kollwitz born, German painter, printmaker and sculptor; she often depicted the tragedy of war, poverty, and hunger.
- July 8, 1899 – Audrey Richards born, English social anthropologist, and field researcher who studied East African peoples, especially the Bemba, in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Uganda and the Transvaal in South Africa. Richards’ detailed studies included social psychology, food and nutrition, agriculture, land use, economic organization, and how long ordinary tasks took to complete, from fence-building to food gathering and preparation.
- July 8, 1911 – “Two Gun” Nan Aspinwall, rodeo cowgirl, arrives in New York City, after riding across the U.S. on horseback, departing from San Francisco CA on September 1, 1910.
- July 8, 1916 – Jean Rouverol born, American author, actress and screenwriter; blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s. She played supporting roles in Hollywood movies in the 1930s, then after her marriage to screenwriter Hugo Butler and the birth of her children, she acted in radio series like One Man’s Family in the 1940s. While her husband was serving overseas during WWII, she wrote her first novella, which she sold to McCall’s magazine in 1945. In 1950, her first screenplay was made into a film, but in 1951, she and her husband were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee because they had been members of the Communist Party in the early 1940s. The Rouverols took their four children and went into self-exile in Mexico rather than face a prison sentence. They would not return to the U.S. until 1964, but they co-authored screenplays, sold under names of friends from the Writers Guild of America, and she continued to write short stories and articles for magazines under pen names. After their return to California, she wrote a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her husband died in 1968, and she wrote three more books, as well as writing scripts for soap operas like Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow and As the World Turns. At age 84 in 2000, she published Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years. She lived to be 100 years old.
- July 8, 1918 – Julie Pirie born, British spy for MI5, who infiltrated the Communist Party in the 1950s, initially as a typist, but worked her way into the inner circles, working directly for the party undersecretary John Gollan. She was never found out, and retired from the party in 1978, with a pension which the Party paid until her death in 2008; her next assignment for MI5 was to collect information on the activities of the Provisional IRA, often posing as a tourist. She finally left active operations in the 1990s, but lectured to groups of MI5 and police trainees.
- July 8, 1926 – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross born in Switzerland, Swiss-American psychiatrist, author and leading authority on the psychology of dying. She developed the theory of the five mental-emotional stages of terminal illness and grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Best known as the author of On Death and Dying. Kübler-Ross was inducted into the American National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007.
- July 8, 1929 – Shirley Ann Grau born, American author; 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Keepers of the House.
- July 8, 1934 – Raquel Correa, Chilean journalist, mostly worked for newspaper El Mercurio de Santiago, awarded Chile’s National Journalism Award in 1991.
- July 8, 1945 – Micheline Calmy-Rey born, Swiss Social Democratic politician; President of Switzerland (2007 and 2011); Vice President of Switzerland (2006 and 2010); Minister of Foreign Affairs and Member of the Swiss Federal Council (2003-2011).
- July 8, 1947 – Jenny Diski born, English writer; regular contributor to the London Review of Books, and won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions. Noted for her memoirs, Skating to Antarctica in 1997, and In Gratitude, written about her mentor Doris Lessing, and other literary figures who had inspired her, which was published in 2016, just before her death from cancer.
- July 8, 1948 – The U.S. Air Force recruits first women into its W.A.F. program, and the U.S. Navy accepts its first peace-time female recruits after the Women’s Armed Service Integration Act allows women to serve when the nation is not at war.
- July 8, 1948 – Ruby Sales born, African American social activist; at age 17, she participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, she was part of the voter registration drive, and was arrested with others for picketing a whites-only store, which was ignoring the Civil Rights Act of 1964; after her release, she went with friends to buy sodas at a nearby store, where she was confronted by a special county deputy with a shot gun; fellow marcher and activist Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopalian studying for the priesthood, pushed her out of the way, and was shot to death in her place. Sales was so traumatized by his murder she could barely speak for seven months, but in spite of death threats made against her and her family, she testified at the trial. The deputy was acquitted by an all-white-male jury, resulting in legal challenges and a reform of jury selection procedures. She went on to the same divinity school that Jonathan Daniels had attended, then worked as a human rights advocate in Washington DC. Sales founded the SpiritHouse Project, a non-profit inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels’ memory.
- July 8, 1951 – Anjelica Huston born, American actress, director, producer and author; won the 1985 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Prizzi’s Honor, and made her directorial debut with the 1996 film Bastard out of Carolina, then directed and starred in Agnes Browne in 1999. She has published two memoirs: A Story Lately Told and Watch Me. Huston led a 2007 letter campaign for U.S. Campaign for Burma and Human Rights Center, and recorded a public service announcement for PETA urging her Hollywood colleagues not to use great apes in television, movies or advertisements.
- July 8, 1952 – Marianne Williamson born, teacher, author and lecturer on the intersection between spirituality and politics; founder of Project Angel Food, a meals-on wheels program serving homebound people with AIDS; a co-founder of the Peace Alliance, the grassroots campaign supporting legislation to establish a U.S Department of Peace; and member of the Board of RESULTS, a non-profit working to end poverty; author of several books, including A Woman’s Worth, and Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment. Currently a candidate for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination.
- July 8, 1958 – Tzipi Livni born, Israeli politician, diplomat, and lawyer; represented five different factions during her time (1999-2019) in the Knesset (Israeli legislature). She also served in 8 different cabinet positions, including Foreign Minister (2006-2009, record for the most government roles held by an Israeli woman. She is known for her efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is a leading voice for the two-state solution.
- July 8, 1982 – Sophia Bush born, American actress and activist, fundraising for Fuck Cancer, Run for the Gulf and Global Green Gulf Relief; campaigned for Barak Obama and other Democrats in Texas during the 2008 election; supporter of gay rights, women’s rights, and protecting the environment; she was among the performers who told the stories of the people killed in the Orlando Pulse massacre for a 2016 Human Rights Campaign memorial video.
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- July 9, 1764 – Ann Radcliffe born, English novelist, pioneer of the Gothic novel; noted for The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho.
- July 9, 1811 – Fanny Fern born, American author and columnist for the New York Ledger.
- July 9, 1858 – Kaikhusrau Jahan born, progressive Begum (ruler) of Bhopal (1901- 1926), greatly improved education and public health services for her people.
- July 9, 1894 – Dorothy Thompson born, American journalist and radio broadcaster, first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934, recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as the second most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt.
- July 9, 1917 – Krystyna Chlond Dańko born, Polish orphan in Otwock who saved the lives of her Jewish friend Lusia Kokszko, and Lusia’s family during the WWII Nazi occupation of Poland, smuggling two of them out of Otwock to Warsaw; she hid the rest of the family, and brought them food and clothing; in 1998, she was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Most of the rest of the Jews of Otwock perished in the Treblinka death camp, or were summarily shot when the Otwock ghetto was liquidated in September 1942.
- July 9, 1926 – Mathilde Krim born in Italy, American medical researcher, part of the team that developed a prenatal method to determine fetal gender; one of the earliest researchers to recognize the severity of the threat of AIDS, she was the founding chair of AIDS Medical Foundation which became amfAR, an association for AIDS research; she was honored in 2000 with Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2003 Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged.
- July 9, 1930 – Janice Lourie born, American computer scientist and graphic artist; pioneer in CAD/Cam for the textile industry, best known for inventing software tools that facilitate textile production from artist to manufacturer; a founding member of the Camerata of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and played the tenor shawm and psaltery from the museum collection.
- July 9, 1931 – Sylvia A. Bacon born, American Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (1970-1991), appointed by Richard Nixon; worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (1956-1970) and served under Ramsey Clark, helping to draft legislation for D.C. court reform.
- July 9, 1935 – Mercedes Sosa born, Argentine singer and activist, won several Grammy Awards and a posthumous Latin Grammy for Best Folk Album, UNICEF ambassador.
- July 9, 1936 – June Jordan born, American poet, writer, educator and activist, columnist for The Progressive, librettist for the musical I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, recipient of numerous awards including the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists.
- July 9, 1944 – Judith M. Brown born in India, British historian, specialist in modern South Asia, and an Anglican priest; Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford (1990-2011); Research Fellow, Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Girton College, Cambridge (1968-1971); Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928-1934.
- July 9, 1970 – Masami Tsuda born, Japanese shōjo manga artist; noted for Kare Kano: His and Hers Circumstances, and the series Chotto Edo Made.
- July 9, 1974 – Siân Berry born, British politician and environmentalist; Co-Leader with Jonathan Bartley of the Green Party of England and Wales since 2018; Leader of the Green Party in the London Assembly (2016-2018); Member of the London Assembly since 2016; Principal Speaker of the Green Party (2006-2007). She was a founder of the Alliance against Urban 4X4s, a campaign demanding measures to stop sport utility vehicles from “taking over our cities” which has placed about 150,000 mock parking tickets on 4X4s.
- July 9, 1978 – In hot, humid weather, 100,000 supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.) march in Washington DC, with banners in purple and white to honor the National Woman’s Suffrage Party of Alice Paul. Paul had turned, immediately after the long-awaited success of the campaign for women’s right to vote, to making women’s legal equality a Constitutional amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923, but not sent to the states for ratification until 1972. The march supports bill H.J.R. 638, to extend E.R.A.’s deadline to March 22, 1979. Only eight votes by state senators in three states had kept the E.R.A. from being ratified by March 1, 1977.
- July 9, 1986 – New Zealand’s Homosexual Law Reform Act legalizes homosexuality.
- July 9, 1987 – Rebecca Sugar born, American animator, producer and songwriter; the first woman animator to independently create a series for a network, the Cartoon Network series Steven Universe, which first aired in 2013. She was previously a writer and storyboard artist on the network’s Adventure Time series (2010-2013). She has been nominated five times for Primetime Emmy Awards.
- July 9, 2018 – China announces that the poet Liu Xia, who had been under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance since 2010 when her husband, author and activist Liu Xiaobo, won the Nobel Peace Prize, will be allowed to leave the country for Berlin, Germany. She had never been charged with a crime. The announcement came just days before the one-year anniversary of Liu Xiaobo’s death from liver cancer while serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” His arrest and incarceration set off world-wide protests and appeals for his release.
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- July 10, 1553 – Lady Jane Grey, nominated in his will by the dying boy, King Edward VI, as his successor in preference to his Catholic half-sister Mary, begins her nine day reign as Queen of England and Ireland.
- July 10, 1724 – Eva Ekeblad born, Swedish countess, salon host, agronomist and scientist; known for discovering a method to make flour and alcohol from potatoes, transforming potatoes from an exotic food grown only in the greenhouses of the aristocracy to a staple food of Sweden, significantly reducing the country’s incidence of famine; first woman to become a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1748.
- July 10, 1875 – Mary McLeod Bethune born to former slaves, American educator and civil rights leader; Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls founder (which becomes Bethune-Cookman University); president (1917-1925) of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Colored Women, and registered black voters inspite of threats from the Ku Klux Klan, and became NACW national president in 1924. During her tenure, NACW became the first black-controlled organization to have headquarters in Washington DC. In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women, and became a full-time staff member of the National Youth Administration in 1936, then became Director of the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs in 1938, and was an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.
- July 10, 1882 – Texas Governor Jim Hogg named his new-born daughter Ima; in spite of this handicap, Ima Hogg became a leader of Texas society, well-known and respected as a philanthropist and patron of the arts. She established and managed the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and was president of the Symphony Society. She founded the Houston Child Guidance Center, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, and sat on the Houston School Board, where she worked to remove gender and race criteria from teacher and staff pay, and started art education programs for black students.
- July 10, 1891 – Edith Hinkley Quimby born, American medical researcher and physicist, pioneer in nuclear medicine; developed diagnostic and therapeutic applications of X-rays, and instituted protections for both the technicians and the patients from overexposure to radioactive materials, assuring the use of the lowest dose possible to achieve results; in 1940, she was the first woman honored with the Janeway Medal by the American Radium Society; awarded the 1941 Gold Medal of the Radiological Society of North America; she was also one of the first members of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.
- July 10, 1896 – Thérèse Casgrain born, Canadian feminist, reformer and politician, leader in the women’s suffrage movement as a founder of the Provincial Franchise Committee for the emancipation of women, hosted the radio show Fémina in the 1930s; the first woman to lead a political party in Canada, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), ancestor of the current New Democratic Party.
- July 10, 1905 – Mildred Wirt Benson born, American journalist and author of 23 of the 30 original Nancy Drew mysteries (the series was written by various authors but all books were published under “Carolyn Keene”).
- July 10, 1921 – Eunice Kennedy Shriver born, American activist, founder of Camp Shriver which evolved into the Special Olympics, long time advocate for children with disabilities, recipient of many awards and honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- July 10, 1922 – Jean Kerr born, American author and playwright, wrote bestseller Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.
- July 10, 1929 – Winnie Ewing, Scottish lawyer and politician; served as a Member of the UK Parliament, the European Parliament; reconvened and served in the Scottish Parliament.
- July 10, 1931 – Alice Munro born, Canadian author, known for her short stories, recipient of many awards and honors including Canada’s Governor General’s Award, the Man Booker International Prize and the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
- July 10, 1931 – Julian May born, American science fiction, fantasy and children’s author; she used several pen names, including Lee N. Falconer and Ian Thorne; best known for her two series, Saga of Pliocene Exile and Galactic Milieu.
- July 10, 1939 – Mavis Staples born, African American rhythm-and-blues and gospel singer, and civil rights activist.
- July 10, 1943 – Inonge Mbikusita-Lewanika born, Zambian politician; Republic of Zambia Ambassador to the U.S. (2003-2008); Zambian special envoy to the African Union (2001-2003); Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) Member of Zambian Parliament (1991-2001); UNICEF regional advisor for Africa (?-1991).
- July 10, 1959 – Ellen Kuras born, American cinematographer and filmmaker; one of the first women to become a member of the American Society of Cinematographers; known for her cinematography work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and her directorial debut, The Betrayal, which won a Primetime Emmy Award for Non-Fiction Filmmaking, and was nominated for a 2009 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
- July 10, 1966 – Anna Bråkenhielm born, Swedish publisher and television producer; owner and CEO of Passion for Business magazine; CEO of Strix Television and Silverback productions.
- July 10, 1967 – Gillian Tett born, British journalist and finance columnist for the Financial Times, one of the first to warn that a financial crisis was looming in 2007.
- July 10, 1999 – U.S. women’s soccer team wins the World Cup at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl in California.
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- July 11, 1653 – Sarah Good born, one of the first three women accused of witchcraft in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials in colonial Massachusetts. When she was found guilty, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes persisted in trying to force her to confess, but she shouted at him, “I’m no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.” Sarah Good was hanged with four other women, but 25 years later, Noyes died from choking on his own blood.
- July 11, 1850 – Annie Armstrong born, American lay Southern Baptist leader; co-founder and first correspondent secretary (de facto leader – 1888-1906) of the Women’s Missionary Union, which was forged in spite of fierce opposition by male Southern Baptist leaders; she worked tirelessly as an advocate for missionaries, especially those in the U.S. and Canada, telling their stories and raising funds to support their missions.
- July 11, 1851 – Millie and Christine McCoy born, American conjoined twins, born into slavery in North Carolina; after the Civil War, the twins received an education, learning five languages, dancing and music; they had a successful career as “The Two-Headed Nightingale” with the Barnum Circus until their deaths.
- July 11, 1871 – Edith Rickert born, American author and influential medieval scholar at the University of Chicago; notable for her works on Chaucer. She worked as a Cryptographer for the U.S. government in Washington DC during World War I.
- July 11, 1881 – Isabel Martin Lewis born, American astronomer; first woman hired by the U.S. Naval Observatory as an assistant astronomer; elected in 1918 as a member of the American Astronomical Society; after the birth of her son, she worked part-time at the observatory, but wrote three books and countless articles to popularize astronomy and earth science, including a monthly column for thirty years in the American Nature Association’s Nature Magazine (not the same as the journal Nature). She returned to full-time work when her husband died in 1927, and promoted to Assistant Scientist, then in 1930 to the rank of Astronomer; specialized in eclipses, contributing a faster and more accurate method of determining where an eclipse would be visible, and the moon’s occultations. She went on solar eclipse expeditions to Russia in 1936 and to Peru in 1937, and retired from the Naval Observatory in 1951, but continued to write articles for newspapers and magazines; she had of one the longest and most successful careers of any woman astronomer in the first half of the 20th century.
- July 11, 1894 – Erna Mohr born, German zoologist, long associated with the Zoological Museum Hamburg, where she started as a volunteer (1914-1934), then later became department head of the Fish Biology Department (1934-1936), then the Department of Higher Vertebrates (1936-1946), and finally Curator of the Vertebrate Department (1946-1968?); she made many contributions to ichthyology and mammalogy, producing over 400 publications; the first woman to be elected as an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mammalogists.
- July 11, 1901 – Gwendolyn ‘Madame Liz’ Lizarraga born, Belizean businesswoman, women’s rights activist and politician; founder of the United Women’s Group in 1959, with 900 members initially, to empower women culturally, economically and politically; co-founder of the United Women’s Credit Union. She helped women to become “property owners” (then a requirement for voters) by surveying and mapping parcels in the swamps and registering them with the Lands department. In 1961, women were allowed to run for the first time in the national elections, and Lizarraga won her race with 69% of the vote, becoming the first woman elected to the British Honduras Legislative Assembly (1961-1974 –now Belize House of Representatives), she was the first woman appointed as a government minister, the Minister of Education, Housing and Social Services. In 1969, Lizarraga spearheaded a low-cost housing project, and spoke out against granting casino concessions. She collected folklore and music, helping to revive the Mestizada dances. She was also a chess player, and one of the organizers of the first Belize chess club.
- July 11, 1918 – Venetia Burney born, English girl credited by Clyde Tombaugh with suggesting Pluto as the name for his 1930 discovery when she was 11 years old. The asteroid 6235 Burney and Burney Crater on Pluto were named in her honour. In July 2015 the New Horizons spacecraft was the first to visit Pluto and carried an instrument named Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter in her honour. As an adult, she taught economics and mathematics at girls’ schools in the London area.
- July 11, 1928 – Andrea Veneracion born, Filipina choirmaster, founder of the Philippine Madrigal Singers in 1963, which won major awards in international competition; founding choirmaster and first conductor of the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music Chorale; 1999 Philippine National Artist for Music.
- July 11, 1944 – Patricia Polacco born, American author and illustrator of over 60 books, mostly for children; Thank You, Mr. Falker, The Lemonade Club, Mr. Lincoln’s Way and The Mermaid’s Purse.
- July 11, 1954 – Julia King born, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, British engineer, PhD in fracture mechanics; crossbench Life Peer member of the House of Lords since 2015.
- July 11, 1960 – Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is published.
- July 11, 1967 – Jhumpa Lahiri born in London, daughter of Bengali Indian emigrants, moved to the U.S. when she was two; American author and professor of creative writing at Princeton; her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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- July 12, 1879 – Margherita Piazzola Beloch born, Italian mathematician; fields of study were algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry; notable for her work on birational transformations in space, contributions to the theory of skew algebraic curves, and the topological properties of algebraic curves.
- July 12, 1895 – Kirsten Flagstad born, Norwegian soprano, ranked among the greatest singers of the 20th century, known for her roles in the operas of Wagner.
- July 12, 1918 – Doris Grumbach born, American novelist, biographer, essayist and co-owner of Wayward Books bookstore in Sargentville Maine; literary editor of The New Republic (1972-1974); noted for novels about women, many with gay and lesbian themes, and her two memoirs: Coming into the End Zone, and Extra Innings.
- July 12, 1920 – Beah Richards born, American stage, film and television actress, author, poet, playwright, and civil rights activist, best known for performances in the original Broadway productions of The Miracle Worker and A Raisin in the Sun. Also known for her performance in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
- July 12, 1928 – Pixie Williams born, New Zealand singer, of Māori descent, recipient of a triple platinum award from the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand for her “Blue Smoke” and a single platinum award for “Let’s Talk It Over.”
- July 12, 1938 – Eiko Ishioka born, Japanese art director, costume designer, and graphic designer known for her work in stage, screen, advertising, and print media. She won the 1992 Oscar for Best Costume Design for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was posthumously nominated for a costume design Oscar for her work in the 2012 film Mirror Mirror. Ishioka died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.
- July 12, 1944 – Delia Ephron born, American novelist, playwright and screenwriter; co-author with her sister Nora of the play Love, Loss and What I Wore, which ran Off-Broadway for over 2 ½ years; her screenplays include The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and You’ve Got Mail.
- July 12, 1951 – Joan B. Bauer born, American young adult author; noted for Squashed, and Rules of the Road, which was a Newbery Honor Book and won the Golden Kite Award.
- July 12, 1952 – Irina Bokova born, Bulgarian politician and diplomat; first woman Director-General of UNESCO (2009-2017); Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs (acting/1996-1997), Bulgarian Ambassador to France and Monaco; advocate for gender equality, improved education and preventing funding for terrorism, especially by enforcing protection of intellectual goods; firm opponent of racism and anti-Semitism; led UNESCO’s activities on Holocaust remembrance.
- July 12, 1962 – Joanna Shields born in America, Baroness Shields, British Conservative politician and Group CEO of BenevolentAI; Life peer in the House of Lords since 2014; Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Internet Safety (2016-2018); Under-Secretary of State Minister for Internet Safety & Security (2015-2017).
- July 12, 1969 – Chantal Jouanno born, French UDI (center-right) politician and former French karate champion: French Senator for Paris since 2011; French Minister of Sports (2010-2011); French Minister for Ecology (2009-2010).
- July 12, 1969 – Anne-Sophie Pic born, French chef; the fourth woman to win three Michelin stars, for her family’s restaurant, Maison Pic, in Valance, in Southern France.
- July 12, 1970 – Aure Atika born in Portugal to Moroccan-Jewish parents, French actress, screenwriter and director; noted for directing À quoi ça sert de voter écolo? (What’s the point of voting Green?), which won the 2004 Prix de la Fondation Beaumarchais for best short film, De l’amour (In Love), and On ne badine pas avec Rosette (Don’t Mess with Rosette).
- July 12, 1971 – Loni Love born, African American comedian, actress, author, and a host on the talk show The Real since 2013. She switched from electrical engineering to music engineering, then won a $50 prize in a stand-up comedy competition, and played clubs while keeping her day job at Xerox, becoming a regular at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. After eight years at Xerox, Love resigned during a layoff to prevent someone else from losing their job, and pursued comedy full-time.
- July 12, 1972 – Shirley Chisholm receives 152 votes in the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, becoming the first black person to receive convention votes for President of the United States at a major political party convention, and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
- July 12, 1984 – Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale names New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro his running mate, making her the first woman to run on a major party ticket.
- July 12, 1990 – Dobsonville shanty town women in Soweto, South Africa, strip to the waist and confront bulldozers in a vain attempt to stop the demolition of their homes ordered by government authorities. Dobsonville echoes the destruction of Sophiatown in Soweto between 1955 and 1960, (after passage of the Native Resettlement Act No. 19 of 1954) the forcible removal by police of over 60,000 residents, in spite of protests and violent confrontations.
- July 12, 1997 – Malala Yousafzai born, Pakistani universal education and human rights advocate; youngest person to win a Nobel Prize, as co-recipient of the 2014 Peace prize at age 17; she survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012, targeted because of her blog, written as ‘BBC Urdu’ and detailing the Taliban occupation of the Swat district of Pakistan, which received much attention after the NY Times made a documentary in 2010 about her.
- July 12, 2010 – Roman Polanski is declared a free man, no longer confined to house arrest in his Alpine villa, after Swiss authorities reject a U.S. request for the Oscar-winning director's extradition because of a 32-year-old conviction for sex with a minor, a 13-year-old girl. The five original charges against him were for rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, but he accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Polanski fled from the U.S. in February, 1978, to avoid imprisonment and deportation. In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences belatedly voted to expel Polanski from its membership because of his conviction and flight from punishment, after awarding him a Best Director Oscar in 2002 for The Pianist.
- July 12, 2013 – On her 16th birthday, Malala Yousafzai addresses the United Nations, calling for universal access to education.
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Sources
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Late June Poll Results, 9 Votes cast —
Done in Two Parts got the most votes
WOW2 HAS BECOME TOO BIG FOR SINGLE POST. WOULD YOU LIKE IT TO BE:
- Fewer Women? — 33% – 3 votes
- Fewer Pictures and Quotes? — No Votes
- Shorter Biographies? — 11% – 1 vote
- Done in Two Parts — 56% – 5 votes
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