Welcome to WOW2!
WOW2 is a sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events just from September 11 to September 20.
Since I’ve broken the data limit on individual diaries, I’m now splitting WOW2 into three posts. The segment covering Late September will post on Saturday, September 28.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists since its beginning in 2015 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, our intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And many more thanks to wow2lib, who is WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus, and uses her considerable library science skills to seek out new sources of information.
For the entire previous SEPTEMBER lists as of 2018,
click HERE for Early September: www.dailykos.com/…
click HERE for Late September: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Mid-September 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
just posted, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Mid-September’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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- September 11, 1476 – Louise of Savoy born, French Duchess of Nemours, Angoulême and Anjou; mother of King Francis I, serves as Regent of France in 1515, 1525-1526 and in 1529 during times when he goes to war, and while he is held prisoner in Spain; Louise is the principal French negotiator for the Treaty of Cambrai with the Holy Roman Empire, called “the Ladies’ Peace” because it is signed by Louis of Savoy and the Empire’s negotiator, Margaret of Austria.
- September 11, 1762 – Joanna Baillie born, Scottish poet and dramatist known for Plays on the Passions (in three volumes) and Fugitive Verses. Baillie did not learn to read until age 10 when she was sent to boarding school, and the only theatrical presentation she was as a child was a puppet show. When her father died in 1778, the family’s financial situation suffered. Her aunt, Anna Home Hunter, was a poet, held a salon in her home, and was a leading Bluestocking (an educated, intellectual woman, originally a member of the Blue Stockings Society from 1720-1800, and used to describe both women and men, but came to be used only for women, and often meant to be derogatory. ‘Bas bleu’ has the same meaning in French). Baillie was introduced by her aunt to Hunter’s circle of friends, including Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Montagu and Sir Walter Scott. Baillie studied playwrights and poets, then began writing her own while she ran her older brother’s household, until he married in 1791. She then lived with her mother and sister, often having to move, and exchanged letters with Walter Scott and others. She went through period of ill health in her 70s from which she recovered, then continued writing and corresponding until her death, at age 89, in 1851.
- September 11, 1806 – Juliette Magill Kinzie born, history writer, notable for including Native American legends and customs; Wau-Bun: The “Early Day” in the North West (when the ‘North West’ was Chicago).
- September 11, 1847 – Mary Watson Whitney born, astronomer; Maria Mitchell’s assistant; she became director of the Vassar Observatory (1888-1915) and professor of astronomy upon Mitchell’s retirement; like Mitchell, she was a champion for education and professional careers for women in the sciences. She and her staff published 102 papers in major astronomical journals on their work on comets, asteroids, variable stars, and using photographic plates to study and measure star clusters. By 1906, she was teaching pioneering classes in astrophysics and variable stars to 160 students. Whitney retired in 1910 at age 68 for health reasons.
- September 11, 1850 – Mary Elizabeth Lease born, American author, lecturer, fiery orator, suffragist and Populist; “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. . . ."
- September 11, 1877 – Rosika Schwimmer born, Hungarian feminist and pacifist; organized the Association of Hungarian Women Clerks (1897), co-founder of Feministák Egyesülete (Hungarian Feminist Association – 1904), also on the board of the Hungarian Peace Society and later Vice President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF); first Hungarian woman ambassador, to Switzerland.
- September 11, 1917 – Jessica Mitford born, British-born investigative journalist and political activist, author of The American Way of Death (1963), participated in trade-union marches.
- September 11, 1927 – Christine King Farris born, professor and author; active in the International Reading Association, the NAACP and the SCLC; sister of Martin Luther King Jr.
- September 11, 1933 – Dame Margaret Wood Booth born, British lawyer and judge; she is the third woman to be appointed as a High Court judge, in the Family Division.
- September 11, 1941 – Minnijean Brown-Trickey born, American civil rights activist, one of the ‘Little Rock Nine’ who desegregated Central High School in 1957; she was suspended for six day in December 1957 for dropping her tray in the cafeteria and splashing food on two white boys when other students were harassing her by pushing chairs in front of her in the aisle; in February 1958, two girls threw a purse filled with combination locks at her, and when she called them “white trash” she was immediately expelled. She went to Canada in the 1980s and 1990s to get degrees in social work, and became involved in First Nations activism while there. President Clinton appointed her as Deputy Assistant of the Department of the Interior for Workforce Diversity (1999-2001); among many honors, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Wolf Award.
- September 11, 1950 – Anne Dell born, Australian biochemist; Professor of Carbohydrate Biochemistry at Imperial College London; noted for studies of glycomics and carbohydrate structures that modify proteins, which open up possible applications to learning how pathogens such as HIV are able to evade termination by the immune system, and has led to the development of higher sensitivity mass spectroscopy techniques which have allowed for the better studying of the structure of carbohydrates. Dell was awarded the 1986 Tate and Lyle Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2009.
- September 11, 1953 – Jani Allan born in London, South African journalist, columnist and broadcaster; noted as one of South Africa’s most widely-read columnists in the 1980’s and 1990’s, working both in South Africa and in London, and had a radio show on Cape Talk Radio (1996-2000); was a speech writer for Mangosuthu Buthelezi (2000-2001).
- September 11, 1953 – Sarita Francis born, Monserrat civil servant and educator; currently Director of the Monserrat National Trust and the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Trust. She was the first woman appointed as deputy governor of Monserrat (2009-2011) and Acting Governor in March and April of 2011, between when the governor stepped down and his replacement arrived. Previously, she was the vice principal of the Salem Campus of the Monserrat Secondary School. In 1994, she headed the UN Development Programme in Monserrat, and began her work with the Monserrat National Trust.
- September 11, 1955 – Sharon Lamb born, American psychologist and professor in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s, College of Education and Human Development; as a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), she was one of the authors of the APA’s report on the sexualization of young girls; co-author with Lyn Mikel of Packaging girlhood: rescuing our daughters from marketers’ schemes, and Packaging boyhood: saving our sons from superheroes, slackers, and other media stereotypes.
- September 11, 1961 – Samina Raja born, Pakistani Urdu poet, writer, editor, translator and broadcaster; published 12 collections of poetry between 1973 and 1995, and had also been a literary magazine editor. She died in 2012 after a long struggle with cancer.
- September 11, 1963 – Victoria Polevá born, Ukrainian composer; best known for choral works.
- September 11, 1964 – Damares Alves born, Brazilian attorney and politician; current Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights since January 2019; she is also a pastor of Foursquare Gospel Church. She worked as a legal adviser to the Brazilian National Congress from the 1990s until her 2019 ministerial appointment.
- September 11, 1970 – Taraji P. Henson born, American actress, known for her co-starring role as Detective Jocelyn Carter on CBS drama Person of Interest, and her portrayal of Katherine Johnson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the NOH8 Campaign, which advocates for the LGBT community, Henson has appeared in print ads for PETA and a Public Service Announcement for NOH8.
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- September 12, 1590 – María de Zayas y Sotomayor born, Spanish author during Spain’s Golden Age, regarded as a pioneer of literary feminism; Desengaños Amorosos (Disenchantments of Love), Novelas Amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Novels).
- September 12, 1739 – Mary Bosanquet Fletcher born, Methodist preacher and philanthropist, who convinced John Wesley (leading figure in the founding of Methodism) to allow women to preach publicly. She and preacher Sarah Crosby were the most popular women preachers of their day, and Mary Bosanquet Fletcher was honored by Methodists as “Mother in Israel.” She was co-founder of The Cedars, an orphanage for girls, in the East London area of Leytonstone, where they were taught manners, reading, writing, nursing and domestic skills, under strict discipline, as well as receiving intensive religious instruction. Rising costs and concerns about poor air quality caused her to move to the orphanage to Cross Hall, in Morley, West Yorkshire, thinking to save costs as the staff grew their food, but their lack of farming experience made this venture less successful than she hoped. She closed Cross Hall (after finding places for the orphans) in 1782 because she got married. She and her husband then worked together running a school. She began preaching more like the male preachers, by quoting biblical texts, and continued to preach and lead classes up to a few months before her death.
- September 12, 1846 – Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning.
- September 12, 1853 – Celestia Parrish born, American educator and pioneering woman in psychology; overcame English-born psychologist E. B. Tichener’s prejudice against women in order to attend his class, and get him to correspond with her so she could better teach her students – later he submitted some of her papers to the America Journal of Psychology, after she founded the first psychology lab in the southern U.S. at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, VA; after teaching at the Georgia State Normal School, she became Georgia State Supervisor of Public Schools (1911-1918).
- September 12, 1859 – Florence Kelley born, social and political reformer, advocate for minimum wage, 8-hour workdays and against child labor and sweatshops.
- September 12, 1894 – Dorothy M. Wrinch born, English mathematician and biochemical theorist; she read mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge, and became a research student there in 1917. One of the founding members of the Biotheoretical Gathering in the 1930s, an inter-disciplinary group studying how proteins work. Known for her studies attempting to deduce protein structure using mathematical principles; her initial theory turned out to be wrong, but her experimental work with Irving Langmuir led to the principle of the Hydrophobic effect being the driving force for protein folding.
- September 12, 1897 – Irène Joliot-Curie born, French physicist, co-recipient with Frédéric Joliot-Curie of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of new radioactive elements and artificial radioactivity. From 1946, she was the director of the Radium Institute in Paris, founded by her mother, Nobel laureate Marie Curie. She died of leukemia at age 58 because of her exposure to radiation.
- September 12, 1902 – Marya Zaturenska born in Ukraine, American author and lyric poet who won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book, Cold Morning Sky; she came to the U.S. with her family when she was 8 years old; as a teenager, she worked in a clothing factory during the day while attending high school classes at night, and won scholarships to attend college; published eight volumes of poetry, edited six poetry anthologies, and published A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940.
- September 12, 1916 – Adelina and August Van Buren finish first successful transcontinental motorcycle tour by two women, after leaving New York City on July 5, 1916.
- September 12, 1922 – The Episcopal Church removes the word “obey” from the bride’s wedding vows.
- September 12, 1928 – Muriel “Mickie” Siebert born, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, joining the 1, 365 male members of the exchange in 1967 (in 1870, sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were the first women to open a Wall Street brokerage firm.) Siebert was also head of one of the first women’s banks. She was appointed by New York Governor Carey as Superintendent of Banks for New York State (1977-1980); co-author of Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick.
- September 12, 1950 – Marguerite Blais born, French Canadian Quebec Liberal politician, journalist, and media host: Member of the Quebec National Assembly for Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne (2007-2015); president of Conseil de la famille et de l’enfance (2003-2007); director general of the Fondation du maire de Montréal pour la jeunesse; advocate for the deaf community and persons with hearing disabilities.
- September 12, 1953 – Nan Goldin born, American photographer noted for portraiture, and her visual autobiographical documentary slideshow and photobook, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
- September 12, 1953 – Fiona Mactaggart born, British Labour politician, teacher, feminist and activist; Appointed in 2018 as Chair of Agenda, an alliance for women and girls at risk. Member of Parliament for Slough (1997-2017); primary school teacher (1987-1992); General Secretary of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (1982-1987); Vice President and National Secretary of the National Union of Students (1978-1981).
- September 12, 1973 – Tarana Burke born, African-American civil rights activist who started the ‘Me Too’ movement in 2006 which was the inspiration for #MeToo after the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal launched dozens of revelations of cases of sexual abuse and harassment; Senior Director at Girls for Gender Equity; one of “the silence breakers” named collectively by TIME Magazine as its 2017 ‘Person’ of the Year.
- September 12, 1973 – Kara David born, Filipina journalist and television host; news anchor of News to Go at GMA News TV, and host-writer for the i-Witness documentary series; founder and president of the Project Malasakit foundation, which aids people in remote communities and sends poor children to school; in 2010, she became the second person from the Philippines to win a Peabody Award, for her documentary Ambulansyang de Paa (Ambulance on Foot).
- September 12, 1974 – Caroline Aigle born, French aviator; the first woman fighter pilot in the French Air Force. In 1999, she was the first woman to receive the fighter pilot wings, and was assigned to the Mirage 2000-5 in the escadon 2/2 "Côte-d'Or " in 2000, then promoted to the rank of Commandant (similar to Major in the U.S Air Force) in 2005. She was among the top candidates in 2007 under consideration to become an astronaut for the European Space Agency, but was diagnosed with cancer and died a month later, at the age of 32. She was posthumously award the Médaille de l'Aéronautique (Aeronautics Medal).
- September 12, 1981 – Jennifer Hudson born, African American singer and actress, known for her film debut in Dreamgirls, which won the 2007 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. In 2008, her mother, brother and nephew were killed by her sister’s estranged husband. The Hudson family started The Hudson-King Foundation for Families of Slain Victims, and she co-founded with her sister the Julian D. King Gift Foundation, named for her nephew, which provides Christmas presents and school supplies to families in need in the Chicago area.
- September 12, 1992 – Dr. Mae Carol Jemison becomes the first African-American woman in space, as the payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Endeavor. Also onboard are Mission Specialist N. Jan Davis and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mark C. Lee, the first married couple to fly together in space, and Mamoru Mohri, who becomes the first Japanese person to fly into space.
- September 12, 2002 – Police Woman’s Day is launched to honor members of the International Association of Women Police (IAWP).
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- September 13, 1775 – Laura Secord born, Canadian heroine of the War of 1812, who walked 20-miles out of American-occupied territory to warn British troops of an impending attack.
- September 13, 1819 – Lucy Goode Brooks born as a slave in Virginia, American charity organizer. The daughter of the slave Judith Goode and an unnamed white man, she could read and write. When she met Albert Royal Brooks, the slave of a different owner, she taught him to write so they could write passes that would enable them to see each other. When her master died in 1838, she became the property of another man, who allowed her to marry Albert, and live with him. Albert ran a livery stable for is owner, and was permitted to keep his additional earnings so he could buy his freedom. When Lucy’s second owner died in 1858, his heirs wanted to sell her and her children to different masters, but the merchant who bought most of her children allowed them to live with her as long as they showed up every day for work. Lucy’s daughter was sold away to Tennessee. The Brookes worked hard to earn their freedom, and the freedom of their three youngest boys, but the oldest three boys were not freed until the end of the Civil War. The loss of her daughter and an infant son sold away earlier made Lucy Brooks decide to help children separated from their parents. With the support of her Ladies Sewing Circle for Charitable Work and a Quaker congregation, she founded the Friends’ Asylum for Colored Orphans, which opened its doors in 1867. It has become the Friends Association for Children, which currently provides childcare and family support services for low-income families. Lucy Brooks died in 1900, at age 82.
- September 13, 1819 – Clara Schumann born, German composer (‘Three Romances for Violin & Piano’) and pianist; she gave the first public performances of several works by Johannes Brahams.
- September 13, 1830 – Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach born, Austrian novelist, highly regarded German-language author of the 19th century; Božena, Das Gemeindekind.
- September 13, 1844 – Ann Webb Young born, one of LDS President Brigham Young’s many wives, who filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty, neglect and abandonment; excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1874; her divorce is final in 1875. She went on the lecture circuit, advocating against polygamy and Mormonism; Webb testifies before Congress during debates before passage of the Poland (anti-polygamy enforcement) Act. Author of Wife No. 19, or The Story of a Life in Bondage.
- September 13, 1844 – Anna Lea Merritt born, American painter; known for portraits, landscapes and religious scenes; worked primarily in England as a professional artist.
- September 13, 1865 – Maud Ballington Booth born as Maud Charlesworth in England; Salvation Army leader, and co-founder of the Volunteers of America.
- September 13, 1888 – ‘Melli’ Amelie Beese born, early German aviator and sculptor; she had to leave Germany to study sculpting at the Royal Academy in Stockholm because German art schools did not admit female students; returning home, she studied mathematics, ship building and aeronautical engineering, and with difficulty found some aviators who would instruct a woman in flying; she became the first woman pilot in Germany to participate in a flight display on her birthday, September 13, 1911. She opened a flying school the following year, designed and patented a collapsible aircraft, and worked with her future husband, Charles Boutard on a flying boat design. But when they married in 1913, she became a French citizen, and they were arrested during WWI as “undesirable aliens, Charles was interned, and their goods were confiscated. After the war, they filed suit to recover their property, but the case dragged on, and German hyper-inflation greatly decreased its value. The marriage deteriorated, and they separated. In 1925, she crashed the aeroplane she was flying when she reapplied for her pilot’s license. Three days before Christmas that year, she shot herself.
- September 13, 1917 – Carol Kendall born, American historian and author of folk tale stories for children; her book The Gammage Cup was a 1960 Newbery Honor Book.
- September 13, 1919 – Mary Midgley born, British philosopher, advocate for science, ethics and animal rights, author of many books, including her autobiography The Owl of Minerva.
- September 13, 1920 – Else Holmelund Minarik born in Denmark, American children’s author noted for her Little Bear series.
- September 13, 1922 – Caroline Duby Glassman born, American attorney and the first woman to serve as an Associate Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (1983-1997).
- September 13, 1931 – Marjorie Jackson-Nelson born, Australian sprinter who won two Olympic Gold Medals, and held six world records; in 2001, she became the Governor of South Australia, serving until 2007; among her many honors, Member of the Order of the British Empire (1953), and Companion of the Order of Australia (2001).
- September 13, 1933 – Elizabeth McCombs becomes the first woman member of the New Zealand Parliament.
- September 13, 1943 – Mildred DeLois Taylor born, African-American author known for books on the struggles of Black families in the Deep South, including Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Road to Memphis.
- September 13, 1948 – Margaret Chase Smith is elected as a U.S. Senator, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. She was a moderate Republican with a streak of independence, the first woman elected to either House from the state of Maine. She served in the House of Representatives (1940-1949) and as U.S. Senator (1949-1973). Chase Smith was the first member of Congress to go on record criticizing McCarthy’s witch-hunting tactics in her 1950 speech, "Declaration of Conscience." In 1964, she became the first woman placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party’s convention, placing fifth in the first balloting. She is still the current record-holder as the longest-serving Republican woman in the U.S. Senate.
- September 13, 1956 – Anne Geddes, born in Australia, Photographer noted for baby photography shooting infants in arrangements of fruits and flowers; she is the founder of the Geddes Philanthropic Trust, which raises awareness of child abuse and neglect.
- September 13, 1957 – Dame Eleanor Warwick King born, British judge of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales since 2008.
- September 13, 1957 – Tatyana Mitkova born, Russian broadcast journalist who refused to read the official Soviet Union version of the military response to the 1991 uprising in Lithuania; won 1991 International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
- September 13, 1995 – Beverley Palesa Ditsie addressed the UN at the Beijing Women’s Conference about the importance of including lesbian rights in discussions about the empowerment and uplifting of women. Ditsie was the first person and first openly lesbian woman to address the issue of protecting the rights of LGBT people at a UN conference. She was born in Soweto in 1971 during the height of Apartheid, and was an anti-Apartheid and LGBT rights activist, one of the founding members of GLOW, South Africa’s first multiracial and political lesbian and gay rights group. During the drafting of South Africa’s constitution, she was at the forefront arguing for protecting people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. South Africa became the first nation in the world to include such a protection in its constitution.
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- September 14, 1401 – Maria of Castile born, Queen of Aragon; though her health was delicate (she may have had epilepsy), she survived small pox, but was left with permanent scars. She was betrothed at age seven to Alfonso V of Aragon, and they were married when she was 14, but her menstrual cycle did not begin until she was 16, so the consummation of the marriage was delayed, and she bore no children. The marriage was not a happy one, especially after she learned that her husband’s mistress had given birth to a son. Maria acted as regent twice, from 1420 to 1423, and then from 1432 to until her husband’s death in 1458, while Alfonso was off pursuing his claim to the throne of Naples, which he would later secure for his illegitimate son. Maria was left as de facto ruler to deal with frequent family squabbles between her brothers-in-law, and conflicts with burghers and peasants. When Alfonso lost the naval Battle of Ponza in 1435, he was captured, and Maria organized the funds to pay his ransom. Alfonso died in June 1458, but was quickly followed by Maria in September 1458.
- September 14, 1728 – Mercy Otis Warren born, American Revolution political writer and propagandist. In 1805, she published one of first histories of the American Revolution, a three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, history, politics and war were thought to be the province of men. Few men and fewer women had the education or training to write about these subjects. Warren was an exception. Although she had no formal education, she studied with the Reverend Jonathan Russell while he tutored her brothers Joseph and James in preparation for Harvard College. She married James Warren in 1754, and gave birth to five sons. Her husband was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and later he became speaker of the House and President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The Warrens became increasingly involved in the conflict between the American colonies and the British Government. Their Plymouth home was often a meeting place for local politics, and for revolutionaries, including the Sons of Liberty. Mercy Warren was drawn to political activism, and she hosted protest meetings in her home. She regularly corresponded with Abigail Adams, John Adams and Martha Washington. With the assistance of her friend Samuel Adams, these meetings laid the foundation for the Committees of Correspondence. She later wrote "no single step contributed so much to cement the union of the colonies." Mercy became a strong political voice with views on liberty, republican government and independence for the American colonies. She wrote, "Every domestic enjoyment depends on the unimpaired possession of civil and religious liberty." Mercy's husband James encouraged her to write, fondly referring to her as the "scribbler" and she became his chief correspondent and sounding board. During the years before the American Revolution, Warren published poems and plays that attacked royal authority in Massachusetts and urged colonists to resist British infringements on colonial rights and liberties. James Warren served as paymaster to George Washington's army for a time during the war. At the height of the debate over the United States Constitution in 1788, Mercy Warren issued a pamphlet, Observations on the new Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions, using the pseudonym "A Columbian Patriot," that opposed ratification of the document, and advocated for the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. Observations was long thought to be the work of other writers, most notably Elbridge Gerry. It was not until her descendant, Charles Warren, found a reference to it in a 1787 letter to British historian Catharine Macaulay that Warren was credited as the author. In 1790, she published a collection of poems and plays under her own name, highly unusual for a woman at the time. When she published her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, not only was it the first history of the American Revolution written by a woman, and an eye-witness to the events, but also a person who played a part in them.
- September 14, 1816 – Mary Hall Barrett born, American book editor and letter writer; as a teenager, she began teaching Sunday school at a Universalist church; her parents, a brother and a sister all died of consumption (tuberculosis), and she nursed them devotedly, injuring her own health. She married John Greenleaf Adams in 1839, and edited the Sabbath-School Annual for three years, influencing well-known Universalist authors to contribute to the annual, before her health declined to the point she was unable to continue. She died in 1860. The Memoir of Mrs. Mary H. Adams was published after her death.
- September 14, 1830 – Emily Edson Briggs born, first woman White House correspondent during Lincoln’s administration, first president of Women’s National Press Association (1882).
- September 14, 1843 – Lola Rodríguez de Tió born, Puerto Rican poet, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. After her marriage in 1863 to Bonocio Tió Segarra, she became a writer and book importer, and published her first book of poetry, Mis Cantos (My Songs). She and her husband were banished twice for their political activities and writings advocating Puerto Rican independence from Spain. They lived in Venezuela and New York before settling in Cuba. In 1901, she was a co-founder and member of the Cuban Academy of Arts and Letters, and also served as an inspector of schools. Their home was a gathering place for Cuban intellectuals and politicians, and Puerto Rican exiles. She died in Havana at the age of 81, leaving a legacy of books and patriotic poetry, including new revolutionary lyrics for the song "La Boriqueña." In 2014, she was one of 12 Puerto Rican women honored with plaques in La Plaza en Honor a la Mujer Puertorriqueña (Plaza in Honor of Puerto Rican Women) in San Juan.
- September 14, 1854 – Julia Magruder born, American novelist; several of her stories were serialized in the Ladies Home Journal; recipient of an award from the Académie Française.
- September 14, 1857 – Alice Stone Blackwell born, suffragist, journalist and human rights activist; daughter of suffragist Lucy Stone, who pioneered keeping her maiden name after marriage, and Henry Blackwell, abolitionist and advocate for women’s equality and suffrage.
- September 14, 1857 – Julia Barlow Platt born, American embryologist and politician; after graduating from the University of Vermont in 1887, she did research at the Harvard Annex, founded in 1879, which was the only access for women to Harvard at the time, and she was one of several women challenging the university’s anti-coeducational policies; Platt had to get her doctorate at the University of Freiburg in Germany; her major contribution to science, demonstrating that neural crest cells formed the jaw cartilage and tooth dentine in Necturus maculosus (mudpuppy embryos), was not believed by her contemporaries because it ran counter to the belief that only mesoderm could form bones and cartilage. Her hypothesis of the neural crest origin of the cranial skeleton gained acceptance only some 50 years later when confirmed by Sven Hörstadius and Sven Sellman. Frustrated because she was unable to secure a university position, she became a political activist in California, an advocate for maintaining beach access for the public, and for a marine protected area, which became crucial to the recovery of the sea otter. In 1931, she was elected mayor of Pacific Grove California.
- September 14, 1879 – Margaret Sanger born, American birth control activist, sex educator, and nurse; popularized the term “birth control,” and opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. She also established organizations that evolved into Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
- September 14, 1882 – Winnifred Mason Huck born, investigative journalist exposing abuses in the prison system; also a politician, third woman to be elected to the US Congress (R-IL 1922-1923) in a special election to finish her father’s term after his sudden death.
- September 14, 1897 – Margaret Rudkin born, founder of Pepperidge Farm Foods.
- September 14, 1902 – Alice Tully born, American operatic soprano, music promoter and philanthropist; on the boards for the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School; recipient of the Handel Medallion.
- September 14, 1914 – Mae Boren Axton born, American songwriter, best known as co-writer with Tommy Durden of “Heartbreak Hotel.”
- September 14, 1917 – Joyce Chen born, chef/author/ teacher, emigrated to US from China, opened authentic North Chinese restaurant, authored Joyce Chen Cook Book, hosted TV’s “Joyce Chen Cooks.”
- September 14, 1921 – Constance Baker Motley born, American lawyer, judge, politician and civil rights activist, first woman attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She wrote the original complaint in Brown v. Board of Education. She was the first African American woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, the first African American woman to be appointed as a federal court judge, and recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal, and the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
- September 14, 1930 – Romola Constantino born, Australian pianist; gave the first solo piano recital at the Sydney Opera House in 1973; she also worked as a music critic for the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and was a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney; appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1978.
- September 14, 1934 – Sarah Kofman born, French philosopher, author and educator, wrote books on Nietzsche and Freud.
- September 14, 1934 – Kate Millet born, feminist, author of Sexual Politics.
- September 14, 1941 – Joan Trumpauer Mulholland born, American civil rights activist, a white woman from Virginia whose activism as a student at Duke University was regarded as some form of mental illness, and she was taken for testing after her first arrest. She dropped out of Duke, and was one of the Freedom Riders on the Illinois Central train from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested. They were incarcerated at Parchman Penitentiary, a prison with a reputation for violence, and the disappearance of several inmates. She and the other women were strip-searched and given vaginal exams. They were housed for two months on death row, in a segregated cell with 17 women and 3 feet of floor space per prisoner. She refused to pay bail and served more than her two month sentence because each day in prison took $3 off her fine of $200. She became the first white student at Tougaloo College in Jackson, and several attempts were made by local authorities to close down the school, but its charter predated the Jim Crow laws. She was one of the activists in the May 28, 1963 Woolworth lunch counter sit-in, where they were beaten and smeared with condiments. She was called a “white nigger” and dragged out of the store by her hair.
- September 14, 1955 – Geraldine Brooks born, Australian American journalist and novelist. Her 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; her work as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal inspired her first book, the non-fiction Nine Parts of Desire.
- September 14, 1962 – Bonnie Jo Campbell born, American novelist and short story writer; Once Upon a River and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters.
- September 14, 1964 – Helen Keller, Dr. Lena Edwards, Lynn Fontainne, Dr. Helen Taussig, and Leontyne Price all receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- September 14, 1965 – Emily Bell born, British journalist and academic; Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism who previously worked for The Guardian and The Observer.
- September 14, 1975 – Elizabeth Ann Seton canonized by the Catholic church, first American-born saint, founded first U.S. Order of Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph.
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- September 15, 1505 – Mary of Austria born, Queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia as the wife of King Louis II (1515-1526) until his death. He died while retreating after the disastrous Battle of Mohács in which nearly the entire Hungarian army was killed by the much larger army of Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire. Queen Mary governed Hungary as regent for her brother, Ferdinand I, from 1526 to 1527, and then was appointed by her brother, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, as Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands (1531-1555). She strived unsuccessfully for peace in the Netherlands, but Charles disregarded the problems she described in letters to him, and often ignored her warnings of trouble. She was forced to wage war against France in 1537, and to deal with the Revolt of Ghent between 1538 and 1540. Mary's appointment as Governor of the Netherlands was renewed in 1540, after the revolt in Ghent had been subdued. When Charles decided to abdicate as emperor in 1555, and leave the government of the Netherlands to his son Philip, Mary announced her resignation. Both Charles and Philip urged her to remain, but she refused, and her resignation was finally accepted. She retired to Turnhout (now part of Belgium) for a year, then moved to Castile to be near her recently widowed sister Eleanor. But Eleanor died in 1558, and Mary was considering resuming governship of the Netherlands when Charles died in September the same year, and the news caused her to have two severe heart attacks. Mary died in October 1558. In her will, she asked that her heart-shaped medallion, once worn by her husband, be melted down and the gold distributed to the poor.
- September 15, 1853 – Antoinette Brown Blackwell ordained, first U.S. woman minister.
- September 15, 1857 – Anna Winlock born, American astronomer, and one of “the Harvard computers” who made her era’s most complete catalogue of stars near the north and south poles. Also remembered for calculations and studies on asteroids 433 Eros and 475 Oclio.
- September 15, 1868 – Lida Shaw King born, American classical scholar; professor of classical literature and archaeology at Vassar (1894-1897); dean of the Women’s College at Brown University (1905-1922); published in the American Journal of Archaeology.
- September 15, 1877 – Yente Serdatzky born in the Russian Empire Koveno Governorate (now Lithuania), Jewish-American Yiddish-language author of short stories, sketches and one-act plays.
- September 15, 1890 – Agatha Christie born, international best-selling British mystery novelist and playwright, Witness for the Prosecution, The Mousetrap, and creator of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
- September 15, 1890 – Sonja Branting-Westerståhl born, Swedish lawyer and politician; one of the first women lawyers in Sweden, specializing in matrimonial law, after working in the Stockholm city legal aid office. She was very active in the 1930s in raising awareness of the dangers of Nazism and totalitarianism. Branting-Westerståhl was a social democrat, and served in the lower house of the Riksdag in 1948. She was also on the executive board of the Social Democrat Women’s Organisation (1936-1952).
- September 15, 1915 – Fawn Brodie born, American biographer and historian; noted for psychobiography; Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History and No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith.
- September 15, 1918 – Margot Loyola born, folk singer, musician and musical ethnographer and anthropologist, who published numerous books on folk music and customs of Chile and other South American countries.
- September 15, 1919 – Heda Margolius Kovály born, Czech writer and translator; noted for her memoir Under a Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941-1968.
- September 15, 1929 – Eva Burrows born, Australian Salvation Army officer; at 56, she became the organization’s youngest commander, the 13th General of the Salvation Army.
- September 15, 1936 – Sara J. Henderson born, Australian cattle station owner and author, noted for her 1993 autobiography From Strength to Strength.
- September 15, 1940 – Anne Moody born as Essie Mae, civil rights worker, author of award-winning autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi.
- September 15, 1942 – Ksenia Milicevic born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, French painter, architect and town planner. She has lived and worked in Argentina, Spain and Mexico, before settling in France. In 2012, she originated the International Children’s Painting Biennial, and started the Art Resilience movement in 2014.
- September 15, 1945 – Jessye Norman born, dramatic soprano, noted for performing Wagnerian repertoire.
- September 15, 1947 – Diane E. Levin born, American professor of education, author, an authority on how media effects young children; noted for Teaching young children in violent times: building a peaceable classroom and So sexy so soon: the new sexualized childhood, and what parents can do to protect their kids.
- September 15, 1955 – Betty Robbins, first woman cantor officially appointed by a congregation, leads Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Avodah in Oceanside New Jersey.
- September 15, 1961 – Helen Margetts born, British political scientist specializing in digital era governance and politics; Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, and Professor of Internet and Society at the University of Oxford.
- September 15, 1963 – Four black girls are killed when the African American 16th Street Baptist Church is bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
- September 15, 1975 – Martina Krupičková born, Czech post-impressionist painter.
- September 15, 1977 – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie born, Nigerian Author of novels, short stories and nonfiction; her work includes the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, her short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists; awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008.
- September 15, 1992 – Frances Cannon born, Australian queer multidisciplinary artist and author, working primarily with watercolour, gouache and ink.
- September 15, 2019 – Sarah Thomas, American long-distance swimmer, begins to swim the English Channel four times continuously, in 54 hours and 10 minutes, just a year after she completed treatment for breast cancer. The straight distance would have been 84 miles, but strong currents pushed her off-course, lengthening the distance she swam to over 130 miles.
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- September 16, 1295 – Elizabeth de Clare, Lady of Clare born, heiress to the lordships of Clare in Suffolk, England, and Usk in Wales. She married three times, and bore three children, one to each husband. Her last husband, Sir Roger, Lord D’Amory of Ireland, was reckless and violent, and was embroiled in the Despenser War. Her brother-in-law, Hugh Despenser, began to take over lordships in south Wales, in a land grab, often by foul means. He was especially interested in the estates of his sisters-in-law and their husbands, but the Marcher lords of south Wales rose up against him, and he was banished by the King Edward II in August of 1321, but Edward recalled Despenser in October, and the war began. Elizabeth’s husband was captured at Tutbury Castle, then Elizabeth and her children were captured at Usk Castle in January, 1322, and imprisoned at Barking Abbey, a nunnery on the outskirts of London. Sir Roger died of his wounds two months later. Elizabeth was forced by the king to exchange her lordship of Usk with Despenser’s less-valuable lordship of Gower, but the rebellion of Queen Isabella forced the king to flee with Despenser, and Elizabeth regained her lordship over Usk when Despenser was executed. She never remarried, and styled herself Lady of Clare after her principal estate in Suffolk. She built a London house in 1352, and exerted considerable influence in society as one of the richest women in England. But she was also known for her alms giving and patronage of religious houses. Her most important and lasting contribution was Clare College, Cambridge. Though founded by Richard de Badew in 1326, he gave over his rights as patron to Elizabeth in 1346. She made further grants to sustain and expand the college, and it became known as Clare Hall. She died in 1360, leaving extensive bequests. Her will and the records of her household expenses are invaluable sources of information on how the nobles of the period lived.
- September 16, 1672 – Anne Dudley Bradstreet, the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished colonial American poet, dies in Andover, Massachusetts. Commemorated as Anne Dudley Bradstreet Day.
- September 16, 1846 – Anna Kingsford born, one of the first English women to obtain a medical degree, but the only medical student to graduate without ever dissecting a single animal; anti-vivisectionist, women’s rights and vegetarian campaigner. She is the founder of the Food Reform Society, and author of The Perfect Way in Diet.
- September 16, 1861 – Miriam Benjamin born a free African American; graduated from Howard University law school and specialized in patent law; she was the second black woman inventor to receive a U.S. patent, for the Gong and Signal chair, used by hotel guests to signal a waiter or attendant that they wanted service; the system was later adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives to signal pages, and was a precursor of the signaling system used by passengers on airplanes to attract a flight attendant’s attention; her two brothers also held patents for inventions.
- September 16, 1880 – Clara Ayres born, American nurse who joined the U.S. Army Corps during WWI; she and Helen Burnett Wood were the first two nurses to be killed in military service during the war, by accident on May 17, 1917, aboard the USS Mongolia heading for Europe, hit by shell fragments when one of the ship’s guns exploded during a drill.
- September 16, 1885 – Karen Horney born in Germany, American psychoanalyst who differed from Freud, suggesting that environmental and social conditions played a more determining role in the creation of an individual’s personality than biological drives, and these are the chief cause of neuroses and personality disorders. Her view of human begins allowed more scope for development and rational adaptation than Freudian determinism.
- September 16, 1887 – Nadia Boulanger born, French composer, mentor to Aaron Copland, Philip Glass and Quincy Jones among others.
- September 16, 1902 – Maude Eyston Sumner born, South African painter, she moved to Paris in 1926, and became part of the Ateliers d'Art Sacré (Studios of Sacred Art) movement.
- September 16, 1912 – Edith Anrep born, Swedish lawyer and feminist; President of the International Alliance of Women (1970-1973). Member of the Fredrika Bremer Förbundet, Sweden’s oldest women’s rights organization, which is part of the International Alliance of Women, and has general consultative status with the UN. The FBF was founded in 1884, and named in honor of Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer, whose novel Hertha sparked the legislation emancipating unmarried Swedish women from the wardship of their male relatives.
- September 16, 1916 – Marie Vieux-Chauvet born, Haitian novelist, poet and playwright; she sometimes published under Marie Vieux; best known for her novels, Fille d'Haïti (Daughter of Haiti), La Danse sur le Volcan (Dance on the Volcano), Fonds des Nègres and for her trilogy, which was the posthumous winner of the 1986 Prix Deschamps: Amour, Colère, Folie (Love, Anger, Madness).
- September 16, 1920 – Sheila Quinn born, British nurse; Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing, and its president (1982-1986); Executive Director of the International Council of Nurses (ICN – 1967-1970) and an ICN representative to the International Labour Organisation; consultant to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) to the Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust, Regional Nursing Officer (RNO) for the Wessex Regional Health Authority, and Chief Nursing Advisor for the British Red Cross. Elevated to Dame Commander (DBE). In 1993, the ICN awarded her the Christiane Reimann Prize, for outstanding contribution to the nursing profession. Dame Sheila contributed significantly to the Problem Solving for Better Health (PSBH) program at the Dreyfus Health Foundation (DHF – 1995-2016).
- September 16, 1921 – Ursula M. Franklin born in Germany, Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Author of The Real World of Technology.
- September 16, 1927 – Sadako Ogata born, Japanese diplomat, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1991-2001); President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA, 2003-2012); 2002 Fulbright Prize for International Understanding.
- September 16, 1928 – Patricia Wald born, American judge; U.S. representative to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1999-2002); Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1986-1991); Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1979-1999). She was born in very modest circumstances, and worked as a teenager during summers in brass mills in her home state of Connecticut. Her involvement with union work and the labor movement fired her ambition to go to law school and help working class people. She was class valedictorian when she graduated from high school, and an affluent woman in her hometown gave her a scholarship to the Connecticut College for Women (now Connecticut College). When she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, she received a national fellowship from the Pepsi-Cola Company allowed her to go to Yale Law School, earning her law degree with only eleven other women in 1951, out of a class of 200. She worked as a waitress and a researcher to pay the rest of her expenses at Yale. She still found time to be a student editor on the Yale Law Journal, one of only two women editors. After graduation, she clerked for Judge Jerome Frank of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for a year. Then briefly entered private practice before leaving to raise her five children for the next six years. She then began taking on part-time consulting and research jobs, and was editorial assistant for Frederick M. Rowe (1959-1962). In 1963, she spent a year as a member of the National Conference on Bail and Criminal Justice, then worked for the National Conference on Law & Poverty in its Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1964, she was co-author of Bail in the United States, which was influential in the reform of the nation’s bail system. She was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the President’s Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia (1965-1966), then consulted for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement & Administration of Criminal Justice in 1967, and joined the U.S. Department of Justice as an attorney in the Office of Criminal Justice. She then worked for Neighborhood Legal Services in Washington, D.C (19687-1970), and also consulted for the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorder and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Wald worked at the Center for Law and Social Policy as an attorney (1971-1972), then switched to an attorney at the Mental Health Law Project (1973-1977). She went back to the Department of Justice (1977-1979), and was Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs during the Carter Administration before being nominated by Carter to the DC Circuit.
- September 16, 1942 – Susan L. Graham born, American computer scientist; Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley; research projects include Harmonia, a language-based framework for interactive software development, and Titanium, a Java-based parallel programming language, compiler and runtime system. Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which awarded her the ICCC John von Neumann Medal in 2009.
- September 16, 1948 – Julia Donaldson born, English author, playwright, songwriter and performer, best known for rhyming stories for children, including The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man.
- September 16, 1953 – Nancy Huston born, French Canadian novelist, essayist and translator, who translates her own work from French into English. Awarded the 1982 Prix Contrepoint for Les variations Goldberg (The Goldberg Variations).
- September 16, 1956 – Maggie Atkinson born, English educator and civil servant; Children’s Commissioner for England (2010-2013).
- September 16, 1957 – Clara Furse born, Dutch-British financial executive, first woman Chief Executive of the London Stock Exchange (2001-2009).
- September 16, 1961 – Annamária Szalai born, Hungarian journalist and politician; President of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (2010-2013); member of the National Radio and Television Commission (2004-2009); Member of the National Assembly (1998-2004).
- September 16, 1964 – Mary Coustas born, Greek-Australian comedian and writer; performs stand-up as “Effie.” She won the Logie Award for Most popular Comedy Personality in 1993. Author of Effie's Guide to Being Up Yourself, and All I know: a memoir of love, loss and life, published in 2013.
- September 16, 1971 – Amy Poehler born, American comedian, actress, director, producer and writer; Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, Comedy Central; executive producer of Broad City and Difficult People; creator of The UCB Show.
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- September 17, 1382 – Mary of Anjou, eleven-year-old daughter of Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland, crowned as “King” of Hungary, seven days after her father’s death. But having a female on the throne was unpopular with Hungarian noblemen, who wanted her distant cousin, Charles III of Naples, instead. Charles landed Dalmatia in September 1385, while Sigismund of Luxembourg invaded Upper Hungary, and forced Mary’s mother, Dowager Queen Elizabeth, acting as regent, to give Mary in marriage to him in October. But when Charles entered the capital, Buda, Mary had to renounce the throne, and Charles was crowned king at the end of December. However, he was murdered at the instigation of Mary’s mother in February 1386. Mary was restored to the throne, but the murdered king's supporters captured her and her mother in July. Elizabeth was murdered in January 1387, but Mary was released in June 1387. Mary officially remained the co-ruler with Sigismund, who had meanwhile been crowned king, but her influence on the government was minimal. In 1395, she went into premature labor after her horse threw her while hunting. She died at age 23, along with her new-born son.
- September 17, 1802 – Mercy Jackson born, American physician; a pioneer in U.S. women's acceptance in the field of medicine. She graduated at age 17 from a private school in her hometown of Hardwick, Massachusetts, and accepted a winter teaching position in Plainfield, over fifty miles west of her hometown — a daring decision for a young woman in 1819. She was married in 1823, but her first husband died in 1829, and two of her three children had died of illnesses by 1832. She and her second husband, Daniel Jackson, had eight children, but half of them died in infancy or early childhood. Her husband’s cousin married Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Jacksons became well acquainted with the Transcendentalists of Concord. She began to study on her own the new system of homeopathic medicine, and then tried treating her family and friends, with good results. Word of her success spread, and patients began to come from the surrounding towns to consult with her. But no treatment worked on her second husband, who died of cancer in 1852. Mercy Jackson, inspired by Elizabeth Blackwell (the first woman to earn a degree in conventional medicine in 1849), enrolled at Boston’s New England Female Medicine College and graduated in 1860, at the age of 58. She became friends with Harriet K. Hunt when Hunt was refused admission to Harvard because she was a woman, and they were both increasingly involved in the struggle for women’s rights. Jackson’s medical practice also grew, bolstered by her higher success rate, and the many women who preferred to be seen by a woman doctor, especially when pregnant. In 1871, Jackson was the first woman admitted to the American Institute of Homeopathy. She wrote articles about better medical treatments for women in homeopathic journals, and in favor of women’s rights in Lucy Stone’s feminist weekly Woman’s Journal. In 1875, the 73-year-old Jackson traveled from New England to northern Michigan by train, speaking for women’s rights. She died in December 1877 at age 75.
- September 17, 1849 – Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery with her brothers, but they insist on returning because of their families; Tubman soon escapes again, this time on her own. She went on to become the most famous ‘Underground Railroad conductor,’ making 19 trips back into the South to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom, without losing a ‘passenger.’
- September 17, 1866 – Mary Burnett Talbert born, African-American orator, suffragist and reformer; worked to develop black women leaders and women’s clubs, early advocate of women of all colors working together for women’s rights.
- September 17, 1867 – Vera Popova born, one of the first Russian women chemists, and the first Russian woman author of a chemistry textbook; Popova was also the first woman to die in a laboratory explosion in 1896, while attempting to synthesize methylidynephosphane, which was not successfully synthesized until 1961 (it was prone to spontaneous combustion at room temperature).
- September 17, 1900 – Lena Frances Edwards born, African American physician; after graduating from Howard University Medical School in 1924, she married fellow medical school graduate Keith Madison, and they moved to Jersey City NJ, where she became speaker on public health and advocate for natural childbirth serving the European immigrant community, until joining the staff of Margaret Hague Hospital in 1931, but her race and gender prevented her from being admitted to residency in obstetrics and gynecology until 1945. In 1954, she returned to Howard University Medical School to teach obstetrics, and became the medical adviser to the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and chair of the Maternal Welfare Committee of the Washington DC Urban League. Edwards helped found Our Lady of Guadaleupe Maternity Clinic in Hereford Texas in 1960 to serve Mexican migrant worker families. After a heart attack in 1965, she returned to Washington, where she worked for federal agencies until she retired in 1970.
- September 17, 1900 – Martha Ostenso born, Norwegian American novelist and screenwriter; her family immigrated from Norway to Canada, then moved to the American Midwest; Ostenso briefly attended the University of Manitoba, then left for New York City. She worked for a time as a social worker, but was involved in literary circles, and her first and best known novel, Wild Geese, was published in 1925, and became a best-seller. In 1931, she became an American citizen. She wrote numerous short stories, moved to Hollywood to write screenplays, and in all published 15 novels.
- September 17, 1900 – “Hettie” Hedwig Weitzel Ross born in New Zealand, Australian teacher and political activist; she was a leader of the Australian Militant Woman’s Group, and edited several political publications, including Young Communist. Ross was an advocate for the children of the poor, and argued for the centrality of education in raising them out of poverty. She was active with the Federated Seaman’s Union of New Zealand while still at Wellington’s Girls’ College, and co-founded the Communist Party of New Zealand with the union’s leader, Fintan Patrick Walsh. In 1921, she was arrested for selling a copy of an Australian publication, the Communist, to an undercover policeman. Labour Party Member of Parliament, Peter Fraser, who would later become New Zealand’s Prime Minister (1940-1949), took her case. Four years earlier, he had been convicted of the same offense, and served twelve months jail time. He strongly believed that Ross, who he described as a "young girl on the threshold of womanhood," was a victim of unfair police officiousness, but Ross was convicted of selling seditious literature, then expelled from Wellington Teachers' College where she was studying for a degree in Education. When her widowed mother and two siblings emigrated to the U.S. in 1921, she had difficulty getting a passport to follow them, so in 1922, she moved to Australia, where her communist views were more openly acceptable. She married Hector Ross in 1923, then earned a diploma in Education from the University of Sydney in 1926. She and Herbert divorced, childless, in 1931, and she taught in Sydney schools until her retirement in 1956.
- September 17, 1907 – Elizabeth Enright born, American children’s book author and illustrator, short story writer for adults and literary critic; her book Thimble Summer won the 1939 Newbery Medal, and Gone-Away Lake was a runner-up for the 1958 Newbery Medal. She was also a multiple O. Henry Award winner for her short stories.
- September 17, 1916 – Mary Stewart, born Mary Florence Rainbow, British novelist and poet, pioneer in the romantic mystery genre; her Merlin series has elements of both historical and fantasy fiction.
- September 17, 1918 – Lea Gottlieb born in Hungary, Israeli fashion designer and co-founder of the Gottex Company; she and her husband emigrated to Israel in 1949, and opened a raincoat factory near Tel Aviv with money borrowed from family and friends. After months and months of no rain in Israel, she sold her wedding ring to buy fabric, and with a borrowed sewing machine started designing and making high-fashion beachwear and bathing suits, founding Gottex in 1956 – the company’s name is a combination of Gottlieb and textile, and it became the leading exporter of fashion swimwear to the U.S.
- September 17, 1944 – Jean Ellen Taylor born, American mathematician, currently professor emeritai at Rutgers University. After undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College, she earned a M.Sc. in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, but then switched to mathematics, transferring to the University of Warwick to earn a second M.Sc. in Mathematics. She completed her doctorate at Princeton in 1972. Taylor is known for her work on the mathematics of soap bubbles and of the growth of crystals. In 1976 she published the first proof of Plateau's laws, a description of the shapes formed by soap bubble clusters that had been formulated without proof in the 19th century by Joseph Plateau. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Women in Mathematics, the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
- September 17, 1947 – Tessa Jowell born, Baroness Jowell, British Labour politician; Lord Temporal member of the House of Lords (2015-2018); Minister for the Cabinet Office (2009-2010); Paymaster General (2007-2010); Minister for the Olympics (2005-2010); Minister for Women (2005-2006) Member of Parliament for Dulwich and West Norwood (1992-2015).
- September 17, 1947 – Gail Carson Levine born, American young adult author, her first published book, Ella Enchanted, was a 1998 Newbery Honor Book; she worked for 27 years for New York state as a welfare administrator, helping people find jobs, but took a class in writing in 1987, and wrote manuscripts that were all rejected until 1996, when Ella Enchanted was accepted for publication. Her next novel, Dave at Night, was inspired by her father, who had grown up in an orphanage.
- September 17, 1953 – Tamasin Day-Lewis born, English television chef, food critic, and author of cookbooks and food-related books.
- September 17, 1953 – Rita Rudner born, American comedian and humor book author; co-author with her husband of the several screenplays, including the script for the film Peter’s Friends; she holds the record for the longest-running solo comedy show in Las Vegas.
- September 17, 1968 – Cheryl Strayed born, American novelist, essayist and memorist; noted for her 2012 memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
- September 17, 1978 – Sheeri Cabral born, American database administrator and architect; a MySQL community contributor, and the first Oracle ACE Director for MySQL. Cabral was the keynote presenter for the 2009 MySQL User Conference & Expo, “How to be a Community Superhero,” and a three-time winner of the MySQL Community Award.
- September 17, 1980 – Shabana Mahmood born in Birmingham, England, of Pakistani heritage; British Labour politician and barrister, a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford. Mahmood is the current Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood, since 2010, one of the three first women Muslim MPs in Britain. Mahmood was a member of the new House International Trade Select Committee (2016-2019), and is a member of Labour’s National Policy Forum.
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- September 18, 1587 – Francesca Caccini born, Italian composer, singer, lutenist, poet and teacher, known by the nickname “La Cecchina”, one of the most well-known and influential female European composers between Hildegard of Bingen and the 19th century. Her work, La liberazione di Ruggiero, is considered the first opera by a woman composer.
- September 18, 1858 – Kate Booth Clibborn born, English Salvation Army officer, daughter of William and Catherine, dubbed "la Maréchale"; she, with a few sister missionaries, brought the Salvation Army to France and Switzerland, meeting fierce opposition in both countries. At the beginning of her mission in France, she often came back from preaching on the streets bruised and bleeding, and had to pin on her bonnet strings instead of sewing them because men came up behind her and tried to use them to choke her.
- September 18, 1888 – Toni Wolff born, Swiss psychologist, worked closely with Carl Jung.
- September 18, 1889 – Doris Blackburn born, Australian activist, social reformer and Member of Australian Parliament for Bourke (1946-1949), the first woman elected to the Australian House of Representatives as an independent. She was an advocate for Aboriginal rights, and co-founded the Aborigines Advancement League and the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement. She later served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
- September 18, 1891 – Harriet Maxwell Converse, a white American woman author, is named as a chief of the Six Nations Tribe at Towanda Reservation in New York in honor of her untiring efforts on their behalf to gain U.S. citizenship and other benefits.
- September 18, 1905 – Agnes de Mille, influential American dancer and choreographer; best known for the ballet Rodeo, and for her choreography of the musical Oklahoma!, in which she integrated the dancing into the storyline, advancing the plot and illuminating the characters’ feelings instead of being separate “set pieces.”
- September 18, 1912– María De la Cruz born, Chilean women’s suffrage activist, publisher-editor of the magazine Luz y sombra (Light and Shadows), radio journalist and political commentator; founder of the Feminine Party of Chile; first woman elected to the Chilean Senate (1953), but she was accused of smuggling watches from Argentina, indicted and stripped of her position, even though nothing was ever proved against her, and the accusations are now seen as purely politically motivated to remove her from the Senate.
- September 18, 1917 – June Foray born, American voice actress best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, in a remarkable career that began in radio and spanned 80 years; Natasha of Boris and Natasha, Nell Fenwick, Lucifer the Cat from Disney’s Cinderella, and Nagaina the Cobra in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, are among the dozens of characters she gave a voice. In the 1960s, Foray was a pioneering and passionate advocate for the preservation and promotion of animation, credited with establishment of the Annie Awards, and a prime mover behind creation of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Famed animator Chuck Jones said, "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc was the male June Foray."
- September 18, 1919 – Dutch women win the right to vote. In 1883, the physician Aletta Jacobs tried to make use of the lack of the explicit exclusion of women in the electoral law to register herself as a candidate in Amsterdam, but was blatantly refused. This led to a constitutional revision in 1887, in which it was explicitly stated that the right to vote applied only to men. On October 2, 1889, the Vrije Vrouwen Vereeniging (VVV) was established. The aim of the association was “to promote the social importance of women” as well as fight for their “mental and political development”. Four years later, the VVV organized a public meeting with its main theme as ‘women’s suffrage’. They got some support from socialist circles, since only propertied men could vote, socialists teamed up with the VVV to fight for the universal right to vote. The collaboration was short because prominent socialists of that time – such as Henri Polak and Frank van der Goes – thought the demands of women were over the top and that they had gone too far. (How familiar all of this sounds!)
- September 18, 1923 – Bertha Wilson born in Scotland, Canadian jurist and the first woman Puisne (not a senior or chief justice of a court) Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1982-1991); first woman appointed to the Court of Appeal for Toronto (1975-1982); first woman associate, then partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt (1958-1975), where she created the first in-firm research department in Canada.
- September 18, 1925 – Dorothy Wedderburn born, British academic administrator, applied economist, sociologist and women's rights advocate. She had a significant role in the reorganisation of the University of London in the 1980s: Principal of Bedford College (1982-1985), which then merged with Royal Holloway College, and she became the first principal of the merged college (1985-1990); head of the Department of Social and Economic Studies (1978-1981) at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. Previously a professor of industrial sociology at ICST (1965-1981). She also supported the coalition of women's groups fighting to increase the participation of women in the professions, more employment opportunities, and pay equity after WWII.
- September 18, 1927 – Muriel Turner born, Baroness Turner of Camden, British Labour politician and trade union leader; Life Peer of the House of Lords (1985-2017); Assistant General Secretary of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS – 1970-1987).
- September 18, 1929 – Nancy Kassell Littlefield born, producer-director of documentary programs; Director of NYC Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting (1978-1983).
- September 18, 1937 – Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri born, South African politician and teacher; served twice as Acting President of South Africa, the first time in 2005 when both President Mbeki and his Deputy President were outside the country, and for 14 hours in September 2008, between the resignation of Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe taking the oath of office; Minister of Communications (1999-2009). She went into exile in 1965, working as a teacher, and for the UN Institute for Namibia, based in Zimbabwe, as a lecturer and registrar, and earned her PhD in sociology from Rutgers University in the U.S., then returned to South Africa in 1990.
- September 18, 1946 – Meredith Oakes born, Australian playwright and music critic, primarily working in London; her plays include The Neighbor, The Editing Process, Scenes from the Back of Beyond, and Mind the Gap; she wrote the libretto for the opera The Tempest, loosely based on Shakespeare’s play.
- September 18, 1948 – Lynn Abbey born, American computer programmer, fantasy author and anthology editor; known for Daughter of the Bright Moon.
- September 18, 1949 – Dr. Mo Mowlam born, British Labour politician; Minister for the Cabinet Office Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1999-2001); first woman Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1997-1999), overseeing the negotiations which led to the Good Friday Agreement, and was instrumental in restoring the IRA ceasefire; Member of Parliament for Redcar (1987-2001); after her retirement in 2001, she became a vocal critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and took part the anti-Iraq war protests. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1997, which she kept quiet for as long as possible, before dying in 2005.
- September 18, 1950 – Anna Deavere Smith born, actress and playwright; founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University; noted for writing, and starring in her one-woman “documentary theatre” shows , including Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, The Arizona Project, and Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education; recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
- September 18, 1950 – Siobhan Davies born, British modern dance choreographer; founder of the Siobhan Davies Dance Company in 1988; two-time winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in dance.
- September 18, 1960 – Carolyn Harris born, British Labour politician; the first woman Deputy Leader of Welsh Labour since 2018; Member of Parliament for Swansea East since 2015.
- September 18, 1981 – Lucy Aharish born, Arab-Israeli news anchor, reporter and television host; the first Muslim Arab presenter on mainstream Hebrew-language Israeli television. Since 2018, she is a news anchor on Reshet 13, after previously being the morning anchor on a current-affairs show, a news presenter and reporter, and a co-host on radio programme. She and Jewish-Israeli actor Tsahi HaLevi kept their relationship secret for four years before they got married in 2018, fearing harassment. Their marriage did cause a public controversy, with one members of the Knesset criticizing it as “assimilation” while several others congratulated them, and called the criticism “racist.”
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- September 19, 1426 – Marie of Cleves born, German princess, poet, songwriter and patron of letters. In 1440, she became Duchess of Orléans by marriage at age 14 to Charles, grandson of the French King Charles V. Marie’s son became King Louis XII of France. Her husband, who was 32 years her senior, died in 1465. In 1480, she secretly married the Artesian "Sieur de Rabodanges" who was one of her gentlemen of the chamber, and several years her junior. She died at age 60 in 1487.
- September 19, 1883 – Mabel Vernon born, American Quaker pacifist and national leader in U.S. suffragist movement; a principal member of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage. With major figures like Inez Milholland and Alice Paul, she was an organizer of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade and of the Silent Sentinels, the six-day-a-week picket of Woodrow Wilson by Suffragists in front of the White House, later moved to Lafayette Square, from January 1917 to June 1919.
- September 19, 1887 – Lovie Austin born, American bandleader, pianist, and composer-arranger; considered one of the best women jazz blues piano players of the 1920s.
- September 19, 1889 – Sarah Louise Delany born, African American civil rights pioneer; the first black teacher of high-school-level domestic science in New York public schools; she and her sister are the subjects of the oral history, Having Our Say, by journalist Amy Hill Hearth.
- September 19, 1893 – New Zealand women win the right to vote by Royal Assent of the governor to the Electoral Act of 1893. All New Zealand women, including the Māori, may vote. New Zealand becomes first independent country in modern times to enfranchise women. However, New Zealand women were not eligible to run for office until 1920.
- September 19, 1894 – Rachel Field born, American novelist, poet and children’s author; best known for Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, winner of the 1930 Newbery Award, and also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, for books considered worthy of placement “on the same shelf” as Carroll’s Alice; Time Out of Mind won an inaugural National Book Award in 1935, for Most Distinguished Novel.
- September 19, 1911 – Judith Vallentun Auer born, German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. As a student, she joined the Young Communist League of Germany in 1924, and married Erich Auer, a worker in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1926, and became a member of the KPD. When Hitler seized power in 1933, the KPD was banned. After her daughter Ruth was born in 1929, she learned typing and shorthand. She found work at Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG, producer of electrical equipment) in the cable works division, first as a short-hand typist, and later as a buying agent. At AEG, she came in contact with the resistance group led by Fritzs Plön, who was a welder. Auer managed the finances of the resistance group, and used her buying trips for AEG to do courier work, establishing links with other resistance groups, especially Theodor Neubauer in Thuringia, one of the states which became a Nazi stronghold early in the 1930s. She hid the Communist politician and resistance fighter Franz Jacob in her flat for several months after he fled from Hamburg. Auer was arrested at her workplace in July 1944, and later tortured. She was sentenced to death along with others who had been arrested, and hanged in October 1944.
- September 19, 1911 – Jane Oppenheimer born, studied fish embryos and investigated similarities/differences between fish and avian and amphibian species, sent embryos into space on 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission to study effects of zero gravity on embryonic development, She was also a major patron of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
- September 19, 1915 – Elizabeth Stern born in Canada, American pathologist; a pioneer in work on cell progression from normal to cancerous. Her breakthrough studies of cervical cancers have changed the disease from fatal to one of the most easily diagnosed and treatable. Her studies showed that a normal cell advanced through 250 distinct stages before becoming cancerous and thus is the most easily diagnosed of all cancers. Stern was the first to linking a virus in herpes simplex to cervical cancer. She was also the first to report a possible linkage between oral contraceptives and cervical cancer.
- September 19, 1917 – Amalia Hernández Navarro born, Mexican ballet choreographer; , pioneer in developing baile folklorico, and a Mexican cultural icon. In 1952, she founded the world-renowned Ballet Folklórico de México. Originally there were only eight dancers, but the company grew to 60 performers by 1959, and was commissioned to represent Mexico at the Pan American Games in Chicago, Illinois. She created over sixty baile folklorico works. Hernández also founded the Folkloric Ballet School in Mexico City. She was knowledgeable about pre-Columbian culture, and used elements from Mexico’s diverse cultural heritage, including specific regional folklorico traditions, in her choreography.
- September 19, 1917 – Pablita Velarde born Tse Tsan (Tewa for ‘Golden Dawn’), American Santa Clara Pueblo ‘flat style’ painter; at age fourteen, she was one of the first female artists accepted to Dorothy Dunn’s Santa Fe Studio Art School. Velarde learned to prepare paints from natural pigments for her later work, which she called ‘earth paintings.’ She was commissioned in 1939 by the U.S. National Park Service, under a grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), to depict scenes from Pueblo life for the Bandalier National Monument. In 1953, she was the first woman recipient of the Grand Purchase Award at the Philbrook Museum’s annual Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Painting, and in 1954, Velarde was among the twelve Native American artists and craftsmen honored by the government of France with the Palmes Académiques, the first foreign honors ever paid to Native American artists. She published Old Father the Story Teller, featuring six Tewa tribal stories, in 1960. Honored as a Santa Fe Living Treasure in 1988, and by the National Women’s Caucus for Art with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990.
- September 19, 1929 – Marge Roukema born, American moderate Republican politician, Member of the U.S, House of Representatives for New Jersey’s 5th District (1983-2003), and 7th District (1981-1983). She was frequently challenged by more conservative male Republicans in the primaries, but continued to be reelected, until she decided not to run for a 12th term in 2002 after her district had been gerrymandered in favor of conservative voters. She refused to endorse Scott Garrett, the conservative Republican who won the primary to succeed her. He held the seat from 2003 to 2017 (in the 2016 election, he was the only incumbent Congressman in New Jersey not to be reelected). Marge Roukema died of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease in 2014, at the age of 85.
- September 19, 1930 – Bettye Lane born, American photojournalist who covered the American feminist movement, donating over 1700 images and her collection of ephemera, all documenting the women’s movement from the 196os to the 1980s, to the Schlesinger Library; some of her work is also preserved at the Library of Congress and the NY Public Library.
- September 19, 1932 – Stefanie Zweig born, German Jewish writer and journalist; best known for her novel Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa), a bestseller in Germany, and translated into several other languages, based on her early life in Kenya, where her family had fled to escape persecution by the Nazis.
- September 19, 1939 – Louise Botting born, British radio presenter and journalist, and she became one of the first women directors on the board of an FTSE-100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange Index) company, when she was appointed to the board of AVIVA, a multinational insurance company. Her career in journalism began in 1970 when she wrote articles for the Daily Mail newspaper. She was the founding presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Money Box programme (1977-1992?), a financial advice programme aimed at “ordinary people,” which is still on the air. Among her many appointments to various boards and committees, she was a member of the Top Salaries Review Body (1987-1994) and was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CPE) for her service.
- September 19, 1940 – Zandra Rhodes born, English fashion designer, noted for her 1977 collection, a take on punk which she called Conceptual Chic, featuring beaded safety pins and dresses with holes; she was the founder of the Fashion and Textile Museum, which opened in London in 2003.
- September 19, 1945 – Kate Adie born, English television and radio journalist; as chief news correspondent for BBC News (1980-2003), she frequently covered war zones and terrorist attacks; since 2003, presents From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4.
- September 19, 1947 – Torunn ‘Teri’ Garin born, Norwegian chemical engineer, one of the developers of aspartame sweetener as a sugar substitute while working for General Foods (1971-1985), where she became a senior laboratory manager. Earlier in her career, she researched ways to minimize water pollution caused by food production. She co-patented an adsorption process to extract caffeine from coffee (1978) and a method to derive food dyes from natural sources to replace possibly cancer-causing synthetic dyes (1983), yielding, for example, non-toxic betanin, a natural red pigment from red beet. These U.S. patents were assigned to General Foods Corp.
- September 19, 1947 – Tanith Lee born, prolific British science fiction, horror and fantasy author of over 90 novels and 300 short stories; first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel for Death’s Master in 1979, which is part of her Flat-Earth Cycle, won several World Fantasy Awards for Best Short Story, and 2009 World Horror Grand Master Award.
- September 19, 1950 – Joan Lunden born, American television news correspondent and co-host of ABC’s Good Morning America (1980-1997).
- September 19, 1965 – Sunita Williams born, U.S. astronaut and Naval officer; assigned to the International Space Station as a member of Expeditions 14 and 15, flight engineer on Expedition 32, and commander of Expedition 33.
- September 19, 1966 – Soledad O’Brien born, American broadcast journalist and executive producer; anchor for the syndicated weekly program Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien; founder and chair of Starfish Media Group since 2013.
- September 19, 1970 – The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuts on CBS; a rare American television show which made a point of having a female lead character over 30 who has never married.
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- September 20, 1822 – “Libby” Smith Miller, suffragist, designer of the “bloomer” costume made popular by Amelia Bloomer in The Lily.
- September 20, 1831 – Kate Harrington born, teacher, author of children’s books and educational materials; pioneer in developing a sequential reading program, with emphasis on phonics, complete with a separate teacher's manual and spelling and reading books; noted for innovative use of music and reading materials geared to children’s interests.
- September 20, 1847 – Susanna Rubinstein born, Austrian psychologist; she earned a Ph.D. in 1874 in psychology and German literature. Her 1878 work "Psychologisch-Asthetische Essays" ("Psychological-Aesthetic Essays") is considered a major contribution to the study of human emotions. It was reprinted in 2012.
- September 20, 1884 – The National Equal Rights Party is founded in San Francisco; Belva Lockwood and Marietta Snow are nominated as President and V.P. candidates.
- September 20, 1888 – Sue S. Dauser born, serves as a Navy nurse from 1917 until her appointment as Superintendent of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps during WWII; retires in 1945.
- September 20, 1890 – Linda Eenpalu born, Estonian politician and women’s rights activist. She was the first Estonian woman member of the National Constituent Assembly (1937) and of the Second Chamber of the National Council (1938). She was a librarian at the Tartu Public Library Society (1913-1914), co-founder of the Estonian Female Student's Society (1911), member of the central committee of the Estonian Women's Club from 1928, Chairperson of the Central Society of the Estonian Rural Women in 1929–1940 and a member of the National Economic Council in 1935–1938. In 1937, she was a member of the national housing department, and in 1938–1940 she was the only woman member of the Second Chamber of the National Council. She was arrested in 1941, and deported to Tomsk Oblast in Siberia, where she remained until 1956.
- September 20, 1899 – Anna L. Strauss born, League of Women Voters national president (1944-1950); President Truman named her to Commission on Internal Security and Individual Rights (1951). Strauss was the great-granddaughter of abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Mott.
- September 20,1902 – Stevie Smith born, English poet, novelist and short story writer.
- September 20, 1906 – Vera Faddeeva born, Soviet mathematician; she published some of the earliest work in the field of numerical linear algebra. Her 1950 work, Computational methods of linear algebra was widely acclaimed and she won a USSR State Prize for it. Between 1962 and 1975, she wrote many research papers with her husband, Dmitry Konstantinovich Faddeev.
- September 20, 1917 – Olga Dahl born, Swedish genealogist. In the 1950s, she wrote consumer advice articles for the women's magazine Husmodern, then became interested in family history when she moved to Gothenburg. In the late 1970s she was a co-author with Per Clemensson, Sven Gulin and other contributors of Gothenburg, Göteborgs hjärta – en bok om människor, affärer och byggnader kring Kungsgatan (The Heart of Gothenburg - a book about people, things, and buildings around Kungsgatan). In 2007, the database "Göteborgs tomtägare 1637-1807," based on their work, opened to the public, detailing 900 properties and their owners over two centuries. Dahl is a member of the Gothenburg Regional genealogical society.
- September 20, 1923 – Geraldine Clinton Little born in Northern Ireland, American author, playwright, poet and singer; her book-length poem Hakugai (Persecution) is based on the Japanese-American internment during WWII, but her best-known work is her historical play Heloise and Abelard; sang with the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia.
- September 20, 1928 – Olga Ferri born, Argentine choreographer and ballet dancer. She joined the Ballet of the Teatro Colón at eighteen and was prima ballerina from 1949.
- September 20, 1929 – Anne Meara born, American actress, comedian and writer; she and her husband, Jerry Stiller, performed as the comedy team Stiller and Meara; she wrote the play, After-Play, and won a Writers Guild Award for The Other Woman. Meara was nominated for 4 Emmys and a Tony Award.
- September 20, 1934 – Sophia Loren born, International Film Star, first to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for a performance in a non-English language in the film Two Women. In September 1999, Loren filed a lawsuit against 79 adult websites for posting faked nude photos of her on the internet.
- September 20, 1937 – Birgitta Dahl born, Swedish Social Democratic Party politician: Member of Parliament (1969- 2002; Minister for Energy Affairs (1982-1990); Minister for the Environment (1986- 1991); Speaker of the Parliament (1994- 2002). Since 2005, chair of the Swedish section of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
- September 20, 1946 – Judith Baca born, Latina visual artist and muralist, community activist. Teaches art in the University of California system since 1984. Artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).
- September 20, 1973 – Billie Jean King defeats Bobby “No-Broad-Can-Beat-Me” Riggs in their famous media event, the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ tennis match at the Houston Astrodome in Texas.
- September 20, 2011 – Repeal of the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" compromise takes effect, making it possible for LGBTQ members of the military to serve more openly.
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Sources
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