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- August 1, 1786 – Caroline Herschel, German astronomer, discovers the first of her eight comets; she was the first woman to discover a comet; Herschel was paid 50 pounds a year by the British Crown as her brother’s assistant, which he insisted upon, becoming the first woman to be paid for her work as an astronomer.
- August 1, 1818 – Maria Mitchell born, American astronomer and academic, discoverer of a comet, first American woman paid professional astronomer; first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Vassar College professor of astronomy (1865-1888) – when she found out she was paid less than younger male professors, she insisted on and got a salary increase; abolitionist (refused to wear cotton clothing until after the Emancipation Proclamation). She was also a suffragist, and a friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mitchell’s journals and letters were published in 1896, and were reissued in paperback in 2008.
- August 1, 1837 – Mary Harris baptized after birth in Ireland, her exact birthdate unknown; she became the American labor organizer and rallying speaker ‘Mother Jones’ after her husband and children died of yellow fever; in 1902 she was called ‘the most dangerous woman in America’ because she was so successful in organizing mine workers and their families. Mother Jones was an activist for child labor laws as well.
- August 1, 1841 – Lilli Suburg born, Estonian journalist, writer, and feminist. As a girl, she suffered from erysipelas, a severe skin infection which disfigured her face, but during the time she was forced to stay at home, she became an avid reader and studied on her own. By 1869, she had recovered enough that she completed the examinations required to obtain her teaching certificate. Suburg established a school for girls in Pärnu (1882-1894), and published Linda, the first women’s magazine in Estonia (1887–1894). In 1894, she was forced to sell the magazine, and moved to Latvia, where she was the head of a school until 1907. She began working on her memoir after the school closed. Though recognized as one of the first feminists of Estonia and made an honorary member of the Tartu Women’s Society in 1916, she was unable to attend the first women’s congress held in Tartu in 1917. In her last years, she made periodic visits back to Estonia to see her sister Laura, and it was during one of these visits that she died in 1923, at age 81.
- August 1, 1865 – Isobel Lilian Gloag born in London of Scottish parents, British painter known for oil and watercolour portraits, posters and stained glass designs; exhibited works at the Royal Academy of Arts, and elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours. Gloag had suffered ill health since childhood, and she died at age 51.
- August 1, 1888 – Aline Murray Kilmer born, American poet, children’s author, and essayist. Overshadowed by her husband, Joyce Kilmer, who died in WWI. Her works include the poetry collections Candles That Burn, and Vigils, and her essay collection: Hunting a Hair Shirt and Other Spiritual Adventures. Among Kilmer’s children’s books are: A Buttonwood Summer; and Emmy, Nick and Greg.
- August 1, 1905 – Helen Sawyer Hogg born, American-Canadian astronomer and academic; did pioneering research into globular clusters and variable stars; first woman president of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (1939-1941); wrote a weekly column “With the Stars” for the Toronto Star, and a column “Out of Old Books” for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada; strong advocate for women’s careers in science; winner of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy (1949), the Rittenhouse Medal (1967) and the Klumpke-Roberts Award (1983).
- August 1, 1910 – Gerda Taro born as Gerta Pohorylle, German Jewish war photographer, one of the first women photojournalists to be killed while covering the front lines of a war; she was opposed to the Nazi party, and joined leftist groups in 1929. In 1933, she arrested and detained for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda; in 1934, she and her family were forced to leave Germany, scattering in different directions. She moved to Paris, and never saw her family again. She learned photography from Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, and they became lovers. She went to work for Alliance Photo as a picture editor. They created the fictional persona of Robert Capa for Friedmann, but both of them submitted work under the alias, as it became more difficult for Jews to get their work accepted. The secret came out, but Friedmann kept the name Capa, and she adopted Gerda Taro as her professional name. While covering the Spanish Civil War, she photographed the bombing of Valencia and the Brunete region near Madrid, where her photographs showed that the Nationalist propaganda claiming control of the region was false. She was killed in 1937, accidentally hit by a Republican tank.
- August 1, 1911 – Harriet Quimby passes her pilot’s test, becoming the first woman in the U.S. to receive an Aero Club of America aviator’s certificate.
- August 1, 1911 – Jackie Ormes born, American cartoonist, first woman African American cartoonist in the U.S.; noted for the comic strips Torchy Brown, and Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger.
- August 1, 1912 – Gego born as Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt in Germany; Venezuelan modern artist and sculptor; because she was Jewish, her German citizenship was nullified in 1935, and she moved to Venezuela in 1939, becoming a Venezuelan citizen in 1952.
- August 1, 1916 – Anne Hébert born, Canadian author and poet, honored three times with the Governor General’s Award.
- August 1, 1923 – Beatrice Medicine, Standing Rock Sioux anthropologist, focused on the roles of Lakota women in changes facing their cultures in bilingual education, alcohol and drug use, domestic abuse, socialization of children, and identity needs. She is the author of Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining Native.
- August 1, 1926 – Hannah Hauxwell born, English farmer in the North Riding of Yorkshire. By 1961, she was working alone on her family’s 80 acre farm, Low Birk Hatt Farm, running the farm with no help after the deaths of her parents and an uncle. There was no electricity or running water, and she was struggling to survive on £240-280 a year (the average annual UK salary at the time was £1,339.) Life was a constant battle against poverty and hardship, especially in the long, harsh winters with temperatures well below freezing. In the summer of 1972, she was discovered by a friend of a researcher at Yorkshire Television who was on a walking tour. After hearing some of her story, the researcher spoke with one of the company’s producers, who decided to make a documentary about Hauxwell, which came to be called Too Long a Winter. After it was shown on television, Yorkshire TV’s phone lines and mail were jammed for days by viewers wanting to help her. A local factory raised money to fund getting electricity to the farm, and Hauxwell received thousands of letters and donations from around the world. In 1989, a second documentary was made, A Winter Too Many, which found Hauxwell better off financially, having invested in a few more cows, but finding each winter more difficult to endure than the last, and her strength and health weakening. The film showed her leaving her beloved farm after selling it, and moving into a cottage in a nearby village. She was invited to the Women of the Year Gala at the Savoy Hotel in London, which was also documented, including her meeting HRH the Duchess of Gloucester. In 1992, she was filmed leaving Britain for the first time, on a trip to Europe, which was so popular that another film was made in 1994, showing her visit to the U.S. The meadows of her old farm have been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, now called Hannah’s Meadows, and managed by the Durham Wildlife Trust. She died at the age of 91 in 2018.
- August 1, 1927 – María Teresa López Boegeholz born, Chilean oceanographer and pioneer in marine sciences; professor of zoology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; professor at the University of Concepción, where she taught courses in ecology, aquaculture, women and the environment, marine biology and sustainable development; did field work on ecologic projects in the Chiloé Archipelago; advocate for women in artisanal fishing.
- August 1, 1946 – Fiona Stanley born, Australian epidemiologist, noted for research on child and maternal health, and birth defects; confirmed the benefit of folate in preventing spina bifida; her early work was on health problems among Aboriginal children caused by changes to their environment and traditional culture. She then studied in the UK at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in the U.S., before returning to Australia to establish research programs at the University of Western Australia and within the health department, focusing on preventing instead of curing diseases caused by societal and environmental issues. In 1990, she was the founder and director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research; a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences since 1996; recipient of the 2001 Centenary Medal; a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 2002; honored in 2004 by the National Trust as an Australian Living Treasure.
- August 1, 1947 – Lorna Goodison born, Jamaican poet, writer and painter; first woman Poet Laureate of Jamaica, since 2017; honored with 1999 Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for literary contributions, and the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Poetry; Goodison’s poetry collections include I Am Becoming My Mother; Oracabessa; and Supplying Salt and Light.
- August 1, 1947 – Chantal Montellier born, French cartoonist, artist, graphic novelist, writer, political leftist and feminist. She was the first woman editorial cartoonist in France, and a pioneering woman in comic books. In 2007, she and Jeanne Puchol, a cartoonist and graphic designer, founded the Prix Artémisia, named for the 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, an annual prize awarded to comics created by one or more women.
- August 1, 1964 – Fiona Hyslop born, Scottish National Party politician; Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs (2011-present); Member of the Scottish Parliament for Linlithgow since 2011.
- August 1, 1964 – Augusta Read Thomas born, American composer and conductor; Chair of the Board of the American Music Center; in 2007, Astral Canticle was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music; in 2017, she was commissioned to compose Plea for Peace, music commemorating the first nuclear chain reaction and its legacy.
- August 1, 1974 – Cher Calvin born, Filipina American television journalist, working for KTLA television in Los Angeles since 2005, and winner of six Emmy Awards for News Journalism. She speaks English and Tagalog, and participates in many Filipino and Asian community events, including a program at the Center for the Pacific Asian Family to raise awareness and help stop violence against women.
- August 1, 1980 – Vigdís Finnbogadóttir takes office as Iceland’s first woman president, and Europe’s first democratically elected female head of state, five years after the Icelandic ‘Women’s Day Off.’ This was a national strike for women’s equality in which 90% of Icelandic women took part, not going to work, and leaving the children and the housework for the men to manage, so fathers were unable to go to work either, virtually shutting down the country for a day.
- August 1, 2014 – The Council of Europe (COE) Convention to Prevent and Combat Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence goes into force.
- August 1, 2019 – Khadijah Mellah, age 18, became the first jockey in Britain to ride in a race wearing a hijab under her helmet, which she won aboard Haverland. The Magnolia Cup, a charitable race at Goodwood Racecourse, was also her first race. Her journey from the multiethnic community of Brixton to one of Britain’s most famous racecourses reads like a fairytale. She had not even been on a horse before her early teens, when her mother saw an ad for the Ebony Horse Club, an outreach program for south London’s most disadvantaged youth. Oli Bell, an ITV racing presenter is a patron of the club, and arranged for her to take part in the Magnolia Cup. Mellah went though just two months of intense training at the British Racing School in Newmarket, but her coach was Hayley Turner, British’s most successful woman jockey. Mellah said, “Haverland is such an amazing horse and I love him so much . . . Ambitious women can make it . . . I’ve had so much support, and I can’t wait to see other stories of other women getting into the industry and doing amazing.” Mellah began studying mechanical engineering at Brighton University in the fall of 2019.
- August 1, 2020 – Ryu Ho-jeong, a Justice party politician, who at 28 is the youngest member of the Korean national assembly, drew condemnation and praise after she was photographed in the national assembly chamber in what media described as a red minidress, a vivid contrast to the dark suits and ties worn by most male MPs. The dress triggered a flood of misogynistic comments online. On a Facebook forum for supporters of the governing Democratic party, a commenter said Ryu “looked as if she had come to the assembly chamber to collect payment for alcoholic drinks,” according to the Yonhap news agency. Other lawmakers came to Ryu’s defence, including Ryu’s Justice party colleagues, and other women MPs. In a Facebook post, Ko Min-jung, a member of the ruling party, thanked Ryu for “shattering the excessive rigour and authoritarianism” of the national assembly. Ryu said her choice of clothes was a challenge to male dominance in the 300-seat assembly, which has a record 57 women MPs after the April 2020 election. “In every plenary session, most lawmakers, male and middle-aged, show up in a suit and a tie, so I wanted to shatter that tradition,” she told Yonhap. “The authority of the national assembly is not built on those suits.” Ryu is part of a growing movement of South Korean women who are challenging outdated expectations of how they should appear in public. The “escape the corset” campaign is being driven by a backlash against exacting beauty standards that call for women to spend hours applying makeup and performing skincare regimes, as well undergoing cosmetic surgery to achieve a certain look which is considered the country’s ideal of beauty.
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- August 2, 1343 – Breton War of Succession: After her husband was beheaded for treason following a trial where no evidence against him is publicly demonstrated, and all his lands are forfeit (given by the king to her husband’s accuser), Jeanne de Clisson uses her own funds to outfit three ships, all black-hulled with red sails, naming her flagship My Revenge. She forms an alliance with the English as a privateer, becomes ‘the Lioness of Brittany’ and gains a fearsome reputation for personally decapitating captured French nobles, in her quest to be avenged against French King Phillip VI and her husband’s accuser, Charles de Blois.
- August 2, 1858 – Catharina van Rennes born, Dutch composer and music educator; composed music for the 1904 founding meeting of the International Alliance of Women/Alliance Internationale des Femmes organized by major campaigners in the Woman’s Suffrage movement in Europe and the U.S., including Marie Stritt, Millicent Fawcett, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Susan B. Anthony. The IAW is still in existence, and now has 41 member organizations, and consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
- August 2, 1870 – Marianne Weber born, German sociologist, author and women’s rights activist; published her landmark book Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (Wife and Mother in the Development of Law) in 1907, followed by works on “The Question of Divorce” (1909), "Authority and Autonomy in Marriage" and "On the Valuation of Housework" (both in 1912), and "Women and Objective Culture" (1913); she was the first woman delegate in the federal state parliament of Baden in 1919, and chair (1919-1923) of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (League of German Women's Associations). After the unexpected death in 1920 of her husband, Max Weber, she was left a widow with four adopted children to raise, so she became a public speaker, along with her writing. All her public activities stopped in 1935, when Hitler dissolved the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, but she held a private weekly salon in her home.
- August 2, 1878 – Aino Kallas born, notable Finnish-Estonian author, who wrote in both Finnish and English; her trilogy, Barbara von Tisenhusen, Reigin Pappi (The Pastor of Reigi), and Sudenmorsian (The Wolf’s Bride) exemplifies her recurring theme of Eros leading to tragedy or death.
- August 2, 1894 – Bertha Maria Lutz born, Brazilian zoologist, politician, diplomat, and leading figure in the Pan American feminist and human rights movements; she sparked the lagging campaign for Brazilian women’s suffrage, founding the League for Intellectual Emancipation of Women in 1919, and the Brazilian Federation for Women’s Progress in 1922; Brazilian women won the right to vote in 1932; in 1933, she had obtained a law degree from Rio de Janeiro Law School, and went to the Inter-American Conference of Montevideo, Uruguay, where she introduced several proposals, including calling for the Inter-American Congress of Women to focus on gender equality in the workplace; in 1936, she became a member of the Brazilian congress, one of the few congresswomen at the time, where she presented an initiative to create a committee to analyze every Brazilian law and statute to ensure they did not violate the rights of women, but when Getúlio Vargas was reinstated as dictator in 1937, he suspended parliament, ending any hope of going forward with the project. Lutz was one of four women in San Francisco in 1945 to sign the United Nations Charter, and was vice president of the Inter-American Conference of Women (1953-1959), and continued to be an active member of the commission, advocating for the rights of indigenous women. In 1975, she attended the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City, the year before she died at age 82.
- August 2, 1896 – Sarah Tilghman Hughes born, American federal judge, first woman to swear in a U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
- August 2, 1902 – Mina Rees born, mathematician and pioneer in the history of computing. She graduated Summa cum Laude with a math major at Hunter College in 1923. She earned a masters in mathematics from Columbia University in 1925, where she also studied law. At that time she was told unofficially that "the Columbia mathematics department was not really interested in having women candidates for PhD's." She earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1929. She taught at Hunter College until WWII, when she worked as a Technical Aide and Executive Assistant with the Applied Mathematics Panel at Office of Scientific Research and Development. Rees became an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Council member in 1947. In 1971, she was the first woman president of American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research of the U.S. Rees was honored with the Public Welfare Medal, the highest honor of the National Academy of Sciences. For her contributions during WWII, she was awarded the (UK) King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom, and the (U.S.) President’s Certificate of Merit.
- August 2, 1907 – Mary Hamman born, American writer, and editor for Pictorial Review, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, and editor-in-chief for Bride & Home. She also worked for LIFE magazine, as the modern living editor, one of the “trio of formidable and colorful women” at LIFE, with Mary Letherbee, the movie editor, and Sally Kirkland, the fashion editor. They ran the “back of the book” for Ed Thompson, the managing editor; when Thompson went on to found Smithsonian magazine, Hamman contributed pieces for its Back Page.
- August 2, 1942 – Isabelle Allende born in Peru, Chilean ‘magic realist’ author; widely read and influential Spanish-language author of The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts; she became an American citizen in 1993. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and letters in 2004; honored with the Chilean 2010 National Literature Price, and the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barack Obama.
- August 2, 1942 – Nell Irvin Painter born, American historian and biographer, whose field is American Southern history of the 19th century; her book, The History of White People, was a New York Times bestseller.
- August 2, 1943 – Rose Tremain born, English historical novelist, short story writer, and academic. She taught creative writing (1988-1995) at University of East Anglia, and later became the school’s Chancellor (2013 -2016). Tremain has been honored with the 1999 Whitbread Award for Music and Silence, the 1994 Prix Femina Étranger and the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, both for her book Sacred Count.
- August 2, 1947 – Ruth Bakke born, Norwegian organist, composer, and music theorist.
- August 2, 1967 – Aline Brosh McKenna born in France, American screenwriter and producer; noted for the screenplays for Laws of Attraction, The Devil Wears Prada and We Bought a Zoo.
- August 2, 2013 – Responding to the Supreme Court decision in U.S v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, the U.S. State Department announces it will begin granting U.S. entry visas to foreign spouses of U.S. citizens in same-sex marriages, and visa applications of foreign same-sex couples will be considered jointly.
- August 2, 2018 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern returned to work, following six weeks of maternity leave after giving birth to her first child, daughter Neve Te Aroha. "I feel like I've been gifted by the New Zealand public, by my team and with the help of the acting prime minister this time to be with Neve, which has been wonderful," Ms Ardern told TVNZ. "But of course, this is a unique circumstance and I'm really very keen to get back to work." Ms Ardern's partner Clarke Gayford, a television presenter, will be a stay-at-home dad, allowing her to focus on running the country. It is, she says, a privilege many other women do not have. "I'm very very lucky," she said. "I have a partner who can be there alongside me, who's taking up a huge part of that joint responsibility because he's a parent too, he's not a babysitter." She had said when she announced in January that she and her partner were expecting: "I am not the first woman to multi-task. I am not the first woman to work and have a baby - there are many women who have done this before." During her leave, she continued to read papers and consult on significant issues. She shared with the public a video of her rocking her daughter’s cot while dealing with a pile of papers.
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- August 3, 1851 – Isabella Caroline Somerset born, President of the British Women’s Temperance Association; women’s rights and birth control campaigner (“sin begins with an unwelcome child”), and editor of the feminist magazine The Woman’s Signal.
- August 3, 1902 – Regina Jonas in Germany, first woman ordained as a rabbi; she spent two years at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she continued teaching and holding services. She also met the newly-arrived prisoners to help them recover from shock and disorientation. She was transferred to Auschwitz in October, 1944, and killed there. The date of her death is uncertain.
- August 3, 1905 – Maggie Kuhn born, American activist, founder of the Gray Panthers, advocate for human rights, rights for seniors, social and economic justice, nursing home reform and an increased understanding of mental health issues.
- August 3, 1905 – Dolores del Rio born, Mexican actress and film star, regarded as the first Latin American crossover star in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s. After her busy career in the U.S. began to decline, she returned to Mexico and became one of the most important women in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1966, she was the co-founder with Felipe Garcia Beraza of the Society for the Protection of the Artistic Treasures of Mexico, which worked to protect the nation’s buildings, paintings, and other works of artistic and cultural significance. In 1972, she was one of the founders of Rosa Mexicano, which ran a day nursery for the children of members of the Mexican Actors Guild, and she served as the group’s first president (1970-1981), and a major fundraiser. After her death, the day nursery was named Estancia Infantil Dolores del Río (The Dolores del Río Day Nursery), and is still in operation. In 1972, she was a founder of the Festival Cervantino in Guanajuato, and made a series of television commercials for UNICEF shown throughout Latin America. In 1978, she was jointly honored by the Mexican American Institute of Cultural Relations and the White House as a cultural ambassador of Mexico in the United States.
- August 3, 1920 – P. D. James born as Phyllis Dorothy James, British author and Baroness James of Holland Park, a life peer in the House of Lords; best known for her Adam Dalgliesh detective series, but she also ventured into both historical fiction with Death at Pemberly, and dystopian fiction in The Children of Men. Among the many honours which she received, James was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the winner of three Silver Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers Association.
- August 3, 1928 – Cécile Aubry, French author, actress, screenwriter, and TV director; she adapted two of her children’s book series, Poly and and Belle et Sébastien, for television.
- August 3, 1937 – Yvonne Kauger born, Associate Justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court since 1984, Oklahoma Chief Justice (2007-2008). Honorary member of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, founder of Gallery of the Plains Indian (1981), coordinator of the Sovereignty Symposium (1987) and co-founder of Red Earth Indian Arts Festival, which began in 1987. Active supporter of the Art in Public Places Act, and served as chair of the Art committee when the Oklahoma Supreme Court underwent extensive renovations, assuring that work by Native American artists were included. Inducted into Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame (2001).
- August 3, 1941 – Martha Stewart born, American founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a communications, publishing, and merchandising empire; television host of Martha Stewart Living (1996-2004) and editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living magazine, beginning in 1990.
- August 3, 1949 – Sue Slipman born, British civil, human and women’s rights activist; executive member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (1977-1979); founding member of the Social Democratic Party (1981); Director of the National Council for One Parent Families (1986-1995); a staunch advocate for women, especially single parents, she was a member of the Working Group on Women’s Issues to the Secretary of State for Employment (1992-1998).
- August 3, 1953 – Marlene Dumas born, South African artist, whose uses themes of race, sexuality, guilt, violence, and tenderness in her paintings. In 1985, she became one of three living women artists whose work had sold for over $1 million USD to that date.
- August 3, 1957 – Kate Wilkinson born, New Zealand lawyer and politician, Commissioner of the Environment Court since 2015; Member of NZ Parliament (2005-2014); Minister of: Food Safety (2008-2013), Conservation (2010-2013), and Labour (2008-2012).
- August 3, 1958 – Lindsey Hilsum born, English television journalist and writer; International Editor for Channel 4 News, and regular contributor to the Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Granta; Hilson was a recipient of the 2017 Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
- August 3, 1958 – Ana Kokkinos born, Australian film and television director and screenwriter; her second short film, Only the Brave, won several awards; her first feature film, Head On (1998), won Best First Feature at San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; other feature films include The Book of Revelation and Blessed.
- August 3, 1984 – Mary Lou Retton’s perfect 10 vault wins gold at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles CA.
- August 3, 2019 – Pania Newton, one of the leaders of SOUL (Save Our Unique Landscape) a Māori group that has been encamped for over 10 days at Ihumātao, is trying to save this site which is sacred to her people, from a private developer who has a deal to put up a housing development. Newton says, “To me, this land is the very essence of who I am, it’s where my identity lies. How much more do we have to sacrifice at the hands of capitalism, at the hands of the crown, before it is all gone?” She traces her ties to Ihumātao to the first Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, who planted market gardens to feed their people as early as the 14th century. “We have experienced ongoing injustices since Ihumātao was forcibly taken in 1863. Our ancestral lands have been quarried, our waterways polluted. We feel as though we have sacrificed enough for the greater good of Auckland, and all we’re asking for now is that this small piece of land is returned back to the guardians so that we can hold it in trust for all New Zealanders to enjoy as a cultural heritage landscape.” It is a matter of record that Ihumātao was seized by the crown in 1863 and sold to white settler farmers. In 2016 it was sold again to developer Fletcher Building, which plans about 500 homes on the prime site so close to the airport – made even more valuable by Auckland’s well-documented housing crisis. The chief executive of Fletcher Building’s residential division, Steve Evans, said the company has committed to returning 25%, or eight hectares, of land to Māori and would take due care of the site. In February, 2020, the disputed land at Ihumātao was granted the highest level of heritage recognition by Heritage New Zealand, which extended the borders of the Ōtuataua Stonefields reserve in Māngere to include the controversial whenua (sacred land - literally ‘placenta’ – from the womb of Papatūānuku, Earth Mother) This is a largely symbolic gesture as Heritage New Zealand is not a government agency, and has no power to grant any protections to Ihumātao.
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- August 4, 1470 – Lucrezia de' Medici born, eldest daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Clarice Orsini. She married the politically astute and ambitious Jacopo Salviati in 1486, and gave birth to 10 children, all of whom lived to at least early adulthood. She used her wealth and influence to support the de’Medici family as they went in and out of favor in as rulers in Florence, and was a trusted advisor to her brother Giuliano, who became Pope Leo X. Later, when her husband became a prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, she raised the ransom money and helped get Jacopo released. She lived to the age of 83.
- August 4, 1890 – Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong born, first woman law professor at major university law school, Boalt Hall, University of California Berkeley. Served on California Social Insurance Commission (1915-19). Expert on social economics and labor law (PhD Economics 1921), author of Insuring the Essentials (1932). Served as chief of staff for social security planning of the Committee on Economic Security, and was major contributor to the Social Security Act. Her two-volume work California Family Law (1953) is regarded as the seminal work in the field.
- August 4, 1892 – Johanna Bordewijk Roepman born, Dutch composer, largely self-taught; noted for her orchestral piece, The Garden of Allah.
- August 4, 1900 – Elizabeth Bower-Lyon born, future wife of King George VI, and Queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions; mother of Queen Elizabeth II; she lived to the age of 101; she was greatly admired for her indomitable spirit during WWII and her calm, cheerful public persona. As the Dowager Queen, she was often affectionately referred to as ‘the Queen Mum.’
- August 4, 1910 – Hedda Sterne born in Romania, American Abstract Expressionist/Surrealist painter; along with sculptors Louis Bourgeois and Mary Callery, she was one of the three women members of “The Irascible Eighteen” of the New York School.
- August 4, 1920 – Helen Thomas born, American journalist, columnist, White House press corps member who covers eleven U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Obama; first woman officer of National Press Club, first female member of Gridiron Club, first woman member of the White House Correspondents’ Association and its first woman president.
- August 4, 1923 – Mayme Agnew Clayton born, American librarian, founder and president of the Western States Black Research and Education center (WSBREC), the largest privately held collection of African-American historical materials in the world, representing the core holdings of what is now the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum in Culver City California; for almost 50 years, Clayton single-handedly, using her own re4sources, collected over 30,000 rare and out-of-print books, newspaper clippings, movie posters, sheet music – in all, some 3.5 million items. In 1969, she helped establish the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) African-American Studies Center Library, formed her own company, Third World Ethnic Books, and supported black filmmakers through the Black American Cinema Society.
- August 4, 1928 – Nadežda Mosusova born, Serbian composer, musicologist, and writer; professor and research fellow at the Stankovic Music School in Belgrade until her retirement in 1994.
- August 4, 1932 – Frances E. Allen born, American computer scientist; she went to college to become a high school math teacher, but instead became a pioneer in optimizing compilers, with seminal work in computer program optimization and parallel computing; first woman IBM Fellow; first woman recipient of the Turing Award (2006); also honored with a Computer Pioneer Award (2004) and as a Computer History Museum Fellow (2000).
- August 4, 1938 – Ellen Schrecker born, American historian and professor; notable for American Inquisition: The Era of McCarthyism, and several other books on the McCarthy era, also Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s.
- August 4, 1940 – Frances J. Stewart born, British pre-eminent development economist, named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders in 2003 by Scientific American; director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the University of Oxford; president of the Human Development and Capability Association (2008-2010); author of Technology and underdevelopment; Basic needs in developing countries; and Horizontal inequalities and conflict: understanding group violence in multiethnic societies.
- August 4, 1943 – Barbara Saß-Viehweger born in what was then the Province of Saxony; German lawyer, civil law notary and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician; member of the Abgeordnetenhaus (a representative assembly governing non-federal regional matters) of Berlin (1975-1995), where she was speaker of the CDU caucus, and chair of the Enquete-Kommission (inquiry commission) for Abgeordnetenhaus administration reform; member of the communal parliament in Steglitz (1971-1975).
- August 4, 1944 – A Dutch informer betrays the hiding place of Anne Frank’s family and their friends. The Gestapo arrested all ten of them and the two Christians who helped them. Anne and her sister died of typhus in Belgen-Belsen, less than two months before the camp was liberated by British forces in 1945. Only Anne’s father Otto survived.
- August 4, 1958 – Allison Hedge Coke born, American poet and editor of mixed Native American heritage. Her debut collection, Dog Road Woman, won a 1998 American Book Award. She has since written five more books and edited eight anthologies. Her 2006 poetry collection, Blood Run, was inspired by the traditions of the Native American Mound Builders and their earthworks.
- August 4, 1970 – Kate Silverton born, English journalist and BBC News and BBC Radio 4 presenter. She was a co-presenter with historian Dan Snow of the live coverage of the celebrations of the 90th Birthday of the Royal Air Force at RAF Fairford airfield.
- August 4, 1971 – Bethan Benwell born, British linguist and author; since 2008, a senior lecturer in English language and Linguistics at the University of Stirling; co-investigator (2007-2010) on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project Devolving Diasporas: Migration and Reception in Central Scotland, 1980–present; she and co-author Elizabeth Stokoe were nominated for the 2007 British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Book Prize for Discourse and Identity.
- August 4, 1975 – Jutta Urpilainen born, Finnish politician; Deputy Prime Minister of Finland (2011-2014); Minister of Finance (2011-2014); Leader of the Social Democratic Party (2008-2014); Member of Parliament for the Vaasa constituency since 2003.
- August 4, 1983 – Greta Gerwig born, American actress, screenwriter, and director; co-writer and co-director of Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), and Nights and Weekends (2009). On 2017, she wrote the screenplay for her solo directorial debut, the comedy-drama, Lady Bird, which won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture–Musical or Comedy, and was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
- August 4, 2006 – Single Working Women’s Day is started by Barbara Payne, co-founder of the Single Working Women’s Affiliate Network, for both young women just joining the workforce and all the single-parent moms (almost one-third of American families today).
- August 4, 2010 – The state government of Malaysia and its Islamic Religious Council announced that it will allow Muslim girls under age 16 and boys under 18 to be married, claiming it will reduce the number of babies born out of wedlock; Minister for Women Shahrizat Abdul Jalil called the decision “morally and socially unacceptable.”
- August 4, 2019 – Dame Vera Baird, the new Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, calls for increased support for domestic abuse victims after Abigail Blake’s violent ex-partner was given early release from prison. He was let out just six months after he was sentenced to three years and four months in a plea bargain, for breaking Blake’s back and neck, and her ribs, which punctured one of her lungs, leaving her permanently disabled. He was given a travel warrant and was allowed to make his way from Wrexham prison to his family’s home in Berkshire without a police escort, prompting Blake to go into hiding for 24 hours. Blake, mother of two, described her situation: “He left me for dead and now he is out. This is a daily hell, and will be for years. Forever looking over my back, laying in bed paralysed hearing sounds. Scared to death for the children and I. This is not living, this is existing, all while for Sebastian it’s the start of a new life having had zero punishment [because of] his abysmal sentencing.” Baird said she will meet with Abigail Blake to discuss her case.
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- August 5, 1529 – The Treaty of Cambrai is signed, after negotiations conducted primarily by Louise of Savoy for the French and Margaret of Austria for her nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V; also known as the Paix des Dames, or the Ladies’ Peace.
- August 5, 1565 – Paola Massarenghi born, Italian composer; her only composition to survive is a spiritual madrigal, called Quando spiega l’insegn’al sommo padre.
- August 5, 1833 – Carola of Vasa born, Queen consort of Saxony, noted for her support of expanding medical services, women’s education, and her leadership in reorganizing the health care system of Saxony. She was the co-founder of the Albert-Vereine, which was a women’s association of the Red Cross; founded the Carola Haus hospital. She founded a wet nurse school; a school for women in Schwarzenberg; and a women’s employment agency. She founded Gustavheim, a home for the aged and infirm; and a home for the handicapped as well.
- August 5, 1876 – Mary Ritter Beard born, American historian and author, social justice and women’s rights activist; On Understanding Women, America Through Women’s Eyes, and Woman As Force In History: A Study in Traditions and Realities.
- August 5, 1880 – Gertrude Rush born, American lawyer, author, and civil rights and woman suffrage activist; first black woman attorney in Iowa; in 1921, she was elected president of the Iowa Colored Bar Association. When she and several other Midwestern black lawyers were denied admission to the American Bar Association in the early 1920s, they founded the National Bar Association, which incorporated in 1925, in Des Moines, Iowa. A Monumental Journey, a public art project undertaken by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation to honor the 12 original organizers, including Gertrude Rush, of the National Bar Association, was completed in July 2018.
- August 5, 1880 – Ruth Sawyer born, American author of fiction and nonfiction for adults and children; her children’s book Roller Skates won the 1937 Newbery Award.
- August 5, 1882 – Anne Acheson born in Ireland, British-Irish sculptor and inventor who exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1913. During the WWI she volunteered to work for the Surgical Requisites Association at Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, London, where she was the co-inventor with sculptor Elinor Hallé of plaster casts for soldier’s broken limbs, which speeded the healing time by stabilizing and supporting the broken limb. She and Hallé were both awarded CBEs for their contribution in 1919. Acheson was the first woman elected to be a fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, and received the Gleichen Memorial Award in 1938. During WWII, she retrained as a precision engineer and draftswoman to enable her to do further volunteer work.
- August 5, 1888 – Bertha Benz drives from Mannheim to Pforzheim – the first long-distance automobile trip (almost 55 miles/82 kilometers), and the first made by a woman; now called the Bertha Benz Memorial route.
- August 5, 1891 – Harriet Spiller Daggett born, American academic, lawyer, schoolteacher and law professor; She graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU), studying while her children were at school, earning her AB in government (1923), AM (1925), LLB in 1926 and her MA in 1928. She was an instructor at the School of Government from 1925, admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1926, and also became an instructor in the LSU Law School in 1926, one of the first women to be on the faculty of a U.S. law school. She attended Yale Law School for one year to earn her JSD in 1929, and became an LSU Law School associate professor in 1930. In 1931, she became the first woman to be a full professor at an ABA-approved AALS-member college (Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong became a tenured law professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1933, and Margaret Harris Amsler was the third woman tenured law professor to be appointed, at Baylor University Law School in 1941). Spiller Daggett retired as a Professor Emeritus in 1961. She specialized in mineral rights, community property, and domestic relations. She published The Community Property System of Louisiana in 1931, and Mineral Rights in Louisiana in 1939, both leading works. She was also Chair of the Louisiana Library Commission, and co-founded the Family Court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
- August 5, 1918 – Betty Oliphant born, Canadian ballet dancer, and co-founder of the National Ballet School of Canada.
- August 5, 1926 – Betsy Jolas born in Paris, French-American composer; important figure in post-WWII French modernist music, she is a composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music, as well as opera; Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (1985), and Officier de la Légion d'honneur (2006).
- August 5, 1932 – Tera de Marez Oyens born, Dutch composer and Reformed church cantor; noted for her chamber music and song cycles, and electronic music compositions. In 1995, she was commissioned to write Unity, a piece for the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Nations.
- August 5, 1946 – Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson born, American nuclear physicist; first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); President of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999; Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board during the Obama administration (2014-2017), and Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Clinton administration (1995-1999), the first woman to hold that position. Noted for her work on elementary particle theory, subatomic particles, and semiconductor systems.
- August 5, 1947 – France Anne Córdova born, American astrophysicist and administrator. She is the current director of the National Science Foundation (since 2014). President Obama appointed her to the Smithsonian Board of Regents (2009-2014), and she served as its Chair (2012-2014). She was President of Purdue University (2007-2012). Córdova was Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Vice-Chancellor for Research (1996-2002), then Chancellor (2002-2007) at the University of California, Riverside. She was the youngest person and first woman to be appointed as NASA Chief Scientist (1993-1996). Córdova was head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University (1989-1993). She worked at and became Deputy Group Leader at the Space Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (1979-1989). Her research has been in observational and experimental astrophysics, multi-spectral research on x-ray and gamma ray sources, and space-borne instrumentation. She originally got a BA in English, because everyone she knew said it was “more practical” because she was “just going to get married anyway,” and she didn’t know any scientists. But her feeling that science was where she belonged wouldn’t go away, so she went back to school, earning a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1979, the year of her 32nd birthday.
- August 5, 2010 – The U.S Senate confirms Elena Kagan as the Supreme Court’s fourth woman justice by a vote of 63-37.
- August 5, 2017 – Venezuela’s new Constitutional Assembly ousted the nation’s top prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, sending guards in riot gear to keep her from her office. Ortega, a critic of President Nicolas Maduro, was replaced by one of Maduro’s supporters.
- August 5, 2019 – New Zealand announced a bill to legalise abortion for all women that would reclassify terminations as a health matter rather than a crime. The justice minister, Andrew Little, announced the bill which would bring New Zealand law into line with many other developed countries. The bill permits the termination of pregnancy for up to 20 weeks of pregnancy and removed abortion from the Crimes Act 1961. After 20 weeks, abortion is permitted only if a health practitioner deems it "clinically appropriate" and consults at least one other health practitioner. Abortion is only illegal if a person who is not a licensed health practitioner procures or performs an abortion. On March 18, 2020, the Abortion Legislation Bill 2020 was passed.
- August 5, 2020 – The British Medical Association (BMA) has found a strong pattern of highly experienced women leaving general practitioner partnerships, ending their positions as clinical leaders and directors, and leaving medicine early. They are leaving because of their struggles to cope with menopause symptoms, with no support from management or peers. Many hospitals fear National Health Service (NHS) understaffing has become so severe that patients’ health could be damaged: there are currently more than 30,000 British women doctors aged 45-55, when menopause typically occurs. This number will rise significantly as the new cohort of medical students progress, since almost 60% of them are women. “It is extremely concerning to find that some women may be permanently stepping back from senior positions in medicine – a key cause of the gender pay gap – and the health service may be losing highly experienced staff because of inflexibility and a lack of support during a relatively short phase of life,” said Dr. Helena McKeown, BMA representative body chair. “The health service is under immense pressure and we cannot afford to lose experienced doctors because of a lack of flexibility and support.”
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- August 6, 1619 – Barbara Strozzi born, Italian Baroque singer and composer; one of the few women of the day to have her compositions published during her lifetime, which were mostly secular vocal music. She is also likely the author of some of the lyrics put to her music.
- August 6, 1774 – Shaker Founder ‘Mother’ Ann Lee and a small group of her followers arrive in New York from Great Britain, where she had been arrested and jailed multiple times.
- August 6, 1817 – Zerelda Wallace born, American lecturer, temperance advocate and suffragist, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women’s suffrage.
- August 6, 1848 – Susie King Taylor born, African-American U.S. Civil War nurse, author and educator; she was born as a slave on a Georgia plantation, but allowed as a 7-year-old child to live with her grandmother in Savannah, where she learned to read and write in an illegal school run by Mrs. Woodhouse, a free black woman, and then extended her education with the help of two white youths, who knowingly broke the law against teaching slaves. But she was returned to her mother after her grandmother was arrested at a church meeting for singing freedom hymns. The Union took the area not long after, and she went with her uncle’s family under Union protection, eventually arriving at St. Simon’s Island in 1962. The commanding officers, discovering she was literate, offered the 14-year-old Susie a position running a school for children and adults. That same year, she married Edward King, a noncommissioned officer with the unit she would serve as an unpaid volunteer, the first black U.S. Army nurse. During the next three years, she also taught several of the soldiers to read and write. In 1866, she and her husband returned to Savannah, but he died there in an accident a few months later. She became the first African-American to teach former slaves openly in Georgia, where she taught children during the day and adults at night, but was not able to earn enough from teaching, and worked as a laundress at a military camp. By the 1870s, she was working as a domestic servant, and traveled to Boston with the family that employed her. There she met Russell L. Taylor, who became her second husband in 1879, and she settled in Boston for the rest of her life. In the 1890s, she wrote her memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, the only record by an African American woman of her experiences during the Civil War to be published (privately) in 1902. She died in 1912, at the age of 64.
- August 6, 1862 – Elizabeth Robins born, American playwright, actress, novelist, and campaigner for woman suffrage who lived most of her adult life in England. She married a fellow actor in 1885, but he resented her greater success as an actress, and her refusal to leave the stage. In 1887, he killed himself by jumping off a bridge, leaving a suicide note which said, “I will not stand in your light any longer.” The following year, she moved to London, and remained for the rest of her life. She formed a jointly-managed company with Marion Lea and mounted Ibsen plays, including Hedda Gabler. When Lea married playwright Langdon Mitchell and returned to America, Robins produced independently The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. With William Archer she created the New Century Theatre, producing and acting in John Gabriel Borkman and Echegaray's Mariana. In 1902, at age 40, she retired from acting, and focused on writing, having already published several novels and a collection of short stories, some under the pen name C.E. Raimond. She began attending open-air meetings of the suffrage movement, and in 1907 her novel The Convert was published. The Convert was expanded from her play, Votes for Women, considered the first suffrage drama. She was a member of both the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and the Women’s Social and Political Union, although she broke with the WSPU when its protests became more violent. In 1909, she met Octavia Wilberforce, who, because she insisted on pursuing a career as a doctor, had been disinherited by her father, a man regarding careers as ‘unsexing’ for women. Robins and other friends provided financial and moral support until she succeeded in becoming a physician. Dr. Wilberforce was the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce, noted British abolitionist. Just as she had documented Suffrage politics in her 1913 Way Stations, Robins contributed regularly to Time and Tide, a feminist magazine, including the campaign to allow women to enter the House of Lords. Her friend Margaret Haig was the daughter of Viscount Rhondda, who designated his daughter in his will as the inheritor of his title. In 1918, when her father died, Haig became Viscountess Rhondda, but the House of Lords refused to allow her to take her seat. Women were not admitted to the House of Lords until 1958. In the 1920s, Robins wrote Ancilla’s Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism, and other books which explored sexual inequality. She stayed an independent single woman, but enjoyed long friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Lady Florence Bell. Robins died at age 89 in 1952, less than three months before her 90th birthday.
- August 6, 1886 – Inez Milholland Boissevain born, labor lawyer, suffrage leader, WWI correspondent and orator; noted for leading the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington DC on a white horse. During her years at Vassar College she was once suspended for organizing a women's rights meeting. The president of Vassar had forbidden suffrage meetings, but Milholland and others held regular "classes" on the issue, along with large protests and petitions. Defying the campus ban on suffrage meetings, she convened one in a cemetery across the road. She enrolled 2/3 of the student body as suffragists, and taught them the principles of socialism. After graduating from Vassar, she applied for admission to study law at Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, but was denied because she was a woman. Milholland earned her LL.B degree from the New York University School of Law in 1912. She was admitted to the New York Bar, and handled criminal and divorce cases, but also investigated conditions at Sing Sing prison. So she became involved in prison reform. She also campaigned for world peace, was an active member of the NAACP, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the National Child Labor Committee. She played a prominent role in the National Woman’s Party, leading many suffrage parades before the 1913 parade in Washington D.C.
- August 6, 1894 – Paula Fürst born, German-Jewish reform educator who was forced to resign from teaching in 1933 at the first Montessori school in Berlin by the Nazi regime. She then taught at a Zionist School until 1938, when Rabbi Leo Baeck appointed her as head of all the Jewish schools in Germany. Fürst often accompanied children of the Kindertransport to London, but always returned to Germany, even as conditions worsened radically. She was arrested in June, 1942, and deported to Minsk. There are no further records of her, but historians believe she died in a death camp, possibly Auschwitz, later that year.
- August 6, 1903 – Virginia Foster Durr born, civil rights activist and author, founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (1938). She was a friend of Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt. Durr supported the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers by housing and taking care of many volunteers who came to Montgomery to work on voter registration issues.
- August 6, 1908 – Maria Ludwika Bernhard born, Polish classical archaeologist and specialist in Greek Art. During the WWII German occupation of Poland, she was active in the Polish Resistance as a liaison officer of the Home Army and worked in communications. Bernhard also helped guard the art collections at the National Museum of Warsaw. She was arrested in 1940, and sent to Pawiak, a Gestapo prison. At the end of the war, she was released from prison, and became Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. She was also curator of the Ancient Art gallery at the National Museum (1945-1962). In 1957, she became the chair of the Department of Classical Archaeology at Jagiellonian University. She wrote the Polish-language four-volume History of Ancient Greek Art, and the seven-volume Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.
- August 6, 1908 – Helen Jacobs born, American tennis star who served as a commander in U.S. naval intelligence during WWII, one of only five women to achieve that rank in the U.S. Navy at the time.
- August 6, 1911 – Lucille Ball born, American actress and producer; best known as the star of the television series I Love Lucy (1951-1957). She was the first woman to head a major television studio, Desilu Productions.
- August 6, 1912 – The Progressive ‘Bull Moose’ Party holds their convention at the Chicago Coliseum; Jane Addams gives the seconding speech nominating Theodore Roosevelt as their presidential candidate, a first for a woman. Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Progressive Party fully endorses women’s suffrage, in addition to advocating for child labor laws, and an 8-hour workday. Though they disagreed on how to end child labor, and gain suffrage for women – Addams favored federal laws, while Roosevelt wanted to stay with a state-by-state approach – they admired and respected each other. Roosevelt thanked Addams for her nominating speech in a telegram: “I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolizes for the new movement.”
- August 6, 1917 – Barbara Cooney born, American children’s author and illustrator, honored with two Caldecott Medals, for Chanticleer and the Fox (1958), and Ox-Cart Man (1979); then won a National Book Award for Miss Rumphius (1982). She was also a nominee in 1994 for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for children’s authors.
- August 6, 1920 – Selma Diamond born, Canadian-American writer for radio and television, and actress, whose family moved to New York when she was a child, giving her distinctive, raspy voice a Brooklyn accent. She wrote for a number of radio series in the 1940s, including Duffy’s Tavern, and was a staff writer for The Big Show (1950-1952). She moved to television, writing for Your Show of Shows (1952-1954), Caesar’s Hour (1954-1957), and Kraft Music Hall (1958-1963). In the 1960s and 1970s, she became a frequent guest on the Jack Paar Show, and the Tonight Show. Best remembered now for playing Bailiff Selma Hacker on the TV show Night Court, until her death from lung cancer in 1985.
- August 6, 1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
- August 6, 1926 – Elisabeth Beresford born in France, British author of children’s books, known for creating The Wombles of Wimbleton Common, who “make good use of bad rubbish.”
- August 6, 1930 – Abby Lincoln born as Anna Marie Woolridge, adopted the name Aminata Moseka after a 1970s tour of Africa, American singer-songwriter, actress and civil rights activist.
- August 6, 1942 – Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina is first reigning queen to address U.S. Congressional joint session.
- August 6, 1942 – Radhia Cousot born in Tunisia, the only woman in her class at the Polytechnic School of Algiers – she was also ranked first in her class; French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation, a theory of sound approximation of the semantics of computer programs, a way of gaining information about control- and data-flow without performing all the usual calculations; after working as an associate research scientist at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble, she was appointed in 1980 to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where she rose through the research ranks to the senior level to head the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract Interpretation” in 1991, and then on to the École normale supérieur (2006-2014); honored with the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award in 2014.
- August 6, 1961 – Mary Ann Sieghart born, English journalist, wrote a weekly political column for The Independent; BBC Radio 4 presenter of Start the Week; chair of the Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank.
- August 6, 1962 – Michelle Yeoh born, Malaysian actress, martial artist and film producer; best known as an actress for her performances in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which she had to learn Mandarin phonetically, since she spoke Malay, English and Cantonese. In 2002, she co-produced the English-language film, The Touch, through her production company, Mythical Films. In 2008, she filmed a documentary in Vietnam for the Asian Injury Prevention Foundation (AIPF). After portraying Aung San Suu Kyi in The Lady in 2011, she was blacklisted by the Myanmar government, and refused entry into the country. Yeoh is a patron of the Save China’s Tigers project, committed to protecting the endangered South China tiger.
- August 6, 1964 – Kemi Omololu-Olunloyo born, Nigerian journalist, and controversial activist against gun violence while living in Canada. She was deported from Canada in 2012. "Sometimes, as a cop, in order to keep the streets safe, you have to dance with the wolves," Constable Scott Mills of the Toronto police said. "I don't want to call Kemi a wolf, because I think she has a good heart. I just think, on more than one occasion, she hurt the cause more than she helped it. [But] at the same time, not only in Toronto but in other jurisdictions, we have solved some major incidents because of her work." Since returning to Nigeria, Omololu-Olunloyo has campaigned against male prostitution, and appeared on international news programs to discuss terrorism.
- August 6, 1965 – The Voting Rights Act outlaws the discriminatory literacy tests that had been used to prevent African Americans from voting. Suffrage is finally fully extended to African American women.
- August 6, 1967 – Lorna Fitzsimons born, British Labour politician, member of Parliament for Rochdale (1997-2005); President of the National Union of Students (1992-1994).
- August 6, 1973 – Vera Farmiga, American actress, director, and producer; she portrayed the Polish-American suffragist Ruza Wenclawska in the 2004 HBO film Iron Jawed Angels. She made her directorial debut with the 2011 film Higher Ground, in which she also starred. She was executive producer on the 2017 documentary film Unspoken, about Emma Zurcher-Long, who was diagnosed at age 2½ with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and taught herself to read and write. Farmiga was at the 2017 Women’s March in Vancouver with her daughter and husband, and was one of over 300 women in the entertainment industry to lend her name to the Time’s Up movement, to end sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace.
- August 6, 1991 – Takako Doi becomes first woman speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives.
- August 6, 2009 – The U.S. senate votes 68-31 to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic, and third woman, Supreme Court Justice.
- August 6, 2018 – A U.S. federal court became the second to rule against Donald Trump's updated policy barring certain transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. Trump banned transgender service members in 2017, citing concern over medical costs and distractions. Facing a challenge, he tweaked the plan in March to focus the restrictions on transgender people affected by a condition called gender dysphoria. The administration asked U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington to lift her injunction against Trump's original ban, arguing that the new policy is not a total ban because it only bars people who need or have undergone gender transition. Kollar-Kotelly disagreed, saying the new policy is essentially a total ban because it requires people to serve "in their biological sex."
- August 6, 2019 – Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale, banned beers with sexist names or imagery from its flagship event, the Great British Beer Festival. A YouGov survey found that 68% of women beer drinkers would be unlikely to buy a beer with offensively male-oriented advertising. Last year the Society of Independent Brewers (Siba) drew up a new code of practice to outlaw marketing deemed to be sexist and offensive. Abigail Newton, the vice-chair of Camra’s national executive, said: “Consumer organisations like Camra have an important role to play in making women feel more welcomed within the beer world. This is the first time we’ve made such a bold statement with a ban. It’s hard to understand why some brewers would actively choose to alienate the vast majority of their potential customers with material likely to only appeal to a tiny and shrinking percentage. We need to do more to encourage female beer drinkers, which are currently only 17% of the market, despite the fact that they make up more than 50% of the potential market. Beer is not a man’s drink or a woman’s drink, it is a drink for everyone.”
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- August 7, 1560 – Elizabeth Báthory born, the infamous “Blood Countess,” one of the first women serial killers in history; Hungarian torturer and murderer of hundreds of young women over a 24-year period. Stories of Báthory's sadistic murders were verified by the testimony of over 300 witnesses and survivors as well as physical evidence, and the horribly mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found when she was arrested.
- August 7, 1751 – Wilhelmina of Prussia, Princess of Orange born, leader of the dynastic stadtholder (hereditary stewards and officials) party and the counter revolution while married to William V of Orange.
- August 7, 1813 – Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis born, American abolitionist, feminist and educator, founder of the pioneering U.S. women’s rights newspaper, The Una; co-founder of the New England Woman Suffrage Association; she published her The History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement in 1870.
- August 7, 1848 – Alice James born, American diarist, chronicled her life and struggles with mental illness, sister of psychologist William James and novelist Henry James.
- August 7, 1864 – Ellen Fitz Pendleton born, American academic and administrator; Wellesley College president (1911-1936); acting president in 1910; Wellesley College dean (1902-1910); associate professor of mathematics and in charge of College Hall (1901-1902).
- August 7, 1876 – Mata Hari born as Margaretha MacLeod, Dutch exotic dancer; executed as a WWI German spy, but probably a double-agent for the French and the Germans.
- August 7, 1887 – Anna Elisabet Weirauch born, German author and screenwriter; actress with the German State Theatre under Max Reinhardt; notable for Der Skorpion, a pioneering novel of lesbian literature.
- August 7, 1890 – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn born, American feminist, labor activist, writer, organizer and powerful orator for the International Workers of the World (IWW). She was only fifteen when she gave her first public speech, "What Socialism Will Do for Women," at the Harlem Socialist Club. The song “The Rebel Girl” was written about her by Joe Hill. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formed in 1920, and a principal activist for their International Labor Defense (ILD). She worked with feminist and IWW activist Marie Equi in Portland, Oregon, during the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike of 1934. She joined the Communist Party in 1936, and wrote a feminist column for The Daily Worker. During WWII, she campaigned for equal opportunity and equal pay for women workers, and set up day care centers for working mothers. Flynn was arrested in 1951 and prosecuted under the ‘Smith’ Act, the Alien Registration Act (which set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the federal government.) She was found guilty of advocating the overthrow of the government, and served two years in Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. She wrote The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner about her time there. She later became chair (1961-1964) of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA. She died at the age of 74 during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1964. She was accorded a state funeral with processions in Red Square, which was lined by a crowd of over 25,000 people, but her remains were returned to the U.S. as she wished, and were buried in Chicago, near Emma Goldman and other labor activists.
- August 7, 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey becomes first to complete a cross-country automobile trip, traveling with three friends (none of whom could drive) for 59 days from New York, New York, to San Francisco, California.
- August 7, 1928 – Betsy Byars born, American children’s book author; Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans; National Book Award and Edgar Award winner.
- August 7, 1933 – Elinor Ostrom born, American political economist; shares 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver Williamson; first woman Nobel Laureate in Economics; elected to U.S. National Academy of Science in 2001; noted for Ostrom’s Law: A shared resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.
- August 7, 1938 – Helen Caldicott born, Australian physician, author, and activist; outspoken opponent of nuclear power and weapons; radio host of If You Love This Planet; now campaigning against climate change deniers.
- August 7, 1942 – Jane Fortune born, American author, journalist, women’s art expert, activist, and philanthropist; she was the cultural editor of The Florentine, an English-language newspaper in Tuscany (2005-2018), and wrote Mosaics, a column which led to publication of her guidebook, To Florence, Con Amore: 77 Ways to Love the City (expanded in the second edition to 90 Ways to Love the City). She spent many years tracing, documenting, and fighting to preserve, restore and promote the women artists of the city. She wrote Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence, published in 2009, and co-authored with Linda Falcone, Art by Women in Florence: A Guide through Five Hundred Years (2012), which details where the work of women artists may be viewed in the public collections of Florence. She founded the Italian nonprofit, The Florentine Committee of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 2005, and in 2009, she founded the American nonprofit, Advancing Women Artists Foundation (AWA), to research, restore and exhibit art works by woman artists. Since AWA’s founding, over sixty restoration projects have been completed for drawings, paintings, and sculpture, concentrating on Florentine women artists, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, but also work by 19th century French sculptor Félicie de Fauveau. AWA also sponsors the Nelli Awards, given to modern women artists, curators, and restorers working in Florence. Initially, she funded the restoration of a painting in the San Marco Museum, Lamentation with Saints, a large-scale Renaissance painting by Suor Plautilla Nelli, Florence's earliest recognized woman painter to date. In 2008, David and Bathsheba, by Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, was restored. In 2015, the city of Florence bestowed on her its highest honor, the Fiorino d’Oro. In 2018, after Fortune died of cancer at age 76 in her Indianapolis home, a memorial mass was held for her at the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.
- August 7, 1953 – Anne Fadiman born, American journalist and essayist; won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for her non-fiction book,The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization.
- August 7, 1957 – Daire Brehan born, Irish stage and television actress, barrister and BBC radio presenter; co-founder in 1985 of the theatre company Theatre Unlimited; was called to the Bar in 2002, practicing in criminal defense and prosecution; in 2005, became a member of the Inner Temple; elected in 2012 a Bencher of the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple. She died at age 55 of cancer in 2012.
- August 7, 1962 – Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey receives U.S. President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service from President Kennedy for refusing to authorize thalidomide.
- August 7, 1968 – Francesca Gregorini born in Italy, Italian-American film director, scriptwriter and musician; made her directing debut on Tanner Hall, for which she also co-authored the screenplay; her film The Truth About Emanuel was selected for the dramatic competition at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
- August 7, 1969 – Dana G. Peleg born as Kiryat Bialik in the U.S.; Israeli writer, journalist, translator, editor, poet, and activist for women’s and LGBT rights. From 1996 to 2006, she wrote a column for At (You) magazine, the first regular column in the mainstream Israeli press on lesbian, bisexual and pansexual women. Peleg also wrote for the magazine Haim Aherim (A Different Life – 2003-2013). She wrote for the LGBT publication Hazman Havarod (Pink Times – 1997–2007). In 2000, she published her first collection of short stories, Te'enim, Ahuvati (Figs, My Love), and her poetry has appeared in LGBT magazines and anthologies.
- August 7, 1971 – Karen Blackett born, British advertising executive; CEO of MediaCom UK (1999 to present), and Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth since 2017.
- August 7, 1979 – Birgit Zotz born, Austrian cultural anthropologist and writer; noted for her knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, and studies of cross-cultural hospitality management; she has been president of Komyoji, an intercultural institution, since 2005
- August 7, 1985 – Chiaki Mukai becomes Japan’s first woman astronaut, along with her male counterparts, Mamoru Mohri and Takao Doi.
- August 7, 1987 – Lynne Cox becomes first person to swim from the United States to the USSR, crossing from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union.
- August 7, 2010 – Elena Kagan is sworn in as the fourth woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
- August 7, 2012 – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a guest of honor at a dinner hosted by South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in Johannesburg, was one of the first people out on the dance floor, laughing with jazz singer Judith Sephuma as they tried to outdo each other in dance moves. This was a break from serious business; Clinton was attending a conference on stopping the spread of AIDS in South Africa, which has the highest HIV infection rate in the world.
- August 7, 2019 – Cyntoia Brown, a sex trafficking victim who in 2006 was sentenced to life in prison over the murder of Johnny Allen, was released on parole, seven months after Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam granted her clemency. Brown was 16 when she killed Allen, but she was tried as an adult. She said she acted in self-defense and that Allen had solicited her for sex after she was forced into prostitution, also saying that she believed Allen was going to kill her. Following her conviction, Brown would not have been eligible for parole until serving 51 years, but her sentence was commuted. Brown said she looks forward "to using my experiences to help other women and girls suffering abuse and exploitation."
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- August 8, 1640 – Amalia Catharina, Countess of Erbach born, German poet and composer; she published 67 Pietist poems and songs in 1692, meant for private household devotions.
- August 8, 1807 – Emilie Flygare-Carlén born, the most widely read Swedish novelist of her day; her early work was populated with seafaring folk, based on her childhood in the archipelago of Bohuslän. Her later work reflected her life in Stockholm, where her home became a meeting place for the city’s literati. She founded charitable endowments for the widows of fishermen, as well as scholarships for students. Noted for Ett köpmanshus i skärgården (The Merchant's House on the Cliffs) and Kyrkoinvigningen (The Magic Goblet), which was controversial for its honest treatment of divorce, rare in the 1840s.
- August 8, 1814 – Esther Hobart Morris born, abolitionist and suffragist; first woman Justice of the Peace in the U.S., appointed as J.P. in South Pass City, Wyoming, when the previous justice resigned in protest after Wyoming extended suffrage to women in December 1869. She served the remainder of the term, which expired in December 1870, but was not nominated for reelection by either the Republican or Democratic Party. South Pass City was a mining town, which went boom and bust several times. Morris left not only the town, but her husband, whom she had once had arrested for assault and battery. She moved several times, but attended the 1872 American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in San Francisco, then declined the nomination in 1873 by the Woman’s Party of Wyoming to be their candidate for the Wyoming Territorial Legislature. Morris served as Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, addressing its 1876 National Convention in Philadelphia. In July, 1890, she presented the new Wyoming state flag to Governor Warren during the Wyoming statehood celebration. She died in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1902.
- August 8, 1857 – Cecile Chaminade born, French Romantic composer and pianist, in spite of her father’s disapproval; noted for character pieces for piano and salon songs, including Scarf Dance, The Silver Ring and Flute Concertino in D Major; she was the first woman to receive the French Légion d’Honneur for music composition.
- August 8, 1863 – Florence Merriam Bailey born, American ornithologist, nature writer, and field guide author. She was an advocate for protecting birds, calling for birders to use binoculars instead of shotguns, and she denounced the fashion of using bird feathers and whole birds as decorations on women’s hats, which caused millions of birds a year to be killed. Author of Birds Through an Opera Glass. She organized Audubon Society chapters, and was co-author with her husband of Handbook of Birds of the Western United States and The Birds of New Mexico.
- August 8, 1884 – Sara Teasdale born, lyric poet, winner of the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Love Songs; also published Rivers to the Sea, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, and Helen of Troy. She married a businessman, Ernst Filsinger, who admired her poetry, in 1914, but his constant business travel caused her much loneliness, and in 1929, without telling her husband, she moved interstate for three months to satisfy the criteria for a divorce. She only notified him at her lawyer’s insistence as the divorce was going through. Filsinger was shocked. She died by suicide in 1933, overdosing on sleeping pills. She was 48 years old.
- August 8, 1896 – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings born, American author; won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Yearling.
- August 8, 1898 – Marguerite Bise born, French chef and restaurateur; notable as the third woman to win three Michelin stars, in 1951 as head chef of the restaurant Auberge du Père Bise which she founded with her husband in Talloires, Haute-Savoie, a lakeside resort town in southeastern France.
- August 8, 1922 – Gertrude Himmelfarb born, American traditionalist historian, noted for works on Victorian England; among her many titles are Victorian Minds, and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians.
- August 8, 1927 – Maia Wojciechowska born in Poland, American children’s and young adult fiction author, Newbery Award for Shadow of a Bull.
- August 8, 1929 – Larisa Bogoraz born, Soviet linguist, author, and dissident for free speech and civil rights, she organized a protest in Red Square of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. She was exiled for four years to Siberia; co-author of Memory. Contributor to the Chronicle of Current Events (1968-1983), an underground periodical run by dissidents which reported violations of judicial procedure and civil rights by the Soviet government.
- August 8, 1933 – Serena Wilson born, American dancer, choreographer and teacher; a pioneer in legitimizing belly dance in the U.S.; a student of Ruth St. Denis; television host of The Serena Show.
- August 8, 1937 – Sheila Varian born, American Arabian Horse breeder and trainer; received recognition for her work from the U.S. Equestrian Federation as one of the top ten breeders of Arabians in the country, and awarded the 2001 Ellen Scripps Memorial Breeders’ Cup to her; honored in 2005 with the Arabian Breeders Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
- August 8, 1942 – L.V. Hull born, self-taught African American artist; Vernacular Art Yardscape.
- August 8, 1948 – Svetlana Savitskaya born, Soviet cosmonaut , aerospace engineer, and test pilot who became the second woman in space aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982; on her 1984 mission, she became the first woman to be in space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk, in 1984. She was a test pilot from 1976 to 1980, when she joined the Russian space program. Previously, as an aviator, she set 19 women’s world records, and won the 1970 world aerobatics championship.
- August 8, 1948 – Margaret Urban Walker born, American philosopher, ethicist and author; Moral Contexts, and Naturalized bioethics: toward responsible knowing and practice.
- August 8, 1958 – Deborah Norville born, American television journalist; anchor on the syndicated news magazine Inside Edition since 1995; on the Board of Directors of Viacom Corporation; worked for CBS News (1992-1995), including a stint as co-anchor on America Tonight; she hosted The Deborah Norville Show on ABC TalkRadio (1991-1992) after taking maternity leave; worked for NBC (1987-1990).
- August 8, 1959 – Caroline Ansink born, Dutch composer, musician, and music educator; won both a Composition Prize and a GEDOK for Pyrrhus for Organ in 1989.
- August 8, 1964 – Anastasia Ashman born, American author, blogger, digital strategist, and co-founder of the global branding startup GlobalNiche.net; she is noted for her books, Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, and The Thong Also Rises: Further Misadventures from Funny Women on the Road.
- August 8, 1969 – Executive order 11478 issued by President Nixon requires each federal department and agency to establish and maintain an affirmative action program of equal employment opportunity for civilian employees and applicants.
- August 8, 1970 – Janis Joplin buys a headstone for blues singer Bessie Smith’s unmarked grave, two months before her own funeral.
- August 8, 1973 – Ilka Agricola born, German mathematician in the field of differential geometry; she is concerned with its applications in mathematical physics; dean of mathematics and computer science at the University of Marburg since 2014.
- August 8, 2018 – The Senate of Argentina rejected, by a vote of 38 to 31, a bill that would have decriminalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The nation’s current law only allows exceptions to the abortion ban in cases of rape, or severe risk to the woman’s health. During the Senate debate, the Roman Catholic Church held a “Mass for Life” at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral. After the vote was announced, police broke up several confrontations between advocates and opponents of the change outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires. A similar bill was introduced in May, 2019, in the Chamber of Deputies, Argentina’s lower house, which passed the bill by a vote of 129-121 in June 2019. The Senate again voted 38 to 31 against the proposed measure in August 2019.
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- August 9, 1757 – Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton born, daughter of a Continental Army General from a wealthy and politically influential Dutch heritage family; she accompanied her father to a meeting of the Six Nations, and met Benjamin Franklin when he stayed at the Schuyler family home. She married Alexander Hamilton, helping with his political articles and correspondence, serving as an intermediary with his publisher, and frequently hosting and attending political and social dinner parties. After her husband’s sudden death in the 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, she was left a widow with seven children, and many debts to pay, so she sold their estate, The Grange. In 1806, she and several other women founded the Orphan Asylum Society, opening the first private orphanage in New York. She was its second vice president, then served as its directress (1821-1848). The New York Orphan Society is now Graham Windham, an agency providing services to over 4500 children and families affected by abuse and neglect in low income New York neighborhoods.
- August 9, 1762 – Mary Randolph born, American author of The Virginia Housewife, an influential domestic “how-to” book. Randolph is the first recorded person buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- August 9, 1861 – Dorothea Klumpke born, American astronomer and astophotographer, one of the five Klumpke sisters, who all went on to distinguished careers, two of the others in music, one in art, and another in medicine; Dorothea began work at the Paris Observatory in 1887, measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, and studying stellar spectra; she was chosen as the observatory’s Director of the Bureau of Measurements (1895-1901), over 50 male applicants, and worked on astrophotography for the atlas of the heavens proposed by Sir David Gill in 1886; she left Paris in 1901 when she married Welsh astronomer Dr. Isaacs Roberts, and assisted in a British project to photograph 52 of the Herschel “areas of nebulosity.” Sadly, her husband died in 1904, but she inherited all his astronomical equipment and considerable fortune. Later, she returned to the Paris Observatory, working on plates and notes from her husband’s years of work; in 1929, she published “The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel’s Fields of Nebulosity.” She was awarded the Hèléne-Paul Helbronner prize in 1932 from the French Academy of Sciences for this publication.
- August 9, 1865 – Janie Porter Barrett born to a former slave; American welfare worker, social reformer and educator; she founded the Locust Street Social Settlement, the first of its kind for black people in the U.S., and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, a pioneer in rehabilitation of African-American female delinquents, which is now the Barrett Learning Center. The program included academic and vocational instruction, and “big sister” mentoring.
- August 9, 1867 – Evelina Haverfield born, Scottish nurse and woman suffrage activist; active member (1908-1915) of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant suffrage organization; during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), she set up a retirement camp for horses; founder of the Women’s Emergency Corps; worked as a nurse in Serbia, and fundraiser for Serbian relief (1915-1916) during WWI, then returned after the war with her companion Vera Holme to set up an orphanage in Bajina Bašta in western Serbia.
- August 9, 1878 – Eileen Gray born in Ireland, architect and furniture designer based in Paris; a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture; noted for her design of E-1027, a holiday home near Monaco, and Tempe à Pailla (‘Time and Hay’), a smaller home in Menton, also on the Côte d’Azur; during WWII, while she was interned as a foreign national, the Nazis looted the houses she had designed, which were damaged by bombing, and E-1027 was used for target practice by German soldiers.
- August 9, 1899 – P.L. Travers born as Pamela Travers in Australia, English author of the Mary Poppins books.
- August 9, 1908 – Mary G. Ross born, American Cherokee engineer and mathematician with an fascination for astronomy, the first Native American woman engineer; hired in 1942 by Lockheed as a mathematician, she worked with the engineering staff on the P-38 Lightning fighter plane, the first aircraft to exceed 400 mph; after the war, Lockheed sent her to UCLA for professional certification in engineering, where she studied aeronautics, missiles and celestial mechanics – she was one of the few women kept on after the war. Most were laid off so their jobs could go to the men returning home from military service. In 1952, she joined Lockheed’s Advanced Development Program at the then-secret ‘Skunk Works’ working on preliminary design concepts for manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights and satellites, interplanetary space travel, the RM-81 Agena rocket project. She was a co-author of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Volume III, about space travel to Mars and Venus. By 1958, she was ranked as an advanced systems engineer. Ross worked on the U.S. ballistic missile system, and overcoming the problems with launching them from submarines, and the Polaris reentry vehicle; Member of the Society of Women Engineers and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society; after she retired in 1973, Ross began actively recruiting Native Americans and women for engineering careers.
- August 9, 1914 – Tove Jansson born, Finnish author who often wrote in Swedish; painter, illustrator, and comic strip artist; noted for The Moomin series of children’s books; she won the 1966 Hans Christian Andersen Medal.
- August 9, 1915 – Mareta West born, American geologist, the first woman geologist hired by the U.S. Geological Survey, in Arizona; then became the first woman astrogeologist; West was the only woman on the Geology Experiment Team for Apollo 11, and she chose the site for the first manned lunar landing.
- August 9, 1919 – Leona Woods Marshall Libby born, physicist, only woman on team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor; worked on the Manhattan Project; professor at New York University and UCLA.
- August 9, 1928 – Camilla Wicks born, American violinist, one of the first women to establish an international career as a violinist.
- August 9, 1931 – Paula Kent Meeham born, American business executive and co-founder of the Redken hair products company; philanthropist who supported Childhelp, a non-profit dedicated to the prevention of child abuse; donated $5 million USD to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and was a large donor to the 9/11 Memorial Garden in Beverly Hills, California.
- August 9, 1940 – Linda Keen born, American mathematician; since 1974, mathematics professor at Lehman College and at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York; noted for work on Riemann surfaces, hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian and Fuchsian groups, and complex analysis; president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1985-1986); a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2012; served on the AMS Board of Trustees (1999-2009).
- August 9, 1944 – Patricia McKissack born, prolific African American children’s and historical fiction writer, many co-authored with her husband Frederick; won three Coretta Scott King Awards for A Long Hard Journey: The Story of the Pullman Porter, Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, and Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters; she was a board member of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance.
- August 9, 1945 – Posy Simmonds born, British newspaper cartoonist and children’s book author-illustrator; worked for The Guardian newspaper, satirizing the English middle classes.
- August 9, 1952 – Prateep Ungsongtham Hata born in a Bangkok slum, Thai activist and politician; noted for work with slum dwellers, and for opening a school in her home for children too poor to pay regular school fees. A newspaper story about her school led to donations, and university students volunteering as teachers. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration gave the school official recognition in 1976, and she was the recipient in 1978 of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service. In 2000, she was elected to the Thai Senate, representing Bangkok. In 2004, she received The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child from Queen Silvia of Sweden. After the coup d’état in Thailand 2006, she was a supporter of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (“Red Shirts”). During the protests of 2010, she belonged to the more moderate wing of the movement and was concerned to see the militant tendencies within the group. The political polarisation in Thailand led to a decline of donations for her Duang Prateep Foundation from within the country, as some regular donors who were affiliated with the opposite political camp stopped their payments.
- August 9, 1964 – Hoda Kotb born, Egyptian American television journalist and author; one of the co-anchors on Today, the NBC News morning show since 2008, she replaced Matt Lauer after he was dismissed; Dateline NBC correspondent since 1998; she has published three books, including her 2010 best-selling autobiography, Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee.
- ·August 9, 1966 – Linn Ullman born, Norwegian author, journalist, and columnist for Norway’s leading morning newspaper; noted for her novels, Before You Sleep, and Grace.
- August 9, 1979 – Lisa Nandy born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Wigan since 2010; senior policy adviser on young refugees to The Children’s Society from 2005; researcher for Centrepoint, a homeless charity (2003-2005).
- August 9, 1982 – Yekaterina Samutsevich born, Russian political activist and musician, member of the anti-Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot; convicted in 2012 of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for an appearance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. An international campaign was launched by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and Amnesty International which named her as a prisoner of conscience; on appeal, her sentence was suspended after her lawyer argued that she had been stopped by cathedral guards before she could get her guitar out of its case.
- August 9, 1990 – Sarah McBride born, American transgender rights activist and author; currently the National Press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign; major influence in passage of legislation in Delaware banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity; became the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention when she spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention; published her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality, in 2018.
- August 9, 1995 – Roberta Cooper Ramo becomes first woman president of the American Bar Association.
- August 9, 1995 – In South Africa, National Women’s Day becomes a public holiday to celebrate the 1956 Women’s March on the Union Buildings of Pretoria. Over 2,000 women of all races protest against the Urban Areas Act of 1950 amendments. This law required all South Africans defined as “black” to carry an internal passport that served to maintain segregation, control urbanization, and manage migrant labor during the apartheid. The protest was led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams. They left 14,000 petitions with 100,000 signatures at the office doors of the prime minister, and held a 30 minute silent vigil. After the vigil, they sang the song “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo” which translates to “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock.”
- August 9, 2016 – The longest hunger strike in history, by Indian activist Irom Sharmila, ends after 16 years of protesting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The act gives Indian soldiers sweeping powers to make arrests without warrants and even shoot to kill in certain situations. Sharmile announced her fast after 10 civilians were killed by soldiers in Manipur. She was arrested, and has been held since in judicial custody under a law that makes attempting suicide a crime, being force-fed through a tube in her nose for over a decade. She stated that she was ending her fast because it had not worked, and she was going to enter politics instead, standing in opposition to the government in the elections.
- August 9, 2019 – Carolyn Tuft survived the 2007 mass shooting at the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City, but her 15-year-old daughter Kirsten was killed. Now Tuft has lead poisoning from 300 shotgun pellets still in her body, leaving her with debilitating headaches, nausea, and other serious health problems. Unable to work, she lost her home and her business. She responded to the recent shootings in El Paso TX, which killed 23 and injured 23 others, and in Dayton OH, where 9 died and 17 were wounded: “I feel for them because I know that their journey ahead is a rough, rough journey.”
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- August 10, 1858 – Anna Haywood Cooper born into slavery in North Carolina, American Black liberation activist, scholar, author, educator, and lecturer. In 1868, at age 9, she received a scholarship to the new Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, founded by the Episcopal diocese in Raleigh to train teachers to educate former slaves. She distinguished herself as a bright and ambitious student who did well in all subjects. In spite of a two-track system, which relegated females to lower level courses, Copper fought for and earned her right to take the more demanding courses designed for the men. She tutored younger children to help pay her expenses, then stayed on as an instructor after completing her studies. She taught classics, rhetoric, history, higher English, and music. She married George Cooper, a fellow student, but he died only two years later. She went to Oberlin College in Ohio, where Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs Hunt were classmates, earning her BA in 1884. She taught at Wilberforce College and St. Augustines, then returned to Oberlin to earn an MA in Mathematics in 1888. By 1892, she was living in Washington DC, and was a member of the Colored Women’s League, a coalition of black women’s clubs and service organizations. In 1900, she went to London, to participate in the First Pan-African Conference, then went on to Paris for the 1900 World Exposition, and continued her travels in Germany and Italy. In 1901, she was the principal of M Street High School. Her book, A Voice from the South: by a Woman of the South, published in 1892, is one of the first Black feminist books. It brought to the attention of the public, and she became a popular lecturer. In 1924, she was one of the first African American women to earn a PhD, a prestigious one from the Sorbonne in Paris. After retiring from M Street School, she became president of Frelinghuysen University (a college for working black adults who were part-time students, which existed between 1906 and the 1950s.) She retired again in 1954, and died in 1964 at the age of 105.
- August 10, 1894 – Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca born in Latvia, American labor leader; she arrived in the U.S. at age 6, and became a garment worker at 13. She worked to convince men that unionizing women, a majority of the industry, benefited all workers. In 1914, Bellanca was one of only 5 women, out of 175 delegates, to attend the founding convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, where she promoted the need for women organizers. The ACWA would clash with the United Garment Workers, who distrusted their more progressive socialist ideology, and were unwilling to promote women to leadership positions. She was the first full-time woman organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), became Joint Board Secretary (1918 – ?), and then the first woman Vice President (1934-1946) of a national labor union. In the 1930s, Bellanca helped to found the American Labor Party, ran for Congress from Brooklyn, and organized labor and political support for federal housing, national health care, progressive labor laws, and civil rights legislation. She also served on the New York City Mayor’s Commission in Unity, and the Maternal and Child Welfare Committee under U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. She died at age 52 in 1946.
- August 10, 1908 – Rica Erickson born, Australian naturalist, botanical artist, historian and author; noted for Orchids of the West, and Triggerplants, as well as her work as editor of Flowers and Plants of Western Australia. She was a member of the Royal Western Australia Historical Society; made a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of her work as an author and illustrator in 1987. The Rica Erickson Nature Preserve was founded in her honor, and officially opened in 1996.
- August 10, 1914 – Margaret Morgan Lawrence born, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; first black woman physician certified by the American Board of Pediatrics; Chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Service for Infants and Children at Harlem Hospital for 21 years, as well as associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, retiring in 1984; noted for her research on development of strength in black families; author of The Mental Health Team in Schools, and Young Inner City Families; from 1932 to 1936, she was on a scholarship from the National Council of the Episcopal Church. The only black undergraduate at Cornell University, she was denied a place in the segregated dormitory. At first, she supported herself by working as a maid for a white family, living in the attic, but later worked as a laboratory assistant. In spite of academic excellence, she was refused admittance to Cornell Medical School because of her race, but became the third African American admitted to Columbia Medical School (1936-1940). Then she was rejected from a residency at New York Babies Hospital because of race, and rejected by Grasslands Hospital because she was a married woman. Lawrence completed a two-year pediatric residency at Harlem Hospital (1940-1942). She got her masters in science at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, where one of her teachers was Dr. Benjamin Spock; in 1948, she was the first African American to join the New York Psychiatric Institute, and the first African American psychoanalysis trainer at Columbia’s Psychoanalytic Center; she also earned certification as a pediatric psychiatrist (1951).
- August 10, 1931 – Dolores Alexander born, lesbian feminist, writer and reporter; In 1960, she was not hired as a copy “girl” at the New York Times after working there as an intern because it would “cause a revolution in the newsroom.” She went to work for the Newark Evening News, working up from reporter to copy editor to bureau chief (1961-1964), then worked for Newsday in various capacities (1964-1967). Alexander became chair of a committee of the National Task Force on Image of Women in Mass Media at the newly-formed National Organization for Women (NOW), and was NOW’s first Executive Director 1969 to 1970, when she resigned in protest of some negative attitudes exhibited towards lesbians during NOW’s early inception. She and Jill Ward borrowed money from friends to renovate a run-down luncheonette in Greenwich Village NY, which they opened in 1972 as Mother Courage, the first feminist restaurant in the U.S. Both women and men were served, but wine was poured for women to taste rather than their male guests, and checks were placed within equal distance of diners. It became a popular place for women dining solo, assured of good service and no hassling by men. Alexander lectured on women’s rights, working with the New Feminist Talent Collective, formed by Jacqueline Ceballos to provide speakers about the women’s movement; she also pushed for integration of want ads, beginning with the New York Times.
- August 10, 1933 – Elizabeth Butler-Sloss born, British judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss; President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice (1999-2005); first woman to serve as Lord Justice of Appeal (1988-1999); Family Division High Court Judge (1979-1988).
- August 10, 1941 – Susan Dorothea White born, Australian painter, sculptor and how-to author of Draw Like Da Vinci.
- August 10, 1956 – Perween Warsi born in India; moved to the UK in 1975; she began her business of making ethnic finger foods in her home kitchen, and won her first major contract in 1986. In 1987, her company was acquired by Hughes Food Group. Warsi was the CBE founder and Chief Executive of S & A Foods until 2015, when the loss of their largest contract forced the company into administration (similar to bankruptcy in the U.S.). Since 2016, she has been a consultant, through her company Succeda, to owner-managed businesses in the food industry.
- August 10, 1958 – Rosie Winterton born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for Doncaster Central since 1997; Parliamentary Undersecretary of State (2001-2003) Minister of State for: Health (2003-2006), Transport (2007-2008), Work and Pensions (2008-2009) and Local Government (2009-2010); appointed to Privy Council in 2006.
- August 10, 1962 – Suzanne Collins born, American television writer and science fiction/fantasy Young Adult novelist; known for her best-selling Hunger Games trilogy; began her TV career writing for several Nickelodeon children’s television series, becoming head writer for Clifford’s Puppy Days; her first novel was Gregor the Overlander, which began The Underland Chronicles. The Hunger Games won the 2008 CYBIL Award for Fantasy and Science Fiction.
- August 10, 1963 – Phoolan Devi born to a poor family in rural India as Phoolan Mallah; notable as a Dacoit (bandit) who became a Member of Parliament. She was sold off in marriage by her family to a much older man at the age of 11, who abused her physically and sexually. After multiple attempts, while still a teenager she finally managed to run away, becoming the only woman in a gang of bandits. She became lovers with one member of the gang, who took over after killing the gang’s leader, but this split the gang into two factions, and he was killed by the rival faction. The rivals took her to their village and held her prisoner, repeatedly gang raping her over several weeks. She escaped, found the remaining members of her faction, took another lover from among them, and a few months later, they descended upon the rival’s village and killed as many as 22 men, most of whom had raped her. The massacre was portrayed in some of the press as righteous, and she was dubbed Phoolan Devi (a respectful title), but also called the Bandit Queen. She evaded capture for two years before she and the few remaining gang members surrendered to police in 1983. She was charged with 48 crimes, including multiple murders, and spent 11 years in jail, as the charges were tried in court. In 1994, the state government summarily withdrew all charges against her, and she was released. She ran for parliament and was twice elected (1996-2001). In 2001, she was shot to death by relatives of the men she and her gang massacred.
- August 10, 1966 – Charlotte “Charlie” Dimmock born, English gardening expert and television presenter, known for Ground Force, a BBC garden makeover programme (1997-2005), Charlie’s Garden Army (1999-?) and as a commentator for the Chelsea Flower Show.
- August 10, 1974 – Haifaa al-Mansour born, the first and best-known Saudi Arabian woman filmmaker; after making three short films, she directed the documentary Women Without Shadows, which received the Golden Dagger for Best Documentary at the Muscat Film Festival in Oman; she wrote and directed her first feature film, Wadjda, which was the first full-length feature made entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first directed by a woman. It made its world premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. It was also the official Saudi Arabian entry for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film. Her focus on women’s issues has brought her criticism and hate mail, as well as praise. In 2015, she was selected as a jurist for the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of the Cannes Film Festival. Mary Shelley, her romantic drama about Shelley’s early life, premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
- August 10, 1974 – Rachel Simmons born, American research scholar at New York’s Hewitt School; author of the 2002 book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and the 2009 book, The Curse of the Good Girl.
- August 10, 1993 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
- August 10, 2019 – The Royal Bank of Scotland names Allison Rose as its new CEO, effective November 2019, following Ross McEwan.. Allison Rose, a 25-year veteran at RBS, was McEwan’s deputy chief at NatWest Holdings. She is the first woman to head a major bank in the UK. RBS is currently partly state-owned, but that is slated to change by 2024, when the government is expected to sell off its final stake in the bank. RBS made Katie Murray its finance chief in January. None of banks which are RBS’s main rivals, including Barclay’s, Lloyd Banking Group, and HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), has ever appointed a woman to any of the top three boardroom positions in the male-dominated banking industry.
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- August 11, 1384 – Yolande of Aragon born, titular queen regnant of Aragon who was denied rule because she was a woman, and was forced to marry Louis II of Anjou over her objections; she later supported the claim to the French throne of Charles the Dauphin, and helped finance Jeanne d’ Arc’s army, tipping the balance in favor of the French during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France.
- August 11, 1862 – Carrie Jacobs Bond born, American singer-songwriter of popular music; “I Love You Truly” and “A Perfect Day.”
- August 11, 1897 – Enid Blyton born, prolific English children’s author and poet; The Enchanted Wood, The Yellow Fairy Book, and many, many others.
- August 11, 1897 – Louise Bogan born, American poet, U.S. Consultant in Poetry (re-named Poet Laureate in 1986) to the Library of Congress (1945-1946), poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine (1931-1970).
- August 11, 1912 – Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs born, German astronomer; assistant astronomer at the Sonneberg Observatory (1945-1954); noted for her observations of variable stars.
- August 11, 1919 – Ginette Neveu born, French classical violinist, child prodigy, won the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition at the age of 16; she achieved international fame, but died in a plane crash at age 30.
- August 11, 1941– Elizabeth Holtzman born, youngest woman elected to U.S. Congress to that time, (Democrat-New York, 1973-1981); she was the first woman District Attorney in New York City (1981).
- August 11, 1941 – Alla Kushnir born in Russia, Israeli chess champion, Woman Grandmaster, three time winner of the Women’s Chess Olympiads.
- August 11, 1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil receive a patent for a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that later became the basis for modern technologies in wireless telephones and Wi-Fi.
- August 11, 1946 – Marilyn vos Savant born, American author and “Ask Marilyn” magazine columnist; noted for The Power of Logical Thinking.
- August 11, 1955 – Sylvia Hermon born, Lady Hermon, lawyer and Northern Irish independent unionist politician, regarded as socially liberal, concerned with pensioner’s and women’s rights; she first entered politics in 1998, and became the Member of Parliament for North Down in 2001, her current position; lecturer in Law at Queen’s University of Belfast during the 1980s; longstanding supporter of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, helping to launch its Northern Ireland network centre.
- August 11, 1965 – Viola Davis born, American actress, producer and activist; first black actor to win the “Triple Crown” of American acting: the Academy Award (2008 and 2016), the Tony Award (2001 and 2010) and the Emmy Award (2015 – for How to Get Away With Murder). She is also the first black woman to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Davis is the co-founder with her husband Julius Tennon of the JuVee Productions. She is a feminist and an activist for human rights and equal rights for women, and for women of color. She is also an active supporter of the Hunger Is campaign to eradicate childhood hunger in America.
- August 11, 1974 – Hadiqa Kiani, Pakistani singer-songwriter, social activist and the first Pakistani woman UN Goodwill Ambassador, in 2010; after the devastating 2010 floods in Pakistan, she volunteered with her siblings, working alongside the Pakistani Army distributing food, water, clothing and shelter to flood victims, and visiting with refugees; she helped finance and oversaw construction of over 250 houses for families who lost their homes during the floods; a supporter of Yeh Hum Naheen, an anti-terrorism campaign, she also joined with other Pakistani musicians in 2007 to produce an anti-terrorism song, and in 2015 became one of ten mentors who are part of an initiative to support Pakistani women in becoming community and national leaders, and overcoming gender discrimination. Kiani has been outspoken on the issue of sexual abuse of children, criticizing actor Yasir Hussain for joking about child molestation, and expressing disappointment in the Pakistani entertainment industry for its support for him
- August 11, 1974 – Audrey Mestre born, French marine biologist and record-setting free diver; after her family moved to Mexico when she was in her teens, she studied marine biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur; in 2000, she broke the female world record for free diving, reaching 410 feet (125 meters) on a single breath, then broke her own record in 2001; she was killed in a diving accident in 2002.
- August 11, 1978 – Lillian Nakate born, Ugandan civil engineer and politician; Member of the Ugandan Parliament representing the Luweero District Women’s Constituency since 2016; worked as an engineer in the private sector on construction projects and as a consultant (2011-2016); Town Engineer for Wobulenzi Town Council (2007-2011); Assistant Engineering Officer for Loweero District Local Government (2001-2006).
- August 11, 2019 – According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, at least 79 bills relating to sex education were introduced in legislatures in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Most of the bills have been aimed at expanding youth education around healthy sexuality and relationships — and reducing the reach of the abstinence-only ideology that had become part of many sex ed classes over the past four decades. In Colorado, a law passed in 2019 requires any sex education taught in the state’s public schools to be medically accurate and, in an unusual move, carved out $1 million to pay for it. California’s Board of Education updated its statewide framework in May 2019 for teaching comprehensive sex education that prioritizes medical accuracy and sensitivity to diverse sexualities. And in Virginia, a measure signed into law in March 2019 requires school-based sex education to include instruction on human trafficking. In Tennessee, where Republicans control the Senate, House and governor’s office, lawmakers passed a bill encouraging schools to provide education on sexual violence awareness. Utah’s Republican governor signed a law allowing educators to discuss contraception in public school classrooms. Renewed interest in the issue was fueled in part by legislative flips during last November’s midterm elections that brought into office more Democrats — and more female lawmakers — but also by questions about sexual assault and consent raised by the #MeToo movement. Although women hold fewer than 30% of state legislative seats, they introduced five out of every seven state bills updating sex education standards that were enacted in the past year, according to a recent brief by the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank. Women also introduced more than half of the bills to modernize sex education in this year’s sessions.
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- August 12, 30 BC – Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII Philopator, last ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, commits suicide rather than be displayed in Rome as a prisoner of Octavian in his triumphal procession.
- August 12, 1806 – Elizabeth Oakes Smith born, prolific American author, poet, lecturer and women’s rights activist. She was one of the speakers at the Seneca Falls Convention, but one who has been largely forgotten. Noted for "Woman and Her Needs," a series of essays published in the New York Tribune between 1850 and 1851 that argued for women's spiritual and intellectual capacities, and woman's equal rights to economic and political opportunities, including a right to higher education and the right to vote.
- August 12, 1831 – Helena Blavatsky born, Russian author and theosophist, co-founder of Theosophical Society, noted for Isis Unveiled, and The Key to Theosophy.
- August 12, 1833 – Lillie Devereux Blake born, American author (sometimes under the pen name Tiger Lily), suffragist, reformer, and Civil War correspondent for the New York Evening Post, New York World, and the Philadelphia Press. She is best known for her novels, Southwold and Rockford.
- August 12, 1857 – Ernestine von Kirchsberg born in Italy, Austrian painter; part of the atmospheric Stimmungsimpressionismus school of landscape painting.
- August 12, 1859 – Katharine Lee Bates born, American writer, poet, academic, and social activist; her poem “America the Beautiful” became the lyrics for the song; she was one of the pioneers in creating American Literature as a field of study, teaching one of the first college courses, and writing one of the first textbooks on the subject; She co-founded Denison House, a settlement house in Boston, and worked for the rights of women, workers, people of color, immigrants, and slum dwellers; after WWI, she was active in the peace movement, and the attempts to establish the League of Nations, opposing American isolationism.
- August 12, 1867 – Edith Hamilton born in Germany, American author, classicist, and educator, known for her books The Greek Way and Mythology.
- August 12, 1876 – Mary Roberts Rinehart born, American author and playwright, known for mystery and suspense novels, best remembered for The Circular Staircase.
- August 12, 1880 – Radclyffe Hall born, English poet and author; best known for her groundbreaking 1928 novel of lesbian literature, The Well of Loneliness. Though not sexually explicit, it became the subject of an obscenity trial in the United Kingdom which resulted in a ruling that all copies of the book be destroyed. Its U.S. publication was allowed only after an extended court battle.
- August 12, 1889 – Zerna Sharp born, American author and educator, creator of the Dick and Jane series for beginning readers.
- August 12, 1907 – Gladys Bentley born, African American lesbian cross-dressing blues singer, pianist, and lyricist who reached the height of her career during the Harlem Renaissance. She appeared in her signature white tails and top hat, and sang in a deep, booming voice her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day. As a headliner at Harlem’s Ubangi Club, she backed by a chorus of drag queens. With the repeal of Prohibition, the Harlem speakeasies began closing, and she moved to Southern California, but without recreating her past success. Bentley was often harassed for wearing men’s clothes. During the McCarthy era, she started wearing dresses, claimed to have been “cured” of lesbianism by taking female hormones, and was briefly married. She died of pneumonia in 1960 in Los Angeles, at age 52.
- August 12, 1914 – Ruth Lowe born, Canadian songwriter; her songs “I’ll Never Smile Again” and “Put Your Dreams Away” were early major hits for a young Frank Sinatra. The recording of her song “I’ll Never Smile Again” by Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra with Frank Sinatra was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1982.
- August 12, 1919 – Margaret Burbidge born in England, British-American astrophysicist; did her undergraduate and graduate studies in astronomy at University College, London (1936-1939, Ph.D. 1943). She was turned down for a Carnegie Fellowship in 1945 for the Mount Wilson Observatory because only men were allowed there at the time. She did come to the U.S. in 1951 on a grant for the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, focusing on the chemical abundances in stars. Returning to England in 1953, she collaborated with her husband and others on the stellar nuceleosynthesis theory, that all the chemical elements could be synthesized within stars by nuclear reaction. In 1955, she finally made it to Mount Wilson, posing as her husband’s assistant. When management found out, they agreed to let her stay on condition that the couple live in a cottage on the grounds instead of in the segregated dormitory. In 1972, for the first time in 300 years, the directorship of the Royal Greenwich Observatory was not combined with the post of the Astronomer Royal, but was given to Margaret Burbidge, while Martin Ryle got the more prestigious post of Astronomer Royal. Her appointment was short-lived. In 1974, she left after controversy broke out over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from its place in the observatory to a more useful location. Burbidge became one of the foremost and most influential advocates for ending discrimination against women in the field of astronomy. In 1972 she turned down the Annie J. Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society because it was awarded to women only. In 1984, the Society awarded her its highest honor, regardless of gender, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. Burbidge was the first director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California San Diego (1979-1988). In 1976, she became the first woman president of the American Astronomy Society. In 1977, she became an American citizen. Elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1981. In 1983, Burbidge was awarded the National Medal of Science. She also received the 1988 Albert Einstein World Award of Science.
- August 12, 1928 – Fatima Meer born, South African writer academic, feminist, human rights and anti-Apartheid activist, a leader in the South African Indian Community. In 1976, Meer became the first woman to be banned by the Apartheid regime, and was put in solitary confinement. The ban was extended until 1981. She also survived two assassination attempts. She published over 40 books, including Higher than Hope (1988), the first biography of Nelson Mandela.
- August 12, 1932 – Sirikit, the current Queen mother of Thailand, born; the world’s longest-serving consort to a reigning head of state; she took on duties as queen regent in 1956, when her husband, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, entered the Buddhist monkhood for a time.
- August 12, 1945 – Dorothy E. Denning born, American computer scientist, software engineer and information security researcher, innovator in lattice-based access control (LBAC) and intrusion detection systems (IDS); inducted into the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2012; now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School; author of Cryptography and Data Security; named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery in 1995; recipient of the 2001 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
- August 12, 1972 – Wendy Rue founds National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), the largest U.S. businesswomen’s organization.
- August 12, 1990 – American paleontologist Sue Hendrickson discovers the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton yet found, in South Dakota. It is dubbed “Sue” in her honor, and displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.
- August 12, 2017 – Violence erupted at the white nationalist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heather Heyer, age 32, one of the anti-racist demonstrators staging a counter-protest, was killed in a vehicle attack by a white nationalist. He deliberately rammed his car into the anti-racist crowd, killing Heyer and injuring 19 more. At least 15 other counter-protesters were hurt by four other white supremacists, who were arrested for inciting a riot and attacking the counter-protesters. Their actions were under consideration as hate crimes.
- August 12, 2019 – In the UK, Elena Bunbury, a Young Conservative activist, said she had submitted a complaint a year ago alleging that the organiser at a Young Conservative panel event had been rubbing his crotch repeatedly while she was speaking, and made her feel “continually objectified” with his comments. She said that “numerous other young females within the party” have alleged that they “have been continually harassed and made to feel uncomfortable by the accused.” After she went public with her claims, at least five other women said they had been targeted by the man, who is involved with a regional Conservative policy forum. Some of the women were attacked on Twitter for raising the issue, but Conservative activist Emily Hewertson responded, “The problem is, the party has had ample opportunity to investigate this after a number of formal complaints. Taking it to Twitter was a last resort, as people were not getting listened to.” A party source claimed the Conservative party’s central office had only received a complaint the day before, and acted immediately to suspend the member pending an investigation. A Conservative spokesperson said: “We take any allegations of this type incredibly seriously and are investigating this matter in line with our procedures.” While Bunbury declined to name the man in question, reports in the British press later revealed that he was Robert Winfield, a prominent member of Leeds City Conservatives, and that the party had suspended him during its investigation.
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Sources
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