WOW2 is now a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from October 16 through 23.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, October 23.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
October is
Domestic Violence Awareness Month
and Gay & Lesbian History Month
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- October 16, 1384 – Jadwiga is crowned “King” of Poland, the first woman monarch of the Kingdom of Poland, and rules from 1384 until her death in 1399; after her marriage, she is co-King with her husband, Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, a heathen who converted to Catholicism in order to marry her; she becomes a very successful mediator between his quarreling kinsmen, and uses her persuasive skills to convince the people of Ruthenia to switch their loyalty from Hungary to Poland.
- October 16, 1678 – Anna Waser born, Swiss painter; her father promoted her talent by paying for a tutor, then sending her to Bern to study with Joseph Werner, a leading Swiss painter of the time. She was his only girl student during her four years of study there. When she returned home to Zurich, members of her family’s wide social circle commissioned portraits, and her work began to be known. In 1699, at age 21, Waser was appointed by Count Wilhelm Moritz von Solms-Braunfels as court painter to his castle Braunfels an der Lahn in Hessen. But her promising career was ended when she had to stay in Zurich to take care of her ailing her mother, and run the family household. She died in 1714, at the age of 35, from injuries after a fall.
- October 16, 1793 – Marie Antoinette, convicted of depleting the national treasury, conspiracy against the security of the State, and high treason for intelligence activities for the enemy, is guillotined in Paris.
- October 16, 1831 – Lucy Stanton Day born, free-born African American abolitionist and women’s rights supporter; she became the first black woman to complete a four-year course of study at an American college when she graduated in 1850 from a ‘Ladies Literary Course’ (women took fewer classes and weren’t eligible for Bachelor of Arts degrees) at Oberlin College. Her step-father was an active participant in Cleveland Ohio’s branch of the Underground Railroad, so there were often fugitives hidden at her home as she grew up. He also founded the Cleveland Free School which Stanton attended; after college, she worked as a free school principal, a teacher, and a seamstress. In 1866, she was sent by the Cleveland Freedmen’s Aid Society to teach newly freed slaves, first in Georgia, and then in Mississippi. Later, she moved to Tennessee. In 1900, she moved to Los Angeles. In 1904, she was a founder of the Sojourner Truth Industrial Club for the large numbers of black working women seeking better employment opportunities in California.
- October 16, 1847 – The novel Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë, is released in London as Jane Eyre, An Autobiography, “edited by Currer Bell.” It revolutionized prose fiction by revealing Jane’s moral and spiritual growth and her emotional conflicts through an intimate, first-person narrative. Many of the reviews at the time were negative, some condemning it as “anti-Christian,” in violation of “every code human and divine” and fostering “rebellion at home.”
- October 16, 1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded, England’s first residential college for women. Women are originally only granted titular degrees – the title of a Bachelor or Master of Arts, but not full rights – they couldn’t vote in the university Senate, sit on committees, or use the library, museums, or laboratories of Cambridge.
- October 16, 1895 – Marguerite Rawalt born, lawyer, president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women (1954-1956), supporter of the ERA and the entire feminist agenda, particularly including the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- October 16, 1903 – Cecile de Brunhoff born, French storyteller and classical pianist, creator of the original Babar story, which began as a bedtime story for her children. Her husband, painter Jean de Brunhoff, illustrated and wrote down the story for a picture book, then went on to create six more Babar books. Her son Laurent de Brunhoff, continued the series, writing and illustrating dozens of additional Babar books.
- October 16, 1908 – Olivia Ensor Coolidge born in Britain, American author of historical books for Young Adults, many about Ancient Greeks and Romans; and biographies for adults, including one on Edith Wharton.
- October 16, 1916 – Margaret Sanger opened the first U.S. birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. Nine days later she was arrested after an undercover policewoman bought her pamphlet on family planning.. When Sanger is convicted of illegally distributing contraceptives, the trial judge declares that women “do not have the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”
- October 16, 1919 – Kathleen Winsor born, American journalist and author; best known for her racy historical novel Forever Amber.
- October 16, 1925 – Angela Lansbury born, actress with a 70+-year career in theatre, film, and television from Gaslight (1944) to Driving Miss Daisy (in the 2014 Broadway production). She is involved with Abused Wives in Crisis, which combats domestic abuse, and with other organizations that rehabilitate drug users, or help those with HIV/AIDS.
- October 16, 1928 – Mary Daly born, American radical lesbian feminist philosopher, academic and theologian; taught classes in theology, feminist ethics, and patriarchy at the Jesuit-run Boston College (1967-1999). She was threatened with dismissal in 1968 after publication of her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, but was given support by the then all-male student body, and later was granted tenure. Ironically, she would later be forced out after refusing to admit male students to her advanced women’s studies classes, which violated university policy and its interpretation of Title IX, even though she did allow men in her introductory class, and tutored male students separately who wanted to take advanced classes; noted for her second book, Beyond God the Father.
- October 16, 1928 – Sehadete Mekuli born, Albanian gynecologist, professor, and lecturer who worked to improve the health education of girls. She became a public figure when she gave medical treatment to injured students at the University of Pristina during the Kosovo protests in the spring of 1981. The protests began when a few students began demonstrating against having to wait in line for hours for poor-quality food, but escalated as police cracked down harshly, and made dozens of arrests. Albanian students began demanding more autonomy for Albanians within the Yugoslavian federation, and the demonstrations spread to other ethnic Albanians, launching a nationalist and egalitarian movement. The Yugoslavian government declared a state of emergency in Pristina and Kosovska Mitrovica, which led to rioting. The unrest was suppressed by a large police intervention that caused numerous casualties, and a period of political repression followed. Because of her treatment of the students and her ethnic background, Mekuli was accused of “showing too much zeal” in treating the wounded and of siding with the students. She was denied a full professorship at the University of Pristina School of Medicine, then forced into early retirement in 1988. In 1996, she opened a gynecology and obstetrics clinic, where she enlisted other gynecologists in Kosovo to work with her in treating women. She died at age 85 in 2013.
- October 16, 1941 – Emma Nicholson born, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, British politician; originally a Conservative, switched to Liberal Democrat as a Member of the European Parliament for South East England (1999-2009); in 2016, switched back to Conservative Party; Executive Chairman of the AMAR Foundation, which works to rebuild and improve the lives of disadvantaged communities in war-torn areas.
- October 16, 1948 – Alison Chitty born, British theatre production designer, and set and costume designer; honored with two Olivier Awards for Best Costume Design, 2001 for Remembrance of Things Past at the Royal National Theatre, and 2007 for The Voysey Inheritance, Royal National Theatre.
- October 16, 1948 – Hema Malini born, Indian actress, writer, director, producer, dancer, and Bharatiya Janata Party (Hindu nationalist) politician; elected to the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) since 2014; she had been appointed as a Member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house 2003-2009); recipient of the Padma Shri, the Government of India’s fourth-highest civilian honour, for contributions to Indian cinema. She is a supporter of PETA India, and has campaigned to ban horse carriages from Mumbai’s busy streets, and to ban jallikattu (bull fighting).
- October 16, 1956 – Marin Alsop born, American conductor and violinist; musical director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2007, the first woman to hold the position with a major American orchestra.
- October 16, 1956 – Meg Rosoff born, American writer based in London; noted for her first novel How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Prize, and the Printz Award, and her second novel, Just in Case, winner of the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book.
- October 16, 1959 – Tessa Munt born, British Liberal Democrat politician; Member of Parliament for Wells (2010-2015); Somerset County Hall councilor since 2017; member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
- October 16, 1960 – Terri J. Vaughn born, American actress, producer, and director; currently playing the recurring character of Melisse on the television series Greenleaf. She is the co-founder with Cas Sigers-Beedles of Nina Holiday Entertainment, which has produced several independent films, and Vaughn’s debut project as a director, #DigitalLivesMatter.
- October 16, 1965 – Kang Kyung-ok born, South Korean Manhwa (cartoon) artist; noted for It’s Two People and Narration in Seventeen.
- October 16, 1977 – Laura Wade born, English playwright; noted for her plays Limbo, 16 Winters, Colder Than Here and Breathing Corpses.
- October 16, 1978 – Wanda Rutkiewicz becomes the first Polish woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
- October 16, 1978 – Adrianne Frost born, American comedian, actress and author; best known for her work on The Daily Show in 2002, and her 2006 book, I Hate Other People’s Kids. Frost is now a seven-time champion of the Manhattan Monologue Slam, and the Grand National Champion for 2010.
- October 16, 2012 – Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney inadvertently created a new tone-deaf catchphrase, "binders full of women," during a debate discussion about gender equality in the workplace. Romney was describing his big effort to recruit women when he was governor of Massachusetts, even receiving "binders full of women" qualified to serve on his team. The phrase immediately went viral on social media. He did have nine women in his cabinet – out of a total of 27 appointees.
- October 16, 2019 – NASA unveiled two spacesuits designed to be worn by the first woman to walk on the moon. The next-generation suits were made for the Artemis programme, which aims to land the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024. A bulky, mostly white prototype with blue and red arms was demonstrated by Kristine Davis, a spacesuit engineer at the Johnson Space Center. The garment, called an exploration extravehicular mobility unit (xEMU), is designed for exploring the lunar surface, specifically the Moon’s south pole – target for NASA’s next crewed lunar landing. The other new spacesuit is a new orange pressure suit, the Orion crew survival system, which will be used by astronauts when they launch into space on the Orion capsule and return to Earth. The focus on spacesuits designed to fit a more diverse crew came after plans for the first all-female spacewalk had to be scrapped earlier in 2019 because there were not enough spacesuits available that fit the women.
- October 16, 2020 – An Italian woman who attempted to discredit her office rival by spiking her coffee with high doses of a sedative was sentenced to four years in jail. The woman brought her colleagues a round of coffees every workday from a bar near their office. On October 6, 2017, as Alice Bordon, the target of the plot, describes it: “Usually I would just sip it, but on that day I drank it all in one gulp,” Shortly after, she lost her balance as she walked towards her desk. “Everything was black, I felt like I was floating.” Bordon was taken to a hospital where she was tested for a possible stroke, but the tests came back negative. Other incidents followed, including Bordon crashing her car into a wall. But it wasn’t until Christmas that year that Bordon suspected that the coffee was the problem. The colleague took a few days off, and during that time Bordon was fine. She stopped drinking the coffee. Later, she accepted another cappuccino from her co-worker, but only sipped part of it, then put some in a test tube, and had it analyzed. It contained ten times the normal dose of the tranquillizer. The colleague was then caught red-handed by police as she was putting the medicine into Bordon’s cup.
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- October 17, 690 – Wu Zetian ascends to the throne of the Tang dynasty, proclaiming herself ruler of the Chinese Empire; she is the sole officially recognized Empress Regnant of China in over two millennia.
- October 17, 1538 – Irene di Spilimbergo born, Italian Renaissance poet and painter who studied with Titian; the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has a portrait attributed to her of her sister Emilia. She is also known for some poetic elegies, which were published two years after her death as part of an anthology edited by Dionigi Atanagi of works by contemporary cultural figures. She died in Venice at the age of 19.
- October 17, 1720 – Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini born, Italian composer, harpsichordist, and singer; often performed at the gatherings for the lectures of her more famous sister, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the mathematics and language prodigy, but also performed in Vienna and Dresden, cities which were more favorable toward women’s education and independence than her home city of Milan at the time. She enjoyed the patronage of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, and Maria Antonia, Electress of Saxony.
- October 17, 1864 – Elinor Glyn born, provocative English author, screenwriter, and producer-director; her novels It and Three Weeks were scandalous at the time; she wrote Hollywood silent film screenplays for Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow – Glyn gave Bow her ‘It Girl’ title. Briefly in 1929, Glyn had her own production company in Britain, Elinor Glyn Ltd, but it failed, and she went back to writing novels.
- October 17, 1868 – Sophia Hayden Bennett born, American architect, first woman to receive an architecture degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; designed the Woman’s Building at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition in 1893.
- October 17, 1882 – Haritina Korotkevich born, during the Russo-Japanese War, she disguised herself as a man using the name Khariton Korotkevich, and worked as a brakeman on the Trans-Siberian Railway to reach Port Arthur, in order to be reunited with her husband. She revealed she was a woman to the officer in charge, who heard her story sympathetically, and allowed her to take the oath of fidelity and don a uniform to serve as a soldier in the Imperial Russian Army. At first, she was not taken seriously, but proved herself to be an able fighter, and her courage inspired the men around her. When her husband was wounded, she spent three weeks caring for him at the field hospital, then returned to the fighting, assigned by the captain to be a messenger, carrying orders and reports between the commander and the front lines. When the Japanese launched a massive offensive in October 1908, she was carrying a report of causalities and an urgent request for reserve troops and more ammunition, when she was killed by a Japanese howitzer shell as she was leaving the regiment’s dugout. She was posthumously awarded the Cross of St. George, given for undaunted courage and distinction in battle.
- October 17, 1895 – Doris Humphrey born, American dancer and choreographer; along with Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, she was one of the second generation of pioneers in modern dance. Many of her works were annotated, so Humphrey’s choreography continues to be taught, studied, and performed. Her theories on the fundamentals of movement were very influential, especially her idea of Fall and Recovery as the center point of movement, which she described as "the arc between two deaths." It was based on the change in the center of gravity, then balance and recovery. Humphrey’s theory was that moving away from center should be followed by an equal adjustment to return to center to prevent a fall. The more dramatic the movement, the more dramatic the recovery should be.
- October 17, 1900 – C. C. “Cox” van Asch van Wijck born, Dutch artist and sculptor; after schooling in America, she studied with sculptor Toom Dupuis, who was the docent of Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the Hague). She was married in 1930, and set up her atelier in the gatehouse of her new home. In 1932, she died in childbirth, a month before her 32nd birthday.
- October 17, 1901 – Emma Gambia Alvarado born, Costa Rican educator; as a student who excelled in reading and mathematics, she was given a scholarship to the Escuela Normal de Costa Rica, founded in 1914, as a secondary school to train teachers. She graduated as a teacher in 1920, then continued her studies at Ohio University in the U.S., with a bachelor’s degree in Education Sciences in 1939, and a Master of Arts in 1940. She was a founding member of the Costa Rican Asociación Nacional de Educadores (National Association of Educators), and was elected as its second president in 1947. She earned a PhD in Philosophy from Ohio University in 1951. After her persistent campaigning for an education department, in 1958 she inaugurated the Education building at the University of Costa Rica. In 1960, she contributed to the creation of the Escuela Nueva Laboratorio (primary laboratory), brokering an agreement between the University of Costa Rica and the Ministry of Public Education. She promoted her ideas for an integral and democratic education system in books, talks and seminars, and at national, Latin American, European, and American conferences. She also wrote readers and textbooks for Costa Rican children, including My home and my Village; Active Reading; and Paco and Lola and The Little House on the Mountain. In 1998, she became the first woman whose likeness appeared on a Costa Rican banknote, the ten thousand colones bill.
- October 17, 1910 – Esther Wier born, American novelist and children’s author; The Loner won the 1964 Newbery Award for young adult fiction.
- October 17, 1910 – Marina Núñez del Prado born, notable Bolivian sculptor who used native Bolivian woods as well as granite, onyx, alabaster, and basalt. Much of her work was inspired by the art of Bolivia’s Aymara people and other indigenous peoples, and she was an advocate for their civic and human rights. Her house and studio are now the Núñez del Prado Casa Museo, governed by the Foundation Núñez del Prado, and designated as a Bolivian National Cultural Site.
- October 17, 1913 – Marian Marsh, born as Violet Krauth in Trinidad, American film actress and environmentalist. Her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts during WWI, then to Hollywood, California in 1923. Her older sister became a contract player, using the name Jean Fenwick. Marsh attended Hollywood High School. In 1928, she began taking speech and movement lessons from silent screen actress Nance O’Neil, and was soon under contract at Pathé Studios, making short subject films under the name Marilyn Morgan. In 1930, after parts in the Howard Hughes film Hell’s Angels and the Eddie Cantor musical Whoopee!, she was signed by Warner Brothers, and her professional name was changed to Marian Marsh. One of her best-known roles was as Trilby in the 1931 film, Svengali, co-starring with John Barrymore. Her career had ups and downs, and she retired in 1959. She moved to Palm Desert, California, where she founded Desert Beautiful, a non-profit, all-volunteer conservation organization to promote environmental and beautification programs in the 1960s. She died in Palm Desert in 2006, at the age of 93.
- October 17, 1917 – Adele Stimmel Chase born, American painter, sculptor, and ceramicist; noted for faience figures and ceramic tiles.
- October 17, 1918 – Rita Hayworth born as Margarita Cansino in New York, legendary American screen star, actress and dancer. She was a lifelong Democrat and an active member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee. She campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt during the 1944 election. When her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was made public in 1981, the disease was little-known, and she became its “public face,” not only raising awareness of the disease, but helping to destigmatize a condition that many families tried to hide out of embarrassment.
- October 17, 1919 – Violet “Vi” Milstead Warren born, Canadian aviator, she earned her private and commercial aviation licenses early in 1940; noted for being the first Canadian woman bush pilot, and one of four Canadian women who served in the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during WWII. With over 600 hours of flight time in 47 different types of aircraft during the war, she was also the longest-serving Canadian woman. After the war, she returned home and worked as a flight instructor and bush pilot. She was a member of the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame, the Order of Canada, and the Bush Pilots Hall of Fame.
- October 17, 1921 – Priscilla Langford Buckley born, American journalist, author, and editor. She attended Smith College, where she and Betty Friedan became close friends, and graduated with a degree in history in 1943. She worked for United Press (1944-1948 in New York and 1953-1956 in Paris). In between, she worked for the CIA. She started working at her father’s conservative publication, National Review, in 1956, then became managing editor in 1959 when Suzanne La Follette retired. She served as managing editor until 1985, then as a contributor until 1999. Her 2001 memoir, String of Pearls, covered her Paris years. In 2005, she published Living It Up with National Review. She died at age 90 in 2012.
- October 17, 1936 – Sathima Bea Benjamin born, South African singer-songwriter and record producer; sang with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival; founded her record label, ekapa, in 1979; received the Order of Ikhamanga Silver Award from South African president Thabo Mbeki for “excellent contribution as a jazz artist” and “contribution to the struggle against apartheid.”
- October 17, 1943 – Vilma Socorro Martinez born, lawyer, first woman U.S. Ambassador to Argentina (2009), and civil rights crusader. She was one of first women on the board of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) .
- October 17, 1946 – Drusilla Modjeska born in England, Australian author and anthology editor; novels Poppy and Stravinsky’s Lunch.
- October 17, 1946 – Daniela Payssé born, Uruguayan Broad Front (center left) politician; Senator of Uruguay (2015-2018); Deputy of the Republic in Uruguay’s lower house (2005-2015). Before entering politics, she was a teacher (1968-1995). She died at age 72 from an infarction in 2018.
- October 17, 1956 – Mae Jemison born, American physician, holder of a degree in chemical engineering, and NASA astronaut (1987-1993). Since 1993, Director of the Jemison Institute for Advancing Technology in Developing Countries, which researches, designs, implements, and evaluates cutting-edge technology in a real-life context. She was the first African American woman in space, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor in 1992, as a Science Mission Specialist, conducting space-sickness experiments and research on bone loss in zero gravity. Jemison also served as a doctor in the Peace Corps in West Africa (1985-1987).
- October 17, 1964 – Margarita Liborio Arrazola born, Mexican PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) politician; Deputy of the Legislature of the Mexican Congress representing Oaxaca (2009-2012).
- October 17, 1968 – Alejandra Ávalos born, Mexican singer-songwriter, actress, dancer, record producer, and philanthropist; she has been a supporter of causes including AIDS and cancer research, anti-poverty campaigns, children with disabilities, and animal rights.
- October 17, 1974 – Ariel Levy born, American writer and author; staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, and author of a memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, a critique of America’s highly sexualized culture, in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves.
- October 17, 1978 – Isabel Díaz Ayuso born, Spanish People’s Party politician; President by the Assembly of Madrid since 2019; her tenure has produced mixed results in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic; she was widely criticized for rescinding all contracts with companies which provided food for Madrid’s public school canteens, and making an agreement with Telepizza to distribute food to scholarship students, downgrading the quality of food given to the affected children, and hurting concessionaire workers.
- October 17, 2014 – Ángel Donesteve, a Madrid councilor on the city’s Family and Social Affairs Committee, dismissed a high-ranking employee, implying that she wasn’t showing “complete dedication” to her work after she became a mother. Madrid Mayor Ana Botella told Donosteve that she was "offended as a mother and a mayor" by his explanation of his decision to fire the woman who had run a legal services department for 10 years before taking the post of district secretary, the third most important position in the local administration. Botella ordered Donosteve to reinstate the woman. Donosteve had claimed, a year after the employee had given birth, that "she would rather balance her personal and family life, but I need maximum performance and as many work hours as possible” even thought the employee had not asked for a reduction in her hours or any other measure to balance work and family life. Donesteve made a public apology. A few days later he resigned, after the woman declined the offer to reinstate her.
- October 17, 2018 – Meredith ‘Merrie’ Ringel Morris and her co-author Eric Horvitz won the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) Lasting Impact Award given by the Association for Computing Machinery, for their work on SearchTogether, an interface for collaborative web search. Morris went on to become the Director and Principal Scientist at the People + AI Research Team at Google Research. She is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. Previously she was the Research Area Manager for Interaction, Accessibility and Mixed Reality at Microsoft Research. Morris has received 22 US patents and has authored more than 100 publications on topics including collaborative technologies, gesture interfaces, social media, accessible technologies, and human-centered AI.
- October 17, 2020 – Fawzia Koofi is continuing the fight for Afghan women, but from exile. In an interview, she said her life had a very rough start. After giving birth to a daughter instead of the son her husband demanded, her mother was severely depressed, and put Fawzia on her first day of life outside in the sun to die. But her mother changed her mind after a few hours, and brought her daughter back in the house. Koofi became an exceptional student, and was at university when the Taliban came to power in 1996. She was forced to leave school, along with all other Afghan females, who were banned from leaving their homes to go to school or to work. But after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in 2001, Koofi completed her education, and ran for parliament. She became her country’s first woman deputy and first woman deputy speaker, then Vice President of the National Assembly. She also worked with UNICEF as a Child Protection Officer to combat the abuse and exploitation of children. In 2020, she was one of the four women selected as part of the 21-member delegation for peace talks with the Taliban, after Afghan feminists lobbied hard to have women represented in the negotiations. Koofi nearly didn't make it to the peace talks, held in Qatar, because gunmen fired at her car before the talks started. She was shot in the arm, but the assailants got away. It was not the first assassination attempt made on her. Koofi said just being at the negotiations was an achievement, because it forced the Taliban to deal with women, even if some of them were so conservative that they refused to even look at her. She wanted respect for rights of the women of Afghanistan, but she also talked about the future of her country, about a cease-fire, “about everything that actually matters for my people.” Koofi stayed for two weeks after the Talban retook control of the government, but when she was placed under house arrest, she decided she would be more effective outside the country. She fled, and is now in exile in Qatar, still speaking out for the women of Afghanistan.
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- October 18, 1523 – Anna Jagiellon born, the last Polish ruler of the Jagiellonian dynasty; Queen of Poland and Grand Duchess of Lithuania from 1575 to 1587, after the death of her brother, King Sigismund II Augustus, the last Jagiellon male, in 1572. She had never married, but now her hand was sought by pretenders to the Polish throne. She chose Stephen Báthory of Transylvania, who was ten years her junior, and they were married in 1576, when she was 52 years old. He was crowned as co-ruler with her, but it was a dynastic arrangement, and they were never close. Her husband was preoccupied with the Livonian War against the Tsardom of Russia, so she took on local administrative matters, and oversaw several notable construction projects, including reconstruction of the Royal Castle, and a city wall in Warsaw to protect access to the Sigismund Augustus Bridge which crossed the Vistula River, the longest wooden crossing in Europe at the time, and one of the greatest engineering works of the Polish Renaissance. When Báthory died in 1586, Anna could have made a claim to continue as sole ruler, but chose instead to promote her nephew Sigismund III Vasa as the next ruler (1587-1632), establishing the House of Vasa on the Polish throne until 1668. Anna died in Warsaw in 1596 at age 72, the last Jagiellon.
- October 18, 1587 – Lady Mary Wroth born, English Renaissance poet, one of the first woman to achieve an enduring reputation in literature; wrote Urania, the first known/surviving prose romance written by an English woman, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, and Love’s Victory, a pastoral closet drama (reader’s theatre piece for private performance).
- October 18, 1775 – Poet Phillis Wheatley, a black slave in Boston, is freed upon the death of her master John Wheatley.
- October 18, 1874 –Dr. Christine Murrell born, English medical doctor, first woman member of the British Medical Association's Central Council; woman suffragist, chair of the WWI Women’s Emergency Corps; president of the Medical Women’s Federation (1926-1928). Murrell graduated from the London School of Medicine for Women with an MBBS in 1899, and was the second woman to serve as a house physician at London’s Royal Free Hospital. In 1903, she established a private practice in Bayswater with her friend Elizabeth Honor Bone. She earned an MD in psychology and mental diseases from the University of London in 1905. From 1907, she led an infant welfare clinic run by the St Marylebone Health Society at Lisson Grove for 18 years. In 1923, she published a series of lectures she had given, under the title Womanhood and Health.
- October 18, 1897 – Isabel Briggs-Myers born, American author and co-creator with her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs, of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a Jung-based psychological questionnaire to determine a person’s dominant perception function – sensation, intuition, feeling or thinking – and decision-making process, designed to evaluate “normal” populations.
- October 18, 1900 – Evelyn Berckman born, American author of detective fiction, Gothic horror novels and non-fiction British naval history, who began writing after semi-paralysis ended her career as a pianist; The Beckoning Dream, The Heir of Starvelings, and Creators and Destroyers of the English Navy.
- October 18, 1900 – Sarah Bavly born in the Netherlands, Dutch-Israeli nutritionist, researcher and author; came to British Mandatory Palestine in 1926, became the chief dietician for Hadassah hospitals, and head of Hadassah’s school lunch program; founder and dean of the College of Nutrition and Home Economics in Jerusalem (1953-1965); her book Tzunatenu (Our Nutrition) was a standard elementary-school textbook for decades.
- October 18, 1920 – Melina Mercouri born, award-winning Greek actress and singer; activist against the Greek military junta which overthrew the government in 1967 – the junta revoked her Greek citizenship. After the junta's fall in 1974, she became a founding member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), a centre-left political party; Mercouri was elected in 1977 as the Member of Parliament for Piraeus B; she served as Greek Minister of Culture (1981-1989).
- October 18, 1921 – Beatrice Worsley, Canadian born in Mexico, first woman to earn a Ph.D. in what is now called computer science, from Cambridge (Alan Turing was one of her advisors); female computer scientist in Canada; wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, and co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto’s Ferranti Mark 1.
- October 18, 1923 – Jessie Mae Hemphill born, African-American country blues singer-songwriter and guitarist. Known for her songs “Black Cat Bone,” “I’m So Glad You Don’t Know What’s on My Mind,” and “Lord, Help the Poor and Needy.”
- October 18, 1929 – Celebrated in Canada as “Persons Day”: The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overrules the Supreme Court of Canada in Edwards v. Canada when it declares that women are to be considered “Persons” under Canadian law, establishing both the citizenship rights of Canadian women, and the “living tree doctrine,” that a constitution is organic and must be read in a broad and liberal manner so as to adapt it to changing times. The Lord Chancellor, Viscount Sankey, wrote that “exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours,” and that “to those who ask why the word should include females, the obvious answer is why should it not.”
- October 18, 1929 – Violeta Chamorro born, Nicaraguan publisher and politician, President of Nicaragua (1990-1997).
- October 18, 1930 – Flora Fraser born, the Lady Saltoun, Scottish peer; holder of a lordship of Parliament since 1979, one of the 90 hereditary peers chosen by election to remain in the House of Lords after the House of Lords Act 1999 removed 662 hereditary peers. Lady Saltoun retired from the House of Lords in 2014. She is the Chief of the Name and Arms of Clan Fraser, following a 1984 decree of the Court of the Lord Lyon, and is also head of the Scottish lowland family the Frasers of Philorth.
- October 18, 1930 – Esther Hautzig born in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), American writer known for The Endless Steppe, and winner of the first Sydney Taylor Book Award in 1968, which is an account of her life in Siberia after her family’s deportation there following the Soviet conquest of eastern Poland in 1941.
- October 18, 1931 – “Ien” Isabella Dales born, PvdA (labor party) Dutch politician; Minister of Internal Affairs (1989-1994); Mayor of Nijmegen (1987-1989); Member of Parliament (1982-1987); State Secretary for Social Affairs (1981-1982); Rotterdam Director of Social Services (1977-1981).
- October 18, 1940 – Cynthia Weil born, American songwriter in partnership with her husband, Barry Mann. Known for “Blame It on the Bossa Nova,” “Here You Come Again,” “Love Her,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and many others.
- October 18, 1941 – Martha Burk born, American political psychologist, syndicated columnist and feminist; money editor for MS magazine, and current head of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations, which started the 2003 Women on Wall Street investigation into sex discrimination at companies associated with Augusta National, which led to two women becoming members of the all-male golf club in 2013; Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations (2001? -2005), an umbrella organization for over 100 women’s organizations.
- October 18, 1948 – Ntozake Shange born as Paulette Williams, American playwright, poet, and black feminist, best known for her Obie Award-winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.
- October 18, 1950 – Wendy Wasserstein born, American playwright, noted for The Sisters Rosenzweig, and The Heidi Chronicles, winner of a Tony Award for Best Play, and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
- October 18, 1951 – Terry McMillan born, American author, noted for Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
- October 18, 1955 – Rita Verdonk born, Dutch politician, originally with the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (2002-2007), then an independent (2007-2008), and founder and leader of the Proud of the Netherlands Party (2008-2011); Parliamentary leader in the House of Representatives (2007-2010); Member of the House of Representatives (2007-2010); Minister of Justice (2006).
- October 18, 1956 – Martina Navratilova born in Czechoslovakia, Czech-American tennis player, considered one of the all-time best women tennis players; advocate for LGBT rights, freedom of speech, and animal rights; involved with charities which benefit underprivileged children.
- October 18, 1972 – Mika Ninagawa born, Japanese photographer and director of films and music videos; winner of the 2006 Ohara Museum of Art Prize; known for intense color photographs of flowers, goldfish and landscapes.
- October 18, 1977 – Flavia Colgan born in Brazil, Brazilian-American Democratic strategist; political contributor to MSNBC.
- October 18, 1984 – Esperanza Spalding born, American jazz bassist and singer; musical prodigy, played violin in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon at age 5; Four-time Grammy Award winner, including first jazz artist to win Best New Artist in 2011.
- October 18, 1988 – Tessa Schram born, Dutch director and actress; noted for writing and directing the 2014 film Painkillers.
- October 18, 2007 – Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan, after eight years of living abroad; while her cavalcade is making its way through a crowd in Karachi, two bombs explode, killing 149 people, and injuring 402 more, but Bhutto is uninjured.
- October 18, 2019 – NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Dr. Jessica Meir successfully completed the first all-woman space walk after working seven hours outside the International Space Station to repair a failed power control unit. It was the fifth spacewalk for Koch, but the first for Meir, who is now the 15th woman to walk in space. Christina Koch is an electrical engineer, while Jessica Meir’s doctorate is in marine biology.
- October 18, 2020 – The Prado Museum in Madrid was under fire for its exhibition Invitadas no invitadas (Uninvited Guests) featuring artwork bought by the Spanish state between 1833 and 1931 that depicts women, as painted by men in the first half, with paintings by women brought together specifically for this show in the second half. According to curator Carlos G. Navarro, one of reasons for the exhibit is to explain “how the state – and the middle classes – came to fix on and publicly value certain images, prototypes and clichés that eventually became a collective imagination in which women were always represented in certain ways.” The paintings in the women’s side chronicle how women finally managed to invite themselves to the party by working in the less threatening roles of miniaturists, copyists, and painters of still lifes and flowers. But efforts to go further than that and paint what they wanted often met resistance. Aurelia Navarro’s 1908 “Female Nude” won much admiration and an award at that year’s national exhibition. But the attendant publicity and family pressure eventually led Navarro to abandon art and secular life and enter a convent. Embarrassingly, one of the paintings had been misattributed to a woman, and had to be removed when it was pointed out it was actually painted by a man. The final painting in the exhibition is a self-portrait by María Roësset (1882-1921), who looks over her shoulder directly at the viewer. Some women artists and academics accused the museum of echoing the very misogyny it was seeking to expose because of 70 of the paintings are by men, and only 60 are by women. Navarro argues that Uninvited Guests is partly an act of self-criticism by the Prado over its complicity in ignoring so many female artists in the 19th century. He points out that the exhibition is intended to provide social, historical, and artistic context, and is not a standalone showcase for female artists. He said, “For me as a curator, the biggest problem female artists had in the 19th century was how they were treated by a state that protected, promoted and indulged male artists, and left them totally passed over. It reduced them to decorative elements like still-life painters and flower painters.” Navarro hoped to provoke discussion, “. . . what do we do with the pictures of the girls, or the ones of the slaves? Our stores are full of these kinds of images so what should we do with them? Which of the pictures in this exhibition should be on permanent show? That’s what I’d like people to debate because that’s the feedback museums need.”
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- October 19, 879 – Shulü Ping born, Empress Yingtian of the Khitan Liao dynasty; in 916, her husband Yelü Abaoji, after consolidating his power over the Khitan tribes, declared himself Emperor Taizu and Shulü Ping Empress. She has described by contemporaries as brave, resolute and full of strategies, often advising the Emperor in military matters. Once, when he was away fighting the Dangziang tribe, and the Empress was left in charge, two Mongolian tribes decided to raid the Khitan. The Empress heard of their plans, and had her army ambush them, a crushing defeat for the tribesmen. When the Emperor was urged to take advantage of coups in neighboring domains, she opposed the operation, and was proved right when the Khitan army was defeated and forced to withdraw. After Emperor Taizu died in 926, as Empress Dowager, she continued to advise her son, Emperor Taizong, including arranging his marriage, but also arranged the executions of troublesome officials and courtiers. In traditional Khitan society, women were expected to sacrifice themselves, and Empress Dowagers were supposed to wield their influence quietly behind the scenes, but Shulü Ping provided an alternative role model for high status women through the rule of two emperors.
- October 19, 1825 – Jeanette Granberg Stjernström born, Swedish writer, playwright, feminist, and translator. She sometimes used the pseudonym “Georges Malméen.” She wrote plays for the popular Mindre teatern (“smaller theatre”) in Stockholm. Known for Läsarepresten (The Reading Priest), and Tidningsskrifvaren (The Newspaper Clerk). In 1854, she married the actor Edvard Stjernström, founder of the Swedish Theatre (Stockholm). Jeanette died in 1857. After her death, her husband married her sister, Louise Granberg, who was a theatrical director and also wrote plays. Jeanette Granberg was considered a rising dramatic talent, and expected to become a major playwright. Her death at age 31 was seen as a great loss for the theatre.
- October 19, 1850 – Annie Smith Peck born, American mountaineer, teacher, feminist, author, and lecturer; first woman to attend the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; taught archeology and Latin at Purdue University and Smith College; her tunic and trousers worn with boots when she climbed the Matterhorn in 1895 caused a serious hullaballoo in the press, and prompted public debate on what woman can and should do; she was the first woman to climb Huascarán in Peru (22,204 feet/6768 meters) when she was 57 years old, then climbed Coropuna (20,922 feet/6.377 meters) in 1911 and planted a “Votes for Women” banner at the summit; she continued to climb mountains until she was 82 years old.
- October 19, 1868 – Bertha Knight Landes born, high school teacher who married geologist Henry Landes in 1894, and moved with him to Seattle. She became president of the Washington State chapter of the League of Women Voters. In 1921, as president of the Seattle Federation of Women's Clubs, she orchestrated a week-long Women's Educational Exhibit for Washington Manufacturers. Staffed by more than 1,000 clubwomen, and showcasing the technological innovations of 130 manufacturers, it bolstered the spirits of the business community during a period of severe recession, and symbolized the emergence of Seattle as a sophisticated, modern metropolis. The mayor promptly appointed her as the only woman member of a commission studying ways to relieve unemployment. She served as a Seattle city councilwoman (1922-1924) – she and Kathryn Miracle were the first two women on the city council. Landes became the first woman mayor of a major American city, when she was elected Seattle’s mayor (1926-1928). In spite of her record of cleaning up corruption, and putting the city’s finances in order, she was defeated in her run for a second term by Frank Edwards, after a concerted effort to get out the male vote. In 1931, Edwards would be recalled by the voters, 125,000 votes to 15,000, because he was suspected of being in cahoots with corporations trying to get City Light, the municipal power company, privatized. Landes continued her civic activism until her health began to decline around 1939. She died in 1943, at the age of 75.
- October 19, 1879 – Emma Bell Miles born, American short story writer, poet, and artist; published The Spirit of the Mountains in 1905, which contained stories, travels narratives, memoir, and cultural analysis of Southern Appalachia; a section of her book on Appalachian music which first appeared as an article in Harper’s Monthly in 1904 is probably the first printed in a popular magazine; her journals have also appeared in print.
- October 19, 1909 – Marguerite Perey born, French physicist and chemist, a student of Marie Curie. Noted for her discovery of the element francium; in 1949, she became chair of a new nuclear chemistry department at the University of Strasbourg. In 1962, she became the first woman elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor. She died in 1975 of cancer caused by radiation.
- October 19, 1917 –During WWII, Salvation Army Ensign Helen Purviance and Captain Margaret Sheldon, two of the first eleven Salvation Army women to arrive in France, were stationed behind the American fighting lines at Monte-sur-Soux, France. They rigged-up a make-shift system to provide doughnuts for the soldiers. Purviance had to get on her knees to work the tiny stove, and they had no way to make holes in the first batch of 150 “doughnuts.” They were nevertheless received with overwhelming enthusiasm by the troops. Purviance improvised the tools they needed, using a wine bottle as a rolling pin, and getting a French blacksmith to combine an empty evaporated milk can, a shaving cream tube, and a block of wood into a dough cutter so their doughnuts had holes and were more symmetrical. The doughnuts were in such demand, they had to upgrade their equipment, and production increased to over 2,000 doughnuts a day. The “Doughnut Girls” often received thank you notes on scraps of paper, but they wanted to do more. In January, 1918, in spite of General Pershing’s reservations about women in a combat zone, Helen Purviance and three other “Doughnut Girls” were admitted to the front lines, equipped with gas masks, steel helmets, rubber blankets, and army revolvers. They suffered freezing cold, artillery bombardment, and all the other hardships which the soldiers faced except combat, and carried out their mission until the end of the war in November, 1918. Purviance estimated she had cooked over one million doughnuts. She came home a national heroine, and used her celebrity to promote the Salvation Army, helping to set up Salvation Army posts in her hometown of Huntington, Indiana, and in Oswego, New York. By 1924 she was on the teaching staff at the Salvation Army’s training school in the Bronx, New York. In 1936, she became the dean of the training college. She continued to make speeches, and often demonstrated making doughnuts at events, generating more positive press for the Salvation Army. Doughnuts surged in popularity in the U.S. Though she dreaded another war, when the U.S. entered WWII, Brigadier Helen Purviance trained the Salvation Army recruits for work in the field. A new treat was developed, the “All-American Cookie,” which could be made and packaged in Salvation Army kitchens at home, then shipped overseas.
- October 19, 1923 – Ruth Carter Stevenson born, American art patron and collector; founder of the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas, noted for its collection of American Western Art; she was the first woman appointed to the board of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and its first woman chair.
- October 19, 1926 – Marjorie Tallchief born, member of the Osage nation and prima ballerina, the first Native American to be named première danseuse étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet; younger sister of Maria Tallchief. One of the ‘Five Moons’ - Native American ballerinas from Oklahoma who achieved international prominence during the 20th century.
- October 19, 1930 – Mavis M. Nicholson born in Wales, British writer and radio-TV broadcaster; started with Thames Television hosting one of their first daytime television programmes; was a presenter on Tea Break, Good Afternoon, After Noon and Mavis on 4, from the 1970s to the 1990s.
- October 19, 1936 – Johnnetta Cole born, American anthropologist and educator; director of the National Museum of African Art (2009-2017), and was president of Bennett College (2002-2007). She was the first African-American woman president (1987-1997) of Spelman College. In 1960-1962, she did her dissertation field work in Liberia, together with her husband. He conducted economic surveys and she engaged in fieldwork in Liberian villages and towns.
- October 19, 1945 – Patricia Ireland born, American lawyer, administrator, and feminist activist; president of the National Organization for Women (1991-2001); when she worked as a flight attendant for Pan Am, Ireland discovered gender-based discrepancies in the treatment of insurance coverage for spouses of employees, brought a formal complaint and fought for a change in coverage. After the U.S. Department of Labor ruled in her favor, she began law school and performing volunteer work for the National Organization for Women. She advocated extensively for the rights of poor women, gays and lesbians, and African-American women. She has campaigned for electing female candidates, and trained people to defend clinics from anti-choice protesters around the United States; author of What Women Want.
- October 19, 1954 – Deborah Blum born, American journalist, science writer and director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York and The Poison Squad; she wrote a series of articles for the Sacramento Bee called “The Monkey Wars” which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.
- October 19, 1958 – Carolyn Browne born, British diplomat, British Ambassador to Kazakhstan (2013-2018); Ambassador to Azerbaijan (2007-2011); one of the Permanent Representatives of the United Kingdom to the European Union (2002-2005).
- October 19, 1960 – Susan Straight born, American author, essayist, and short story writer; 2007 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction; 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for her short story “The Golden Gopher.”
- October 19, 1962 – Tracy Chevalier born in America, American-British historical novelist, best known for Girl with a Pearl Earring.
- October 19, 1967 – Amy Carter born, American human rights and diplomatic solutions activist; daughter of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter; as a student she campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, and CIA recruitment on college campuses. She is a member of the board of counselors of the Carter Center. She illustrated a book her father wrote for children, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, about the unlikely friendship between a boy who can’t walk and a sea monster.
- October 19, 1982 – Gillian Jacobs born, American actress and director; known for playing Britta Perry on the TV series Community (2009-2015). In 2015, she directed The Queen of Code, a documentary short about computer pioneer Grace Hopper, and in 2018, she directed Curated, a narrative film short for TNT.
- October 19, 1983 – Cara Santa Maria born, American science writer, producer, television host, and podcaster; host of Talk Nerdy to Me (2011-2013); co-host of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe since 2015; science correspondent for the Huffington Post.
- October 19, 2016 – During the third Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton said, “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. I don’t think there’s a woman out there who doesn’t know what that feels like.”
- October 19, 2019 – In the UK, the Centre For Women’s Justice brought a complaint about the “boys’ club” culture within certain police forces that allows officers to abuse their spouses or partners without fear of arrest or prosecution. Key to the complaint are 19 cases where women have made allegations of domestic abuse and sexual violence against an officer or staff, only for the case to be dropped. “The police service is a traditionally male environment, where female officers remain in the minority, and also has a strong tradition of solidarity and loyalty between officers,” the complaint states. “This setting creates the potential for the seriousness of abuse to be downplayed and for a primary loyalty given to the male insider.” The CWJ complaint recommends appointing an external force to investigate police domestic abuse cases, “There is a real risk of lack of integrity and manipulation of police processes. We consider that the only way to address this is to create a physical separation between the investigation and the parties,” adding that this could help victims feel more confident in the process. Nogah Ofer, the CWJ solicitor who wrote the complaint, said: “We have been contacted by over 40 women who have felt severely let down by the police service after they reported domestic abuse and sexual offences committed by police officers and staff.” The three policing bodies who deal with complaints – the Independent Office for Police Conduct, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, and the College of Policing – will now decide whether to investigate further the CWJ’s complaint.
- October 19, 2020 – Joyce Chen, associate professor of development economics at Ohio State University, was working on multiple research projects, and on track for a promotion to full professor when Covid-19 put the brakes on, after four years of hard work as an associate professor. Chen is part of a small group of accomplished women academics in the field of economics. But now Chen, a mother of three, is also one of millions of moms sidelined by the pandemic because of the overwhelming needs of their families at home. While working fathers have not been spared in the pandemic, data collected by the U.S. Labor Department shows it was largely mothers who dealt with children who weren’t in school full time. In September, 2020, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce — four times the number of men who did. Countless others like Chen are struggling to get anything done. For highly educated, high-income women, the "mom penalty" can be severe. Stepping down the career ladder puts promotions, future earning power, and their roles as leaders at risk. Ironically, in the fall of 2019, Chen co-authored a study in the gender pay gap at Ohio State. She took on the project after fighting and winning her own pay equity case, resulting in a 20% bump in her salary. Chen found that female professors at the university earn 11% less than their male counterparts, translating to a loss of close to $18,000 a year. In 2020, because of the pandemic, Chen missed out on grant opportunities and had to turn down collaborations. She didn’t submit any papers for publication. Her research was on indefinite hold. "That's something that's going to ripple out through your entire career," Chen says. The unequal division of household labor in families gives rise to not just the "mom penalty" but the "dad premium." Driven by the biological clock, women take time off or cut back on their hours just as their careers are taking off, giving men the opportunity to carry on with their work and move up.
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- October 20, 1740 – Isabelle de Charrière born, aka Belle van Zuylen, Dutch writer of the Enlightenment; noted for her novels and letters, but she also penned pamphlets, plays, and music; corresponded with writers like James Boswell and Benjamin Constant; her first novel, Le Noble, a satire against the nobility, was published anonymously when she was 43 years old, but her identity was soon discovered, and her parents withdrew the work from sale.
- October 20, 1832 – Ellen Hardin Walworth born, author, lawyer, historic preservationist, early advocate for the establishment of the U. S. National Archives. one of the first women in New York State to hold a position on a local board of education, a role she used to bolster the call for women's suffrage.
- October 20, 1862 – Maud Nathan born, social worker, advocate for working women, stalwart suffragist, and a notable speaker much admired for her sense of humor. She was a co-founder and second president (1897-1917) of the Consumers’ League of New York. In 1912, she was head of the women’s suffrage committee in Theodore Roosevelt's National Progressive Party Bull Moose campaign. She frequently clashed with her sister, Annie Nathan Meyer (a founder of Barnard College), who was an advocate for higher education for women, but was as much against women winning the right to vote as Maud Nathan was in favor of it. They were cousins of poet Emma Lazarus, and of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Both sisters tried to influence Cardozo.
- October 20, 1862 – Nellie McClung born, Canadian politician, activist, Liberal member of Legislative Assembly of Alberta (1921-26), one of Canada’s ‘Famous Five’ in the Persons’ Case.
- October 20, 1873 – Frances Alice Kellor born, American social reformer, investigative reporter, and sociologist, who studied prisons, immigration, and the treatment of women in education and the workforce. She did field work in women’s prisons, at Hull House in Chicago, and in educational institutions. Her publications include Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytical; Athletic Games in the Education of Women; Immigration and the Future; and The Federal Administration and the Alien. Her articles appeared in both academic journals and popular publications like the Atlantic Monthly and The New York Herald. She was the chief investigator for the Bureau of Industries and Immigration of New York State (1910-1913), and worked on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential campaign, using her expertise on immigration as one of the writers on the Progressive Party’s platform. She had a long-term relationship with Mary Dreier, another social reformer, until Kellor’s death at age 72 in 1952. They are buried side-by-side in a Brooklyn cemetery.
- October 20, 1901 – Adelaide Hall born, African American jazz singer, pioneer in scat singing, musician, and dancer. She was born in Brooklyn, became a notable figure in the Harlem Renaissance, including making recordings of “Creole Love Call” and “Chicago Stomp Down” with Duke Ellington and his orchestra, and appeared on Broadway with ‘Bojangles’ Robinson in Blackbirds of 1928. In the 1930s, she was in Chocolate Soldiers, a revue at the Apollo Theater, and The Cotton Club Parade at Harlem’s famed Cotton Club. After a national tour of the U.S., she arrived in Paris in 1935, and opened her own nightclub, La Grosse Pomme (The Big Apple), where she appeared until 1938, when she moved to London to star in The Sun Never Sets at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. She was so popular there that she made her home in London from then on. She was still performing in 1992. In 1993, Hall died in London at age 92. She was buried in New York next to her mother in a Brooklyn cemetery.
- October 20, 1904 – Enolia Pettigen McMillan born, African American high school teacher and principal, civil rights activist, and community leader; President of Maryland’s State Colored Teachers’ Association; first woman to chair the Morgan State University Board of Regents; first woman president of the NAACP (1984-1990).
- October 20, 1920 – Fanny de Sivers born, Estonian-French linguist, literature researcher, and essayist; linguist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
- October 20, 1927 – Joyce Brothers born, American psychologist, author, television personality; columnist for Good Housekeeping magazine for almost 40 years.
- October 20, 1937 – Byllye Avery born, African American women’s healthcare and reproductive justice activist and advocate. She was one of the founders of the Gainesville Women’s Health Center, the first abortion and gynecological care clinic in the city, in 1974, which offered services at low cost, and specific services for black women, like sickle cell anemia testing. In 1978, Avery helped to found Birthplace, an alternative birthing center in Gainesville, where certified nurse-midwives assisted women with deliveries. In 1984, she initiated, and became a founder, of the National Black Women’s Health Project (now the Black Women’s Health Imperative). NBWHP was the first national organization to focus exclusively on the health and wellness of black women and girls. Along with prominent African-American leaders like Shirley Chisholm, Maxine Waters, Dorothy Height, and Faye Wattleton, she signed a public statement, "We Remember: African American Women for Reproductive Freedom” in 1989. The statement supports reproductive freedom (including the right to have children, the right to access to contraceptive services, and to reproductive health information, and the right to health care as well as safe and legal abortions). The statement connected racism, poverty, and violence to negative reproductive health outcomes for African American women.
- October 20, 1937 – Emma Tennant born, British postmodern novelist; author of The French Dancer's Bastard, which tells “the story of Adele from Jane Eyre.”
- October 20, 1942 – Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard born, German developmental biologist; she was the co-winner of 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on identifying genes involved in embryonic development, which revolutionized the field of developmental genetics. In a systematic search for mutant genes affecting the formation of segments in the eggs of a small fruit fly, she and her colleagues identified all of the genes of this type, clarifying the processes of development in the fruit fly embryo. They categorised the mutants as three different types of genes, which they believed controlled an increasingly complex organisation of the organism.
- October 20, 1946 – The Democratic Republic of Vietnam sets October 20 as Vietnamese Women’s Day.
- October 20, 1946 – Elfriede Jelinek born, Austrian playwright, novelist, feminist, and controversial political activist; won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature; her novel, The Piano Teacher, inspired the 2001 film.
- October 20, 1946 – Diana Gittins born, American author and academic; noted for Madness in Its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital 1913-1997.
- October 20, 1952 – Wilma Salgado born, Ecuadorian politician and economist; Minister of the Interior (2008); member of the Andean Parliament (2007-2008); appointed as Manager of the Deposit Guarantee Agency (AGD) in 2003, she ordered the seizure of goods from dozens of companies and individuals owing money to banks that had been bankrupted in the financial crisis of 1999. Former President of the National Congress Juan José Pons filed a lawsuit against Salgado for seizing a house belonging to him, accusing her of perverting the course of justice, but she was acquitted of the charges.
- October 20, 1957 – Jane Bonham Carter born, Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury; British Liberal Democrat politician and member of the House of Lords since 2004; Liberal Democrat’s Director of Communications (1996-1997); previously, she was a television news producer for the BBC and Channel 4.
- October 20, 1957 – Valerie Faris born, American film and video director with partner Jonathan Dayton; noted for co-directing the feature film Little Miss Sunshine, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture; writer Michael Arndt won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor for the film.
- October 20, 1957 – Hilda Solis born, American Democratic politician, daughter of immigrants from Nicaragua and Mexico; California State Assemblywoman (1992-2001), and first Hispanic woman to serve in the State Senate, where she authored 17 bills to prevent domestic violence, and championed labor, education, and health care issues; U.S. Representative from California (2001-2009); U.S. Secretary of Labor (2009-2013); since 2014, serving on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
- October 20, 1958 – Lyn Flewelling born, American fantasy fiction author, noted for The Nightrunner Series, and The Tamir Triad.
- October 20, 1961 – Kate Mosse born, English novelist and non-fiction author; her novel, Labyrinth, has been translated into 37 languages.
- October 20, 1963 – Julie Payette born, Canadian politician, astronaut, and engineer; Governor General of Canada since 2017; COO for the Montreal Science Centre (21013-2017); chief astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency (2000-2007), she completed two spaceflights STS-96 (1999) and STS-127 (2009), logging more than 25 days in space, and served as a capsule communicator at NASA Mission Control in Houston.
- October 20, 1964 – Kamala Harris born, American lawyer and Democratic politician; since January, 2021, the first woman to serve as U.S. Vice President; U.S. Senator from California (2017-2021), the third woman to serve as a California U.S. Senator, and the first of Jamaican or Sub-continental Indian descent; Attorney General of California (2011-2017); District Attorney of San Francisco (2004-2011).
- October 20, 1967 – Susan Tully born, actress noted for playing Michelle Fowler in the BBC series EastEnders (1985-1995); since then, she has been working behind the camera, usually credited as ‘Sue’ Tully, directing and producing British television programmes, including EastEnders, The Bill, Lark Rise to Candleford, The A Word, and Line of Duty. Tully is a supporter of The Meningitis Trust, and also involved with Comic Relief, the British annual charitable fundraising programme.
- October 20, 2015 – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed eight bills aimed at breaking down barriers that perpetuate discrimination against women. They were initially introduced as part of the broader Women’s Equality Agenda long championed by the New York Civil Liberties Union. NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman stated, “We applaud Governor Cuomo for signing into law eight bills that provide important protections for the equal rights of women. These bills include provisions that promote pay equity, prohibit certain forms of housing discrimination, and protect against pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. By closing significant loopholes in the existing legal framework for women's rights and affirming our state’s commitment to equality, the bills signed today lay the foundation for further, future reforms. We have more work to do to ensure that New York’s women can participate fully and equally in society. As states around the country turn back the clock and deny women reproductive rights, it is more important than ever that New York acts as a leader and stands up for progress by updating our abortion law and unequivocally protecting women's fundamental rights to decide to end a pregnancy under Roe v. Wade. Women’s equality also requires statewide paid family leave, so that new mothers are not forced to choose between taking time off from work to care for a newborn and being able to pay the bills. The legislation signed into law today will provide New York’s women with additional tools to assert their rights.”
- October 20, 2019 – English poet Fiona Benson’s second collection, Vertigo & Ghost, won the prestigious £10,000 Forward prize for best poetry collection. Described as poems that bring the violence of Greek myths into the #MeToo era, Vertigo & Ghost explores women’s fear, desire, and ferocity, while outing Zeus as a serial rapist.
- October 20, 2020 – Next, the British women’s clothing store, is fighting an appeal claim potentially worth up to £200 million being brought by store staff. Next employs 25,000 store staff across 500 stores in the UK and Ireland. The 330 shop workers involved in the claim, who are mostly women, argue their work is no less demanding than that of their male colleagues in the warehouses who, on average, earn between £2 and £6 more per hour. By August, 2021, the number of shop workers involved in the appeal had grown to over 400, and Next had conceded that the two types of roles can be compared, the first step in a three-step process for equal pay claims. The retailer will now have to show that the jobs are not of equal value, or if they are of equal value, there is a reason other than gender why the two groups of workers are not paid equally. It could be years before a final decision is made. The legal action against Next began in 2018 when a claim was filed with the conciliation service Acas. If the claim against Next is successful, it will open the door for more equal pay action against fashion retailers in the UK.
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- October 21, 1854 – Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses leave Britain for Scutari, in the Ottoman Empire, to tend sick or wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War.
- October 21, 1896 – Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein born in Belorussia, Canadian Yiddish poet, playwright, and screenwriter; she moved to New York after her marriage in 1918 to New York Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirschbein, where she published two children’s plays intended for use in the Yiddish secular schools. In 1940, the couple moved to Hollywood. She is noted for writing poems about pregnancy, motherhood, and grief when her husband died.
- October 21, 1911 – Mary Robinson Blair born, American artist and children’s author who drew concepts for the Walt Disney animated films of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Song of the South and Cinderella; also worked on designs for attractions at Disneyland. In 1953, she resigned from Disney Studios, and created artwork for the children’s Little Golden Books series. She died at age 66 in 1978 of cerebral hemorrhage.
- October 21, 1918 – Albertina Sisulu born, South African anti-apartheid activist, married to Walter Sisulu; she won a scholarship to Mariazell College in the Eastern Cape, but was only able to go home during the December holidays, then became a trainee nurse after graduation at Johannesburg General in 1940, which is where she met Walter Sisulu in 1941. They were married in 1944, with Nelson Mandela as Best Man. In 1946, she began working as a midwife in Johannesburg. Walter Sisulu was already active in the African National Congress, and she joined the ANC Women’s League in 1955, taking part in the launch of the Freedom Charter that year. She was the only woman present at the birth of the ANC Youth League. Sisulu became a member of the executive of the Federation of South African Women in 1954. On 9 August 1956, Sisulu joined Helen Joseph and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn in a march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings of Pretoria in protest against the apartheid government's requirement that women carry passbooks as part of the pass laws. "We said, 'nothing doing'. We are not going to carry passes." The day is celebrated in South Africa as National Women's Day. She spent three weeks in jail before being acquitted on pass charges, with Nelson Mandela as her lawyer. Her husband was repeatedly arrested, and went underground in 1963 while out on bail. She became the first woman arrested under the General Laws Amendment Act of 1963. He was caught in July, along with 16 others. At the conclusion of the trial (1963–1964), he was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964. With other senior ANC figures, he served the majority of his sentence on Robben Island, and was finally released after almost 26 years in prison in 1989. Though she was arrested several times, she held the family together, and scraped and saved to send the children to schools in Swaziland. Most of them grew up to be leaders in democratic South Africa, serving in government, and as heads of non-profit foundations. She served as a member of Parliament (1994-1998). The Sisulus were married for 59 years, but spent much of that time apart. In 2003, Walter Sisulu died in his wife’s arms at the age of 90. She founded the Albertina Sisulu Foundation to improve the lives of small children and old people. She died in 2011 at the age of 92, while watching television with her grandchildren. Albertina Sisulu was given a state funeral, and national flags were flown at half-mast.
- October 21, 1921 – Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld born, Dutch astronomer; she is credited with the discovery or co-discovery of 4,625 numbered minor planets.
- October 21, 1925 – Celia Cruz born, Afro-Cubana singer; five-time Grammy-winning “Queen of Salsa Music.” She recorded over 50 albums in her career. Notable for her famous “¡Azúcar!” (sugar) catchphrase, powerful voice and over-the-top wigs and outfits, Cruz achieved global recognition and numerous accolades. After the Cuban Revolution, she moved to Mexico, then to the U.S. In 1998, she received the U.S. National Medal of Arts at the White House.
- October 21, 1928 – Eudóxia Maria Froehlich born, Brazilian zoologist, noted for her work on land planarians (flatworms) and arachnids.
- October 21, 1929 – Ursula K. Le Guin born, American author, poet, and critic; The Left Hand of Darkness, The Earthsea series, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven; became a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grandmaster in 2003.
- October 21, 1933 – Maureen Duffy born, English author, poet, and playwright. Known for the play Rites, and its sequel, Washhouse; activist for LGBTQ and Animal rights.
- October 21, 1940 – Frances Fitzgerald born, American journalist, historian, and nonfiction author; Fire in the Lake won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
- October 21, 1940 – Marita Petersen born, Faroese politician, special needs teacher and school manager; the first woman Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (1993-1994); first female speaker of the Løgting (Parliament 1994-1995); Leader of Javnaðarflokkurin (Faroese Socialist Party); Minister of Cultural Affairs (1991-1993); member of the Løgting (1988-1998 – except when she was a minster or prime minister). When she became Prime Minister, unemployment rates were at a record high, people were leaving the country, the fishing industry was struggling, protests occurred almost daily, and the economy was on the brink of collapse. As Prime Minister, Petersen spearheaded tough negotiations with the Danish Government and the Danish Bank, preventing the Faroese economy from crashing. She also reached an agreement with the trade unions to cut back wages in order to avoid mass lay-offs in the public sector. When she first became a member of the Løgting, she was one of only three women representatives. Today, 10 of the 33 members are women, and many more women are involved in both the ministries and local government. Petersen is credited as “the woman who saved the Faroe Islands,” and is an icon for the islands’ women. She died of cancer at the age of 60 in 2001.
- October 21, 1945 – French Women go to the polls and vote for the first time.
- October 21, 1946 – Jane Heal born, British philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and language; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge since 2012; first woman President of St. John’s College, Cambridge (1999-2003); professor at Cambridge (1999-2012); lecturer at Cambridge (1986-1999); lecturer at Newcastle University (1975-1985); author of Mind, Reason and Imagination.
- October 21, 1956 – Carrie Fisher born, American actress and author; noted for her book and screenplay, Postcards from the Edge.
- October 21, 1959 – Kathleen Graber born, American poet; she has published three books: The River Twice (2019), The Eternal City (2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Correspondence (2006), which won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.
- October 21, 1967 – Jilly Dybka born, American poet, author of Trouble and Honey, and the chapbook Fair Territory. She is disabled by 2 rare diseases, Ehlers Danlos syndrome and postural tachycardia syndrome/dysautonomia. She has M.S. in Information Sciences and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and lives in rural Tennessee.
- October 21, 1967 – Coretta Scott King and freelance journalist Karen Wald are among the members of the National Mobilization Committee to End the Vietnam War, organizers of ‘The March on the Pentagon’ by 50,000-70,000 protesters on this day, which began with a performance by folk singer Phil Ochs at the Lincoln Memorial, and was followed by marching to the Pentagon in nearby Arlington, Virginia, where about 650 of the marchers were arrested for civil disobedience. The iconic “Flower Power” photo was taken by Bernie Boston, showing a protester putting flowers into the barrels of the National Guardsmen’s rifles. After the assassination of Dr. King, Coretta Scott King made speeches about the notes found in her husband’s pocket called “Ten Commandments on Vietnam” which began with “1. Thou shalt not believe in a military victory.”
- October 21, 1973 – Lera Auerbach born to a Jewish family in Soviet Russia; orchestral composer and pianist; she defected to the U.S. in 1991 during a concert tour, and studied composition at the Julliard School; made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2002, performing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra.
- October 21, 2019 – In Northern Ireland, legislation that decriminalized abortion went into effect at midnight. "Thousands of women from the North have abortions every year, outside the law in their bedrooms or in England," said Alliance for Choice spokeswoman Goretti Horgan. "They will now be able to access normal health care." Northern Ireland previously had some of the most restrictive abortion laws anywhere, with the procedure almost entirely banned except when a woman's life was threatened. Under the old laws, women could be arrested for getting or even seeking an abortion, and healthcare workers could be prosecuted for performing an abortion.
- October 21, 2019 – How to Treat People: A Nurse’s Notes, the memoir of Molly Case is released. Case is a British nurse, a cardiac nurse specialist, raised in South London, is also a spoken word poet. In 2013, when she was a student nurse, she was invited to speak at the Royal College of Nurses Congress. “I didn't realize this was going to be a Bruce Springsteen stadium arena of 5,000 health care workers in Liverpool,” she said. “And even when I saw that it was going to be, I thought that my little kind of three minutes on stage would be the interlude whilst people went for their toilet breaks or they went to get their coffee. I thought people would be kind of bustling in and out as I try to read poetry because, as I'm sure most people know, it's hard to get an audience for poetry at the best of times.” After she recited her poem, “Nursing the Nation” the entire stadium leaped up and gave her a standing ovation. By the next morning, her You Tube channel had reached 100,000 views overnight. Her poem, Womens Work 101, was commissioned for the 2019 centennial exhibition for WWI at the Imperial War Museum in London.
- October 21, 2020 – In Saudi Arabia, Lina al-Hathloul spoke out against the W20 summit on women’s rights which opened this day by Riyadh, calling it an attempt to whitewash the dismal Saudi record on women’s rights. Lina al-Hathloul’s sister Loujain al-Hathloul, a leading women’s rights activist, has been in prison for over two years without a trial. Loujain campaigned to end Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving, and the system of male guardianship which effectively relegates women to the legal status of minor children, requiring permission from male relatives who act as lifelong guardians for many activities and decisions. She was arrested in a crackdown against women’s rights activists in May, 2018, ironically just before the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia was lifted. Her sister Lina charges that little has changed since her sister’s arrest, saying: “The only thing that has changed is Saudi Arabia’s image in the West. There is no place for reform at all. All the reformers are behind bars and my sister is one of them. What Saudi Arabia wants is to whitewash all the rights violations.” In December 2020, Loujain was sentenced to five years, 8 months after being found guilty of “spying with foreign parties and conspiring against the kingdom.” The court suspended two years and 10 months of her sentence, and backdated the start of her jail term to May 2018, so she had three months left to serve. Loujain al-Hathloul was finally released from prison after a total of 1,001 days of captivity, but the court imposed three years of probation, during which she cannot speak her mind or return to activism without risking being returned to prison, plus a five-year ban on travel outside Saudi Arabia. Her appeal of the restrictions was denied.
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- October 22, 1701 – Maria Amalia, Archduchess of Austria born, she became Holy Roman Empress and Queen consort of the Germans through her marriage to Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII. She gave birth to seven children, but three died in childhood. She was a notable planner of court festivities, made the Bavarian court a cultural center, and was a patron of opera. Maria Amalia was also interested in politics, had a passion for hunting, and by declaring that pilgrimages would make it easier for her to bear sons, was able to indulge her desire to travel. She protected churches and convents, and had a close friendship with her sister-in-law Maria Anna, who was a member of the Poor Clares. After the death of her husband in 1745, she turned even more to good works, and founded the first modern medical hospital in Munich in 1754, which was managed by nuns of the Elisabetinerinnen. She died at age 55 in 1756.
- October 22, 1834 – Abigail Scott Duniway born, Pacific Northwest suffrage leader who campaigned successfully for Oregon suffrage in 1912. She was one of five National Woman Suffrage Association vice-presidents-at-large before the NWSA merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association, becoming the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. She also edited and published a weekly human-rights newspaper, The New Northwest, (1871-1887). The paper’s motto was "Free Speech, Free Press, Free People," and she wrote about the legal status of women, the treatment of the Chinese, policies related to American Indians, and the limits of Temperance and Prohibition. Author of Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States. She died in 1915, a few days before her eighty-first birthday.
- October 22, 1844 – Sarah Bernhardt born, renowned French stage actress; after a lackluster debut at the Comédie-Française and brief membership in the company (1862–1864), she clashed with one of the leading actresses and was forced to leave. After further trials and tribulations, she found her home at the Odéon theatre, which was popular with students from the Left Bank. The theatre became a hospital during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and Bernhardt took charge of nursing the wounded. Later, she returned triumphantly to the Comédie-Française (1872-1878), and would also make several world tours, beginning with a debut in London in 1879. She was noted for playing the title roles in La Dame Aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
- October 22, 1875 – Harriet Chalmers Adams born, American explorer, writer, photographer, and lecturer, who traveled extensively in South America, Asia and the South Pacific, publishing accounts of her journeys in National Geographic magazine. Though she was a regular contributor to the magazine, she was never offered a membership in the National Geographic Society because she was a woman. In 1925, she was a founding member of the Society of Women Geographers. Adams was a correspondent for Harper’s magazine in Europe during WWI, one of the few women journalists permitted to visit the trenches.
- October 22, 1897 – Marjorie Flack born, American children’s book author; The Story About Ping, her Angus series, and Boats on the River, which was a Caldecott Honor book.
- October 22, 1919 – Doris Lessing born, British novelist, poet, playwright; won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature; noted for The Grass Is Singing, her Children of Violence series, and The Golden Notebook.
- October 22, 1925 – Edith Kawelohea McKinzie born, Hawaiian genealogist, author, and hula expert; chair of the University of Hawaii’s Committee for the Preservation and Study of Hawaiian Language, Art and Culture; director of the Hawaiian Language Newspaper Index Project.
- October 22, 1929 – Dory Previn born, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and writer; she released six albums of original songs, and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Lyrics in 1982 for “We’ll Win This World,” written for GE Theater’s “Two of a Kind.” In 1983, she wrote and appeared in August 6, 1945, a musical statement on nuclear war. She died at age 86 in 2012.
- October 22, 1930 – Estela de Carlotto born, Argentine human rights activist; president of Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Association of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), founded in 1977, which searches for children stolen and illegally adopted during the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983). The association’s work has led to the creation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, and the establishment of the National Genetic Data Bank. Using increasingly sophisticated genetic testing, they have found over 10% of the estimated 500 children either kidnapped, or born in detention to mothers who later “disappeared.” Among the children discovered by the Abuelas was the son of de Carlotto’s daughter, who was kidnapped while pregnant and gave birth in prison. It took 36 years to find him. UNESCO awarded Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo the 2011 Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize.
- October 22, 1931 – Ann Rule born, American true crime author and former Seattle police officer; in 1971, while volunteering at a suicide crisis hotline, she worked with Ted Bundy, and after he was revealed as a serial killer, she wrote The Stranger Beside Me (1980).
- October 22, 1943 – Catherine Deneuve born, French International film star; won the 1993 Oscar for Best Actress for Indochine; UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Safeguarding of Film Heritage (1994-2003), also involved with Children of Africa, Voix de femmes pour la démocratie (Voices of women for democracy), and Amnesty International’s campaign against the death penalty. In 1972, she signed the Manifesto of the 343, an admission by the signers they had undergone illegal abortions, which exposed them to judicial actions and prison sentences. She was involved in Choisir ("To Choose"), founded by feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi. Their actions led to the reform statute passed in 1974 which gave limited access to abortion to French women. In 2007, Deneuve signed a petition on the internet protesting against the misogynous treatment of socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal. Over 8,000 French women and men signed the petition.
- October 22, 1952 – Julie Dash, American film producer-director-writer; her television films include, The Rosa Parks Story, starring Angela Bassett, and her 1991 theatrical feature, Daughters of the Dust, was the first full-length film directed by an African-American woman in general theatrical release in the U.S.
- October 22, 1966 – The Supremes A' Go-Go becomes the first No. 1 best-selling album by an all-woman music group on the Billboard 200 charts.
- October 22, 1967 – Oona King born, Baroness King of Bow, British Labour politician; member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow (1997-2005); the second British black woman elected to Parliament; served as Vice-Chair of the All-Parliamentary Group on Bangladesh; strong advocate for international aid and human rights; after a visit to Rwanda, she spoke out about genocide.
- October 22, 1970 – Amy Redford born, American actress, director, and producer; noted directing for the 2008 film The Guitar.
- October 22, 1971 – Jennifer Lee born, American screenwriter, film director, and, since 2018, chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Best known as the writer-director of Frozen, the first Disney feature film directed by a woman, which is also the first film directed by a woman which earned over $1 billion in gross box office revenue.
- October 22, 1972 – Saffron Burrows born in London, British-American actress and campaigner against racism, and for disabled rights and equality.
- October 22, 1991 – The New Woman’s Survival Catalog: A Woman-made Book is reissued. This classic resource was originally published in 1973, a compendium of feminist presses, women’s farming and artist collectives, political action groups, healthcare clinics, rape crisis centers, daycare programs, feminist bookstores – everything that was part of the women’s movement. Researched and edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, it was billed as “a feminist Whole Earth Catalog” and “a grassroots guide to surviving the patriarchy.” The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is now a remarkable historical document of the feminist revival.
- October 22, 1992 – Wendy Wasserman’s play, The Sisters Rosensweig, premiered in New York, starring Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, and Frances McDormand. After a successful Off-Broadway run, the show moved to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where it ran for 556 performances.
- October 22, 1999 – Mai Narva born, Estonian chess player, Woman International Master.
- October 22, 2013 – The Australian Capital Territory becomes the first Australian jurisdiction to legalize same-sex marriage with the Marriage Equality Act 2013.
- October 22, 2019 – The UK Parliament passed legislation to legalise same-sex marriage and liberalise abortion in Northern Ireland during the 2003-2020 period when the Northern Irish Assembly was in suspension.
- October 22, 2020 – Human Rights Watch reported that Iranian judiciary authorities are prosecuting human rights defenders and conservationists for reporting abuse in detention. Authorities charged Niloufar Bayani, an environmental conservationist serving a 10-year sentence, with “publishing false information.” In February, the BBC Persian website published a detailed account, based on her letters, of the alleged mistreatment of Bayani by prison authorities, including “1,200 hours of interrogations,” “long hours of interrogation while standing.” “threatening with a hallucinogenic injection,” and “sexual insults.” Tara Sepehri Far, Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch said, “Punishing people reporting mistreatment in Iranian detention facilities shows a warped sense of justice,” and “The judiciary’s recent rhetoric on ‘transparency’ rings especially hollow if prosecutors silence alleged torture victims rather than impartially investigating their claims.” Bayani and seven of her colleagues at the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation were arrested in January 2018 for “using environmental projects as a cover for espionage.” One detainee died in custody under suspicious circumstances. The defendants were not allowed to have access to a lawyer of their choice. Bayani interrupted a trial session in February 2018, saying that the defendants were under psychological torture, and coerced into making false confessions. A court of appeal upheld her ten-year sentence, and ordered her to return US$360,000 in “illicit funds.” Authorities calculated this amount by multiplying Bayani’s last annual salary from the United Nations Environment Programme, where she worked prior to joining the wildlife group, by the six years she worked at the UN. Over the past two years, several senior Iranian government officials have indicated that they did not find any evidence to suggest that any of the detained activists are spies.
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- October 23, 1636 – Hedwig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp born, Queen of Sweden by marriage to Charles X Gustav (1654-1660). She served as regent (1660-1672) during the minority of her son Charles XI. Her husband’s will made her regent and council chair, with two votes and a final say over the rest of the council. The council contested the will, questioning whether it would be good for her health or suitable for a widow to attend council, and that if not, it would be hard to keep sending a messenger to her quarters, but she maintained her regency by “conceding” that they could meet without her, while keep her informed. However, she appeared at almost all the meetings of the council, and used her position to protect her son’s interests, although she rarely contested the council’s decisions since she had only one ally on the council. She used what influence she had to support the peace faction. Hedwig Eleonora was briefly regent again (1697) after the death of her son, until her grandson Charles XII came of age. She also represented Charles XII during his absence in the Great Northern War from 1700 until the regency of her granddaughter Ulrika Eleonora in 1713. Hedwig Eleonora was described by contemporaries as a dominant personality, and regarded as the de facto first lady of the royal court for 61 years, from 1654 until her death in 1715.
- October 23, 1850 – The first U.S. National Woman’s Rights Convention begins in Worcester, MA; 1,000 people, representing 11 states, including a delegate from California, came to the first session, and more people stood outside. Ironically, the majority of attendees were men, and the Central Committee appointed by the convention was made up of 9 women and 9 men. Paulina Wright Davis presided, and in her opening address called for “the emancipation of a class, the redemption of half the world, and a conforming re-organization of all social, political, and industrial interests and institutions.” Lucy Stone, who was still recovering from typhoid fever, spoke on the evening of the second day, “We want to be something more than the appendages of Society; we want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was the “relict” of somebody.” (Note: ‘relict’ can refer to a bereaved spouse, but it also means something left over, such as a species or geologic feature from a previous age.) The national convention was preceded in April 1850 by the first state-wide women’s rights convention in Salem, Ohio; 500 people attended, but men weren’t allowed to vote, sit on the platform, or give speeches during the Ohio convention.
- October 23, 1865 – Neltje Blanchan born, American scientific historian and nature writer; she published eleven books, many on wildflowers and birds, noted for a combination of scientific facts and poetic expression; a devoted supporter of American Red Cross, serving as a Red Cross commissioner in China when she died suddenly at age 52.
- October 23, 1889 – Frieda Fromm-Reichmann born, in Germany, German psychiatrist; emigrated to the U.S. during WWII. She was a major pioneer in using therapeutic relationships in treating mental illness, and in the treatment of schizophrenia, at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland, where she was a resident psychiatrist for 22 years. Author of Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy. She died in 1957 at age 67.
- October 23, 1894 – Emma Williams Vyssotsky born, American astronomer at the McCormick Observatory of the University of Virginia, specialized in the motion of stars and kinematics of the Milky Way; fifth awardee of the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy, for distinguished contributions to astronomy.
- October 23, 1906 – Miriam Gideon born, composer of approximately 70 works including “The Hound of Heaven” (1945), developed more atonal pieces for voice and instruments after beginning with a more conservative tonal style.
- October 23, 1906 – Gertrude Ederle born, American swimmer and Olympic champion. In August, 1926, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel.
- October 23, 1910 – Blanche Stuart Scott becomes first American woman pilot to make a public flight, at the county fair in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.
- October 23, 1911 – Martha Rountree born, creator and first moderator (1945-1954) of television show Meet the Press, pioneering unrehearsed panel discussion television.
- October 23, 1915 – Woman’s Suffrage March: In New York City, over 31,000 women march on Fifth Avenue for the right to vote.
- October 23, 1922 – Jean Alys Barker born, Baroness Trumpington, British Conservative politician; during WWII, she was one of the “land girls” who took the place of agricultural workers serving in the military, before going to work in 1940 for naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, using her knowledge of German to assist the code crackers. After the war, she spent four years working for the European Central Inland Transport Organization, which shipped and distributed supplies to the war-devastated continent, and became the de facto transport manager of the Paris office. She was a Lord Temporal Member of the House of Lords (1980-2017), from which she retired one day after her 95th birthday. She died in her sleep in 2018 at age 96.
- October 23, 1934 – Jeanette Ridion Piccard and her husband Jean Piccard take off for a balloon flight from Ford Field in Dearborn, Michigan, in an enclosed gondola with scientific instruments to take high-altitude readings, and bottles of oxygen. They reach an altitude of 17,500 meters (57,579 feet/10.9 miles), and are carried by the prevailing winds over 300 miles before they can land, near Cadiz, Ohio. She was later ordained as an Episcopal priest.
- October 23, 1935 – JacSue Kehoe born, American neuroscientist-researcher; noted for discovering that a single neurotransmitter can have multiple types of receptors.
- October 23, 1940 – Ellie Greenwich born, American singer-songwriter and record producer; wrote or co-wrote hits like “Be My Baby” “Da Wa Diddy Diddy” “Leader of the Pack” and “River Deep – Mountain High.”
- October 23, 1942 – Anita Roddick born, Britishbusinesswoman, human rights activist and environmental campaigner;founder of The Body Shop, a pioneer in ethical consumerism and fair tradewith developing countries.
- October 23, 1945 – Maggi Hambling born, British contemporary painter and sculptor, whose public works projects have stirred a great deal of controversy, including ‘The Scallop’ (2003) on the beach near Aldeburgh, a tribute to composer Benjamin Britten, who often walked there. The line on the shell’s upper edge ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned’ is from Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes. In 2018, she was commissioned by the ‘Mary on the Green’ campaign to create a permanent memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft to be erected at Newington Green in north London.
- October 23, 1945 – Graça Machel born, Mozambican politician and humanitarian, second wife of Nelson Mandela (1998-2013), and widow of Samora Machel, who was President of Mozambique (1975-1986). She served as Mozambican Minister for Education and Culture (1975-1989). In 1990, she was appointed as the expert in charge of producing a ground-breaking UN report on the impact of armed conflict on children.
- October 23, 1946 – Alicia Borinsky born, Argentine novelist, poet, and literary critic based in the U.S.; professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University.
- October 23, 1961 – Laurie Halse Anderson born, American author for kids of all ages; noted for Speak, Chains, Ashes, and The Impossible Knife of Memory.
- October 23, 1969 – Trudi Canavan born, Australian author of fantasy novels and short stories; noted for her trilogies The Black Magician and Age of the Five.
- October 23, 1985 – Masiela Lusha born in Albania, came to the U.S as a refugee; Albanian-American actress, author, producer, and humanitarian. In 2010, Lusha was appointed as an Ambassador for the charity, Sentebale, founded by Britain’s Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, in memory of their mothers, to help vulnerable children in Lesotho, Africa, through grassroots programs. Lusha has been a spokesperson for Scholastic's Read for Life, and also involved in national PSA commercials and school readings across the country.
- October 23, 2017 – Three women U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists, scheduled to speak and present a 500-page report on climate change this day, had been abruptly removed from the program of a conference on the Narragansett Bay Estuary and Watershed in Rhode Island, at the EPA’s request, just four days before the event. The EPA said the scientists could attend the conference, but were not to speak because “it is not an EPA conference.” EPA Scientist Autumn Oczkowski was to be the conference’s keynote speaker, and the other two scientists, Rose Martin and Emily Shumchenia, were scheduled to appear on a panel entitled “The Present and Future Biological Implications of Climate Change.” Scott Priutt, Trump-appointed head of the EPA since February 2017, would resign in July 2018, while under at least 14 separate investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the EPA inspector general, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, and two House of Representatives committees over his spending habits, conflicts of interests, extreme secrecy, and questionable management practices.
- October 23, 2019 – It was announced that Karen Uhlenbeck, American mathematician, who earlier in 2019 became the first woman to win the prestigious Abel Prize, will be awarded the 2020 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, for her long-lasting influence in geometric topology and analysis and for her mentorship of young people and women in mathematics.
- October 23, 2020 – After Poland’s constitutional court ruled on October 22 that aborting fetuses with congenital defects was unconstitutional, angry Polish women took to the streets on this day to protest, and the protests continued over the weekend, the most dramatic in Catholic churches, where young women confronted priests and carried signs in support of women’s right to abortion. One woman in a Warsaw church stood near the altar with a sign saying, “Let’s pray for the right to abortion.” The Roman Catholic Church has been venerated for centuries in Poland as the highest authority, and earned respect during the communist era for supporting pro-democracy dissidents in their struggle for freedom. The late Polish pope St. John Paul II has been held up as a national hero. But the Catholic church’s authority is being challenged now because of its support of Poland’s right-wing regime, and the shocking revelations of a series of clerical abuse scandals. Women’s and LGBTQ rights activists are turning to more radical protest tactics after years of politely lobbying for their rights have fallen on deaf ears, but haven’t even prevented the erosion of existing rights. Women’s Strike, the organizer of these protests, argues that forcing women to give birth to fetuses with severe defects will result in unnecessary physical and mental suffering. Women’s Strike vowed there will be more protests, including blockades of city centers, and a nationwide women’s strike. The Polish government has already been struggling to contain escalating coronavirus cases, and to cope with the economic fallout from pandemic restrictions on businesses.
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Sources
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Feminist Cats