WOW2 is a thrice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from March 11 through March 21. The WOW2 Late March edition will post on Saturday, March 27.
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.
March is Women’s History Month in the U.S.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
just 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.
Mid-March’s 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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- March 11, 1279 – Mary of Woodstock born, seventh named daughter of Edward I of England and Eleanor of Castile. She became a nun at Amesbury Priory, at the request of her grandmother, dedicated at age seven, and formally veiled at age 12. Her parents granted her ₤100 per year, and she received double the normal clothing allowance and special entitlements to wine from the Priory’s stores, as well as private quarters. In 1292, she was also given the right to forty oaks from royal forests and twenty tuns of wine (a tun is a large barrel – sizes varied, but probably about 252 gallons per tun) per year from Southampton, and later, the management of Grove Priory in Bedfordshire. In spite of the papal decretal (decree in ecclesiastical law) by Pope Boniface VIII, requiring the claustration (strict enclosure away from the secular world) of nuns, Mary had “a retinue of up to 24 horses” who traveled with her, and she regularly attended court, even running up considerable dice gambling debts there, which her father paid. The English Dominican friar, Nicholas Trevet, dedicated his Chronicles to her, which became an important source for several popular works of the period.
- March 11, 1708 – Queen Anne withholds Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, fearing an armed Scottish military would not be loyal to the British crown; this was the last bill to be refused Royal Assent, now considered a formality.
- March 11, 1815 – Anna Bochkoltz, German coloratura soprano, teacher, and composer; noted for her vocal range, and performances in operas by Mozart, Beethoven and Bellini; became in 1846 a “Membre Solo de la Sociètè du Conservatoire de Paris.” She performed mostly in Germany, Austria and Paris, and composed several songs with piano accompaniment.
- March 11, 1818 — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel, Frankenstein; or The modern Prometheus, is published.
- March 11, 1854 – Jane Meade Welch born, American journalist, music critic, and lecturer-author on American history; first woman in Buffalo NY to be a professional journalist; the first American woman to lecture at Cambridge University.
- March 11, 1893 – Wanda Gág born, American artist, illustrator and author; noted for writing and illustrating the children’s book Millions of Cats, which won the 1928 Newbery award, and is the oldest American picture book still in print; her 1927 article, These Modern Women: A Hotbed of Feminists, published in The Nation; and illustrated covers for the leftist magazines The New Masses and The Liberator.
- March 11, 1896 – Lady Dorothy Mills, British novelist, memoirist, and traveler; believed to be the ‘first white woman’ to visit Timbuktu, and traveled extensively in West Africa, Arabia, and Venezuela. She published 9 novels, 5 travel books and a memoir.
- March 11, 1898 – Dorothy Gish born, American theatre and silent film actress; in the early days of silent film she also wrote and directed. While her sister Lillian was famous as a dramatic actress, Dorothy was better known as a comedian, and her films for Triangle and Mutual were very popular and financially successful, often covering the higher costs of D.W. Griffith’s expensive epic productions. Lillian Gish said in her autobiography, “I couldn’t make people laugh, but Dorothy could make them laugh and cry, so therefore she was the better actress than I was.” Sadly, many of Dorothy Gish’s films, especially the early ones, have been lost.
- March 11, 1900 – Hanna Bergas born, German Jewish teacher; under the Nazi regime, she was fired from her job and barred from teaching in public schools; she was hired to work in a private school, and moved with the school’s founder, Anna Essinger, and most of the school’s staff to Kent, England in 1939, where the school was re-established. Bergas and three others from the school ran a reception camp at the seaside town of Dovercourt for mostly Jewish, unaccompanied refugee children in the Kindertransports, helping the children to adjust to life in a new country.
- March 11, 1903 – Dorothy Schiff born, American newspaper owner and publisher; in 1939, she bought the tabloid New York Post, then in 1942, became the first woman newspaper publisher in New York. She supported Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, and was credited with Nelson Rockefeller’s victory as New York Governor. She sold the Post for an estimated $30 million to the infamous Rupert Murdock in 1976.
- March 11, 1904 – Hilde Bruch born, escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933 to England and then America, pioneer and leading expert in eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa.
- March 11, 1911 – Marion Stirling Pugh born, American archaeologist and author; she and her husband, Matthew Stirling, investigated the ancient Olmec civilization in Mexico, beginning in 1938, where they discovered eight colossal Olmec heads, and also worked in Panama, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. She was involved with the Society of Women Geographers from 1948 to 2000, before she died in 2001.
- March 11, 1921 – Charlotte Friend born, microbiologist, in 1950s at Sloan-Kettering Institute discovered a link between defective maturation and tumor growth in mice, discoveries that were critical in establishing the role of viruses in some cancers.
- March 11, 1922 – Vinette J. Carroll born, director and actress, first African American woman to direct a show on Broadway in 1972, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, nominated for 4 Tony Awards, including her nomination for Best Director of a Musical; nominated again for a Best Director Tony for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God in 1976.
- March 11, 1925 – Margaret Oakley Dayhoff born, American physical chemist and pioneer in bioinformatics; professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, and research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation. Developed the application of mathematics and computational methods to biochemisty, including creation of protein and nucleic acid databases; tools to interrogate the databases, and one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM); developed one-letter code for amino acids, to reduce data file size describing amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.
- March 11, 1927 – Freda Meissner-Blau born, Austrian politician, founder of the Austrian Green Party, and a leading figure in the Austrian Anti-Nuclear and environmental movements; elected to the Austrian National Council (Parliament – 1986-1988). In 1995, she co-chaired the first International Human Rights Tribunal in Vienna, condemning the Republic of Austria in all seven cases that were brought forward by the LGBT community for the persecution of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender persons in Austria between 1945 and 1995. Austria abolished its LGBT discrimination laws by 2005.
- March 11, 1949 – Griselda Pollock born in South Africa; after a childhood in Canada, she moved to Britain in her teens, and went on to be a highly influential cultural analyst and scholar of modern and contemporary art, and a respected feminist theorist in art history and gender studies.
- March 11, 1959 – Lorraine Hansberry’s drama A Raisin in the Sun opens at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the first play by a black woman to run on Broadway, and the first Broadway play with an African-American director, Lloyd Richards. All the major characters are black. Only ten dramas previously on Broadway had been written by African-American playwrights, all men, and only Mulatto, by Langston Hughes, had lasted a year. A Raisin in the Sun was nominated for four Tony Awards, and named “Best Play” by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. Hansberry was the first African-American and youngest person whose play won the Circle Award for Best Play. The original production ran from March, 1959, to June, 1960, for 530 performances. At her insistence, as a condition for selling the movie rights, Lorraine Hansberry also wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film version. In 2005, the film was selected for preservation by the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
- March 11, 1969 – Soraya Lamilla born as Soraya Lamilla Cuevas in New Jersey a year after her family moved to the U.S. from Columbia, Columbian-American singer-songwriter, arranger, and record producer. Her maternal relatives were Lebanese Christians who had emigrated to Columbia. When she was eight, she took up the violin, becoming a member of the New York City Youth Philharmonic. Her first album, On nights like this/En esta noche, was released in 1996 simultaneously in English and Spanish, and she toured in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. She was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer in 2000, went into remission in 2003, then composed, produced, and arranged her album Soraya, which won a 2004 Latin Grammy Award for Best Album by Songwriter. She became a spokesperson for breast cancer awareness, and wrote the song, "No one else/Por ser quien soy," to encourage others struggling with the disease. She died at age 37 in 2006.
- March 11, 1993 – Janet Reno unanimously confirmed as the first woman U.S. Attorney General – sworn in on March 12.
- March 11, 2006 – Michelle Bachelet Jeria is elected as the first woman president of Chile.
- March 11, 2019 – Italy’s highest court of appeal overturned a lower court’s reversal in 2017 of the conviction of two men on rape charges, in part because the alleged victim, a 22-year-old Peruvian woman, appeared “too masculine” to have attracted the men. The higher court ordered a retrial of the men, who originally had been convicted in 2016 by a lower court. When the men appealed, they were acquitted by judges – who were all women – in the Ancona appeals court. The judges’ reasoning document included a passage that said the woman’s story was not credible enough because she resembled a man and was therefore unappealing. The judges looked at the woman’s photograph, and the defendants’ statements that they weren’t attracted to her. One man put the victim’s number in his mobile phone under “Viking.” Cinzia Molinaro, the victim’s lawyer, based her appeal on that passage. The case was sent down to be reheard by a court in Perugia. The defendants spiked the woman’s drink with drugs when the group went to a bar. Doctors testified her injuries were consistent with rape, and a high level of benzodiazepines were in her blood. The woman moved back to Peru after being ostracized because she reported the men. Luisa Rizzitelli, speaking for the women’s group Rebel Network, said, “The worst thing is the cultural message that came from three female judges who acquitted these two men because they decided that it was improbable that they would want to rape someone who looked masculine.”
- March 11, 2020 – Harvey Weinstein, convicted in February, 2020, on charges of sexually assaulting Mimi Haleyi in 2006 and raping Jessica Mann in 2013, was sentenced by Judge James Burke to 23 years in prison.
- March 11, 2021 - In the UK, remains of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive who went missing on March 3, 2021, were found fifty miles from London. She was last seen around 9 PM walking toward home in the Brixton district of south London. An officer in the Metropolitan police’s diplomatic protection unit was arrested on suspicion of Everard’s murder. Dame Cressida Dick, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, said, “The news today that it was a Metropolitan police officer who was arrested on suspicion of Sarah’s murder has sent shockwaves and anger through the public and through the Met. I speak on behalf of all my colleagues when I say that we are utterly appalled at this dreadful, dreadful news.” Using the hashtag #SarahEverard, hundreds of women online expressed sadness and outrage, and shared their fears about walking alone at night. On March 12, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) told police forces across England and Wales that they could not waive covid lockdown bans on gatherings for vigils planned to honour the memory of Sarah Everard. The women’s activist group Reclaim These Streets had been organising a vigil on Clapham Common in south London. Even though they canceled it, hundreds of people showed up, many bringing flowers for an impromptu memorial at the bandstand, and police arrested four people.
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- March 12, 1862 – Jane A. Delano born, American nurse and educator, insisted on mosquito netting in 1887 to prevent the spread of yellow fever before doctors knew mosquitoes were carriers. Was chair of the Red Cross national committee on nursing service and superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps (1909-1912). Instituted the Red Cross Nursing Service as a reserve for the Army corps, so 8,000 nurses are ready for overseas duty when the U.S. entered WWI. In 1918, as director of the wartime Department of Nursing, mobilized 20,000 nurses, plus nurses’ aides and other workers. The influenza epidemic that swept Europe and America in 1918-1919 greatly increased demands on Delano and the Red Cross – exhausted, she fell ill and died in France on a European inspection tour in 1919. Delano was co-author with Isabel McIsaac, the American Red Cross Textbook on Elementary Hygiene and Home Care of the Sick (1913).
- March 12, 1864 – Alice Tegnér born, Swedish, music educator, poet, and composer, especially of children’s songs; became a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1926.
- March 12, 1884 – Mississippi authorizes the first state-supported college for women, the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College.
- March 12, 1903 – Der Wald, a one-act opera written by Dame Ethel Smyth, was performed at the Metropolitan Opera, the only opera by a woman to be performed there.
- March 12, 1904 – Lyudmila Keldysh born, Russian mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology; taught at the Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, beginning in 1934, but fled with her family in 1941 from advancing German troops to Kazan, living in Kazan University gym until they were assigned a dorm room. In late 1942, they returned to Moscow. Honored with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Order of Maternal Glory in the 2nd degree, and in 1958 received the Prize of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In 1964, she became a full professor at Moscow State University, but resigned in 1974 to protest of the expulsion of one of her students, and died in 1976.
- March 12, 1907 – Dorrit Hoffleit born, American research astronomer at Yale University, worked on variable stars, astrometry, spectroscopy, meteors, and compiling and editing several editions of the Bright Star Catalog. She also mentored generations of young women and men in astronomy. In 1988, she was awarded the George Van Biesbroeck Prize by the American Astronomical Society, for a lifetime of service to astronomy. She turned 100 in March, 2007, and died a month later from complications of cancer.
- March 12, 1908 – Rita Angus born, a leading artist of New Zealand, known for portraits and landscapes; her iconic 1936 painting Cass was voted New Zealand’s most-loved painting in a 2006 poll.
- March 12, 1912 – Juliette Gordon Low assembles 18 girls together in Savannah, Georgia, for the first Girl Scout meeting.
- March 12, 1918 – Elaine de Kooning born, American Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter, and art critic; her portraits and other artwork have gained acclaim, after being overshadowed by her famous artist husband William DeKooning. There was a retrospective show, “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, from March 2015 to January 2016.
- March 12, 1923 – Clara Fraser born, American feminist and socialist political organizer; leader of the Freedom Socialist Party in 1966, and co-founder of Radical Women in 1967. Hired in 1973 by publicly-owned utility Seattle City Light to run a hiring/training program for female electrical workers, she was fired in 1974, and filed a discrimination complaint documenting political bias and pervasive sexism. After a 7-year battle, she won a ruling affirming workers’ right to speak out against management and organize on their own behalf, and was reinstated in her former job at City Light. Fraser joined with women and pro-affirmative action male employees to form the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL).
- March 12, 1924 – Mary Lee Woods born, English mathematician and computer programmer; during WWII, she worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern; worked at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia (1947-1951); in 1951, she joined the Ferranti International team that developed programs for University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1, and Mark 1 Star computers.
- March 12, 1929 – Lupe Anguiano born, Mexican-American civil rights activist, advocate for women’s rights, the rights of the poor, and protection of the environment; she was a member of Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters (1949-1964) but left the church after joining picket lines and protesting a proposed law that would reverse the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act (a law to stop racial discrimination by landlords); worked for and in consultation with government agencies and legislative bodies, as well as for Cesar Chavez, and as a national organizer for the United Farm Workers. She founded the National Women’s Employment and Education Inc., which has helped hundreds of women gain education and work skills enabling them to get off welfare. Some of her ideas were incorporated into the landmark welfare reform legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996. She was a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and campaigned for the E.R.A. Now an advocate for the California Coastal Protection Network, she campaigns on environmental issues.
- March 12, 1935 – Valentyna Shevchenko born, Ukrainian politician; deputy chair of the Supreme Council Presidium of the Ukrainian SSR (1975-1985); when Oleksandr Andreyev died in office in 1984, she became acting chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, and then officially chair (1985-1990). In 1989, she refused to sign the prohibition against the People’s Movement of Ukraine.
- March 12, 1936 – Virginia Hamilton born, African American children’s author; won a National Book Award for Children’s Books, and the 1975 Newbery Award for M.C. Higgins, the Great; and in 1992, the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for lifetime achievement in children’s literature.
- March 12, 1945 – Anne Summers born, Australian feminist writer, columnist, editor, and publisher. In 1969, she was a co-founder of Women’s Liberation Movement in Adelaide. Their first national conference was in 1970 at the University of Melbourne. With other Australian women’s groups, they pushed for equal pay. Summers and other WLM members took over two derelict houses in Sydney and turned them into Elsie Women’s Refuge, a shelter for women and children escaping from domestic violence. She wrote a book, Damned Whores and God’s Police: the colonization of women in Australia, about Australian women’s history. Summers headed the Office of the Status of Women in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (1983-1986), then moved to New York to become editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine. Summers joined the board of Greenpeace Australia in 1999 and from 2000 to 2006 was chair of Greenpeace International. In 2018, she published Unfettered and Alice: A Memoir.
- March 12, 1946 – Liza Minnelli born, singer-actress, international star of stage, screen, and television. Has served on the board of the non-profit Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (IAHP/child brain development) for 20 years; and given generously of her time to AmFAR (foundation for AIDS research).
- March 12, 1968 – Tammy Duckworth born in Thailand, Thai-American Democratic politician; Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs Director (2006-2008); U.S. Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2009-2011); first disabled woman elected to Congress, and first Asian American elected to U.S. Congress from Illinois (2013-2017); elected U.S. Senator (D-IL) in 2017; during Iraq War, served as a U.S Army helicopter pilot, and lost both her legs, the first female double amputee from that war.
- March 12, 1978 – Arina Tanemura born, Japanese shōjo manga artist, known for I.O.N., and several series, including Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne; Full Moon o Sagashite; and Idol Dreams.
- March 12, 1994 – The Church of England ordains its first 32 women priests, in alphabetical order, so technically Angela Berners-Wilson was the first to be ordained.
- March 12, 2016 – A report issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirms that the South Sudanese government conducted a “scorched earth policy” against civilians caught up in the country’s civil war, and allowed its soldiers and allied militias to rape women in lieu of wages, as well as condoning the torture and murder of suspected opponents, a death toll of at least 50,000, and the deliberate displacement of an estimated 2.2 million people. The report laid bare the scale of the atrocities committed by both sides and warned that many of those may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity, calling most of the civilian casualties the result of deliberately targeted attacks rather than combat operations. While the report was unequivocal in asserting that “the government appears to be responsible for gross and systematic human rights violations.” From April to September in 2015, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in Unity state alone, an oil-rich area in the north of the country that has seen some of the worst violence. Its assessment team was told that youth militias who carried out attacks with the SPLA had an agreement – “do what you can and take what you can.” The report added: “Most of the youth raided cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a form of payment.” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said, “The scale and types of sexual violence – primarily by government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods.” South Sudan has been consumed by conflict since December 2013, when President Kiir accused his former vice-president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup. The fighting quickly pitted supporters of Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, against those backing Machar, an ethnic Nuer.
- March 12, 2019 – Women of the Wall, an organization of Jewish women from Israel and around the world, who are determined to uphold women’s right to pray aloud and read from Torah scrolls at the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, came to celebrate 30 years of prayers. Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox teenagers were bused in to disrupt their celebration by cursing, spitting, pushing and shoving the women, and the men who support them, including rabbis.
- March 12, 2020 – Pakistan’s parliament passed the nation’s first child abuse law, four years after the body of Zainab Ansari was found in a rubbish skip in the Kasur district near Lahore. The rape and murder of the 7-year-old girl caused a national outcry. A number of missing children were reported in the district since 2015, when authorities uncovered what they said was a pedophile ring linked to a prominent local family. The man convicted as her killer was also linked to the deaths of 7 other girls. Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari said getting the bill passed had been “a long struggle” and added, “Finally, we have emerged today successful, getting the Zainab Alert Bill sailed through the national assembly with a majority of votes.” Zainab Ansari’s case triggered debate in Pakistan over whether to teach children how to guard against sex abuse, a taboo subject in the Muslim-majority nation. Girls are disproportionately affected, according to Sahil, an organization that works on child protection. The new law requires police to register a case within two hours of a child’s parents reporting them missing, and includes establishment of a dedicated helpline and a new agency to issue alerts for a missing child.
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- March 13, 1798 – Abigail Powers Fillmore born, American teacher and U.S. First Lady. In 1819, she was teaching at the New Hope Academy, a private school. One of her students was Millard Fillmore, who was only a year younger than his teacher. After a lengthy courtship, she married the young lawyer in 1826. She continued to teach until the birth of their son, the first of two children, in 1828, the same year Millard was elected to the New York State Assembly. When he became U.S. Vice President in 1849, they moved to Washington DC. Only 16 months later, President Zachary Taylor died suddenly, and they moved into the White House. Abigail was appalled by the lack of a library in the White House, so she lobbied for a special appropriation from Congress of $2,000, and created the first White House library. Some evidence suggests Abigail advised Millard not to sign the Fugitive Slave Act, which he did nevertheless sign, losing his nomination for a second term, as Abigail predicted would happen if he signed the Act. She caught a cold at the outdoor inaugural ceremonies for incoming president Franklin Pierce in 1853, which turned into pneumonia. She died just 26 days after leaving the White House, at age 55.
- March 13, 1892 – Janet Flanner born, American journalist and author; Paris correspondent (using pseudonym “Genêt”) for The New Yorker for 50 years, except during the Nazi occupation of the city during WWII; she was made a knight of the Legion d’Honneur (1948). She published three collections of her “Letters from Paris” columns – Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939; Paris Journal: 1944-1955; and Paris Journal: 1944-1965, which won the 1966 National Book Award for Arts and Letters.
- March 13, 1898 – La Meri born as Meriwether Hughes, one of the most notable ethnological dancers from 1924 into the 1970s; danced with Anna Pavlova; learned native dances all over the world, lectured, wrote articles, and founded the Ethnologic Dance Theatre.
- March 13, 1908 – Myrtle Bachelder born, American chemist and Women’s Army Corps officer; worked on the WWII Manhattan Project, commanding a WAC detachment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; she was responsible for analysis of the spectroscopy of uranium isotopes at Los Alamos, to ensure the purity of the sub-critical material in the world’s first atomic bombs; in 1945, she opposed a bill in Congress which would have maintained military control over nuclear research; in 1947, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission declassified 270 secret documents, including records of Bachelder’s contributions to the success of the Manhattan Project; at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Metals, she worked as a research chemist, on a wide variety of projects, from developing methods to purify the rare elements tellurium and indium, to analyzing the chemical composition of brass cannons found on sunken ships in the Aegean Sea, and analyzing for NASA the chemistry of Moon rocks brought back from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972; in the 1980s, she supported nuclear arms control, but said of the work at Los Alamos during WWII, “One cannot pull that activity out of that time, set it down in the 1980s, and pass judgment.”
- March 13, 1911 – In Flint v. Stone Tracy, the U.S. Supreme Court rules 7-2 that the privilege of operating in corporate form is valuable and justifies imposition of a federal corporate income tax, which had been challenged by Stella P. Flint, as guardian of the property of Samuel N. Stone Jr., a Minor, arguing that it is actually an excise tax on corporations, which can be imposed by the states, but not the federal government. Incorporation protects stockholders from being sued for the business’s debts, or being held liable for the decisions made by the corporation’s board.
- March 13, 1911 – Dorothy M. Tangney born, Australian teacher and Labor Party politician; first woman member of the Australian Senate (1943-1968), the longest serving woman until Kathy Sullivan surpassed her record in 2001; she was an advocate for social reform, federal support for education, and establishing Australian National University as a research university.
- March 13, 1916 – Lindy Boggs born, American Democratic politician; first woman elected to the US House of Representatives from Louisiana (1973-1991); noted for her work on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, adding the provision banning discrimination due to sex or marital status. First woman to preside over a major party convention (1976 Democratic National Convention). U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican (1997-2001).
- March 13, 1918 – Women are scheduled to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York for the first time because of a shortage of men due to WWI.
- March 13, 1928 – Ellen Raskin born, American children’s author-illustrator; won the 1979 Newbery Medal for The Westing Game.
- March 13, 1941 – Donella Meadows born, pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher and writer, one of the most influential environmental thinkers of the 20th century. She earned a PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 1968, and became a research fellow at MIT, for Jay Forrester, founder of system dynamics and the principle of magnetic data storage for computers. Meadows was lead author of The Limits to Growth, which sold over 9 million copies and was translated into 28 languages, and Thinking in Systems: a Primer. She wrote hundreds of articles, syndicated newspaper columns, wrote or co-authored a dozen books, and gave many speeches. She died in 2001 at age 59 of cerebral meningitis.
- March 13, 1942 – Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps is the first woman promoted to colonel in the U.S. Army.
- March 13, 1944 – Susan Gerbi born, biochemist, helped devise a method to map the start site of DNA replication, researched the role of hormones in certain cancers.
- March 13, 1947 – Lesley Collier born, English principal dancer with the Royal Ballet; has taught at the Royal Ballet School since 1995.
- March 13, 1947 – Lyn St. James born as Evelyn Cornwall, American racecar driver (1996-2001); first woman to win the Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year award; she founded the Women in the Winner’s Circle Foundation in 1994 to provide leadership and support, encouraging more women enter the motorsports field.
- March 13, 1949 – Sian Elias born in London, New Zealand jurist; Chief Justice of New Zealand (1999-2019); Administrator of the Government (for short periods in 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2016), a duty of the Chief Justice in times when the Governor-General is unable to fulfill his or her duties; became a High Court judge in 1995; was one of the first two women to become Queen’s Counsel in New Zealand in 1988; Law Commissioner (1984-1988); she began as a barrister in 1975, and also served as a member of the Motor Spirits Licensing Appeal Authority and of the Working Party on the Environment. She has been a noted as a champion of legal justice for Maori people.
- March 13, 1953 – Dame Nicola V. Davies born in Wales, became a Queen’s Counsel in 1992; served as Presiding Judge of the Wales Circuit (2014-2017); she was a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales.
- March 13, 1954 – Valerie A. Amos, Baroness Amos, born in British Guiana (now Guyana), British Labour politician; United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (2010-2015); British High Commissioner to Australia (2009-2010); Leader of the House of Lords/Lord President of the Council (2003-2007); Member of the House of Lords (1997-2010).
- March 13, 1954 – Robin Duke born, Canadian comedian, voice actress and comedy writer, noted for her work on SCTV (1980-1981) and Saturday Night Live (1981-1984); in 2004, she co-founded Women Fully Clothed, a sketch comedy troupe which toured in Canada, the U.S. and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
- March 13, 1956 – Dana Delany, American actress, producer, and activist; best known for her roles in TV series, China Beach (1988-1991), Desperate Housewives (2004-2012) and Body of Proof (2011-2013), and in the films Housesitter and Tombstone. She has served on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation since the 1990s, and campaigned for funding to find a cure for the disease, and is a board member and former co-president of Creative Coalition, an arts advocacy group; also a supporter of Planned Parenthood, and of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
- March 13, 1964 – Kitty Genovese is raped and stabbed to death in New York City; neighbors hear her screams for help, but there is no record in police logs that anyone called the police. One neighbor, Sophia Farrar, did run down the stairs in time to hold Genovese as she died.
- March 13, 1971 – Annabeth Gish born, American film and television actress, known for her roles in the movies Mystic Pizza and Double Jeopardy, and the TV series The X-Files. She is a supporter of CARE International, Students Rebuild, and One Million Bones, and has filmed a public service announcement for them in 2012.
- March 13, 1986 – Susan Butcher wins the first of three consecutive, and four total, Alaskan Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races.
- March 13, 2016 – Organizers of the South by Southwest arts festival apologized to U.S. fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, 30, after a volunteer told her she would have to remove her Muslim headcovering to get credentials for the festival in Austin, Texas. Muhammad, a member of the U.S. Olympic fencing team, was about to make history at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro by becoming the first woman to represent the U.S. wearing a hijab. She lost in the women’s individual saber, but Muhammad’s U.S. women’s team won a bronze medal in the team saber event.
- March 13, 2020 – Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American woman who worked for University of Louisville Health as an ER technician, was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment, when three white plainclothes officers of the Louisville Metro Police Department, with a "no-knock" search warrant, forced entry into the apartment as part of an investigation into drug dealing operations. One of the suspects in the officer’s investigation was a former boyfriend of Taylor’s who no longer lived at her address. Taylor's current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was inside the apartment with her when the officers knocked on the door and then forced entry. Officers said that they announced themselves as police before forcing entry, but Walker said he did not hear any announcement, thought the officers were intruders, and fired a warning shot at them. According to officials, it hit Officer Jonathan Mattingly in the leg, and the officers fired 32 shots in return. Walker was unhurt but Taylor was hit by six bullets and died. The LMPD fired Officer Brett Hankison for blindly firing through the covered patio door and window of Taylor's apartment. On September 15, the city of Louisville agreed to pay Taylor's family $12 million, and reform police practices. On September 23, a state grand jury indicted Hankison on three counts of wanton endangerment for endangering Taylor's neighbors with his shots. Officer Myles Cosgrove was determined to have fired the fatal shot that killed Taylor. The killing of Taylor added to protests across the U.S. against police brutality and racism. When a grand jury did not indict the officers for her death, there were more demonstrations. Two of the jurors released a statement saying that the grand jury was not presented with homicide charges.
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- March 14, 1489 – Caterina Cornaro, last Queen of Cyprus, goes into exile, after being forced to abdicate, and sell to the Republic of Venice the administration of Cyprus.
- March 14, 1815 – Josephine Lang born, German composer and pianist, primarily noted for songs and choral works.
- March 14, 1822 – Teresa Cristina delle Due Sicilie (of the Two Sicilies) born; became Empress consort of Brazil when she married Dom Pedro II, the last monarch of the Empire of Brazil. Through raised in a repressive, ultra conservative family, she was interested the sciences and the arts. She gave birth to four children, but only her daughter Isabel lived to adulthood. Teresa Cristina won hearts of the Brazilian people with her patience, simplicity, kindness, and generosity, while keeping her distance from political controversy. She sponsored archaeological studies, the immigration of Italians to Brazil, and promoted Brazilian culture. She became known as “Mother of the Brazilians.” When the Imperial Family were sent into exile after a coup d'état staged by army officers in 1889, she was devastated by being forced to leave her beloved adopted country. A little more than a month after the monarchy's collapse, she died at age 67, grieving and despondent, of respiratory failure leading to cardiac arrest.
- March 14, 1833 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor born, women’s rights advocate, first American woman to graduate from dental school, as a Doctor of Dental Surgery. She had been denied entrance into dental schools between 1861 and 1865, so she practiced without a diploma until the Iowa State Dental Society supported her ambition for a college degree and demanded her admission, so she was accepted by the Ohio College of Dentistry. After graduation, she practiced for a short time in Chicago, then married James M. Taylor and taught him dentistry. The couple moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in December, 1867, opened a joint office, and built a prosperous practice.
- March 14, 1836 – Isabella Mayson Beeton born, author, cookery columnist, and journalist, “Mrs. Beeton,” known for her 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
- March 14, 1851 – Anna C. Maxwell born, American nurse, served as superintendent for several nursing schools, was involved in nursing in both the Spanish-American War and WWI, awarded the Medaille de l’Hygiene Publique by the French government for her work in WWI, one of the first women buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- March 14, 1868 – Emily Murphy born, Canadian jurist, author, and activist, first woman magistrate not only in Canada, but in the British Empire; one of the ‘Famous Five’ whose Persons Case which went all the way to the Privy Council of England, and establishes Canadian women as ‘persons’ under the law.
- March 14, 1887 – Sylvia Beach born, American ex-pat proprietor of the famous English-language bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare & Company, a gathering place for ‘Lost Generation’ Americans, like Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald; original publisher of James Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses.
- March 14, 1894 – Osa Leighty Johnson born, American documentary filmmaker, author, and adventurer. With her husband Martin, she studied wildlife and peoples in East and Central Africa, South Pacific Islanders and aborigines of British North Borneo. They created feature films like Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, Trailing Wild African Animals, Osa’s Four Years in Paradise, and Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. She wrote I Married Adventure, her autobiography, which was the best-selling non-fiction book of 1940. After her husband’s death, she made her own TV show, The Big Game Hunt, which debuted in 1952. It was the first television wildlife series. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum is in Chanute, Kansas, her hometown.
- March 14, 1902 – Margaret A. Hickey born, American attorney, journalist, and women’s rights activist; as a lawyer, she worked primarily in poverty law because of the Depression, and established the Margaret Hickey School for Secretaries in 1933; chaired the Women’s Advisory Committee of the War Manpower Commission (1942). She was president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women (1944-1946), and represented the NFBPW at the UN Conference in San Francisco (1945). Served as chair of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1961.
- March 14, 1918 – ‘Dickey’ Chapelle born as Georgette Meyer, American photojournalist known for her work as a war correspondent from WWII through the Vietnam War.
- March 14, 1918 – Zoia Horn, born in the Ukraine, American librarian; her family emigrated to Canada when she was 8 years old, and then to New York City, where she attended the Pratt Institute Library school and first began working in a library in 1942. She joined the American Library Association and state library organizations. She was a peace activist, participating in vigils protesting the Vietnam War. In 1968, she became Head of the Reference Department at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In January 1971, she was contacted by the FBI agents seeking information on Father Philip Berrigan, noted anti-war activist, who was serving a sentence in a nearby federal prison for burning draft files. The FBI believed he was plotting with six others to blow up heating tunnels under Washington DC, and to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Boyd Douglas, a prisoner working at the Bucknell library on a work/study program, was relaying letters between Berrigan and other anti-war activists. Horn was subpoenaed by the prosecution, but refused to testify at the trial on grounds that her forced testimony would threaten intellectual and academic freedom. She served 20 days in jail, but was released after the prosecution’s case proved unreliable. Judith Krug, of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, called Horn “the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession.” She continued to speak out on issues of intellectual freedom, defending librarians who were dismissed or attacked for supplying “subversive materials,” and opposed the Patriot Act provisions for library surveillance, and for gaining warrants for records of library patrons. Horn also campaigned against fees in public libraries because they created barriers to information access.
- March 14, 1921 – Ada Louise Huxtable, author, architecture critic and preservationist, won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970.
- March 14, 1922 – China Zorrilla born, Uruguayan theatre, film and television actress, producer, director, and writer, a “Grande Dame” of South American theatre, who was popular on stage, screen and television in both Argentina and Uruguay. Co-founder of Teatro de la Ciudad de Montevideo, which also toured in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Madrid. They won the Spanish Critics Award for their 1961 productions of plays by Spanish authors Federico García Lorca and Lope de Vega. In the 1960s, she staged a children’s musical, Canciones para mirar, written by Argentine poet Maria Elena Walsh, in New York City. Zorilla was a correspondent for the Uruguayan newspaper El País, covering events like the Cannes Film Festival. She also directed operas by Puccini and Rossini at the Teatro Argentino de La Plata for their 1977 season. In 2008, she was invested Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. She lived to be 90 years old.
- March 14, 1923 – Diane Arbus born, unique American photographer, noted for photographing marginalized people; the first American photographer whose work was displayed at the influential Venice Biennale.
- March 14, 1942 – Anne Sheafe Miller, age 33, of New Haven, CT, was dying of hemolytic streptococcal septicemia, a common infection of the day resulting from miscarriage. Four weeks of treatment, including sulfa drugs, had failed to stop the infection, and her temperature kept climbing. Dr. John Bumstead was her physician, and he was also treating another patient, John F. Fulton, MD, in a hospital room just down the hall. Dr. Fulton was a clinician and researcher known for his extensive research into the relationship between the brain and disease. During the war, Fulton had put his reputation and contacts to work to help his friend Howard Florey, an Australian researcher had isolated penicillin’s active ingredient. Dr. Bumstead asked Dr. Fulton to use his connections to get a sample of penicillin to try on Anne Miller. 5.5 grams of penicillin, were flown in from Merck and Co. The dose for the patient was guesswork, sincce it hadn’t been tried in the U.S. On March 14, Miller received her first dose via intravenous drip at 3:30 p.m., and two more doses during the night. The next morning her temperature, which had hovered between 103 and 106.5 degrees, dropped to normal for the first time in four weeks. By following day, her bacteria count had dropped. Miller fully recovered, and lived to the age of 90. Her dramatic recovery helped convince the U.S. pharmaceutical industry that the antibiotic was viable and worthy of mass production.
- March 14, 1948 – In the UK, new laws were proposed allowing British women married to foreigners to automatically retain their citizenship; only the status of women who choose to formally renounce their British citizenship would change.
- March 14, 1948 – Nicole Taton Capitaine born, French astronomer, expert in astrometry, at the Paris Observatory; graduated in 1970 from Pierre and Marie Curie University, and earned a doctorate there in 1972. In 1985, she became deputy director of the department of fundamental astronomy at the Paris Observatory, and the director of the observatory in 1993. She was part of the Space Geodesy Research Group (GRGS). Retired in 2013; now an emeritus astronomer.
- March 14, 1958 – Francine Stock born, British radio producer and news presenter, who has also worked in BBC television, and novelist; she has worked for the BBC since 1983 on several programmes, including Newsnight, The Money Programme, and Front Row. She has written two novels: A Foreign Country, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel award, and Man-Made Fibre.
- March 14, 1960 – Heidi B. Hammel born, American planetary astronomer; vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which operates world-class astronomical observatories like the National Solar Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope; she is the interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is now rescheduled for launch in March 2021; 2002 recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for communication enhancing the public’s understanding of planetary science.
- March 14, 1972 – Irom Chanu Sharmila born, Indian poet, civil rights and political activist, often called “the world’s longest hunger striker,” for her hunger strike which lasted from 2000 to 2016, to protest the civil rights violations under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which only applies to her home state of Manipur, and gives the army the power to search properties without a warrant, and to arrest people, or to use deadly force if there is "reasonable suspicion" that a person is acting against the state. She has been arrested several times for “attempting suicide,” and nasogastric intubation forced on her for long periods while being held in custody. Amnesty International declared her as a prisoner of conscience. “People just started praising my glory without listening to what I wanted from them. . . It needed to be a collective cause, a mass cause. I was isolated and idolised, living on a pedestal, without voice, without feeling,” she says. In July 2016 she abruptly announced an end date to her fast. “Nothing had changed in people’s mindsets after 16 years,” she says. “I really wanted to change myself, the environment, the tactics, everything.” In August 2016, she ended her fast, after 5,574 days.
- March 14, 1975 – Rushanara Ali born in Bangladesh, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow since 2010; worked at the Communities Directorate of the Home Office (2002-2005), where she led a work programme to mobilise local and national agencies in the aftermath of the 2001 riots; research fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research (1999–2002); worked on human rights issues at the Foreign Office (2000–2001); worked as parliamentary assistant to MP Oona King (1997-1999). When she went to Oxford, she was the first in her family to go to university, then worked as a research assistant for sociologist Michael Young. Rushanara Ali also helped develop Language Line, a national telephone interpreting service available in over 100 languages.
- March 14, 2019 – At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said, and dozens more seriously wounded. Police said three people were taken into custody, and one person was charged with murder. A man who claimed responsibility for the attacks posted links to a white-nationalist, anti-immigrant manifesto on social media and identified himself as a racist. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said many of those targeted may be migrants and refugees. "It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Ardern said, adding that this "will be one of New Zealand's darkest days." New Zealand's national security alert status was raised to high.
- March 14, 2020 – Countries around the world continued to enact strict measures such as border closures and flight cancellations to combat the spread of the novel COVID-19 coronavirus. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced government implementation of a policy under which all travelers, even New Zealanders, must self-isolate upon their arrival in the country for 14 days starting March 15 at midnight. Ardern said New Zealand "will have the widest ranging and toughest border restrictions of any country in the world" and "I make no apologies." All cruise ships were banned from coming to New Zealand until June 30 as well. There had been only six confirmed cases and no deaths attributed to COVID-19 in New Zealand as of that date. The total on March 15, 2021, were 2076 confirmed covid cases and 356 probable cases, with 26 deaths.
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- March 15, 1825 – Harriet E. Wilson born, one of the first African-American women novelists; her novel, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, but was not widely known until it was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- March 15, 1838 – Alice Cunningham Fletcher born, American ethnologist, studied and documented Native American culture, beginning with the Omaha people in 1880. She was one of the first in her field to live among the people she studied. She also worked with the Nez Perce and the Pawnee. Fletcher collaborated on transcribing hundreds of songs of the Plains Indians. She was well-known on the public lecture circuit. Her published works include The Supernatural Among the Omaha Tribe of Indians, Historical Sketch of the Omaha Tribe of Indians in Nebraska and Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs.
- March 15, 1852 – Augusta, Lady Gregory born, Irish dramatist, folklorist, and theatre manager; co-founder with William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn of the Irish Literary Theatre and the world-famed Abbey Theatre. She wrote numerous short works for the companies at both theatres, and produced a number of books retelling stories from Irish mythology. Lady Gregory was a prominent cultural nationalist, and a leader of Ireland’s Literary Revival and the renewed interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage in the late 19th and early 20 centuries. Her home at Coole Park was a major meeting place for leaders of the Revival.
- March 15, 1868 – Grace Chisholm Young born, British mathematician; educated at Girton College, University of Cambridge, where she passed her final examinations with the equivalent of a First Class degree, but women at the time were only given certificates, and not included on the Honours Lists. On a challenge from a classmate, she took the exam for the Final Honours School in mathematics at the University of Oxford in 1892, and outperformed all the Oxford students, making her the first person to achieve the level of a First at both Oxford and Cambridge in any subject. Young continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, working on an equation to determine the orbit of a comet, and in 1895 she became the first woman to receive a doctorate in any field from a German University. Her earliest work on the theory of functions of a real variable was published under the name of her husband, fellow mathematician William Henry Young. After she began publishing under her own name, Girton College awarded her the Gamble Prize for Mathematics for her work on calculus (1914-1916). She and her husband collaborated and published their work jointly until his death in 1942, although she did the majority of the writing. They were the first to publish a textbook on set theory, The Theory of Sets of Points (1906).
- March 15, 1868 – Lida Gustava Heymann born, German women’s rights activist, with her partner Anita Augspurg co-founds the movement to abolish prostitution in Germany; the Society for Women’s Suffrage; the newspaper Women in the State; a co-educational high school; and professional associations for women.
- March 15, 1880 – Hattie Carnegie born in Austria, American fashion designer/entrepreneur for both couture and ready-to-wear lines, designs Women’s Army Corps uniform; Congressional Medal of Freedom for the WAC uniform design and other charitable and patriotic contributions.
- March 15, 1887 – Marjorie Merriweather Post born, American owner of General Foods, philanthropist and noted art collector. She funded a U.S. Army Hospital in France during WWI, and was presented in 1971 with the Silver Fawn Award by the Boy Scouts of America for her support. Lake Merriweather at the Goshen Scout Reservation in Virginia is named for her.
- March 15, 1896 – Marion Cuthbert born, writer and educator; she was the first black woman Dean of Women at Brooklyn College (1944-1961), and a co-founder of the National Association of College Women, which fought discrimination in higher education (1932). She wrote a pioneering dissertation, “Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate” (1942), which focused on the experiences of black women students at the intersection of race, gender and culture. Cuthbert was secretary of the National Board of YWCA. She was a member of the NAACP, and also served on the boards of numerous peace and human rights groups.
- March 15, 1900 – In Paris, Sarah Bernhardt stars in the premiere of Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon.
- March 15, 1905 – Margaret Webster, theater actress, director and producer with citizenship and successful careers in both the UK and the US, known for her Shakespearean productions, including a groundbreaking Othello (1943) with Paul Robeson and Jose Ferrer.
- March 15, 1907 – In Finland, women win their first seats in the Finnish Parliament; they take their oaths of office on May 23.
- March 15, 1909 – Jaroslava Muchová born, Czech painter and art restorer, noted for her work on Slovanská epopej (The Slav Epic), a major project initiated by her father, painter Alphonse Mucha, and especially for her restoration of works from the Slav Epic damaged by frost and water when they were hidden away during WWII to keep them falling into the hands of the Nazis.
- March 15, 1921 – Madelyn Pugh born, American television writer and producer whose career began in radio; she is best known as a writer and producer on I Love Lucy, but also worked on other TV series, and co-wrote the scripts for Lucile Ball’s films Forever, Darling and Yours, Mine and Ours with her frequent writing partner, Bob Carroll Jr.
- March 15, 1927 – The first Women’s Boat Race, which would become an annual event in 1964, took place between Cambridge University Women's Boat Club and Oxford University Women's Boat Club, on the “Isis” (the River Thames) at Oxford. The race was won by Oxford in a time of 3 minutes 36 seconds, beating Cambridge by 15 seconds.
- March 15, 1930 – Wilma L. Vaught born, Brigadier General in U.S. Air Force, first woman to deploy with an Air Force bomber unit, inductee into National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Army Women’s Foundation Hall of Fame.
- March 15, 1933 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg born, American lawyer, professor, and the second woman appointed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1993); courtroom advocate for fair treatment of women, co-founder of Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first U.S. law journal to focus exclusively on women’s rights (1970); taught at Columbia Law School (1972-1980), becoming Columbia’s first female tenured professor; worked on the ACLU Women’s Rights Project cases involving discriminatory labor laws. Her dissent against ending the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which required federal preclearance before changing voting practices: "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." She died of complications from pancreatic cancer in September 2020 at age 87.
- March 15, 1939 – Julie Tullis born, British mountaineer and filmmaker; first British woman to reach the summit of K2 in 1986, but she died from injuries after a fall during the descent. Her autobiography, Clouds from Both Sides, was published posthumously.
- March 15, 1941 – Carolyn Hansson born in England, Canadian materials engineer and research scientist; the first woman accepted as a student at the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College, London, and the first woman to graduate from there with a PhD in metallurgy. Hansson is known for pioneering a monitoring system for evaluating the integrity of concrete structures, measuring the amount of corrosion of steel inside concrete, and also studies rust-resistant reinforcing materials. In 1990, she became a professor and head of the Materials and Metallurgical Engineering Department at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, then joined the University of Waterloo as Vice President of University Research (1996-2001). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.
- March 15, 1943 – Lynda La Plante born, English author and screenwriter; best known for the television crime series, Prime Suspect.
- March 15, 1948 – Kate Bornstein born, American author, playwright performer and gender theorist; in 1986, she identified as gender non-conforming and underwent gender affirmation surgery. Author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us; My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely; and A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir.
- March 15, 1958 – Ann Davies born, British television and radio presenter and newsreader, currently for BBC East Midlands Today, and the documentary program Inside Out.
- March 15, 1959 – Lisa Holton born, American journalist, editor, and non-fiction author; in 1998, she launched the Lisa Company, and has been president since 2012 of Classroom, Inc, a nonprofit organization working to close the achievement gap for low-income adolescents by using technology; former Chicago Sun-Times Business Editor.
- March 15, 1965 – Sunetra Gupta born, Indian Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, with an interest in infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, HIV, influenza and bacterial meningitis. Awarded the 2009 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her research on Surviving pandemics: a pathogen’s perspective. She is also the author of works of fiction in Bengali and in English, including the English-language novel, Memories of Rain, awarded the 1996 Sahitya Akademi Award by the Government of India.
- March 15, 1967 – Naoko Takeuchi, Japanese manga artist; known for her series, Sailor Moon.
- March 15, 1973 – Robin Hunicke born, American video game designer and producer; noted for MySims; Bloom Blox; and Journey.
- March 15, 1976 – Katherine Brooks born, American film writer and director; noted for her feature films, Loving Annabelle, and Waking Madison. She is an LGBTQ activist, and a spokesperson for PETA.
- March 15, 2014 – In the UK, a newly published Home Office code of conduct suggests there will be a tightening of guidelines on undercover surveillance, but it does not explicitly rule out officers engaging in sexual relationships with those being spied on, or those who associate with the target. The new code only says that intrusion into someone's "private or family life," even when they are not the direct targets of the surveillance, should be “justified by the information that might be discovered.” Eight women, who say they were duped into forming long-term sexual relationships with undercover policemen, have attacked the government's failure to ban such behavior. The women are seeking redress for their alleged suffering through the high court. One of them, known in court records as “Lisa,” had a six-year relationship with an undercover officer posing as an activist while he was actually attached to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit spying on environmental activists. She told reporters, "The new code talks of levels of intrusiveness and the need for different levels of authorisation, but they have previously relied on the test that intrusion has to be necessary. So that isn't enough of a safeguard. It hasn't been in the past and it won't be in the future. Unless it is made clear that officers who engage in intrusive activity will face a charge of gross misconduct or be dismissed, or there will be some consequences, then this behaviour will not stop." Five undercover officers engaged in infiltrating environmental campaign groups between the mid-1980s and 2010 are accused of engaging in sexual relationships with the women lasting from seven months to nine years. Scotland Yard was forced earlier in March to drop an attempt to block legal action by five of the women. They conceded that the attempt was neither "appropriate or proportionate" in the wake of the decision by the home secretary, Theresa May, to order a public inquiry into the undercover infiltration of a political group.
- March 15, 2020 – Netflix have stalled their plans to release an Australian documentary about Danish murderer Peter Madsen, after accusations that it contains footage of two people without their consent, and would re-traumatise and “endanger their health” if it airs. Madsen, a well-known Danish inventor, was sentenced to life in jail for the murder and sexual assault of journalist Kim Wall, after he invited her onto his homemade submarine under the pretence of an interview in August 2017. Australian director Emma Sullivan had been filming Madsen and his volunteer crew for months for an unrelated documentary, about the inventor’s attempt to build a homemade rocket, when the murder took place. The resulting film, Into the Deep, contains extensive interviews with Madsen up until the day of the murder, as well as the people who worked with him. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, and had been scheduled for release by the international streaming giant later this year. One woman in the documentary, Anja Olsen, has said she never signed a release form to allow her footage to be used, and told the director and producers repeatedly she was suffering severe mental health effects due to the film’s impending wide release. In portions of the film, as aired at Sundance, Madsen is shown threatening Olsen physically and writing that he would kill other volunteers in his workshop. “I appear against my will as a participant in the documentary,” Olsen said on social media. “I repeatedly and unequivocally told the director Emma Sullivan that I did not want to participate, that it would endanger my health due to trauma I suffer following the murder case.” The second person filmed, who is objecting to the documentary, has chosen to remain anonymous.
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- March 16, 1750 – Caroline Herschel born, German-English astronomer, who was the sister of William Herschel, as well as his assistant, and made calculations associated with his studies. She was the first woman to discover a comet, and went on to discover several more; the first woman to be paid for her contribution to science; the first woman to be awarded a Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal (1828), and one of the two first women to be named Royal Astronomical Society Honorary Members (in 1835, with Mary Somerville).
- March 16, 1799 – Anna Children Atkins born, English botanist and pioneering photographer; in Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, she records all the specimens of algae found in the British Isles, and also created Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns – they are the first sustained demonstrations that photography could be scientifically useful. She is also credited as the first person to publish a book with photographs.
- March 16, 1808 – Hannah T. King born in England, Mormon pioneer and author; last woman sealed to Brigham Young, who had 55 wives; author of Songs of the Heart.
- March 16, 1822 – Rosa Bonheur born, French painter and sculptor, the most famous and financially successful woman artist of her day. Women were only reluctantly educated as artists, so her success helped to open doors for the women artists who followed her.
- March 16, 1846 – Rebecca Cole born, second black American woman to become a physician; in 1873, she and fellow physician Charlotte Abbey opened the Women’s Directory Center in Philadelphia to provide legal and medical services to poor women and children; she was appointed superintendent of the Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington DC (1899), and continued to practice medicine for 50 years.
- March 16, 1881 – Fannie Charles Dillon born, American pianist and composer; known for incorporating bird calls into her scores. In 1924, she founded the Woodland Theatre, and was its general manager (1926-1929), at Big Bear Lake in California. She also taught classes in the 1920s at Los Angeles High School. John Cage was one of her students.
- March 16, 1882 – A campaign to persuade the U.S. to become a signatory of the Geneva Convention, launched by Clara Barton and her allies in 1877, finally met success when President Chester A. Arthur signed the Geneva Convention on March 1, 1882, and the U.S. Senate ratified the convention on this day. The American Red Cross became officially allied with the International Committee of the Red Cross. A new campaign was launched, to obtain a Congressional Charter, which would give the American Red Cross legal protection through federal incorporation, and protection for the Red Cross insignia. This campaign was not won until 1900.
- March 16, 1883 – Ethel Anderson born in England, Australian author, poet, art critic and painter; founded the Turramurra Wall Painters Union in New South Wales. She is known for designing the murals in the Children’s Chapel of St. James’ Church in Sydney, which she worked on with the Turramurra Wall Painters, and her poem “The Song of Hagar.”
- March 16, 1883 – Susan Hayhurst at the age of 63, graduates from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, the only woman in her class of 150, and the first woman to earn a pharmacy degree in the United States. She had been the head of the pharmaceutical department at the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia since 1876, and served as the department’s head for a total of 33 years. Previously, she had graduated in 1857 from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania with a degree in medicine. Hayhurst was a mentor to at least 65 women pharmacists, and an active member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Woman's Suffrage Society of Philadelphia. She died in 1909 at age 88.
- March 16, 1900 – Eveline Burns born in Britain, American economist, technical expert; helped design social security, served on National Resources Planning Board (1939-43), wrote The American Social Security System (1949), the standard text in this field; Columbia Professor of Social Work.
- March 16, 1916 – Mercedes McCambridge born, American actress who struggled with alcoholism, and went public with her addiction in order to help others and bring public recognition to alcoholism as a disease; from 1975 to 1982, she devoted her time to the Livengrin Foundation, a treatment and rehabilitation center, first as a volunteer board member, then as President and CEO, responsible for day-to-day operations. She was a staunch liberal Democrat, and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. Her memoir The Quality of Mercy: An Autobiography is quite frank about her problems. She was a member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air company, and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for All the King’s Men, and was nominated again in the same category for Giant.
- March 16, 1917 – Laure Pillay born, the first woman barrister and first woman magistrate in Mauritius. She originally went to London in 1938 to study medicine, but after WWII broke out, she went to work in the British Foreign Office until 1945. She went home after the war, but returned to London to study law, and was admitted to both Lincoln’s Inn, and the bar in Mauritius in 1955. Pillay was a feminist, and became an advocate for women who were victims of domestic violence, and handled many divorce cases. She advocated for women’s rights as a representative of Mauritius at seminars in Addis Ababa and Berlin on women's roles in Africa. In 1967, she was appointed as a magistrate, and later as a Senior Magistrate, before returning to private practice. She was a founding member of the Mauritius Family Planning Association, and an assessor for the Industrial Relations Commissions. In March 2017, she celebrated her 100th birthday, surrounded by her three children, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. At the time, she was the oldest member of the legal profession in Mauritius. She died four months later.
- March 16, 1925 – Mary Hinkson born, African American dancer and choreographer; member of the Martha Graham Dance Company (1953-1973); also appeared at the New York City Opera, and worked with Alvin Ailey; taught at the Juilliard School of Music, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Ailey School.
- March 16, 1943 – Ursula Goodenough born, educator and author, now Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis, where she continues to engage in research on eukaryotic algae; author of the best-selling book Sacred Depths of Nature, and presenter of her programs Religious Naturalism, and Epic of Evolution in venues around the world, including a Mind and Life dialogue with the Dalai Lama in 2002. She earned her PhD in Biology at Harvard University, and was an assistant and associate professor of biology at Harvard (1971-1978) before she moved to Washington University. She served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology (1984-1985). She was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology in 2013.
- March 16, 1946 – Mary Kaldor born, English economist and academic; Professor of Governance at the London School of economics; key figure in development of cosmopolitan democracy, which advocates policy decisions being made by those affected, avoiding a single hierarchical form of authority, in a kind of global governance without world government; founding member of European Nuclear Disarmament and the European Council on Foreign Relations; wrote Global Civil Society: an answer to war.
- March 16, 1948 – Catherine Quéré born, French Socialist politician and wine-grower; Member of Parliament for Charente-Maritime’s 3rd constituency since 2007; Vice-president and Regional Councillor of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council (2004-2007).
- March 16, 1954 – Nancy Lamoureaux Wilson born, American musician, singer-songwriter, and film composer; best known as a member of the rock band Heart, and for her film scores for Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.
- March 16, 1956 – Yoriko Shono born as Yoriko Ishikawa, Japanese writer; noted for her short story collection, Nani mo Shitenai (Not Do Anything), winner of the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers, and her story “Ni Hyaku Kaiki” (roughly translated as “repeated regression”) which won the Mishima Yukio Prize.
- March 16, 1956 – Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf born, Swiss politician; President of Switzerland (2012); Vice President of Switzerland (2011); Minister of Finance (2010-2015); Minister of Justice and Police (2008-2010); Member of the Swiss Federal Council (2008-2015).
- March 16, 1958 – Kate Worley, American comic book writer; noted for her work on Omaha the Cat Dancer; she was also a writer and performer for the science fiction comedy show Shockwave Radio Theater. She died of cancer in 2004.
- March 16, 1960 – Jenny Éclair born, English comedian, novelist, and actress; helped develop and worked on Grumpy Old Women (2004-2007) and was a panelist on Loose Women (2011-2012); author of The Book of Bad Behaviour (non-fiction), the novels Having a Lovely Time, and Life, Death and Vanilla Slices.
- March 16, 1967 – Lauren Graham born, American actress and author; best known for her role on the television series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007); she also published a novel, Someday, Someday, Maybe in 2013, which made the NY Times bestseller list; a memoir in 2016, Talking as Fast as I Can: from Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between); and In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It, in 2018.
- March 16, 1976 – Zhu Chen born in China, Qatari Chess Grandmaster; in 2001, she became Women’s World Chess Champion, and had previously been World Junior Girls Chess Champion (1994 and 1996). Her FIDE rating as of March 2019 is 2423, and her highest rating was 2548, in 2008. In 2001, she married Qatari Grandmaster Mohammed Ahmed Al-Modiahki, became a Qatari citizen in 2006.
- March 16, 1984 – Aisling Bea born, Irish comedian, writer, and actress; co-writer of the BBC Radio 4 comedy folklore series Micks and Legends, and since 2018, she’s been the co-host on the BBC Radio 2 show, What’s Normal? Bea was a vocal supporter in 2018 of the ‘Repeal the Eighth’ campaign to make abortion legal in Ireland, and also campaigned for the 2015 Irish same-sex marriage referendum.
- March 16, 2003 – Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American woman involved with the International Solidarity Movement, was killed trying to prevent a Palestinian home from being destroyed by a bulldozer in Rafah.
- March 16, 2015 – In Malaysia, Nurul Izzah Anwar, vice president of the People’s Justice Party and lawmaker, was arrested on charges of sedition, in spite of members of parliament being immune from prosecution. Her father, Anwar Ibrahim, head of the party, was already in jail (until May, 2018). National Police Chief Khalid Abu Bakar released a statement that she had been detained to assist police in their investigation of an opposition rally and also for making “contemptuous remarks that those in the judiciary system had sold their souls to the devil.” Her family denounced the arrest as “nothing short of intimidation and an abuse of power.” Anwar’s arrest was widely seen at home and abroad as politically motivated to eliminate any threats to the ruling coalition, whose popularity has been eroding since 2008 after more than five decades of unquestioned dominance. In his statement, Deputy Asia Director of Human Rights Watch Phil Robertson said, “Prime Minister Najib needs to recognise that every sedition arrest of an opposition political leader is another step towards the destruction of rights-respecting democracy in Malaysia, and bring this campaign of abuse to an end.”
- March 16, 2020 – Candidate Joe Biden, during his debate with Bernie Sanders, announced he would name a woman as his running mate, “I’ll pick a woman to be vice-president. There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow.”
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- March 17, 1665 – Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre born into a family of master musicians instrument-makers, French harpsichord player and composer; noted for the 1687 publication of Premier livre de pièces de clavessin (First Book of Harpsichord Pieces), one of the few harpsichord collections printed in France in the 17th Century, and Céphale et Procris, based on the Greek myth of Cephalus and Procris, a married couple tricked and tormented by the Gods, until Cephalus, a hunter, accidently kills his wife, who is hiding in the forest. It is the first opera written by a Frenchwoman to be produced.
- March 17, 1820 – Jean Ingelow born, English poet, novelist, and children’s author; noted for Mopsa the Fairy and Fated to be Free: A Novel.
- March 17, 1842 – The Relief Society, a philanthropic and religious education women’s organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) was founded in Nauvoo, Illinois. Sarah Granger Kimball and her seamstress, Margaret A. Cook, decided that a Ladies’ Society was needed to sew clothing for workers constructing the Latter Day Saints' Nauvoo Temple. Kimball asked Eliza R. Snow to write a constitution and by-laws for the organization for submission to President of the Church Joseph Smith for review. He called them "the best he had ever seen" but said, "this is not what you want . . . I will organize the women . . . after a pattern of the priesthood." On March 17, twenty women formed the core of the society, and Smith ordained his first wife, Emma Hale Smith, as the society’s General President, and Sarah M. Cleveland and Elizabeth Ann Whitney as her counselors.
- March 17, 1846 – Kate Greenaway born, English author and illustrator, noted for her children’s book illustrations; she began her career by designing Christmas and Valentines’s cards. She sometimes used the pseudonym ‘Orris.’ The ‘Kate Greenaway style’ became immensely popular, both in England and internationally, and was much imitated. Liberty of London adapted the clothes in her drawings of children as designs for clothes for little girls, which were also very popular. Greenaway was elected to membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1889. She died of cancer in 1901 at the age of 55.
- March 17, 1849 – Cornelia Clapp born, notable American zoologist and marine biologist; earned the first and second PhB awarded to an American woman, at the University of Syracuse and the University of Chicago; she made a study of chick embryos and earthworms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and on toadfish at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. As an instructor, her philosophy was "Study nature, not books!" In 1904, Clapp became a professor of zoology at Mount Holyoke. Her students learned by doing and by going out of doors; she influenced generations of students, and encouraged many young women to pursue careers in science; noted for The Lateral Line System of Batrachus Tau.
- March 17, 1870 – Wellesley College is incorporated by the Massachusetts legislature under its original name, Wellesley Female Seminary.
- March 17, 1873 – Margaret Bondfield born, British Labour politician and feminist, first woman Cabinet minister in the United Kingdom, one of the first three Labour Party women to be Members of Parliament.
- March 17, 1877 – Edith New born, English suffragette; she left her teaching career shortly after 1900 to work as an organizer and campaigner for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and in January, 1908, chained herself to the railings of 10 Downing Street shouting “Votes for Women!” to help create a diversion for other protesters to sneak past the railings before being arrested. In June, 1908, she and Mary Leigh were the first two suffragettes to use vandalism as a tactic, breaking two windows at 10 Downing Street. They were arrested and sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison. Edith New staged a hunger strike while at Holloway. When New and Leigh were released from prison, a parade was held in their honor, with suffragettes pulling them in a carriage through the streets. She continued to address crowds until 1911, when she returned to teaching, in Lewisham, a small town southeast of London.
- March 17, 1896 – Helen Lynd born, sociologist, studied life in Muncie, Indiana, for 18 months (1924-25) with husband Robert, their book “Middletown” was a best-seller tracing the decline of community spirit as the town faced industrial growth. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College for almost 40 years.
- March 17, 1902 – Alice Greenough born, carried mail at age 15, joined a Wild West show, became a professional rodeo rider in 1921 and earned about $12,000 yearly, toured Australia and Spain as well as the U.S. Greenough started her own rodeo business, and was the first inductee to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.
- March 17, 1905 – Billie/Lillian Yarbo born as Lillian Yarbough, African American stage and screen comedienne, dancer, and singer. She appeared at Harlem night spots and on the Broadway stage in the 1920s, and made her screen debut in 1936, and appeared in at least 50 films, including Stella Dallas, You can’t Take It With You, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Destry Rides Again, They Drive By Night, and Saratoga Trunk, but was often uncredited, and usually cast as a maid. Her last film appearances were in 1949. She had managed her finances well, and spent most of the remainder of her life living in relative comfort in Seattle, Washington, where she died at age 91 in 1996.
- March 17, 1910 – Camp Fire Girls is established as the first interracial, non-sectarian American organization for girls, founded primarily by Luther Gulick and Charlotte Vetter Gulick, and Charlotte Alien Farnsworth.
- March 17, 1917 – Loretta Perfectus Walsh is the first woman to join the U.S. Navy, and the first woman to officially join the military other than as a nurse.
- March 17, 1921 – Dr Marie Stopes opens Britain’s first birth control clinic, in London.
- March 17, 1933 – Myrlie Evers-Williams born, American journalist and activist, Chair of the NAACP (1995-1998); fought for 30 years to bring her husband’s killer to justice, after two all-white juries failed to convict; the first woman and first layperson to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration, for President Obama’s second inaugural.
- March 17, 1933 – Penelope Lively born, British author of fiction for adults and children; winner of a Booker Prize and a Carnegie Medal.
- March 17, 1937 – Galina Samsova born in the USSR, a principal dancer for the London Festival Ballet (1964-1973); National Ballet of Canada soloist (1961-1964); soloist for the Kiev Opera Ballet; noted for her performances of Prokofiev’s Cinderella.
- March 17, 1955 – Cynthia A. McKinney born, African American politician and activist; first black woman elected to represent Georgia in the U.S. House (D-GA 1993-1997 and 2005-2007); left the Democratic Party in 2008 to join the U.S. Green Party.
- March 17, 1961 – Dana Morosini Reeve born, American actress-singer and activist for people with disabilities. She was married to Christopher Reeve from 1992 until his death in 2004. In 2005, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, even though she had never smoked. She died in March, 2006.
- March 17, 1962 – ‘Ank’ Anna Bijleveld born, Dutch civil servant and politician; Minister of Defence since 2017; King’s Commissioner (2011-2017) of Overijssel, an eastern province of the Netherlands; State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations (2007-2010); Mayor of Hof van Twente (2001-2007); Member of the Netherlands House of Representatives (2010-2011).
- March 17, 1969 – Golda Meir, whose father moved their family to Milwaukee from the Ukraine when she was 8 years old, is sworn in as the first woman and fourth premier of Israel.
- March 17, 1972 – Melissa Auf der Maur born, Canadian bass guitarist, singer-songwriter, photographer, and actress; she performed with several alternative rock bands, including The Smashing Pumpkins, and also as a solo performer, with her own independent record label, PHI-MadM Music. Her photographs appeared in National Geographic, and have been exhibited at Sotheby’s. She and her husband, filmmaker Tony Stone, are the founders and creative directors of Basilica Hudson, an arts and performance center in Hudson, New York.
- March 17, 2015 – The Presbyterian Church (USA), the largest Presbyterian denomination in the U.S., formally changed its constitution to permit same-sex weddings. More than half of the church's 171 regional presbyteries voted in favor of changing the church's definition of marriage from being a union "between a woman and a man" to "between two people, traditionally a man and a woman." The change, which took effect on June 21, could deepen differences between the 1.7-million-member church and other Presbyterian groups.
- March 17, 2020 – Legislation making abortion a crime in Idaho should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing the procedure headed to the governor’s desk after both houses of the state legislature voted to approve the measure, which includes exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, but would make it a felony to perform an abortion, and doctors could have their licenses suspended or revoked.The bill’s sponsor, Republican Senator Todd Lakey, said the health of the woman is a secondary consideration. “The health of the woman does matter,” said Democratic Representative Brooke Green, arguing against the bill. All 13 Democrats present voted against the bill and were joined by five Republicans. Maternal mortality in Idaho in 2018 was 21.2 deaths per 100,000 births, higher than the national average of 19 deaths per 100,000 births, and higher than many so-called ‘third-world’ countries.
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- March 18, 1634 – Madame de La Fayette born, French author who published La Princesse de Clèves, her most famous work anonymously, which was a very early French novel, and very possibly France’s first historical novel.
- March 18, 1827 – Janet Burnside Soga born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a family in the weaving and clothing trades who were members of the Hutchesontown Relief Church. She defied convention by marrying Tiyo Soga in 1857, a black South African studying for the ministry at the Presbyterian Church College in Edinburgh, who became the first black minister ordained to the Christian ministry. She went with him to South Africa after their marriage, and they founded a mission at Mgwali, living in poor huts while raising money to build the church. The foundation stone was laid in 1861. Between 1858 and 1870, she gave birth to five sons and three daughters, but their second son was stillborn. After the family moved to a new mission station at Tutura, her husband died in 1871. She first moved with the children to Emgali, where Tiyo’s aged mother was living, then later moved the family to Dollar, Scotland, where the children were educated at the Dollar Academy. All but one daughter returned to South Africa after completing their education. Janet Soga died in Glasgow in 1903.
- March 18, 1863 – Salisbury Bread Riot: 50 women, wives of Confederate soldiers, attack stores with axes for selling food at higher than government prices in Salisbury NC; the “Female Raid” nets the women 23 barrels of flour, and quantities of molasses and salt; as more married men go off to war, farm production drops, and women struggle to feed their families; the Confederacy having made little provision to assist the families is noted in newspaper coverage and editorials; no charges are filed against the women.
- March 18, 1870 – Agnes Sime Baxter born, Canadian mathematician; in 1891, along with her bachelor’s degree from Dalhousie University, she received the Sir William Young Medal for highest standing in mathematics and mathematical physics; and completed her master’s degree in 1892, then held a fellowship at Cornell University (1892-1894); she became the second Canadian woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
- March 18, 1875 – Margaret Foley born, labor organizer, suffragist, and social worker. An outspoken suffrage activist who loudly confronted anti-suffrage speakers. She made a solo balloon flight over Lawrence, Massachusetts, tossing suffrage literature from the basket in 1910.
- March 18, 1904 – Margaret Tucker born, Aboriginal rights activist, a founding member of the Australian Aborigines’ League, founder of the United Council of Aboriginal and Islander Women; first indigenous appointee to the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board; author of If Everybody Cared.
- March 18, 1922 – The first Bat Mitzvah in the U.S. is held for Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.
- March 18, 1927 – Lillian Vernon born as Lili Menasche in the Weimar Republic, American businesswoman and philanthropist. Her Jewish family fled from Nazi Germany in 1937. She became an American citizen in 1942, taking her new last name from Mount Vernon. At age 24, she started the Vernon Specialties Company in 1951, a mail order service, selling personalized handbags and belts. The Lillian Vernon Catalog started in 1956. When her company went public in 1987, it was the first company founded by a woman to be traded on the American Stock Exchange. In 1997, she was appointed by President Bill Clinton as chair of the White House National Business Women’s Council. Vernon sold her company in 2003. She was a strong supporter of the Democratic Party, Emily’s List, and the Women’s Campaign Fund. She has also been a major donor for many civic organizations and charities, through the Lillian Vernon Foundation, which has continued after her death in 2015.
- March 18, 1933 – Unita Z. Blackwell born, civil rights activist and politician; project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration drives; in 1965, she filed suit, Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, after the principal suspended over 300 black children, including her son, for wearing SNCC pins which showed black and white hands clasping; in the suit, she also asked the school district to desegregate their schools per Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the U.S. District Court ruled that students wearing the pins was disruptive, but the school district must desegregate, and the ruling was upheld on appeal, leading to one of the first desegregation plans in Mississippi; in 1976, she was elected mayor of Mayerville, Mississippi, and held the office until 2001, the first African American woman to be a mayor in the state of Mississippi.
- March 18, 1935 – Frances Luella Welsing born, American Afrocentrist psychiatrist; her 1970 essay, The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy) was her analysis of the origins of what she called white supremacy culture. Author of The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, in which her contention that homosexuality among African Americans was a ploy by white males to decrease the black population, her description of white people as genetically defective descendants of albino mutants, and her attribution of AIDS and crack cocaine as “chemical and biological warfare” by whites were highly controversial.
- March 18, 1938 – Because of growing national concern over the spread of syphilis, New York state begins requiring serological blood tests of pregnant women – but not the fathers.
- March 18, 1942 – Kathleen Collins born, African American playwright, civil rights activist, and pioneering director of films centered on black stories, including Losing Ground, the first feature-length drama directed by a black American woman, which won First Prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, but was unable to get large-scale exhibition in the U.S.; thanks to the efforts of her daughter, Collins’ Losing Ground was restored and re-issued in 2015, and had its first theatrical release at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
- March 18, 1947 – Deborah Lipstadt born, American historian; Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lipstadt is the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory; History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier; and The Eichmann Trial. In 1996, Holocaust denier David Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books for libel in an English court for characterizing some of his writings and public statements as Holocaust denial in her book Denying the Holocaust. English libel law places the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff. Lipstadt and Penguin won the case using the justification defence, namely by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous.
- March 18, 1950 – Linda Partridge born, British geneticist whose field is the biology and genetics of aging and age-related diseases; founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Aging; a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1996, and elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2004.
- March 18, 1964 – Isabel Noronha born, film director from Mozambique; she began her career working at the National Cinema Institute, working from a production assistant, continuity editor, and production manager, to documentary film director. In 1985, she in a group of young filmmakers who made O Tempo dos Leopardos (Time of the Leopards), considered the first feature film made in Mozambique. She was also a co-founder of Coopimagem, a cooperative of the Mozambique directors’ guild. In 1991, she made Así na Cidade (Once upon a time in the city), a documentary about child-soldier war refugees who sold newspapers in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. In 2009, Noronha won the Cineposible Film Festival Creative Woman award for her film Mãe dos Netos (Mother of the Grandchildren).
- March 18, 1970 – Queen Latifah born as Dana Owens, American rapper, singer-songwriter, actress, and producer, long considered one of hip-hops pioneering feminists, and recipient of two NAACP Image Awards.
- March 18, 1971 – Kitty Ussher born, British economist, Labour politician, and current Managing Director of Tooley Street Research since 2013. She is also an associate with several London-based think tanks.
- March 18, 1979 – American feminist Kate Millet travels in Iran with Canadian journalist Sophie Keir, under the auspices of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom, an organization Millet helped found seven years earlier, concerned for the rights of Iranian women. Under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the government had abolished coeducational schools, revoked a law allowing wives to divorce their husbands, and warned working women to return to the veil in public or lose their jobs. “I was there as a friend,” Millet explains. “There was never a question of me organizing anything. I don’t even speak Farsi.” On March 8, a small rally planned for International Women’s Day at the gates of Tehran University, unexpectedly attracts thousands of women, surging into the streets. More demonstrations follow, one filling Tehran’s Freedom Square with 20,000 women; some men tried to attack the women with knives and acid, while other men linked arms struggling to form a protective barrier. Iranian authorities arrest Millet and Keir on March 17, refusing to say what charges against them are, and holding them overnight under armed guard at the immigration center, awaiting deportation. The next day, they are put on a plane, after takeoff their passports were returned, stamped as barred from entering Iran again. This was the largest women’s uprising in Iran’s history, but it was swiftly crushed by the new regime.
- March 18, 1989 – Lilly Collins born, British-American actress and author; noted for her performances in Abduction; The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones; and Rules Don’t Apply, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy. She published her first book, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me in 2017. Collins is an outspoken advocate against bullying, and serves as an ambassador for Bystander Revolution. She is also an ambassador for the GO Campaign, a nonprofit which raises money to improve the lives of orphans and vulnerable children by partnering with local grassroots projects that provide access to shelter, food and clean water, medical care, and education.
- March 18, 2018 – Tennis champion Martina Navratilova discovered that fellow Wimbledon pundit John McEnroe was paid at least 10 times more than she was. Navratilova, Wimbledon ladies’ champion nine times, said she was paid about £15,000 by the BBC for her commentator role at Wimbledon while McEnroe earned at least £150,000. McEnroe’s pay packet was revealed in a 2017 list of the BBC’s top-paid talent. Navratilova said she was told her pay was comparable to men doing the same job, “We were not told the truth, that’s for sure. It’s still the good old boys network.” She added that her agent would be asking for more money in future.
- March 18, 2020 – New Zealand’s parliament passed a landmark bill to decriminalise abortion after decades of campaigning. The bill allows women to choose abortion up to 20 weeks after consultation with a General Practioner, and promotes counselling options for women choosing an abortion. Terry Bellamak, the director of Alranz Abortion Rights Aotearoa, celebrated the move, “Finally the New Zealand parliament has brought abortion legislation into the 21st century – it only took 44 years . . . New Zealand parliament has recognised that women have bodily autonomy – and that is huge. Being able to control one’s fertility is key to one’s life – it is hard to see how we could achieve equality without that.”
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- March 19, 1800 – Sara Miriam Peale born, American portrait painter, painted primarily politicians and military figures.
- March 19, 1844 – Minna Canth born, Finnish author, playwright and women’s rights activist; known for The Pastor’s Family and The Worker’s Wife; she has been honored in Finland on her birthday since 2007, which is also the country’s Social Equality Day.
- March 19, 1859 – Ellen Gates Starr born, American social reformer and activist for reforming child labor laws and industrial working conditions. In 1889, she co-founded Hull House with Jane Addams, starting with a kindergarten, a day nursery, an infant care center, and a center for continuing education for adults. Starr added the Butler Art Gallery, a bookbindery class, and an arts and crafts business school. She became paralyzed from the waist down in 1929 because of complications during surgery to remove a spinal abscess. Still seriously ill in 1931, she retired. She died in 1940 at age 80.
- March 19, 1879 – Nancy Astor born in America, English politician; first woman in the British House of Commons.
- March 19, 1880 – Ernestine Rose born, American librarian, named for the 19th century feminist Ernestine Polowsky Rose. During WWI, she served as director of hospital libraries for the American Library Association (ALA). She was head librarian (1915-1917) at the NY Public Library Seward Park Branch. By 1921, she was the head librarian at Harlem’s 135th Street Branch,hiring four African-American librarians, and turned the library into a community center, with free public lectures, exhibitions of Black artists and sculptors, and a reference collection of Black Literature. In 1922, she worked with Franklin Hopper, Central Branch’s chief of circulation, the National Urban League, and the American Association for Adult Education to secure a grant from the Rosenwald Fund and the Carnegie Corporation to form the Harlem Committee. The committee developed cultural programs with well-known speakers, vocational programs at the YWCA and the Urban League, and social programs within the Harlem community. In 1926, the Arthur A. Schomburg collection for the Division of Negro Literature and History was purchased, later named the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. The collection includes over 5,000 volumes and 3,000 manuscripts, showcasing African American history and culture. Schomberg was the first head of the collection. In 1933, Rose worked with the Works Progress Administration on a writers’ project for the library. Worked for the NYPL until her retirement in 1942.
- March 19, 1881 – Edith Nourse Rogers born, American politician, first woman elected to the U.S. Congress from Massachusetts. In her 35 years in the House, she was an advocate for veterans, sponsoring the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (AKA the G.I. Bill), the 1942 bill that created the Women’s Army Auxiliary (WAAC), and the 1943 bill that created the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
- March 19, 1882 – Minnie Fisher Cunningham born, first woman to get a pharmacy degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch; in 1901, she discovered that less-educated men working next to her made twice the pay she did, and “that made a suffragist out of me.” Founding member of the Women’s National Democratic Club; a gifted coalition builder and effective speaker for suffrage, she also campaigned for legislation to lower infant mortality, to recognize married women’s citizenship as separate from their husband’s, for prison reform, and for enriched flour to help improve nutrition for the poor. She was a founding member and first executive secretary of the League of Women Voters, and served on the Democratic National Committee at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt – FDR called her ‘Minnie Fish.’
- March 19, 1893 – Gertrud Dorka born, German archaeologist, prehistorian, museum director, and teacher. She studied anthropology, geography, and prehistory at the University of Berlin and the University of Kiel (1930-1936), and completed her doctorate at Kiel. She was offered a job in a museum in Kiel on the condition that she join the Nazi Party, but she refused, and worked as a teacher instead. Dorka was evacuated to Zeitz with her students at the start of WWII. She returned to Berlin after the war. In 1947, she became director of the State Museum for Prehistory and Early History. Many of Berlin’s museums were badly damaged, destroyed, or looted by the Red Army and locals. She searched the rubble for artifacts, collecting 280 boxes of them, some related to Heinrich Schliemann. Dorka led excavations throughout Berlin while the city was rebuilt. Among her discoveries was a 6th century AD grave found in 1951, which contained the bones of two young women as well as iron tools, bronze buckles, a bone comb, a glass bowl, and a gold coin. She retired in 1958, and wrote a book on archaeological discoveries. Awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1973. She died at age 82 in 1976.
- March 19, 1903 – Ruth Ella Moore born, American bacteriologist, first African-American woman to gain a PhD in a natural science; Howard University head of the Department of Bacteriology; worked on tuberculosis, immunology, and African-American blood types.
- March 19, 1906 – Clara Breed born, American librarian and activist in San Diego, California, who supported Japanese American children, many she knew from her work, while they were interned in camps during WWII. When several children came by the library to turn in their library cards before being sent to the camps and to say goodbye to her, she gave them stamped, self-addressed postcards so they could write to her and tell her what they needed. She not only sent them books, but often sent items like soap and toothpaste as well. Even though many of the children were sent to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, she visited them multiple times, and received over 250 post cards and letters from the children. She wrote letters to many members of Congress, and published articles about the unfair treatment of the children and other Japanese Americans, including “Americans with the Wrong Ancestors” for a magazine in 1943. Breed wrote letters for college-age students requesting they be allowed to attend colleges in the Midwest. She worked for the San Diego Public Library system for over 40 years. She began in 1928 as the children’s librarian at the East San Diego Branch, was named as acting city librarian in 1945, then became city librarian in 1946, and held the position for the next 25 years. She oversaw the expansion of the library system, adding several branches and was the driving force behind the opening of a new main library in 1955. She also established the Serra Cooperative Library System, which allowed patrons to borrow books through their local branch from libraries throughout San Diego and Imperial Counties. The letters and artifacts from her former pen pals are now part of the permanent collection of the Japanese American National Museum, which featured them in an exhibit called “Dear Miss Breed: Letters from Camp.”
- March 19, 1907 – Elizabeth Maconchy born, English composer of Irish heritage, best known for string quartets and symphonic works. She served as Chair of the Composers Guild of Great Britain in the 1960s, and was also President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. Maconchy was a socialist, and her activism extended to supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and other causes.
- March 19, 1909 – Marjorie MacIntyre Linklater born, Scottish campaigner for the arts and environment, especially of the Orkney Islands. She gave up acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and lobbied with actor Michael MacOwan for the establishment of the National Theatre of Scotland while producing plays for drama festivals. She and writer Eric Linklater were married from 1933 until his death in 1974, and had four children. In the 1940s, she was involved in conservation, education, and health matters as a county councillor for Ross and Cromarty County Council. Linklater helped to found a secondary school in the Gaelic-speaking fishing village of Plockton in the Scottish Highlands, so children no longer traveled long distances for their education. Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean was headmaster. In 1975, Linklater moved to Orkney. She was elected chairman of the Orkney Heritage Society in 1976, devoting herself to campaigning for the arts, local heritage, and the environment. Successfully opposed mining of uranium and dumping nuclear waste off Orkney's west coast and was a founding member of the St Magnus Festival. She died of cancer and heart failure in 1997 at age 88.
- March 19, 1930 – White women win voting rights in South Africa, after a campaign originally started by women reformers crusading against alcohol.
- March 19, 1930 – Lorraine Hansberry born, influential American playwright and civil rights activist. Best known for A Raisin in the Sun, the
first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway; it was directed by Lloyd Richards, the first black director to have a show on Broadway. Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award at the age of 29 — she was the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to win. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.
- March 19, 1931 – Emma Andijewska born, modern surrealist Ukrainian author, and painter; suffered serious illness during WWII living in Germany, then France; family moved to New York, 1957; she became an American citizen, married a Ukrainian writer, returned to Munich.
- March 19, 1932 – Elena Poniatowska born in France, Mexican author and journalist; first woman to win Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Periodismo (National Journalism Prize), and numerous other awards, including the 2006 International Women's Media Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
- March 19, 1935 – Nancy Malone born, American actress, director, and producer; made the transition from actress to successful television producer and director; was the first woman vice-president of television at 20th Century Fox (1976); board member of The Alliance of Women Directors; won an Emmy Award for producing Bob Hope: The First 90 Years (1993).
- March 19, 1941 – Nora Ephron born, American author, journalist, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for Silkwood; When Harry Met Sally; and Sleepless in Seattle.
- March 19, 1942 – Heather M. Robertson born, Canadian journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer; Reservations are for Indians, Grass Roots, and Walking into Wilderness; a founding member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Professional Writers Association of Canada; launched the Robertson v. Thomson Corp. class action suit regarding freelancers’ retention of electronic rights to their work.
- March 19, 1946 – Nederlandse Vereniging voor Seksuele Hervorming (NVSH), the Dutch Society for Sexual Reform, is founded, a birth control organization which becomes the only source of condoms in the Netherlands. It gains 220,000 members and runs over 60 birth control clinics at its height. When contraceptives become legal in the country in 1970, the society’s membership drops to only a few hundred by 2008.
- March 19, 1952 – Lillian Hellman sends her letter to the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities in which she refuses to testify against friends and associates, saying “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
- March 19, 1954 – Jill Abramson born, author, journalist, first woman to be executive editor of the New York Times (2011-2014). She and Richard Reeves collaborated on The Kennedy Years in 2013, she worked on the New York Times book Obama: The Historic Journey (2009) and co-wrote with Jane Mayer the 1995 book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.
- March 19, 2019 – The Food and Drug Administration approved the first postpartum depression drug, called brexanolone or Zulresso. It's a synthetic form of the allopregnanolone hormone, a progesterone derivative that increases during pregnancy and plummets after childbirth, possibly contributing to postpartum depression. Administered intravenously to treat the sometimes life-threatening condition, which affects about one in nine new mothers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Due to risks such as excessive sedation, or losing consciousness, Zulresso can only be administered in a certified health care facility. The infusion takes 60 hours, and during a clinical trial, most participants showed improvement within 24 hours of receiving the drug, reporting they still felt the effects 30 days later. The estimated cost, before discounts, for a course of treatment for a single patient is $34,000 USD.
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- March 20, 1612 – Anne Bradstreet born in England, American Puritan poet, the first writer in the British North American Colonies to be published; she had a better education than most women of the time, and became a well-read scholar, but met criticism for her writing (especially after her brother-in-law sent her work to be published without her knowledge) as being an unsuitable occupation for women, put down by Puritan ideology as vastly inferior to men.
- March 20, 1845 – Lucy Myers Wright Mitchell born, American author and art historian, who was one of the first women in the field of archeology, and was mostly self-taught. She spoke Syriac, Arabic, French, German, and Italian. By 1873, she had become one of the foremost archeologists of her time. Mitchell was an internationally recognized authority on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, known for her 1888 two-volume work, A History of Ancient Sculpture, one of the earliest books on the subject by an American.
- March 20, 1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is published, and becomes the best-selling novel of the 19th century.
- March 20, 1879 – Maud Menten born, Canadian physician and biochemist, one of the first Canadian women to earn a medical degree. She is known for the Michaelis-Menten equation (1913), and her contributions to histochemistry and enzyme kinetics.
- March 20, 1888 – Amanda Clement born, first woman paid to umpire a baseball game, umpired semi-professional games in the American Midwest on a regular basis for six years (1904-1910), earning $15 to $25 per game, then continued occasionally umpiring into her forties. Clement was first hired as a teenager when she came to watch her brother play, and the umpire hired for the game didn’t show up. She was an accomplished athlete in baseball, basketball, sprinting, hurdles, shot put, gymnastics and tennis. She later used the money she earned as an umpire to pay for her college education. Because of her reputation for fair calls and being unsusceptible to bribery, baseball marketers listed her by name as the umpire at the games they were touting to bring in crowds. She wrote an editorial for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1906 declaring that women made better umpires than men, in part because the men would not speak abusively to women umpires. A devout Congregationalist, she refused to umpire on Sundays, often staying at homes of clergy while umpiring on the road. After college and regular umpiring, she taught physical education at the University of Wyoming, and other schools in North and South Dakota, then managed the YWCA in La Crosse, Wisconsin. In 1929, she returned to South Dakota to take care of her ailing mother, until her mother’s death in 1934. Clement then became a social worker for 25 years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota before retiring in 1966.
- March 20, 1890 – The General Federation of Womens Clubs was founded by Jane Cunningham Croly, a leading New York journalist. It is now an international women’s organization dedicated to community improvement by enhancing the lives of others through volunteer service.
- March 20, 1894 – Amalie S. Colquhoun born, Australian landscape and portrait painter, large-scale stained glass designer; taught at the Working Men’s College in Melbourne and the Melbourne Technical College; finalist for the 1949 Archibald Prize.
- March 20, 1900 – Amelia Chopitea Villa born, Bolivia’s first woman physician and its first graduate in the field of pediatrics, becoming a surgeon, specializing in gynecology and pediatrics; represented Bolivia at the 1929 Congress of the Association internationale des femmes-médecins (Medical Women’s International Association) in Paris; her sister Ella became Bolivia’s second woman doctor.
- March 20, 1915 – ‘Sister’ Rosetta Tharpe born, American singer-songwriter, and guitarist with cross-over appeal in gospel, jazz, blues, and pop; “the original soul sister.”
- March 20, 1917 – Dame Vera Lynn born, extremely popular English singer during WWII, who gave outdoor concerts for British troops in Egypt, India and Burma. She was a supporter and fundraiser for cerebral palsy and breast cancer research, and a patron of Forces Literary Organisation Worldwide for ALL, the Dover War Memorial Project, and a project to aid refuges from Burma. She also supported a PETA campaign against pigeon racing. Vera Lynn died on June 18, 2020 at age 100.
- March 20, 1918 – Marian McPartland born in England, English-American jazz pianist, composer and founder of Halcyon Records; honored in 2004 with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award.
- March 20, 1920 – Rosemary Timperley born, British author, best known for her ghost stories.
- March 20, 1920 – Pamela Harriman born, American who devoted herself to Democratic Party politics and fund-raising after death of her husband Averell; first woman to be named U.S. Ambassador to France (1993-1997).
- March 20, 1925 – Romana Acosta Bañuelos born in Arizona, first Hispanic-American Treasurer of the United States, (1971-1974); owner of a multimillion-dollar business, Ramona’s Mexican Food Products, Inc. She also co-founded the Pan American National Bank in East Los Angeles.
- March 20, 1935 – Bettye Washington Greene born, first African American woman chemist to work as a professional at the Dow Chemical Company, researching latex and polymers; there are several patents under her name related to advances in latex and polymers.
- March 20, 1937 – Lois Lowry born, American author of over 30 children’s books; 1990 Newbery Medal for Number the Stars and the 1994 Newbery Medal for The Giver.
- March 20, 1940 – Mary Ellen Mark born, American photographer and photojournalist; noted for her published collections, Streetwise and Ward 81; honored with the World Photography Organisation’s Outstanding Contribution Photography Award.
- March 20, 1954 – Liana Kanelli born, Greek journalist, columnist, TV news anchor and Communist Party politician; Greek Parliament Member for Athens since 2000.
- March 20, 1955 – Nina Kiriki Hoffman born, American science fiction and fantasy-horror author; The Thread That Binds the Bones won the 1993 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel; her short story “Trophy Wives” won the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.
- March 20, 1956 – Catherine M. Ashton born, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, British Labour politician; First Vice President of the European Commission (2010-2014); inaugural High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (2009-2014); European Commissioner for Trade (2008-2009); Leader of the House of Lords/Lord President of the Council (2007-2008).
- March 20, 1959 – Mary Roach born, American non-fiction and popular science author of such titles as Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
- March 20, 1961 – Ingrid Arndt-Brauer born, German Social Democratic Party politician; member of the Bundestag since 1999, noted for working on the gender equality and municipal policy committees; member of the Kreistag, district parliament of Steinfurt (1994-1997).
- March 20, 1961 – Sara Wheeler born, British travel author and biographer; noted for accounts of the polar regions; first woman writer-in residence for the U.S. National Science Foundation at the South Pole; Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica is her account of spending 7 months in Antarctica; wrote a biography of polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Gerrard, member of the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition; elected as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (1999).
- March 20, 1969 – Yvette Cooper born, British Labour politician and economist; Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee since 2016; Secretary of State for Work and Pensions 2009-2010; Chief Secretary to the Treasury (2008-2009); Minister of State for Housing and Planning (2005-2008); Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Regeneration and Regional Development (2003-2005); Parliamentary Secretary to the Lord Chancellor’s Department (2002-2003); Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health (1999-2002); Member of Parliament for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford since 1997.
- March 20, 1985 – Libby Riddles wins the 1,135-mile Anchorage-to-Nome dog race, the first woman to win the Iditarod.
- March 20, 1991 – U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, Inc. that employers cannot exclude women from jobs where exposure to toxic chemicals could potentially damage a fetus.
- March 20, 2018 – A Manhattan judge ruled that President Trump must face a defamation lawsuit filed by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump's old reality TV show, The Apprentice. Zervos is suing Trump for calling her allegation that he groped her in 2007 "fiction," and saying she had fabricated the account for "personal gain." Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz had called for throwing out the case, or delaying it until Trump leaves the White House, arguing that presidents are shielded from civil cases in state courts. "Thomas Jefferson made clear that the president's responsibilities are 24/7," he said. Justice Jennifer Schecter disagreed. "No one is above the law," she wrote in a 19-page decision.
- March 20, 2020 – In India, four men were hanged, the nation’s first execution in five years. The men were convicted in 2013 of the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in Delhi, who clung to life for two weeks before succumbing to her injuries. Their executions had been repeatedly postponed due to appeals to India’s Supreme Court. Hundreds gathered outside Tihar prison shouting “death to rapists.” Prevented from using her real name, the Indian press christened the young woman Nirbhaya, meaning fearless. Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother, had campaigned fiercely for her daughter’s murderers to be hanged. She told the press that “today is dedicated to daughters of the country.”
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- March 21, 1474 – Angela Merici born, Italian founder of the secular Company of Saint Ursula (‘Angelines’) in 1535, consecrated Catholic women dedicated to the education of girls and care of the sick and needy; canonized as a Roman Catholic saint in 1807.
- March 21, 1557 – Anne Dacre Howard born, Countess of Arundel, poet; in 1582, converts to Roman Catholicism, placed under house arrest on Queen Elizabeth I’s orders; after her release in 1584, influences her husband, Philip Howard, to also convert; he tries to escape to France, but is caught and held prisoner in the Tower of London; Anne is forbidden to live in London; Philip dies in the Tower in 1595; Anne, unable to claim his possessions because of Philip’s imprisonment, resorts to selling her land to pay debts and support her children.
- March 21, 1752 – Mary Dixon Kies born, American inventor, who receives one of the first patents given to a woman in May, 1809, for a new technique of weaving straw with silk and thread to make hats, which is signed by President James Madison.
- March 21, 1831 – Dorothea Beale born, English suffragist, educational reformer, and author. After graduating from the newly opened Queen’s College, in 1849, she was appointed as mathematics tutor at the college. In 1854, she was head teacher in the prep school attached to the college for girls aged 4-11. In 1857, she became head of the Clergy Daughters' School, but her insistence on reforms led to her resignation a year later. Beale then taught mathematics and Latin at Miss Elwalls School, and compiled her Students' Text-Book of English and General History from B.C. 100 to the Present Time. In 1858, she became principal of Ladies’ College, Cheltenham. Beale spent the rest of her educational career at Cheltenham, which only had 69 pupils and just £400 of its original capital keft when she took over. By 1873, it moved to buildings of its own, and three years later the school had 310 pupils. In 1880, the pupil count had reached 500, and the college was incorporated as an independent company. In 1912, the school had expanded to house 1,000 pupils and 120 teachers, 14 boarding houses, a secondary and a kindergarten teachers' training department, a library of over 7,000 volumes, and 15 acres of playing-fields. She founded The Cheltenham Ladies' College Magazine, and remained its editor until her death. She campaigned for better teacher training, resulting in establishment of St. Hilda’s, England’s first residential teachers’ training college in 1885. She was vice-president of the Kensington Society, an early women’s rights discussion group, which organized the first campaigns for woman suffrage, higher education, and women’s property rights. Beale continued working, in spite of increasing deafness, and signs of cancer, until her death in 1906 at age 75.
- March 21, 1857 – Alice Henry born, Australian suffragist, journalist, and trade unionist; after she emigrated to the U.S., she became a leader in the American Women's Trade Union League.
- March 21, 1866 – Antonia Maury born, American astronomer, one of the “Harvard computers,” a group of skilled women workers who processed astronomical data; Maury developed a catalog of stellar spectra, and published a spectroscopic analysis of the binary star Beta Lyrae (1933). She was unappreciated by the Harvard observatory director, Edward C. Pickering, but her work was important in Ejnar Hertzsprung's verification of the distinction between dwarf stars and giant stars, as now seen in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. After Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary star, Mizar, Maury was the first to measure its period, 104 days. In 1889, she identified the second such star, Beta Aurigae, with a period of about 4 days. Maury was the daughter of John William Draper, a pioneer in using photography in astronomy.
- March 21, 1868 – The Sorosis Club for Professional Women is formed in New York City by Jane Cunningham Crolyn, who joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1855, and was one of the first women to write a syndicated column, after she was not allowed to join the male-only New York Press Club. The new organization was open to professional and wealthy women, not to women who were wage-earners.
- March 21, 1887 – Clarice Beckett born, Australian tonalist painter; she faced considerable prejudice from conservative male artists and critics. Beginning in 1919, she could only paint outdoors during the dawn and dusk because she was taking care of her ailing parents. Beckett died at age 48 from pneumonia, after painting the wild sea off Beaumaris, near Melbourne, during a very big storm in 1935.
- March 21, 1897 – Martha Foley born, creates Story magazine in 1932 with her husband Whit Burnett; also edits annual, “The Best American Short Stories” (1941-1977), which includes entries by Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and other well-known writers.
- March 21, 1904 – Jehane Benoît born, French Canadian culinary author, commentator, journalist, and broadcaster. After studying at the Sorbonne and the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, she started her own cooking school, Fumet de la Vieille France, in Montreal. She also opened one of Canada’s first vegetarian restaurants “The Salad Bar” in 1935. Author of over 30 cookbooks, including the Encyclopedia of Canadian Cuisine, and appeared regularly on Canadian’s television’s newsmagazine series, Take 30.
- March 21, 1905 – Phyllis McGinley born, American poet and author; recipient of 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
- March 21, 1923 – Nizar Qabbani born, Syrian poet, diplomat, and women’s rights advocate, serving in Syrian missions in Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, Madrid, and London, and as UAR Vice-Secretary at their Chinese embassy; his sister’s suicide under pressure when she refused to marry a man she did not love made a profound impression on Qabbani, who was 15 years old at the time.
- March 21, 1923 – Nirmala Srivastava born, Indian founder of Sahaja Yoga, a self-awareness meditation movement, and activist for Indian Independence, who was jailed in 1942 during the Quit India Movement.
- March 21, 1937 – Ann Clwyd born, Welsh Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for the Cynon Valley since 1984; advocate for human rights and international women’s rights; member of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service (1976-1979); helped pass the Female Genital Mutilation Bill in 1985, which bans Female Circumcision in the UK and prohibits parents sending/taking their daughters abroad for the procedure.
- March 21, 1942 – Amina Claudine Myers, American jazz pianist, singer-songwriter, composer, and arranger.
- March 21, 1943 – Cornelia Fort born, pilot in the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron; in 1943, she became the first American woman pilot to die while on active duty.
- March 21, 1962 – Kathy Greenwood born, Canadian comedian and scriptwriter; performer and writer in the Toronto branch of Second City (1988-1992); was a regular cast member of the Canadian television drama Wind at My Back (1996-2001); member of the sketch comedy quintet, Women Fully Clothed.
- March 21, 1962 – Rosie O’Donnell born, American comedian, author, TV producer, and LBGTQ rights activist; host of The Rosie O’Donnell Show (1996-2002), which won five Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show.
- March 21, 1966 – Moa Matthis born, Swedish author and literary critic; she writes historical books, and articles for the Stockholm daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (The Day’s News), from a feminist point of view.
- March 21, 1973 – Ananda Lewis born, African American television host and social activist; host of the talk show The Ananda Lewis Show in 2001, which unfortunately never recovered from debuting the day before 9-11; worked on The Insider 2004-2005; she left show business, in part because of a series of problems with stalkers, and is now a carpenter and home renovator; she’s volunteered as a mentor for Youth at Risk, and as a spokesperson for the Humane Society and Reading is Fundamental.
- March 21, 1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win the World Figure Skating Championships, and the first black athlete to win a medal in the Winter Olympics (1988); she later became an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip and knee replacement, but lost of most of her savings in two divorces and the financial failure of her medical practice in the dying coal-mining town of Richlands, Virginia, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She sold her Olympic Bronze Medal to help pay some of her debts, but was reported as of February 2018 to still be living precariously.
- March 21, 2019 – The Trump administration denied visas to dozens of women scheduled to attend a United Nations women’s conference. Campaigners say at least 41 women were denied entry to the U.S. to attend the annual Commission on the Status of Women — most of them from nations blacklisted under Trump’s travel ban. The move was an apparent violation of a 70-year-old treaty which obligates the U.S. to allow entry to people attending the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Some women were asked to provide supporting documents like marriage certificates, proof of property ownership and employment status, proof of finances, and birth certificates or proof showing that they have children.
- March 21, 2020 – Lucy Clarke revealed the online abuse she was subjected to after appearing with her team on the British quiz programme University Challenge. In addition to negative comments about her appearance – “What a mess, did she get dressed in the dark?” – one man, who identified himself as a “granddad of six, married to my lovely teacher wife” tweeted, “. . . I’ll guess Clarke sucks like a f*cking Dyson.” She went on: “One tweeted me to tell me how ‘ugly’ I was; another told me that with my teeth I should never laugh again. She noted that “Women are grossly under-represented on University Challenge: of 28 teams this year, only five were equally gender-balanced, and no team had more than two women. This is no fault of the production team, but down to selection within institutions. After my experience with the social media circus, though, I think there’s another big reason: women don’t apply because being on the show is horrible. Female contestants walk an impossible tightrope. Answer more than a couple of questions, and you are arrogant. In 2009, contestant Gail Trimble was ‘smug’ and ‘cocky’ because she answered more questions correctly than anyone on the show, ever. Quieter female contestants are ‘useless.’ After her team won an episode, a man tweeted that she “ought to be launched into the sun”, and “did nothing in the contest, Cashman [her teammate] smashed it.” Lucy Clarke had been the match’s highest scorer.
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Sources
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