WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from January 1 through 8.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, January 15, 2022.
(January 8 is my birthday — I’m taking the day off!)
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.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- January 1, 417 – Galla Placidia, daughter of Roman emperor Theodosius I, and widowed queen consort of King Atault of the Visgoths, is forced by her brother Honorius, the Western Roman Emperor, into marriage with his favorite general Constantius, who became Constantius III for seven months before dying in 421. Galla Placidia was regent of the Western Roman Empire (421-437) for her son Valentinian III, during a difficult period of treachery and shifting alliances.
- January 1, 1752 – Betsy Ross born, American seamstress, U.S. flag maker; during the American Revolution, she made flags for the state of Pennsylvania and its fleet of naval vessels. While there is no proof that she designed and made the first American flag, there are records that she made an ensign for Pennsylvania’s navy that was blue with seven red stripes and six white stripes in its upper-left corner.
- January 1, 1768 – Maria Edgeworth born, Anglo-Irish author who wrote Castle Rackrent, often cited as the first historical novel; advocate for equal education for girls and boys, and for a woman only marrying one who suits her “character, temper, and understanding.”
- January 1, 1769 – Marie-Louise Lachapelle born, French midwife and head of obstetrics at Paris’ oldest hospital, the Hôtel Dieu; author of textbooks on women’s bodies, gynecology, and obstetrics, including Pratique des accouchements, long a standard obstetric text, which promoted natural deliveries; she was opposed to the use of forceps; often called the “Mother of Modern Obstetrics.”
- January 1, 1769 – Jane Marcet born, innovative, successful English author of an introductory book series “Conversations on” chemistry and botany, and also on political economy, popularizing the ideas of Adam Smith, Malthus, and David Ricardo.
- January 1, 1839 – ‘Ouida’ born Maria Ramé; English novelist, dog rescuer, anti-vivisectionist, and opponent of the fur trade and hunting; author of over 40 novels, she is best known for Under Two Flags, and A Dog of Flanders.
- January 1, 1847 – The first Mercy Hospital, founded by Mother Frances Warde and six other sisters of the Sisters of Mercy, opens its doors in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was open to all regardless of race, nationality, age, gender, or religion. Mercy established the region's first teaching hospital with resident physicians in training in 1848, and is now affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
- January 1, 1867 – Mary Acworth Evershed born, British astronomer and Dante scholar; author, under the pen name M.A. Orr (Orr was her maiden name), of Dante and the Early Astronomers (1914), a lunar craters index, and several star guides, including her book, An Easy Guide to the Southern Stars. In 1895, she joined the British Astronomical Association. In 1896, on an expedition to view a total solar eclipse in Norway, she met John Evershed, who worked as an industrial chemist, but was greatly interested in solar physics. They married in 1906, and John was offered a post as assistant astronomer at Kodaikanal Observatory in India. Mary and John moved to Kodaikanal in 1907. He became the director of the observatory (1911-1923). She and her husband traveled to view solar eclipses, in Norway, Algiers, Western Australia, and Greece. They returned to England in 1923, and set up a private observatory at Ewhurst, Surrey. Mary directed the Historical Section of the British Astronomical Association (1930-1944).
- January 1, 1897 – Yvonne Rudellat born, Frenchwoman recruited by the UK’s Special Operation Executive, the first SOE-trained woman sent into France as a courier in August, 1942. She traveled in the Loire river valley delivering messages, and participated as a demolition trainee in sabotage operations against facilities important to the Germans. She suffered a serious head injury when she was captured by the Germans in June 1943, and either suffered a real memory loss or feigned one, so she never revealed any secrets. She died of typhus in Bergen-Belson concentration camp in 1945, just a few days before the camp was liberated by the allies.
- January 1, 1903 – Minnie Geddings Cox, an African-American college graduate, tenders her resignation as postmistress of Indianola, Mississippi, after the white supremacist campaign against her escalates to threats of violence, and both the sheriff and the mayor refuse to do anything to protect her. President Theodore Roosevelt refused to accept her resignation, instead closing the Indianola post office, indicating that it would not reopen until Cox could safely resume her duties. The president also ordered the U.S. Attorney General to prosecute those Indianola citizens who had threatened violence against Cox. On January 5, 1903, Cox and her husband left town over concerns for her safety. The situation became a headline news story, sparking a national debate about "race, states' rights, and federal power," and it was debated for four hours in the U.S. Senate. When her term expired in 1904, the Indianola post office reopened with a different postmaster. Cox and her husband later returned to Indianola, where they opened the Delta Penny Savings Bank, one of the earliest black-owned banks in the state. They also founded one of the first black-owned insurance companies in the U.S. to offer whole life insurance, the Mississippi Life Insurance Company.
- January 1, 1909 – Peggy Dennis born, Communist activist, writer for The Daily Worker and The People's World, author of "The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life."
- January 1, 1911 – Audrey Wurdemann born, American poet; at age 24, she became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1935, for her collection, Bright Ambush.
- January 1, 1914 – Noor Inayat Khan born in Russia to Indian Muslim parents, British WWII heroine who served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the first woman wireless operator sent by the British into occupied France to aid the French Resistance – wireless operator was one of the most dangerous jobs –if stopped and searched, the transmitter would be absolutely damning. In 1943, an operator’s life expectancy was six weeks. Khan arrived in June, 1943, and lasted until she was betrayed by a double agent in mid-October and arrested; she stood up to the interrogation, but her notebooks were discovered, and the Germans were able to send false messages using her codes; London initially ignored a message sent by a local SOE-recruited agent to her fiancé in London that Khan had been captured, costing several other agent’s lives; Khan was caught in an escape attempt, but she never broke down during repeated interrogation, and was later transferred to Dachau, where she was executed; posthumously awarded the George Cross, Britain’s highest award for bravery not in the face of the enemy.
- January 1, 1919 – Carole Landis born Frances Ridste, American film and stage actress and singer, whose first major role was in 1940’s One Million B.C., but mostly played second leads, often in musicals. During WWII, she did USO tours in England and North Africa with Martha Raye, Kay Francis, and Mitzi Mayfair. She then toured in the South Pacific with Jack Benny, and made a point of visiting wounded men in camp hospitals. In all, she traveled over 100,000 miles during the war entertaining the troops and visiting the wounded. In 1945, she starred on Broadway in the musical A Lady Says Yes. Landis wrote several newspaper and magazine articles about her experiences during the war, which became her 1944 book Four Jills in a Jeep, and was later made into the movie costarring Landis, Francis, Raye, and Mayfair.
- January 1, 1921 – Jeanne Chall born, psychologist, literacy expert, founder- director of Harvard Reading Laboratory (1967-1991), which is now named after her; she stressed the importance of phonics in beginning reading, worked with Sesame Street on teaching the ABCs, and wrote Stages of Reading Development (1983).
- January 1, 1939 – Senfronia Thompson born, American Democratic politician and attorney; member of the Texas House of Representatives since 1973; she has served longer than any other woman or African-American in the Texas state legislature. She has been a passionate advocate for ending human trafficking; in favor of equal pay, of protections from hate crimes, domestic violence, and sex discrimination; expanding women’s healthcare insurance coverage; and protecting reproductive choice.
- January 1, 1944 – Teresa Torańska born, Polish journalist and author; contributor to Poland’s second-largest daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza; noted for her monograph, Oni (Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets), which could not be published in Poland, and included interviews conducted from 1981 to 1984 about the events in Poland during 1944-1956.
- January 1, 1949 – Olivia Goldsmith born, American author; best known for her novel The First Wives Club, which was made into the 1996 hit movie of the same name.
- January 1, 1951 – Martha P. Haynes born, American astronomer specializing in radio astronomy and extragalactic astronomy; co-winner of the 1989 Henry Draper Medal.
- January 1, 1951 – Radia Perlman born, American software designer and network engineer; inventor of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), fundamental to network bridges operation; inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016.
- January 1, 1954 – Midori Snyder born, author of adult and young adult fantasy, and non-fiction books on myth and folklore; winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for The Innamorati.
- January 1, 1955 – Mary Beard born, British scholar and classicist; Professor of Classics at Cambridge; specialist in life in Ancient Rome; author of Rome in the Late Republic.
- January 1, 1956 – Christine Lagarde born, noted French anti-trust and labor lawyer; President of the European Central Bank since 2019; Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (2011-2019); French Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry (2007-2011).
- January 1, 1966 – Anna Burke born, Australian Labor politician; Member of the General, Freedom of Information, and Veterans’ Appeals Divisions of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal since 2017; Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives (2012-2013); Deputy Speaker of the House (2011-2012); Member of the Australian Parliament for Chisholm (1998-2016). In the 2019 Australia Day Honours, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to the Parliament of Australia, particularly as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and to the community.”
- January 1, 1979 – Vidya Balan born, Indian actress in Hindi cinema, winner of the Indian National Film Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Dirty Picture (2011). She is a member of the Indian Central Board of Film Certification and also hosts a radio show. Balan is a promoter of the empowerment of women, and also supports several humanitarian causes.
- January 1, 2015 – Feminist Felines is published, a book by artist Tasha Bock, a simple story with full-color illustrations and pawsitive messages from Mischief and Tinker.
- January 1, 2020 – As Samira Ahmed’s landmark equal pay case against the BBC made public embarrassing details about the corporation’s inner workings, the BBC began approaching women who are bringing equal pay cases against it, trying to head off more public exposure. During Ahmed’s landmark case, she argued she was owed almost £700,000 in back pay because of the difference in pay between her £440-an-episode pay for the BBC’s Newswatch and the £3,000 an episode which Jeremy Vine received for Points of View. Both are short television programmes of similar length that deal with viewer feedback about BBC output. Ahmed claimed the pay difference was an example of gender discrimination. She was supported by other BBC women presenters. The BBC insisted Newswatch was a journalistic programme that attracts a lower fee and requires a different type of presenter to Points of View, which is an entertainment programme. The lawyer for the BBC said the higher salary was justified because the show required a host such as Vine with a lighthearted “cheeky” manner who would “often dress up”, citing occasions when he wore a hat. To make matters worse, an unredacted document featuring the names of more than 100 BBC female employees who were supposedly bringing equal pay cases against the corporation was included in the documents made available to journalists reporting on the case, and embarrassing details about the BBC’s pay negotiations with Vine’s agent, in which he ended up with a deal worth about £1m a year, while Ahmed claimed she had been told by a senior executive the BBC “doesn’t do equal pay” – something the corporation strongly denied. On January 10, 2020, Ahmed won her case, in a unanimous judgment. She thanked the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), her legal team and "everyone - all the men and women who've supported me and the issue of equal pay." She added: "I'm now looking forward to continuing to do my job, to report on stories and not being one."
- January 1, 2021 – In January 2020, women briefly held more jobs – 50.3% of U.S. jobs – than U.S. men for only the second time – the only previous period of higher employment for women was in late 2009. By New Years’ Day, 2021, women had lost a million more jobs than men – 5.4 million jobs – since the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. Women are disproportionately represented in the sectors of preschool/elementary education, hospitality, and retail, all fields that have been hammered by the pandemic. Women of color were hit hardest: the rate of unemployment among Latinas is 9.1%; for Black women, it’s 8.4%; for White women, it’s 5.7%. The overall unemployment rate for U.S. males was 6.7% – for White men, it was 4.0%.
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- January 2, 1836 – Queen Emma of Hawaiʻi born; when her husband King Kamehameha IV died just a year after their only child was born in 1863, it triggered a royal election. Queen Emma lost to Kalakaua, whose extravagant expenditures and plans for a Polynesian confederation played into the hands of annexationists who were already working towards a U.S. takeover of Hawaiʻi. Two years after his death in 1891, his sister, Queen Liliuokalani, was forced to abdicate, and the United States formally annexed Hawaii in 1898.
- January 2, 1857 – M. Carey Thomas born, American Educator, suffragist, linguist, and white supremacist; second president of the women’s college Bryn Mawr (1894-1922). She graduated from Cornell University in 1877, and did graduate work in Greek at Johns Hopkins University, but left when she was not permitted to attend classes, then studied briefly at the University of Leipzig, which didn’t grant degrees to women. She finally earned a PhD in linguistics, summa cum laude, at the University of Zurich in 1882, where she was the first woman and first foreigner to earn such a doctorate. She then attended lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to the U.S. In 1884, she became dean of the college and chair of English at Bryn Mawr. By 1885, she and several others had founded the Bryn Mawr School, a prep school in Baltimore, Maryland, in order to develop a cadre of young white women who could meet the very high entrance standards of Bryn Mawr College. When James Rhoads, the first President of Bryn Mawr, died in 1894, Thomas was narrowly elected to succeed him. She remained president until 1922, and during her tenure the entrance exams became as difficult as Harvard’s, and no pupil could gain admission by certificate. In 1908, she became the first president of the National College Women’s Equal Suffrage League. Thomas was also one of the early promoters of an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, her espousal of white superiority led her to actively work to bar Jewish and black women from Bryn Mawr, either as students or faculty members. Because of her outspoken racism, in recent years there have been demands that Bryn Mawr buildings named in her honor be renamed.
- January 2, 1886 – Florence Lawrence born, daughter of Canadian inventor Charlotte Bridgwood; she became the “Biograph Girl,” the first actress in silent films to become a star without being famous before making movies. Like her mother, Lawrence was inventive, credited with designing the first “auto signaling arm,” a predecessor to the modern turn signal, along with the first mechanical brake signal. Unfortunately, she did not patent these inventions, so she received no credit or money for either one.
- January 2, 1890 – Alice Sanger becomes the first woman White House staffer, serving in the Harrison administration; she operated a White House typewriter, on which she typed the first known type-written Presidential letter, a thank you signed by President Benjamin Harrison.
- January 2, 1895 – Edith Banfield Jackson born, pediatrician and psychoanalyst, joint appointment in Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Yale Medical School while also Grace-New Haven Community Hospital head of maternity and newborn services; advocated natural childbirth and breast-feeding, established Grace-New Haven's rooming-in unit where child stayed with mother and both parents learned to care for newborn. Later worked on issues of single mothers, and prevention and treatment of child abuse.
- January 2, 1898 – Sadie Mossell Alexander born, first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Economics in the U.S.. She was also the first woman to earn a law degree from University of Pennsylvania Law School, and first the black woman to practice law in Pennsylvania. She served on President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, and President Kennedy’s Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
- January 2, 1900 – Una Ledingham born, British physician noted for her pioneering studies of diabetes during pregnancy; elected as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1942.
- January 2, 1913 – Juanita Jackson Mitchell born, American lawyer and civil rights activist. She was the first African-American woman to practice law in Maryland, and served as president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. Mitchell campaigned for Maryland to be the first southern state to integrate schools, restaurants, parks, and public swimming pools, and spearheaded highly successful voter registration drives. She was the founder of the NAACP Youth Movement. Mitchell was named by President Kennedy to the White House Conference on “Women and Civil Rights.”
- January 2, 1919 – Beatrice Hicks born, American engineer. She was the first woman to be hired as an engineer by Western Electric, in 1942, and designed telephone equipment that was later used for the first long distance phone system. In 1950, she became a co-founder and the first president of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Noted for developing a gas density switch used in NASA space missions, including the Apollo moon landings, which monitored the density of a sealed environment and signaled when the density changed, warning astronauts if there was a leak in the ship. Hicks created several other environmental sensors that were used on space missions and also aboard aircraft.
- January 2, 1923 – Rachel Waterhouse born, English historian, consumer affairs activist and author; chair of the Consumers’ Association, and a founding member of the Victorian Society.
- January 2, 1928 – Kate Molale born, South African political activist; member of the African National Congress. She helped mobilize resistance to the forced eviction of black Sophiatown residents, and to the 1953 Bantu Education Act, a segregation law legalizing racially segregated education, denying non-white students access to education which would enable them to become more than unskilled laborers – at the time, 25% to 50% of non-white schools had no electricity, plumbing or any running water, and only a third of the black teachers were qualified.
- January 2, 1938 – Dana L. Ulery born, American computer scientist, a pioneer in scientific computing applications. She was the first woman engineer to work at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where she designed and developed algorithms to model NASA’s Deep Space Network capabilities and automating real-time tracking systems for the Ranger and Mariner space missions. She became the Chief Scientist of the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), one of the first women managers at ARL. In the 1990s, she served as Pan American Delegate to the United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Trade (UN/EDIFACT). She was Chair of the UN/EDIFACT Multimedia Objects Working Group and Chair of the UN/EDIFACT Product Data Working Group, leading early international development of standards for electronic commerce. In 2002, she was awarded the Army Knowledge Award for Best Transformation Initiative.
- January 2, 1938 – Lynn A. Conway born, American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, and transgender activist; a pioneer in generalized dynamic instruction handling, now used by most computers to improve performance, and the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design recruited by IBM in 1964 for a team working on advanced supercomputer design, Conway was fired by IBM in 1968 when she revealed her intention to transition to a female gender role.
- January 2, 1943 – Janet Akyüz Mattei born in Turkey, American astronomer; director of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO – 1973-2004), collecting amateur astronomers’ observations of variable stars and coordinating them in a program with professional astronomers; the resulting database made available to educators to encourage student science projects. Among her many accolades, she was awarded the 1987 Centennial Medal of the Société Astronomique de France; the 1993 George Van Biesbroeck Prize from American Astronomical Society; in 1995, she was honored with the first Giovanni Battista Lacchini Award for collaboration with amateur astronomers by the Unione Astrofili Italiani; and she also won the 1995 Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
- January 2, 1948 – Joyce Wadler born, American journalist and humorist; reporter and feature writer, first for the New York Post, and then the New York Times; noted for her column I Was Misinformed, and her memoir about breast cancer, My Breast: One Woman’s Cancer Story, which was made into an award-winning television movie.
- January 2, 1949 – Iris Marion Young born, American political theorist and feminist social theorist; Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, affiliated with its Center for Gender Studies and Human Rights program; author of Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), where she put forward her model of the Five Faces of Oppression: Exploitation, Marginalization, Powerlessness, Cultural Domination, and Violence; in her essay, Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality, she discusses the socialization of girls to restrict their body movement and think of their bodies as fragile, and the resulting lessening of their confidence in accomplishing tasks as adults.
- January 2, 1954 – Évelyne Trouillot born, Haitian author and academic who writes in French and Creole; noted for Rosalie l’infâme (The Infamous Rosalie), about the years before the Haitian Revolution, which won the 2003 Prix la romancière francophone, awarded by the Soroptimist Club of Grenoble.
- January 2, 1956 – Lynda Barry born, American cartoonist and graphic novelist; known for her comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, and her 1988 novel, The Good Times are Killing Me.
- January 2, 1958 – Helen C. Goodman born, British Labour politician, MP for Bishop Auckland since 2005; she was the director of the Commission on the Future for MultiEthnic Britain (1997-2005), and served as the Head of Strategy at the Children’s Society (1998-2002), lobbying for policies to cut childhood poverty.
- January 2, 1961 – Gabrielle Carteris born, American television and voiceover actress, talk show host, and union leader; president of the SAG-AFTRA union (2016-2021).
- January 2, 1991 – Sharon Pratt Dixon is sworn in as mayor (1991-1995) of Washington DC, the first African-American woman elected as mayor a city of over 600,000.
- January 2, 2012 – In Afghanistan, Shar Gul, a 15-year-old child bride is now in the hospital. She had attempted to escape four months ago when her new husband and his family tried to force her into prostitution. "She ran away to her neighbour's house and told them that her husband Gulam Sakhi was trying to make her become a prostitute," said local community leader Ziaulhaq. When the police arrived, Sahar's mother-in-law tried to fight them off, screaming that her son had "bought" the girl who therefore had to do what she was told. She appeared to be alluding to the dowry paid by Sakhi's family, a sum thought to be around £2,700. Locals say the family simply promised to stop hurting her. Ziaulhaq also alleged that bribes were paid to government officials to hush up the affair. The abuse resumed and continued for months until a male relative visited. When he found the girl, who had been brutally beaten, burned, and starved in a locked basement for weeks, Gul was almost unable to speak. Her husband is now on the run, and his mother and sister are under arrest. The law on the elimination of violence against women was passed more than two years ago and criminalised many abuses for the first time, including domestic violence and child marriage. A UN report (prior to the 2021 Taliban takeover) found that only a small percentage of reported crimes against women were pursued by the Afghan government. Between March 2010 and March 2011, prosecutors opened 594 investigations involving crimes under the law – just 26% of the incidents registered by the Afghan human rights commission.
- January 2, 2019 – Sahra Wagenknecht, founder and leader of Aufstehen (Get Up) wanted to unite Germany’s left wing, then take to the streets in peaceful protests. She cited growing inequality in Germany and frustration over the government’s failure to adequately tackle it as a powerful motivating force for the protest movement. Aufstehen had signed-up almost 170,000 members since its founding in September. Wagenknecht said she admired Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting Momentum in the UK and that she was effectively modelling the movement on them. “We have big plans for next year, not least because we recognise when people go on to the streets to protest – especially those who have not had a political voice for many years who rediscover their voice by protesting – then political change can happen,” Wagenknecht said, speaking to the foreign press association in Berlin. Aufstehen is however not a political party, and did not field candidates in the 2021 German federal election.
- January 2, 2021 – Sylvia Poggioli of NPR interviewed Linda Falcome, director of Advancing Women Artists (AWA), and other AWA staff members. AWA was founded in 2009 by American philanthropist Jane Fortune, to discover and restore works of the forgotten women artists of the Italian Renaissance. AWA was responsible for restoring Artemisia Gentileschi’s “David and Bathsheba,” and a 21-foot long canvas by Dominican nun Plautilla Nelli – the only known depiction of “The Last Supper” painted by a woman. Currently, art restorer Elizabeth Wicks is working on restoring two large works by Violante Ferroni, a little-known child prodigy of the 18th century, a time when well-educated women in Florence had somewhat more freedom and influence. Ferroni’s paintings were a commission by the city’s San Giovanni di Dio hospital to show spiritual scenes to uplift the sick, a commission that would normally have gone to a man. Wicks found restoring the paintings during the coronavirus pandemic was especially meaningful: “… I was healing the art, but I was also healing myself in a certain sense.”
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- January 3, 1733 – Josina Anna Petronella van Aerssen born, Dutch composer; lady-in-waiting to Anne, Princess of Orange. Several of her compositions were published in 1780.
- January 3, 1793 – Lucretia Mott born, abolitionist, women’s rights pioneer, Quaker minister, pacifist, and social reformer. At Nine Partners, a New York Quaker boarding school, she heard of the horrors of slavery from visiting Quaker abolitionists, and learned that women and men were not treated equally, even among Quakers, when she discovered women teachers at the school earned less than the men. She was a delegate from the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where she first met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose husband was a delegate from New York. Mott and Stanton were indignant that women were limited to observing rather than participating in the convention simply because of their gender. That indignation sparked the idea of holding a woman’s rights convention, which came to fruition in 1848 when the first Woman's Rights Convention was held at Seneca Falls. Mott was one of the authors of the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments; both her “Sermon to the Medical Students” and “Discourse on Woman” pamphlet were published and widely read; after she spoke to a large crowd in Washington DC which included 30 Congressmen in 1843, she had a personal audience with U.S. President John Tyler, who told her, “I would like to hand Mr. Calhoun over to you,” referring to former vice president and now Senator John C. Calhoun from South Carolina, who was an outspoken defender of slavery. In 1866 Mott became the American Equal Rights Association’s first president, an organization formed to achieve equality for African Americans and women.
- January 3, 1824 – Sophia B. Packard born, American educator, co-founder with Harriet E. Giles of the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, a school for African American women that would become Spelman College in 1924. Packard was born in New Salem, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1850 from the Charlestown Female Seminary, and began her teaching career. In 1877, she was a founding member of the Women’s American Baptist Home Mission Society. In 1880, Packard toured the South and decided to open a school for African American women and girls in Georgia. With a gift of $100 from First Baptist Church of Medford, Massachusetts, and a promise of administrative and financial support from the missionary society, she and Harriet E. Giles opened a school in the basement of the Friendship Baptist Church, a Black church in Atlanta. Land was procured, and by 1883, the school had moved into its own building. Packard was president of the school, renamed Spelman Seminary, until her death in 1891. The school had grown by then to an enrollment of 464 students and 34 faculty members.
- January 3, 1831 – Savitribai Jyotirao Phule born, Indian social reformer, Marathi writer and poet, and pioneer in Indian feminism. Along with her husband, Jyotirao Phule, she campaigned for women’s rights, and worked to abolish discrimination and unfair treatment of people based on caste in India during British rule. In 1848, she and her husband founded the first Indian girl’s school at Bhide Wada in Pune.
- January 3, 1887 – Helen Parkhurst born, American educator and lecturer; creator of the Dalton plan, designed to achieve a balance between a child’s talents, interests and independence, and the needs of their community; founder of the Dalton School in 1919, a private, coeducational preparatory school which currently has about 1300 students.
- January 3, 1898 – Carolyn Haywood born, American writer and illustrator, author of 47 children’s books; noted for her Betsy series.
- January 3, 1897 – Dorothy Arzner born, the sole American woman film director between 1927 and 1943; best known for directing The Wild Party starring Clara Bow (1929), Christopher Strong with Katherine Hepburn (1933), and Craig’s Wife with Rosalind Russell (1936).
- January 3, 1905 – Anna May Wong born Wong Liu Tsong, the first Chinese American actress to be recognized as international movie star, who struggled against the stereotypical roles she was given; her career spanned over 40 years, from the early days of silent films, to starring briefly in her own television show The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, as an antiques dealer-amateur sleuth in 1951, her final film role in Portrait in Black (1960), and her last part on TV’s Barbara Stanwyck Show, two days before she died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1961; the annual Anna May Wong Award of Excellence named in her honor.
- January 3, 1916 – Betty Furness born, actress, commentator, consumer advocate, and advertising spokesperson for Westinghouse appliances, who refused to change her name or wear an apron when the sponsor wanted her to appear “more like a housewife,” insisting on wearing her own clothes to retain control over her image. Her advertisements with the tag line “You can be sure, if it’s Westinghouse” caused Westinghouse’s appliance sales to soar. She served as Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs in the Johnson administration (1967-1969), helping to enact regulations on flameproof fabrics and credit card billing. She was a Consumers Union Board Member (1969-1993); became the first chair and executive director of the NY State Consumer Protection Board (1970-1971); and was head of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (1973). From 1969 to 1993, she served as a board member of Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports.
- January 3, 1921 – Isabella Bashmakova born, Russian historian of mathematics of Armenian descent; noted for work on the history of definitions of integers and rational numbers, from Euclid and Eudoxus to Zolotarev, Dedekind, and Kronecker; she became a full professor in 1968 at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University. In 1986, she was one of six women invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians, but was unable to travel, so her paper was recorded in the record of the proceedings. During WWII, she served as a nurse in Samarkand.
- January 3, 1926 – Maria Sanchez born, ”la madrina” (the godmother) community activist, co-leader of the fight for mandatory bilingual education in Hartford, one of the founders of La Casa de Puerto Rico, elected to school board (1973-1988), then the first Hispanic woman elected to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1988, where she served until her sudden death in 1989.
- January 3, 1933 – Minnie D. Craig becomes the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first woman to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
- January 3, 1933 – Anne Stevenson born in England to American parents, American-English poet and author of studies of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop; inaugural winner in 2002 of the Northern Rock Foundation’s Writer’s Award, and the 2007 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, awards that are among the richest literary prizes in the world.
- January 3, 1934 – Carla Anderson Hills born, American lawyer; third woman to serve as a Presidential cabinet officer, and the first woman Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, appointed by President Gerald Ford.
- January 3, 1940 – Kinuko Y. Craft born in Japan, American painter, illustrator, and fantasy artist; winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, three-time winner of the Chesley Award and winner of the 2016 Chesley Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
- January 3, 1944 – Raewyn Connell born as Robert W. Connell, transgender Australian sociologist, known for the concept of hegemonic masculinity, part of her gender order theory, defined as a cultural dynamics practice that legitimizes men's dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of women.
- January 3, 1944 – Blanche d'Alpuget born, Australian fiction and non-fiction writer and women’s rights activist; noted for her quartet of historical ‘Lion’ novels about the early Plantagenets.
- January 3, 1949 – Margaret Chase Smith (Republican-Maine) began her tenure in the Senate; she remained in office until 1973. Previously, Chase was a Representative from Maine in the U.S. House (1940-1949), and was the first woman to serve in both the U.S. House and the Senate.
- January 3, 1950 – Linda C. Steiner born, American journalism academic and editor-in-chief of the journal Journalism & Communication Monographs; serves on the editorial board of Critical Studies in Media Communication; author of The Women's Suffrage Press, 1850-1900: a cultural analysis (1979).
- January 3, 1951 - Dame Linda P. Dobbs born in Sierra Leone, the first person of color appointed to the senior judiciary of England and Wales, serving as a High Court Judge (2004-2013); she was honored with an Eleanor Roosevelt Award in 2014.
- January 3, 1952 – Esperanza Aguirre y Gil de Biedma born, Spanish politician; President of the Autonomous Community of Madrid (2003-2011); President of the Spanish Senate (1999-2002); Minister of Education, Culture and Sport (1996-1999).
- January 3, 1953 – Frances Bolton (Republican–Ohio, 1940-1969) is joined in the U.S. House of Representatives by her son Oliver (Republican-Ohio, 1953-1957), becoming the first mother-son pair to serve at the same time in Congress.
- January 3, 1975 – Danica McKellar born, American television actress (The Wonder Years), mathematician and author of five books on math aimed at middle-school and high school girls to encourage them to study mathematics, including Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail.
- January 3, 1988 – Margaret Thatcher becomes the longest-serving British Prime Minister in the 20th century.
- January 3, 2003 – Greta Thunberg born, Swedish climate change activist; as a 15-year-old student, she spoke for her generation at the 2018 UN COP24 Summit on climate change in Poland, scolding the negotiators, “You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children.” The climate talks resulted in nearly 200 nations agreeing to a set of rules that governed the Paris Agreement on climate change, aiming to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial levels. Even the negotiators acknowledged they’re not doing nearly enough to reach this goal and avoid the disastrous effects of climate change, including the death of coral reefs, rising seas and flooding, stronger superstorms, deadlier heatwaves, and longer-lasting droughts. Her sailing trip across the Atlantic in August 2019 to attend the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City; generated much discussion of reducing humanity’s carbon footprint. With 15 other young people, she made an official complaint to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey, because these countries are not on track to meet the emission reduction targets to which they committed in their Paris Agreement pledges. Thunberg also became the youngest person to be named as Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019, and was also made a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.
- January 3, 2015 – In the UK, Hannah Weller’s Campaign for Children’s Privacy, to make it against the law for the media to use unpixelated photographs of children without parental consent, put David Cameron’s government on the spot when the campaign released the results of a poll, which showed that 79% agreed that newspapers and magazines should not publish photographs of children without parental consent; 77% believe people should not have to take legal action to protect their children’s privacy; and 67% believe the government should act to ensure that it is a criminal offence to publish photographs of children without parental consent. Baroness Smith of Basildon, a former Labour minister, then stood up in the House of Lords on January 6th to ask the government: “What assessment they have made of the effects on children of the publication of photographs of them without agreement or permission; and what consideration they have given to the aims of Protect: the Campaign for Children’s Privacy.”
- January 3, 2019 – The British Treasury announced it has appointed two women to senior roles at the Bank of England following criticism over a lack of diversity among its top ranks. Former Virgin Money CEO Jayne-Anne Gadhia, and Banking Standards Board chair, Colette Bowe, will each serve three-year terms as external members of the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee, which is responsible for spotting risks to UK financial stability. They replace Richard Sharp and Martin Taylor. Elisabeth Stheeman had been the sole woman member of the Bank of England’s Finance Policy Committee since November 2017.
- January 3, 2020 – A record-breaking 144 women were sworn into the 117th U.S. Congress, and 52 of them are women of color, passing the previous record of 127, which was set in 2019. 106 of the women sworn in are Democrats, tying the old record, while there are 38 Republican women, breaking the previous record from 2006 of 30 GOP women representatives. While this is welcome news, women are still only about 27% of the total number of representatives in the House.
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- January 4, 1490 – Anne, Duchess Regnant of Brittany, is married by proxy to Maximilian I of Austria, and fighting to maintain the independence of Brittany, declares that all those who would ally with King Charles VIII of France against her, are guilty of lèse-majesté; but in 1491, she is forced to renounce her unconsummated marriage to Maximilian, and marry Charles; when he dies in 1498, none of their children have survived infancy, and she is married to his cousin, Louis XII, who succeeds Charles. Louis falls deeply in love with Anne, who works to restore Brittany’s independence, and their eldest daughter Claude is proclaimed the heiress of Brittany, but none of their male children survive; Claude’s marriage to her cousin, King Francis I, ends Brittany’s independence.
- January 4, 1864 – Clara Emilia Smitt born, Swedish doctor, and one of Sweden’s first women’s rights activists; she first trains as a nurse, and receives a Red Cross medal for her work during the Greco-Turkish War in 1897; after further study, she becomes a hydrotherapist, and then studies medicine abroad; author of Kvinnans ställning i samhället: några inlägg i nutidens sociala spörsmål (Women's position in society: a few notes about contemporary social questions).
- January 4, 1883 – Johanna “Hans” Westerdijk born, Dutch plant pathologist, who also conducted research on moss regeneration, and was co-discoverer of the fungus which causes Dutch Elm Disease. She was the first woman professor in the Netherlands, at the University of Amsterdam.
- January 4, 1892 – Helen Hall born, director of Henry Street Settlement House. She was appointed by FDR to the Committee on Economic Security which created the Social Security Act of 1935, and Unemployment Compensation.
- January 4, 1915 – Marie-Louise von Franz born, German-Swiss psychologist and author, a Jungian analyst (1948-1998) in collaboration with Carl Jung for over 30 years. She was also fairy-tale expert whose research showed common themes in tales from many cultures, which she linked with experiences in daily life. She began analysis with Jung at eighteen, and worked with him until his death in 1961. As Jung’s primary partner in his research into alchemical texts, her first major publication, Aurora Consurgens, is a companion volume to Jung’s last major work, Mysterium Cuniuntionis. Other works include On Dreams and Myths and C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time.
- January 4, 1931 – Nora Iuga born, Romanian poet, writer, journalist, and editor; she was censored between 1971 and 1978 by the communist government in Romania after the publication of her second collection of poems, Captivitatea cercului (Trapped in a Circle). The first English translation of her work, a collection of poems called The Hunchbacks’ Bus, was published in 2016.
- January 4, 1933 – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor born, American juvenile author; her Shiloh quartet of novels won the 1992 Newbery Award and the Mark Twain Readers Award; her Alice book series, while lauded for realism in portraying a motherless girl, had also been frequently challenged and banned, primarily for broaching the topic of sexuality in teenagers; she founded the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship.
- January 4, 1937 – Dyan Cannon born, American actress, producer, screenwriter, and director; in 1976, she produced, directed, wrote, and edited the short film Number One (1976), an Academy Award nominee for Best Short Film-Live Action.
- January 4, 1943 – Doris Kearns Goodwin born, American historian, biographer, and political commentator; noted author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1995 Pulitzer Prize for History winner), and Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005 Lincoln Prize winner for best book of the year about the American Civil War).
- January 4, 1944 – Angela Harris, Baroness Harris of Richmond, born, British Liberal Democrat life peer; Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords since 2010; Chair and Trustee of the Industry and Parliament Trust.
- January 4, 1947 – Marie-Thérèse Letablier born, French sociologist; Research Director at the French Center for Scientific Research; Executive Committee member of the European Sociological Association (ESA); has worked primarily on work-family-gender issues.
- January 4, 1948 – Cissé Mariam Kaïdama Sidibé born, the first woman Prime Minister of Mali (2011-2012); in a 2012 coup d'état, she was detained by junta forces hostile to the policies of Malian President Amadou Toumai Touré; Amnesty International reported that she and other ministers were being held at a military camp in the Koulikoro region of Mali. They were released in April, 2012. In 2015, Kaïdama Sidibé was appointed as ambassador for the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), for their Climate Investment Plan to help improve the lives of the people who depend on the Niger River, to mitigate the effects of climate change, and insure that the best development choices are made.
- January 4, 1955 – Cecilia Conrad born, American economist and academic; dean of Pomona College in California (2009-2012); Managing Director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation since 2013; President of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE – 2008-2009); current editor of The Review of Black Political Economy, which was founded in 1970; her research centers on the effects of race and gender on economic status; co-editor of African Americans in the U.S. Economy.
- January 4, 1956 – Zehava Gal-On born, Israeli Meretz politician; member of the Israeli legislature, the Knesset (1999-2017); chair of the Meretz political party (2012-2018). Meretz is a secular, left-wing, social-democratic, and green party. Gal-On has been particularly concerned with human rights, women’s rights, and social justice issues. She served as chair of the Knesset committee against trafficking in women (1999-2000).
- January 4, 1956 – Sarojini Sahoo born, Indian feminist author, columnist for The New Indian Express, and associate editor of the English-language magazine Indian AGE; her novel Upanibesh (Colony) was a pioneering work in Odia (an Indo-Aryan language) on sexuality as a part of women’s social revolt; Gambhiri Ghara (The Dark Abode), a story of the relationship between an Indian Hindu woman and a Muslim man from Pakistan, against a background of terrorism.
- January 4, 1972 – Rose Heilbron becomes the first British woman judge to sit at London’s Old Bailey. She was one of the first generation of female barristers, called to the Bar in 1939. Her practice was crime and personal injury. In 1949, just months after the birth of her daughter, she was one of the first two women to be appointed as King’s Counsel at the Bar (now Queen’s Counsel). Rose Heilbron was the first British woman to lead in a murder case, and the first woman leader of a circuit (the Northern Circuit in 1973). She was also the second woman to be appointed as a High Court judge.
- January 4, 1981 – Alicia Garza born, American civil rights activist and editorial writer from Oakland California; she directs special projects at the National Domestic Workers Alliance; co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and received the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize along with her Black Lives Matter co-founders Patriss Cullors and Opal Tometi.
- January 4, 2007 – When the 110th U.S. Congress convenes, Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) is elected as the first woman Speaker of the House in U.S. History.
- January 4, 2007 – American artist, filmmaker, and lifelong peace activist Helen Hill, age 36, was shot and killed in her New Orleans home by an unidentified intruder. Her husband was shot three times, but survived, and their toddler son was not injured. The case remains unsolved.
- January 4, 2018 – Donald Trump announced that he had disbanded the controversial White House commission he created to study voter fraud. Trump, who made a baseless claim that he only lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton because millions voted illegally for her, said that “despite substantial evidence of voter fraud” he was disbanding the commission to avoid spending taxpayer money on legal battles with states that have refused to give the panel “basic information.” Critics celebrated the commission’s demise, saying it proved there was never any evidence of significant voter fraud. “The commission’s entire purpose was to legitimize voter suppression,” said Vanita Gupta, President of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
- January 4, 2020 – The British teenager who was allegedly gang-raped in Cyprus could face a three-year wait to exhaust the legal process relating to her conviction for lying, because she recanted her original statement after hours of questioning by Cypriot police without a lawyer to advise her. The long delay increases pressure on the British Foreign Office to lobby Cyprus to expedite the appeal process. The student, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was ruled to have “wilfully indulged in public mischief” by claiming that she was raped by a group of male Israeli tourists while on holiday in Ayia Napa in July 2020. The verdict led to widespread criticism of both the Cypriot justice system and the judge who heard the case, Michalis Papathanasiou, who adamantly excluded all evidence that the rape took place from the hearing. The 19-year-old, who has been out on bail after spending a month in prison, could be sentenced to a year in jail and a £1,500 fine.
- January 4, 2021 – Pernambuco is one of Brazil’s most culturally vibrant states, but a storm of controversy was unleashed when the latest art installment in a rural art park was unveiled. The sculpture, entitled ‘Diva,’ is the work of Juliana Notari. It is a giant, bright red vulva embedded in a hillside. The work is admired by leftwing art lovers, while the far right has launched vituperative attacks. Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil since 2019, has repeatedly maligned culture, painting artists – many of whom oppose his government – as decadent spongers who milk public funds to peddle communist garbage. A succession of renowned artists died last year, many from Covid-19, and Bolsonaro responded with silence.
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- January 5, 1835 – Olympia Brown born, one of the first women ordained in America; Unitarian minister, and Suffragist speaker, co-founder (1892) and later president of Federal Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton early on called her “the most promising young woman now speaking in this cause.” She kept her maiden name after marriage. Brown was one of the few suffragists active in the cause since before the U.S. Civil War who was still alive in 1920 to cast her ballot, at age 85. She lived for 91 years.
- January 5, 1882 – Dorothy Levitt born, feminist and first British woman racing driver; holder of the first water speed record, the women’s world land speed record, the 1905 women’s longest drive record (London to Liverpool and back in two days); author of The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for all Women who Motor or Who Want to Motor (1909), in which she recommended that women “carry a little hand-mirror in a convenient place while driving” to hold aloft “from time to time in order to see behind while driving in traffic” predating the first manufacture of an automotive rear view mirror by five years, and advised women travelling alone to carry an automatic Colt because the gun had only a slight recoil, making it more suitable for women; she gave driving lessons to Queen Alexandra and the Royal Princesses; her exploits helped gain acceptance of female drivers and popularize motoring with women in a financial position to afford an automobile.
- January 5, 1892 – Agnes von Kurowsky born, American nurse who served in the American Red Cross hospital in Milan during WWI. One of her patients was 19-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who fell in love with her. They planned to marry, but after he returned to the U.S., she wrote to him that she was going to marry an Italian. They never met again, but she became the inspiration for the character of Catherine Barkley in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. She did not marry the Italian, instead marrying an American she met in 1928 while stationed with the Red Cross in Haiti, but she quickly divorced him. Her marriage to her second husband in 1934 lasted until her death in 1984. The American Red Cross honored von Kurowsky for “gallant and commendable services” during WWI.
- January 5, 1893 – Sigrid Schultz born in Chicago to parents of Norwegian ancestry; she was multilingual, which led to her becoming Chicago Tribune Chief Correspondent for Central Europe from 1926 through WWII, one of the first U.S. women to be a chief correspondent for a major newspaper. Though repelled by Nazism, she recognized its growing power in Germany, and was an early interviewer of Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. In 1938, she became the first woman to regularly make radio broadcasts on an American network from Europe, for the Mutual Broadcasting System, while continuing her reporting for the Tribune. She often filed stories critical of the Nazi regime under the pseudonym “John Dickson,” which the Tribune printed with a dateline in Sweden, to avoid losing her contacts inside the Nazi regime. Schultz reported on the negotiations for the German-Russian non-aggression pact, the plan to partition Poland, the regime’s attacks on German churches, the increasing persecution of Germany’s Jews, and filed one of the earliest reports in the U.S. on the concentration camps.
- January 5, 1895 – Rebecca Lancefield born, pioneer microbiologist, overcame sexism, published effects of streptococcal infections in army in Texas (1919), president of Society of American Bacteriologists (1943), elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1970).
- January 5, 1895 – Jeannette Piccard born, the first U.S. woman licensed balloon pilot, and one of first women Episcopal priests in America.
- January 5, 1901 – Aryness Wickens born, statistician, who worked on refining the Federal Reserve Board index of industrial production. She was president of the American Statistical Association in 1952.
- January 5, 1902 – Stella Gibbons born, English reporter and feature writer for the Evening Standard; author of the novel Cold Comfort Farm.
- January 5, 1904 – Erika Morini born, Jewish Austrian violinist; she made her debut in 1916 with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra to excellent reviews, then left Europe for America. She made her American debut in 1921 at age 17 in New York, again to outstanding reviews, and was presented with the Guadagnini violin previously owned by the celebrated American violinist Maud Powell, who died in 1920. Morini also owned and played the 1727 "Davidov" Stradivarius violin. It was stolen from her New York apartment when she was hospitalized shortly before her death, and she was never told of its loss. Her Davidov Stradivarius has never been recovered. She was awarded an honorary degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, in 1963, and New York City presented a posthumous lifetime achievement award in 1976.
- January 5, 1906 – Dame Kathleen Kenyon born, English archaeologist, the leading archaeologist of the Fertile Crescent; excavator of Jericho (1952-1958), whose work there identified it as the oldest known continuously occupied human settlement, discovered when she excavated down to its Stone Age foundation. Her findings pushed back the era of occupation of the mound at Jericho from the Bronze Age and Neolithic to the Natufian culture at the end of the Ice Age (10,000 – 9,000 BC).
- January 5, 1909 – Lucienne Bloch born in Switzerland; American artist, photographer, and illustrator, emigrated to the U.S. in 1917; best known for murals, and for pioneering modern design in glass sculpture. She served her apprenticeship in frescoes working on Diego Rivera’s mural, Man at the Crossroads, at the Rockefeller Center in New York City. Bloch took the only existing photographs of his work before it was destroyed as anti-capitalist propaganda in 1934 by order of Nelson Rockefeller. Bloch later worked with her husband, Stephen Pope Dimitroff, creating nearly 50 fresco murals all over the U.S., working for the Works Progress Administration-Federal Arts Project (WPA/FAP) from 1935 to 1939. She was also a free-lance photographer for LIFE magazine, and illustrated several children’s books.
- January 5, 1917 – Lucienne Day born, British leader in contemporary textile design; best known for Calyx, her abstract screen-printed design for furnishing fabric.
- January 5, 1925 – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming becomes the first U.S. woman governor.
- January 5, 1941 – During WWII, Amy Johnson, pioneering British aviator, while flying an Airspeed Oxford for the Air Transport Auxiliary from Prestwick to RAF air base at Kidlington during terrible weather, reportedly ran out of fuel, and bailed out of the aircraft as it crashed into the Thames Estuary near Herne Bay. There were heavy seas and a strong tide, and snow was falling. The HMS Haslemere attempted to rescue her, but she wasn’t able to reach the ropes they threw out to her, and then was lost under the ship. The ship’s captain, Lt. Commander Walter Fletcher, dove in the water, but was unable to find her, and died in hospital days later from damage caused by hypothermia. Her body was never recovered.
- January 5, 1943 – Mary Gaudron born, Australian lawyer and judge; first woman Justice of the High Court of Australia (1987-2003); Solicitor-General of New South Wales (1981-1987); Queen’s Counsel, 1981; Chairman, NSW Legal Services Commission (1979-1980); Deputy President, Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (1974-1980); she was admitted to New South Wales Bar in 1968.
- January 5, 1955 – Mamata Banerjee born, Indian politician, founder of the political party, All India Trinamool Congress; first woman chief Minister of West Bengal (since 2011); first woman to serve in the Indian government as Minister of Railways (2000-2002 and 2009-2011), and as Minister of Coal (2004-2005); Member of Parliament (1984-1989 and 1991-2011).
- January 5, 1968 – Carrie Ann Inaba born, American dancer and choreographer; one of the original Fly Girls on the comedy series In Living Color (1990-1992). She has created choreography for American Idol, All American Girl, and So You Think You Can Dance.
- January 5, 1978 – Seanan McGuire born, American author of speculative fiction; winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novella for Every Heart a Doorway.
- January 5, 1986 – Deepika Padukone born, Indian actress and producer in Hindi films; known for her films Chennai Express and Piku; founder of the Live Love Laugh Foundation, which campaigns for mental health awareness and treatment; she is also a vocal supporter of feminism, and writes articles about women’s health and other issues for newspapers and magazines.
- January 5, 2018 – Academy Award-winning screenwriter/director Paul Haggis was accused of sexual misconduct by four women, the Associated Press reported, with two alleging they were raped. One woman said the producer/screenwriter forced her to perform oral sex and then raped her. “He said to me, ‘Do you really want to continue working?'” the woman alleged. Another woman told AP that she managed to escape from Haggis after he told her, “I need to be inside you.” Yet another accuser said Haggis “held down her arms, forcibly kissed her on a street corner, then followed her into a taxi.” Haggis’ lawyer says her client “didn’t rape anybody.” Haggis won Oscars for Million Dollar Baby and Crash. A civil lawsuit was filed by publicist Haleigh Breest, and a unanimous ruling in December 2019 by a four-judge panel of the Appellate Division of New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan that a New York City law prohibiting “animus based on the victim’s gender” can apply to any accusation of forced sex, which would extend the statute of limitations on filing suit to seven years, and allow greater financial penalties and recovery of legal fees for victorious plaintiffs. “Rape and sexual assault are, by definition, actions taken against the victim without the victim’s consent,” Justice Peter Moulton wrote for the court. “Without consent, sexual acts such as those alleged in the complaint are a violation of the victim’s bodily autonomy and an expression of the perpetrator’s contempt for that autonomy. Coerced sexual activity is dehumanizing and fear-inducing. Malice or ill will based on gender is apparent from the alleged commission of the act itself.” As of May, 2020, the case was before the Supreme Court of New York County, and still undecided.
- January 5, 2020 – In the UK, anti-abortion campaigners are increasingly targeting students at British universities, where there has been a rise in the number of anti-abortion societies on campus and demonstrations by outside groups displaying graphic imagery. Their campaign has gathered momentum on the back of a continuing debate about freedom of speech in universities. Some student unions have been threatened with legal action if they attempt to prevent anti-abortion groups opening on campus. There are now at least 14 anti-abortion societies in university students’ unions around the UK, many of which have faced fierce opposition from students who are overwhelmingly pro-choice. At Cardiff University, anti-abortion demonstrations have prompted counter-protests by pro-choice students. Isadora Sinha, a postgraduate student at Cardiff, said she and other pro-choice activists have received online threats after the motion she proposed that the Cardiff student union adopt an official pro-choice stance won by overwhelming margin. She said, “The motion was written in a way to ensure free speech and expression for those who are pro-life and the pro-life society can function as before. Unfortunately, there has been backlash against this motion passing despite it having passed by a democratic vote by hundreds of students.”
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- January 6, 1412 – Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) born, French military leader, martyr and saint.
- January 6, 1655 – Eleonore Magalene of Neuberg born. Though she would have preferred to be a nun, she became Holy Roman Empress and Queen Consort of Hungary and Bohemia and bore 10 children, five of whom survived to adulthood; politically active, she often translated foreign political documents for her husband, and was one of his trusted advisors; widely known for her many works of charity; well versed in theology and Latin, she translated the Bible from Latin to German.
- January 6, 1812 – Melchora Aquino Ramos born, Filipina revolutionary and national heroine, known as Tandang Sora (elder sora), and ‘Mother of the Revolution.’ Her home was a meeting place, and her store was a refuge for the sick and wounded of the revolution. She lived to be 107 years old.
- January 6, 1878 – Dame Adeline Genée born in Denmark, ballerina and choreographer; principal dancer of the Royal Danish Ballet (1895); prima ballerina at the Empire Theatre in London (1897-1907); debuted in 1907 in America, performing in The Soul Kiss, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, and toured with the production in 1908; in 1912, she appeared at NY’s Metropolitan Opera in La Camargo, a tribute to the great ballerina Marie Camargo; most notable for her role as Swanilda in Coppélia; became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1950.
- January 6, 1896 – The first U.S. women’s six-day bicycle race is held at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
- January 6, 1907 – Maria Montessori opens her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.
- January 6, 1921 – Marianne Grunberg-Manago born in the USSR, French biochemist; discovered the first nucleic-acid enzyme, polynucleotide phosphorylase, a key step in cracking the genetic code; she was the first woman to direct the International Union of Biochemistry, and the first woman to preside over the French Academy of Sciences (1995-1996).
- January 6, 1936 – Darlene Hard born, American tennis player, teacher, and then worked at USC publications; she played doubles with Billie Jean King, and mixed doubles with Ron Laver.
- January 6, 1938 – Adrienne E. Clarke born, Australian botanist, academic, and public servant; after studying and teaching at schools in the U.S., she taught at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, then returned to her alma mater, the University of Melbourne as a Research Fellow (1969-1977), then lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader. She was appointed Professor of Botany in 1985, and Laureate Professor (1999-2005). Clarke was Chancellor of La Trobe University (2011-2017), Lieutenant Governor of Victoria (1997-2000), and chair of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, an Australian government agency) from 1991 to 1996.
- January 6, 1938 – Larisa Shepitko born in Ukrainian SSR, Soviet film director and screenwriter; she made six films, including an awarding-winning student film, and Voskhozhdenie (The Ascent), which won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival, before she was killed in a car crash in 1979 while scouting locations for a film, which her husband completed after her death, under the title Farewell.
- January 6, 1940 – Penny Lernoux born, American Catholic author and journalist; while writing for the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in 1961-1964 and the Copley News Agency (1964-1967), she spent time in Central and South America, and was appalled by the extreme disparity between the wealthy and the poor. She became the Latin American correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, but was also a freelance writer. The Nation published several of her articles. Lernoux gravitated toward the Christian-Marxist liberation theology. Her first book, Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America, published in 1977, later won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Book Award. In the 1980s, she focused on international banking corruption, and wrote In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican. Her third book, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism, took on the church’s clamping down on dissent, on factions within the church, and the popularity of groups like Opus Dei. Communion and Liberation, the Knights of Malta, and Tradition, Family and Property.
- January 6, 1949 – Caroline "C. D." Wright born, American poet, editor of Lost Roads Publishers, which specialized in publishing new poets and translations; 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, for her book One With Others. She died at age 67 of thrombosis.
- January 6, 1950 – Jessica Amanda Salmonson born, American transgender author, and editor of fantasy, horror fiction, and poetry; winner of a World Fantasy Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Science Fiction/Fantasy as an anthology editor.
- January 6, 1954 – Trudie Styler born, English film producer, actress, and director; producer-director of the film Freak Show; co-founder with husband Sting of the Rainforest Foundation Fund, devoted to protection of rain forests and indigenous peoples. She is also a patron of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and co-founder with Celine Rattray of Maven Pictures. She was a producer on many films, including Boys from Brazil, Snatch, Greenfingers, The Sweatbox (which she also directed), Wilding, and Human Capital.
- January 6, 1955 – Susan B. Horwitz born, American computer scientist who worked on program slicing and dataflow analysis; founder of Peer Led Team Learning for Computer Science (PTLCS); led a collaboration involving eight universities on a study of the effectiveness of combining active recruiting with peer-led team learning, concluding it attracted and retained under-represented students in introductory Computer Science classes.
- January 6, 1956 – Elizabeth Strout born, American novelist; her novel, Olive Kitteridge, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
- January 6, 1960 – Nigella Lawson born, English gourmet, food writer, best-selling cookbook author, and BBC television presenter.
- January 6, 1971 – Karin Slaughter born, American crime fiction and mystery writer; known for Blindsighted, Pieces of Her, and her series featuring GBI investigator Will Trent.
- January 6, 2017 – Michelle Obama delivered her final remarks as U.S. First Lady at a Reach Higher and Counselor of the Year event at the White House. "With a lot of hard work and a good education, anything is possible — even becoming president," Obama said. "That's what the American Dream is all about." America's "glorious diversity of faiths, colors, and creeds is not a threat to who we are," she continued. "It makes us who we are." Obama finished her remarks with a "thank you" to the American people. "Being your first lady has been the greatest honor of my life," she said, "and I hope I made you proud."
- January 6, 2019 – Courts in Saudi Arabia will notify women by text message when their husbands divorce them, as a new regulation takes effect, officials said. The measure, approved by the justice ministry, appears aimed at curbing cases of men secretly ending marriages without informing their wives. “Women . . . will be notified of any changes to their marital status via text message,” the justice ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Al-Ekhbariya news channel and other local media. “Women in the kingdom will be able to view documents related to the termination of their marriage contracts through the ministry’s website.” While there has been a “liberalization” drive in the kingdom, including ending the ban on women motorists, and allowing some women to attend games in sports stadiums (in a segregated section), there has also been a growing number of arrests of women’s rights activists in a recent crackdown on dissent. The country also faces international criticism over its male guardianship system, which grants men arbitrary authority to make decisions on behalf of their female relatives.
- January 6, 2021 – Dr. Marjorie Bessel, the chief clinical officer at Banner Health in Arizona, said, "Most Americans don’t want to know, don't want to acknowledge, don't really want to recognize, and … do not appear to understand the dire circumstances that we are facing." Banner Health, and many other healthcare providers, were overwhelmed as a new U.S. record was set for COVID-19 deaths in a single day: 4,000. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that a highly infectious new coronavirus strain first detected in Britain could soon spread widely through the U.S.
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- January 7, 1815 – ‘E. Louisa Mather’ born as Elizabeth Louisa Foster, the pen name of Louisa Foster Mather, American writer; she was a convert to Universalism, and wrote stories, essays and poems for The Universalist and Ladies’ Repository, a periodical of the Universalist church (1847-1874), as well as contributing to Universalist Union, Trumpet, Ambassador, Golden Hide, and Odd Fellows’ Offering. Mary Livermore invited Mather to write for Lily of the Valley. She wrote frequently on religious subjects, on capital punishment, and in favor of woman’s suffrage.
- January 7, 1863 – Anna Murray Vail born, American botanist and first librarian (1900-1907) of the New York Botanical Garden. In 1911, she moved to France, and was active during WWI with the American Fund for French Wounded, becoming the fund’s treasurer.
- January 7, 1891 – Zora Neale Hurston born, author, best known for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She was a pioneering scholar of African-American and Caribbean folklore, and is considered one of the writers at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, and produced in 1926 with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and other black writers a single issue of Fire!, a literary magazine, before its offices were burned down. She had been largely forgotten before Alice Walker wrote “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" for the 1975 March issue of Ms. Magazine. In 2001, Hurston’s collection of folktales, Every Tongue Got to Confess, was found in the Smithsonian archives, and was published for the first time.
- January 7, 1896 – Fannie Farmer published her first cookbook, in which she standardized cooking measurements.
- January 7, 1905 – Nelle Morton born, feminist educator, received a Master’s in Religious Education in 1931. As the Assistant Director (1937-1944) of Youth Work for U.S. Presbyterian Church Board of Christian Education, she pushed for full integration for black students at the Biblical Seminary of New York, served as General Secretary (1945-1949) of Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, a group of Interfaith reformers especially concerned with race issues. She worked with mentally and physically handicapped children, and developed innovative curricular theories (1956-1971). Morton is the author of The Church We Cannot See. In late the 1950s, she taught a course on "Women in Church and Society," believed to be the first course to address the issue.
- January 7, 1911 – Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen born, African American actress, best remembered for her first film role, Scarlett O’Hara’s maid Prissy, in Gone With the Wind; she was prevented from appearing at the world premiere of the movie because it was held at a whites-only movie house in Atlanta GA; honored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation with its Freethought Heroine Award in 1989 for her public statements on why she was an atheist.
- January 7, 1911 – Yolande Beekman born, British member of the Women’s Auxiliary Force and wireless operator in France during WWII for the Special Operations Executive. She was recruited by the SOE because she was already trained as a wireless operator for the WAAF, and was fluent in French and German. She was landed in France in February 1943, and was assigned to the SOE ‘Musician’ circuit in northern France. She was very good at transmitting, with a steady and calm demeanor, but her work was increasingly risky as German interception of radio signals became more and more efficient. By January 1944, German direction-finding teams had traced her signal to her block, and she was forced to flee to the other side of the city, where she was apprehended by the Gestapo the next day, and arrested, then interrogated and brutalized repeatedly. In May 1944, she was moved to a prison in Germany. In September, she was transferred to Dachau with three other SOE women agents, and they were all executed on September 13, 1944. Beekman was 33 years old. She was listed on the “Roll of Honour” as one of the SOE agents who died for the liberation of France.
- January 7, 1919 – In South Africa, the Bantu Women’s League, led by BWL president Charlotte Maxeke, begins a campaign of passive resistance against the application of the pass laws to women. The BWL was formed in 1918 as a branch of the African National Congress (ANC), and a BWL women’s deputation led by Maxeke had already gone to see Prime Minister Louis Botha in 1918 to argue against the imposition of the passes. The campaign continued, and briefly won some concessions in 1922, but the law was tightened again in the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act.
- January 7, 1921 – Esmeralda Arboleda Cadavid born, Columbian politician, ambassador, and women’s suffrage movement leader who, with suffragist Josephina Valencia Muñoz, campaigned for legislation which granted universal suffrage to Columbian women in 1954. She was the first woman elected to Columbian Senate (1958-1961); served as Minister of Communications (1961-1962); and as Columbian Ambassador to Austria (1966-1968).
- January 7, 1941 – Iona Brown born, British violinist and conductor; as a conductor, she was associated with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the City of Birmingham Symphony. She died of cancer at age 63 in 2004.
- January 7, 1943 – Sadako Sasaki born, Japanese survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 6, 1945, one of the hibakusha (bomb-affected person), who became a symbol of the innocent victims of nuclear warfare. When the bomb dropped, the two-year-old girl was blown out of a window in the family home, just one mile (1.6 kilometres) from ground zero, but her mother found her seemingly uninjured. While her mother fled, carrying her, they were caught in the black rain (nuclear fallout). In November 1954, Sasaki developed swellings on her neck and behind her ears, followed by purpura on her legs in January, 1955, and was diagnosed with acute malignant lymph gland leukemia (many survivors referred to it as “atomic bomb disease”). She was admitted to the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital for treatment in February, 1955, with a prognosis of a year to live. In August 1955, she was moved into a room with an older girl, and a local high school club brought origami cranes to their room. Her father told her the legend of the cranes in Japanese folklore, which says that the crane lives for 1,000 years, and if a person folds 1,000 origami cranes within a year, they will have the chance to make one special wish come true. Sasaki set herself the goal of folding 1,000 cranes. She had to scrounge for paper, using medicine wrappers, wrapping paper donated by other patients from their get-well presents, and paper from school brought to Sasaki by her best friend. While there is a story that she died before reaching her goal, according to her brother, she folded over 1,000 cranes before she lapsed into a coma, and died on October 25, 1955, at the age of 12. Sasaki’s friends and schoolmates published a collection of letters in order to raise funds to build a memorial to her and all of the children who had died from the effects of the atomic bomb. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons uses the folding of 1,000 cranes for peace in its public awareness campaigns.
- January 7, 1952 – Princess Elizabeth, age 25, on a belated honeymoon in Kenya, first learned that her father had died the previous day, and she was now Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth.
- January 7, 1955 – Marian Anderson, American contralto, becomes the first person of color, and the first African American woman, to sing at the New York Metropolitan Opera, in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.
- January 7, 1955 – Mamata Shankar born, Indian actress, dancer, and choreographer. She is the director of the Udayan-Maata Shankar Dance Company, founded in 1986.
- January 7, 1957 – Katie Couric born, American television journalist and author; co-host of the Today show (1991-2006), CBS Evening News anchor (2006-2011); 60 Minutes (2006-2011), CBS Reports (2009-2011), ABC News (2011-2013); children’s author and essayist.
- January 7, 1959 – Angela Evans Smith born, created a Life Peer as Baroness Smith of Basildon in 2010; Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords since May 2015; British Labour Co-operative politician, Member of Parliament for Basildon (1997-2010).
- January 7, 1974 – Alenka Bikar born, Slovenian sprinter who competed in three Olympic games from 1996 to 2004; since 2012, she has been a deputy in the National Assembly of Slovenia as a member of the Positive Slovenia Party.
- January 7, 1977 – Sofi Oksanen born, Finish novelist and playwright; noted for her novel Purge, the first Finnish work to win the Prix Femina Étranger award (2010).
- January 7, 2015 – Prosecutors in the UK faced a 30% increase in the number of rape cases going to trial, including a backlog of historical allegations. The director of public prosecutions (DPP), Alison Saunders, and the Metropolitan police’s assistant commissioner, Martin Hewitt, were circulating new guidance to ensure that officers and prosecutors could manage the heavier caseload. The increase built up over the previous two years. In 2012-2013, there were 1,832 rape trials in England and Wales; in 2014-2015, the figure passed 2,380. There was also a sharp rise in decisions to charge suspects. More government funding was needed to prevent excessive delays in delivering justice, according to the DPP. “We are seeing many more trials,” Allison Saunders said. “This big increase is quite staggering when you bear in the mind that most other crimes are falling. Victims and witnesses must be feeling more confident in coming forward. Referrals from the police are increasing. We don’t have a breakdown of how many of these cases are [historical] and how many are more recent but we don’t think this is a blip. People are seeing cases going to court and seeing people being believed, whereas in the past they might have thought that they wouldn’t be believed.”
- January 7, 2018 – Carrie Gracie, the BBC's China editor, announced her resignation in an open letter posted on her personal blog, citing gender pay inequality at the British public broadcaster. The BBC has faced criticism for paying men more than women in similar jobs, and Gracie said that she learned from salary data revealed in a July funding settlement how much less she made than male colleagues. The BBC has four international editors, of which she was one, and the two men in the role made at least 50 percent more than the women. Gracie said she was offered a raise but it was "far short of equality," and that there was now a "crisis of trust" at the broadcaster. A BBC spokeswoman said "fairness in pay" is "vital" at the organization. She later won her battle over gender pay inequality, receiving an apology and a payout from the corporation, which she will donate to charity. The BBC admitted Gracie had been told she would be paid in line with the North America editor, Jon Sopel, (whose salary is in the £200,000-£250,000 range), but after she accepted the role her pay turned out to be £135,000. Gracie said, “For me, this was always about the principle, rather than the money. I’m delighted to donate all the backdated pay from the BBC to help women striving for equality at work.”
- January 7, 2020 – The British teenager convicted of falsely accusing 12 Israelis of gang-rape was heading back to the UK, hours after she received a suspended sentence and a fine of €140. The 19-year-old student, who has vowed to go all the way to the European court of human rights to clear her name, was spotted at Larnaca airport before her flight, where her mother told supporters: “We are delighted to be going home, where we will continue the fight to clear my daughter’s name. The fight is not over to get justice.” Earlier, the teenager had been handed a four-month prison term, suspended for three years. The judge, Michalis Papathanasiou, said he would give her a “second chance” and she could effectively walk free. The teenager had withdrawn the rape complaint after being questioned by Cypriot police for eight hours without an attorney present. The investigation was immediately stopped, and the suspects in the alleged rape were allowed to fly home, but the British teen spent a month in Nicosia prison before being granted bail on condition that she surrender her passport, stranding her in Cyprus for months awaiting trial.
- January 7, 2021 – Paul Petersen, a former elected county official in Arizona, has pleaded guilty to human smuggling, conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens, and fraud, and was sentenced to six years in prison, fined $100,000, and faces more jail time of other charges. He was part of a human trafficking ring which operated for years in the Marshall Islands and the U.S., luring pregnant Marshallese women with offers of $10,000, and the promise of a new life in America, to give up their babies, which were then adopted out to U.S. couples willing to pay four times that amount for a child. Prosecutors believe at least 70 babies were adopted this way - “sold” in a court’s scathing judgment - for up to $40,000 each.
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- January 8th in Belarus and Russia is Babinden (Day of the Midwife).
- January 8, 1638 – Elisabetta Sirani born, Italian Baroque painter and printmaker; best-known woman artist in Bologna in her day; established an academy for other woman artists which was so successful that, with her commissions, she supported her entire family; her sudden death at aged 27 led to her maidservant being suspected of poisoning her, but there was no evidence of poison; possibly she died from a ruptured peptic ulcer. Her remarkable painting, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, is based on a story from Plutarch: Portia Catonis, wife of Brutus, became the only woman to know about the plot to kill Julius Caesar beforehand. Her husband would not confide in her, fearing she would confess under torture, so she stabbed her thigh in secret, and kept silence for a day to prove to him that she could withstand pain. The painting is probably an allegory, showing the lengths to which a woman has to go in order to prove herself worthy of a man’s trust and respect.
- January 8, 1859 – Fanny Bullock Workman born, American geographer, mountaineer, travel writer, and cartographer; one of the first professional women mountaineers, setting several women’s altitude records; a champion of women’s rights and suffrage; in the picture below, she is on the Silver Throne Plateau in Kashmir (at almost 21,000 feet above sea level), holding a newspaper with the headline "Votes for Women."
- January 8, 1860 – Emma Booth born, daughter of the founders of the Salvation Army; ran the Salvation Army’s first training school for women; married Frederick Tucker and they worked together in India, then returned to London headquarters, and then were assigned to America; Emma’s success there, primarily proselytizing prisoners and working on a farm colony experiment for the urban poor, earned her the title ‘The Consul’; she was killed at age 43 in a train accident on her way to Chicago.
- January 8, 1865 – Winnaretta Singer born, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, one of the heirs to the American Singer sewing machine fortune, whose mother was French. She was a painter and patron of the Arts. The family moved to Paris just after the American Civil War, then to England when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870. She moved back to Paris with her mother in 1875. She was a lesbian, and both her marriages were never consummated, the first being annulled, and the second, a “lavender marriage” to Prince Edmond de Polignac, a gay amateur composer, was based on their love of music, mutual respect and understanding. They established a salon in Paris which became a haven for avant-garde music, and brought attention to the young composers Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel. She had affairs with numerous women. After de Polignac’s death, she used her fortune to benefit the arts, science, and letters, commissioning works from Stravinsky, Eric Satie, and Kurt Weill, among several others, and became an important leader in the development of public housing in Paris. Her 1911 building of a housing project for the working poor became a model for future projects. She also commissioned noted architect Le Corbusier for several public shelters for the Paris Salvation Army. After her death, the Foundation Singer-Polignac carried on her many projects, and continued to present concerts and recitals.
- January 8, 1867 – Emily Greene Balch born, economist, sociologist, academic, and pacifist; co-founder of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom with Jane Addams and others (1919); she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, shared with John Mott.
- January 8, 1881 – Linnie Marsh Wolfe born, American librarian and author; she won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her book Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir, but she died in 1945 at age 64, before she could receive her Pulitzer Prize.
- January 8, 1888 – Octavia Wilberforce born, English physician who became a doctor in spite of her parents’ opposition, with support from actress. playwright, and suffragette Elizabeth Robins, after Octavia’s father disinherited her. She qualified in 1920 after studying at the London School of Medicine for Women, and worked as a physician at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. She opened her own general practice in Brighton in 1923. She became acquainted with author Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, and later treated Woolf's mental illness until Woolf’s death in 1941. Wilberforce retired from practice in 1954, and died at age 75 in 1963.
- January 8, 1891 – Bronislava Nijinska born as Bronisława Niżyńska, Polish ballet dancer and innovative choreographer; founder of a dance school called L'Ecole de Mouvement (School of Movement) to train dancers in more modern movement for ballet. She was the sister of Vaslav Nijinsky.
- January 8, 1891 – Storm Jameson born Margaret Storm Jameson, English journalist and novelist; noted for novels published under the pen name Mary Harvey Russell, her Triumph of Time series, and non-fiction which includes critical essays and biographies.
- January 8, 1900 – Dame Merlyn Myer born, Australian philanthropist; she was a benefactor and member of the Board of Management for the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1935-1976); benefactor and member of the National Council of the Australian Red Cross (1937-1947). She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1960.
- January 8, 1908 – “Fearless Nadia” (Mary Ann Evans) born in Australia; Bollywood stuntwoman and actress, whose father’s military career took the family to India and Pakistan, where she took ballet and tumbling, then became a touring performer, and worked for the Zarko Circus. She tried out for Hindi film mogul J.B.H. Wadia, and started appearing in his movies, starring in Hunterwali (Woman with a Whip - 1935). She married J.B.H.’s younger brother, director Homi Wadia, in 1961, becoming Nadia Wadia.
- January 8, 1909 – Evelyn Wood born, American creator of “speed reading,” a program designed to increase both the reader’s reading rate and comprehension. Co-founder of the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Dynamics company, which held seminars at 150 outlets in the U.S. at the program’s peak of popularity. She sold the business in 1962, but stayed on as a consultant for several years.
- January 8, 1909 – Ashapoorna Devi born, Indian feminist, prolific Bengali-language author, and poet. Her mother taught her to read and got books for her because as a girl she wasn’t allowed to go to school. When she was 13, she sent out one of her poems secretly, and “Bairer Dak” (“The Call from the Outside”) was published. In spite of her arranged marriage at age 15, and running a household for an extended family, she wrote and published hundreds of poems, novels, books for children, and short stories, many of them opposing traditional Hindu gender-based discrimination; honored with many Indian literary awards.
- January 8, 1911 – Gypsy Rose Lee born as Rose Louis Hovick; American burlesque entertainer, striptease artist, actress, author, and playwright; as an author she is best known for Gypsy: A Memoir, published in 1957, the inspiration for the Broadway musical Gypsy. She also wrote two murder mysteries, The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body, and a play, The Naked Genius, which was made into a movie titled Doll Face.
- January 8, 1925 – The women of the Texas All-Woman Supreme Court take the oath of office, for a special session of the Supreme Court of Texas, the first all-female Supreme Court in U.S. history, sitting for five months to consider the case of Johnson v. Darr, a dispute over the ownership of two tracts of land in the city of El Paso. Trustees acting for the El Paso chapter of the Woodmen of the World deeded the tracts to F.P. Jones, and the deed was properly recorded. On the same day, Jones signed an agreement to hold the property in trust and deed it back to the Woodmen upon request, but this agreement was not recorded. When the creditors of Jones claimed the land as payment for his debts, the trustees brought suit to establish the unrecorded agreement and stop the transfer to the creditors. The trial court ruling split the ownership, giving one tract to the Woodmen, and the other to the creditors. Upon appeal, the El Paso Court of Civil Appeals held for the Woodmen on both tracts. Because the Woodmen of the World were very influential in Texas politics, and nearly all the state’s elected officials and most lawyers were members, Chief Justice C. M. Cureton notified Governor Pat Neff that the state Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves. Texas law required the governor to find impartial replacements to hear the case, but after 10 months, he was unable to find any suitable candidates who were not members of the Woodmen. Finally, he hit upon a solution. As a fraternal organization, the Woodmen barred women from membership. As long as a woman was eligible under Texas law to serve on the court, there was no barrier to their appointment. Governor Neff had already appointed women to state boards and commissions during his tenure. There was still a problem because the law required that appointees to the state Supreme Court must have been licensed to practice law in the State of Texas for at least seven years, and two of his first choices were just two or three months shy of meeting the requirement. So Hortense Sparks Ward of Houston was appointed as acting chief justice, with Hattie L. Henenberg of Dallas and Ruth V. Brazzil of Galveston as associate justices. At the time, there was no requirement in state law that trust agreements had to be recorded for them to be legally binding, the special court handed down a unanimous decision in favor of the Woodmen on May 23, 1925. Thereafter, the court disbanded. Women were not allowed to serve on Texas juries for another 30 years, and no other woman served on the state supreme court until 1982, when Ruby Kless Sondock became the first regular woman appointee. She replaced Justice Denton who had died of a heart attack, and served out the rest of his term, but did not seek election to the court in her own right. The next state high court to have a majority of women was the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2015.
- January 8, 1926 – Hanae Mori born, Japanese fashion designer, one of only two Japanese women to present her collections on the runways of Paris and New York, and the first Asian woman to be admitted as an official haute couture design house by the fédération française de la couture in France. Her fashion house, opened in Japan in 1951, grew to be a $500 million international business by the 1990s.
- January 8, 1937 – Shirley Bassey born in Wales, daughter of a Nigerian father and an English mother; jazz and contemporary singer; notable for recording James Bond theme songs. Her family was poor, and as a teenager, she worked in a factory, and sang in public houses and clubs in the evenings and on weekends, then was hired for touring variety shows, until she was offered a feature spot in the show, Such is Life, at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End. She made her first recording, “Burn My Candle” at age 19 in 1956, but it was banned by BBC radio because of its suggestive lyrics. Other recordings became hits, and in 1960, she made her American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1963, she was on the cover of Ebony magazine, and sang at a Washington gala celebrating President Kennedy's second year in office. Her recording of the song for the James Bond film Goldfinger had the most lasting impact on her career, and is most associated with her. In 1985, she was so grief-stricken by the death of her 21-year-old daughter Samantha, ruled a suicide, that she temporarily lost her voice.
- January 8, 1945 – Nancy Bond born, American children’s, fantasy, and historical fiction author; her first book, A String in the Harp, received a Newbery honor and the Welsh Tir na n-Og Award; A Place to Come Back To, was named an ALA Best Books for Young Adults.
- January 8, 1951 – Karen Tei Yamashita born, Japanese-American novelist and playwright; Tropic of Orange and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest.
- January 8, 1955 – Joan M. Kingston born, Canadian nurse and politician; member and past president of the Nurses Association of New Brunswick; member of the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick for New Maryland (1995-1999), served on the New Brunswick Executive Council as Minister of the Environment and Minister of Labour; currently working in the Office of the Premier of New Brunswick.
- January 8, 1975 – Ella Grasso becomes governor of Connecticut, the first U.S. woman elected as a state governor without her husband having preceded her in the office.
- January 8, 1977 – Pauli Murray, an attorney and civil rights activist, is ordained as the first African American woman Episcopal priest at age 67.
- January 8, 1979 – Sarah Polley born, Canadian director, actress, screenwriter, and political activist; she made her feature film directorial debut in 2006 with Away from Her, followed by Take This Waltz and her first documentary, Stories We Tell. She wrote the miniseries Alias Grace, based on the novel by Margaret Atwood. She is a prominent member of the Ontario New Democratic Party (ONDP), and during a protest in 1995 against the provincial government under right wing politician Mike Harris, she lost two back teeth after being struck by a riot police officer, and has been active in the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. In 2017, she wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times about her experience with Harvey Weinstein, and Hollywood’s poor treatment of women in general.
- January 8, 2011 – The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (Democrat-Arizona, 2007-2012) was part of a shooting rampage which left five people dead and 13 wounded in Casa Adobes, Arizona. Giffords survived a shot to the head at point-blank range, but suffered severe brain injury, and resigned from office. She now an advocate for gun control.
- January 8, 2018 – When Ugandan Agnes Acayo escaped from the rebel group who had abducted her at the age of nine, she felt overjoyed to be free and back home at last. She had spent 10 years in captivity as a child soldier and later was forced to marry a member of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. Now 30 years old, Acayo, like many of the women ex-combatants, is stuck in a cycle of poverty, despite government promises that they would be helped. Acayo, who still has a bullet embedded in her right hand from a battle with Ugandan army troops, lives in a rented mud-grass hut with her three children in Gulu, in the north of the country. Like other female returnees, she has struggled to buy food, access healthcare, send her children to school, or get a job as a result of the failure of the government’s demobilisation, resettlement, and reintegration programme. Critics say the programme is biased against female returnees because they are not considered to have been co-opted into the army, like men, and so miss out on any army payments. “I do all kinds of jobs, like washing people’s clothes, in order to get money to buy food, and pay school fees, house rent and for medical care. Despite the promises, the government has never provided any assistance. I got an amnesty [commission] certificate and a reintegration package.” Acayo’s reintegration package consisted of 263,000 Ugandan shillings (£55), a mattress, blanket, hoe, machete, cups, and maize and bean seeds. Justice Peter Onega, chair of Uganda’s Amnesty Commission, appreciates Acayo’s frustrations. “Ex-LRA female combatants, abductees and other returnees in northern Uganda are right when they complain. We have failed them. Our hands as a commission are tied. We don’t have the necessary financial resources for proper resettlement and reintegration of these people into the communities,” he says.
- January 8, 2021 – Witch Hunt, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, presented the work of 16 mid-career women artists from 13 countries who all had decades-long commitments to feminist creative practices of inclusion and intersectionality, as well as often working collaboratively. Called “an incisive survey of complex and impactful practices by some of the most influential artists working today,” Witch Hunt included newly commissioned works as well as major projects that had yet to be shown on the West Coast or in the United States. Witch Hunt also marked the Los Angeles museum debut of Leonor Antunes, Shu Lea Cheang, Minerva Cuevas, Bouchra Khalili, Laura Lima, Otobong Nkanga, and Okwui Okpokwasili.
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Sources
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Feminist Meerkat Matriarch