“The whole world opened to me
when I learned to read.”
― Mary McLeod Bethune,
African-American Civil and
Women’s Rights Leader,
Educator, member of FDR’s
Federal Council of Negro Affairs
(his “black cabinet”)
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers stories from November 9 through November 16.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on Saturday, November 19, 2022.
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“… I desire you would remember the
ladies and be more generous and
favorable to them than your ancestors.
Do not put such unlimited power
into the hands of the husbands. Remember,
all men would be tyrants if they could.
If particular care and attention is not
paid to the ladies, we are determined to
foment a rebellion, and will not hold
ourselves bound by any laws in
which we have no voice or representation.
That your sex are naturally tyrannical
is a truth so thoroughly established as to
admit of no dispute; but such of you as
wish to be happy willingly give up —
the harsh tide of master for the more
tender and endearing one of friend.
Why, then, not put it out of the
power of the vicious and the
lawless to use us with cruelty
and indignity with impunity?”
― Abigail Adams, in a letter to her
husband John dated March 31, 1776
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“I raise up my voice ― not so I can shout but
so that those without a voice can be heard ...
we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”
― Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani Pashtun
advocate for education of girls and women,
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014
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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.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, 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 much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
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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- November 9, 1467 – Philippa of Guelders born; Duchess consort of Lorraine (1485-1508); she bore 11 children, five of whom survived beyond childhood, and served as regent in 1509 during the absence of her son, Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, who was serving in the French campaign in Italy. Even after she retired to the Convent of Poor Clares at Pont-à-Mousson in 1519, she was still much respected and often consulted by members of her family. In 1547, she died in the convent at age 79, having outlined all but one of her children - John, Cardinal of Lorraine and Bishop of Metz, who died in 1550.
- November 9, 1723 – Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia born, became Princess Abbess of Quedlinburg (1756-1787); musician, composer, and notable musical patron, as well as a collector of music whose library included over 600 volumes of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, among many others. She was founder and patron of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, where her own compositions of chamber works were kept after her death. Most of them were believed lost, until 2000, when the Ukrainian government returned the archives stolen from Sing-Akademie by the Red Army in 1945 when it captured Berlin, which included many of her works.
- November 9, 1732 – Julie de Lespinasse born, Frenchwoman who hosted an influential Salon during the Enlightenment; also noted for her love letters, published over 30 years after her death, first to the Marquis de Mora, son of the Spanish Ambassador to France, who died in 1774 from tuberculosis, and then to the Comte de Guibert, whose marriage to another woman led to her downward spiral into depression and opium addiction, and death at 43.
- November 9, 1773 – Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd born as Thomasine Buntzen; Danish author, who published Familien Polonius (The Polonius Family) anonymously in 1827 in her son’s newspaper Flyvende Post (The Flying Post). In 1828, her stories Den Magiske Nøgle (The Magic Key), and En Hverdags-Historie (An Everyday Story) were also published anonymously by the paper. She published successful multi-volume novels and short story collections, using only “The Author of An Everyday Story” as her pen name, between 1833 and 1851. Not even her closest friends knew she was the author, until it was revealed after her death at age 82 in 1856.
- November 9, 1800 – Abigail Adams joins her husband in the unfinished Executive Mansion. The new capital city, carved out of the Maryland and Virginia wilderness, was not ready because of the immense demand for goods with all the new government arrivals, and the lack of local suppliers for even basic items. In the damp, cold winter, Abigail struggled to make the Executive Mansion (later called the White House) a home for her husband, five-year-old granddaughter Susanna, and President Adams's secretary, William Smith Shaw. Lamps to light the house were lacking, and a number of things, including a tea set, had been broken or stolen en route from the former presidential residence in Philadelphia. She wrote to a friend that the new mansion was tolerable only so long as fires were lit in every room, and that she had to hang their washing in an empty “audience room” (now the East Room). In the second floor oval room—the Ladies' Drawing Room—sufficient furniture was placed to welcome visitors. An official reception was held in this room on New Year's Day, 1801. Both John and Abigail Adams were opposed to slavery – Abigail wrote in a 1776 letter that she doubted most of the Virginians had such a "passion for Liberty" as they claimed they did, since they "deprive their fellow Creatures" of freedom, so there were no slaves in the mansion during their brief tenure – John Adams was not re-elected. They moved out in March, 1801, and widower Thomas Jefferson moved in.
- November 9, 1833 – Sally Louisa Tompkins born, Confederate hospital founder, nurse, and philanthropist. After the First Battle of Manassas (aka Bull Run) in July, 1861, she privately sponsored a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, to treat wounded soldiers. The hospital was known as the Robertson Hospital because it was in the home of Judge John Robertson, who had taken his family out into the country for safety. Under her supervision, the hospital had the lowest death rate of any hospital, Confederate or Union, and became one of the largest Southern hospitals during the war. She was the only woman commissioned in the Confederate army. When Richmond was evacuated in April, 1865, Tompkins and several of her volunteer nurses chose to stay at the hospital with the last of their patients. She negotiated with the Union medical director, and was allowed to keep the hospital open for another two months.
- November 9, 1854 – Maud Howe Elliott born, American writer, co-author with her sister of a biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe, which won the 1917 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the first year a prize was given in this category. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party and a participant in the woman suffrage movement. Howe was also a founder of the Newport Art Association in Rhode Island, and served as the NAA’s secretary (1912-1942).
- November 9, 1871 – Florence R. Sabin born, American anatomist; pioneering woman in medical science; first female full professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine; first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences; first woman department head at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; chaired the Colorado Governors’ Committee on Health, spear-heading a campaign to pass health reform laws, named the ‘Sabin Health Laws’ in her honor, which drastically reduced tuberculosis cases in the state, expanded and improved hospital care, and became a blueprint for health reform in many other U.S. states.
- November 9, 1891 – Louisa E. Rhine born, American doctor of botany, who was initially a research fellow in plant physiology, but became the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences. After she and her husband, J.B. Rhine, trained with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society (1926-1927), then moved to Durham, North Carolina, where her husband helped launch Duke University’s parapsychology department. She stopped working in 1928 to raise their adopted son, and was co-founder of the Durham Nursery School, the first nursery school in South Carolina for children of working women, and also helped form the Durham Chapter of the League of Women Voters. In 1948, she returned to academic research, where she took over reading and answering letters from the public about the Duke parapsychology lab, at first part-time, but later she began full-time work researching and analyzing thousands of experiences from letters sent to her, and laying the groundwork for their classification.
- November 9, 1905 – Erika Mann born, German anti-Nazi writer who moved to Switzerland in 1933, then in 1935 entered a marriage of convenience with W.H. Auden to obtain a British passport after her German citizenship was rescinded by the Nazis; her 1938 book, School for Barbarians, criticized the Nazi education system; worked for the BBC during WWII, broadcasting in German, and after D-Day was a war correspondent traveling with the Allied forces, also covered the Nuremberg trials. After the war, she moved to the United States, but was branded a Communist by the McCarthy witch hunt, and moved back to Switzerland.
- November 9, 1914 – Hedy Lamarr born in Austria, Hollywood film star, and co-inventor with composer George Antheil of a radio guidance system using spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology that was twenty years ahead of the time, and became the basis for modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology.
- November 9, 1916 – Martha Settle Putney born, American lieutenant and historian who served as one of the first black members of the WWII Women’s Army Corps, and chronicled the history of African Americans in the U.S. armed forces.
- November 9, 1918 – Florence Chadwick born, legendary woman long distance swimmer; she swam the English Channel in 1950, beating the existing record by 71 minutes.
- November 9, 1922 – Dorothy Dandridge born, the first black American to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress, for her performance in the 1954 film Carmen Jones.
- November 9, 1923 – Elizabeth Hawley born, American journalist, and chronicler of Himalayan expeditions since the early 1960s, even though she never climbed a mountain. Respected by the international mountaineering community for her accurate and detailed records; Peak Hawley in Nepal is named for her.
- November 9, 1928 – Anne Sexton born, American poet; winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Live or Die; co-authored four children’s books with poet Maxine Kumin. She had a long battle with severe bipolar disorder. Her last poetry collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God, was published after her 1974 suicide.
- November 9, 1936 – Mary Travers born; singer-songwriter of Peter, Paul and Mary (1961-1970 and 1978-2009) who also had a successful solo career. The trio was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1999. She was a longtime supporter and ally of People for the American Way, and an advocate for peace, justice, and equal rights. Travers was diagnosed with leukemia in 2004, and died at age 72 in 2009.
- November 9, 1938 – Ti-Grace Atkinson born, American radical feminist, early member of National Organization for Women, but left over disputes about abortion and marriage inequalities; founder of The Feminists (1968-1973), advocate of political lesbianism; author of Amazon Odyssey.
- November 9, 1946 – Dame Marina Warner born, British novelist and historian whose non-fiction works frequently relate to feminism and myth; first woman elected president of the Royal Society of Literature since its founding in 1820.
- November 9, 1948 – Jane Humphries born, American-British Professor of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford; her fields are economic growth and development and the industrial revolution; Gender and Economics; Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution.
- November 9, 1952 – Gladys del Valle Requena born, United Socialist Party of Venezuela politician; Member of Venezuela’s Constituent National Assembly (2017-2020); Minister for Women and Gender Equality (2015-2016); Deputy of the National Assembly (2011-2015). In 1997, she was one of the founders of the Regional Institute for Women in Vargas (IREMUJER) and the Women’s Network in Vargas, and has frequently been a delegate to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). She is a professor of Spanish and literature who graduated from the Instituto Pedagógico de Caracas in 1977, and she graduated as a lawyer from the Central University of Venezuela in 1982, specializing in labor law.
- November 9, 1960 – Sara Franklin born, American anthropologist, who combines ethnographic methods and kinship theory with fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology, and stem cell research, as well as leading major research studies addressing the cultural and social dimensions of new reproductive and genetic technologies; among the first researchers to analyze the forms of social change associated with the introduction of new reproductive technologies in the 1980s.
- November 9, 1961 – Jill Dando born, English journalist, newsreader, and presenter of the BBC programme Crimewatch; after working as a print journalist (1980-1985), she worked in regional BBC television (1985-1988), then moved to national television news on BBC1 and BBC2 (1986-1995) before moving to presenting Crimewatch in 1995; also did episodes of other programmes. She was shot to death on April 26, 1999, outside her home. A local man was convicted and imprisoned for the murder, but was later acquitted after an appeal and retrial. The case remains open.
- November 9, 1969 – Allison Wolfe born, American singer-songwriter, writer, and podcaster; lead singer of Bratmobile and Partyline; one of the founders of the original Ladyfest music festival in Olympia, Washington, and has hosted the podcast I’m in the Band since 2017.
- November 9, 2014 – Women activists who were part of the Arab Spring are now protesting against the violence being used in an attempt to muzzle their calls for women’s rights. From “virginity tests” of protesters arrested in Cairo to the June 2014 assassination in Libya of Salwa Bugaighis, a prominent advocate for gender quotas in parliament and one of the organizers of the “Day of Rage” which launched the Libyan uprising, the backlash against women has increased. After the post-Mubarak elections in Egypt, the new assembly, dominated by the Islamist majority, produced a constitution in which the main reference to women was a promise the government would “guarantee the reconciliation between the duties of a woman toward her family and her work.” However, some of the younger men active in the Arab Spring uprisings have stood by their women compatriots in calling for more rights for women and their greater representation in government, even as sexual harassment and backlash against women’s progress has increased among more conservative men. Favorable coverage of anti-harassment and anti-assault activists on Egyptian satellite television has helped amplify public discussion of sexual violence at protests since Mubarak’s overthrow. The activists have been portrayed as positive role models, and women who were assaulted and visibly injured at protests have been interviewed on satellite talk shows.
- November 9, 2016 – Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, but loses her bid to become the first woman U.S. president to Donald Trump in the Electoral College vote, 227-304.
- November 9, 2019 – A Wall Street regulator is opening a probe into Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s credit card practices after outraged viral tweets from tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson alleged gender discrimination in the new Apple Card’s algorithms when determining credit limits. Hansson says he was given 20 times the credit limit his wife got, even though they file joint income tax returns, and she has a better credit score than he does. Hansson’s tweets prompted a tweet from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak saying that he got ten times the credit limit that his wife did, in spite of the fact that they have no separate bank or credit card accounts, or any separate assets.
- November 9, 2020 – After 10 years of fundraising and campaigning, the sculpture celebrating Mary Wollstonecraft has finally been unveiled, without fanfare because of the pandemic, near where she lived and worked, in Newington Green, north London. The sculpture, by one of Britain’s most important (and sometimes controversial) artists, Maggi Hambling, is a silvery naked woman emerging from a swirling mass of abstracted female figures. “It will definitely start a conversation,” said the writer Bee Rowlatt, who led the campaign to get the sculpture created and installed. “It will definitely promote comment and debate and that’s good, that’s what Mary did all her life.” Wollstonecraft was an important philosopher and essayist best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. Rowlatt said, “People haven’t heard of Mary Wollstonecraft and when you discover more about her, that is actually quite astonishing … Her enemies took aspects of her life and turned them against her … the fact that she had a child out of wedlock, that she tried to take her own life. They used this to completely smear her reputation to the point where she basically vanished for the best part of a century. It was a sustained misogynist attack that went on not just for months, but years … poems were circulated about her, she was lampooned in the press. It got to the point where no-one wanted to defend her legacy.” The suffragist Millicent Fawcett did lead efforts to restore Wollstonecraft’s reputation, a century after Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary – the novelist Mary Shelley. Over 90% of public sculptures in London commemorate men, so this was a step toward more public recognition of the contributions of British women.
- November 9, 2021 – Maria Syrengela, Greece’s Gender Equality Minister, announced a public campaign which urges victims of domestic violence and sexual assault to speak up, in response to a series of brutal femicides that stunned the nation. From January to October 2021, twelve women aged 19 to 75 were allegedly murdered by husbands or partners. After keeping silent for over two decades, Sofia Bekatorou, Olympic gold medalist in sailing, broke her silence about being abused by a senior member of the Hellenic Sailing Federation in a hotel room before the 2000 Sydney Games when she was 21 years old. After she went public with her story, other athletes, university students, and women in the arts, politics, and the media also began coming forward. The new initiative focuses on the message that there is help for women trapped in abusive relationships. Syrengela said, “So often women have been scared to speak. It was such a taboo they remained silent. Now, even in the last village of Greece, we are saying there are services that can help, that they can start a new life.” Greek prosecutors would now be encouraged to use every legal provision in the criminal code when dealing with femicides, and take aggravating circumstances into account.
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- November 10, 1520 – Fru Kristina (Christina Nilsdotter Gyllenstierna of Fogelvik, later called Kristina Gyllenstierna) is taken prisoner during the Stockholm Bloodbath, when 82 of those who had followed her husband, the Swedish regent Sten Sture the Younger, are beheaded as “heretics.” Sture had fought to keep Sweden independent from Denmark, until he was mortally wounded at the Battle of Bogesund early in 1520. Fru Kristina took over as leader of the fight against Danish King Christian II, commanding the castle and city of Stockholm as regent for her son. She was supported by the peasantry and the burgher class, and commanders of the most important fortresses of the realm had pledged their loyalty to her. After initial success against the Danish invaders at Balundsás, her army of mostly peasants was defeated after a prolonged and bloody battle at Uppsala. By late May, the city of Stockholm was under siege, but Kristina had managed to send her son to safety in Danzig just before the Danish fleet arrived. But after four months under siege, in September she was persuaded to capitulate in exchange for a letter of amnesty of an explicit and absolute character for her, her dead spouse, and all their followers for all acts of resistance against the Danish King, Christian II. On November 1, Christian II was proclaimed King of Sweden, but on November 7, the Swedish nobility was summoned to a meeting where they were betrayed, Christian claiming he was not breaking his word because the charges against them were made by Archbishop Trolle as crimes against the church for “heresy” not for treason against the state. The adult male members of her family, and many other Swedish Sture party followers were executed by beheading, and her husband’s remains dug up and burned at the stake as a heretic. Her mother was sentenced to be drowned, but was saved by ceding her property to the king. Kristina was offered a choice between being burned at the stake or buried alive, but Christian was advised to spare her life, so she was forced instead to cede a large part of her property to the King, who declared her “now dead to the world, for she is judged as the others for heresy.” She was held captive at Stockholm Castle with her children and mother until 1521, when they were transferred to the infamous Blåtårn ("Blue Tower") of Copenhagen Castle, along with a large number of other women and children related to those executed in the Stockholm Bloodbath, including her half sister and nieces. According to the Swedish statesman Per Brahe the Elder, it was rumored that they were half-starved, and only survived through the kindness of Isabella, the queen of Denmark. Whether the rumor was true or not, it was confirmed that many of the imprisoned women and children did die, including Kristina’s daughter, half-sister, and a niece, but the cause given out was the plague. In 1523, Christian II was deposed by Frederick I of Denmark, and Kristina’s nephew was elected as Gustav I of Sweden after the Swedish War of Liberation. In 1524, the women and children in the Blåtårn were released, including Kristina and her remaining relatives. But political unrest and rebellion continued, and Kristina was allied with various factions, attempting to regain the Swedish throne for her son, until her death in 1559 at age 64.
- November 10, 1620 – Ninon de l'Enclos born, French author, freethinker, and arts patron; her salon attracted the literati of Paris, including a young Molière; she had a series of love affairs with prominent and wealthy men, but they did not support her, she supported herself; however, her lack of discretion and outspoken opinions on religion got her in trouble, and she was imprisoned in the Madelonnettes Convent in 1656, but released when Queen Christina of Sweden interceded on her behalf; in her will, she left money for the 9-year-old son of her accountant so he could buy books – he grew up to be known as Voltaire.
- November 10, 1779 – Ann-Marie Javouhey born, French founder of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, to educate children, and later to found missions around the world. She is noted for her work in French Guiana, establishing a leper colony there, and her efforts to prepare the African slaves in Guiana for emancipation in 1835. There are now close to 3,000 nuns in the order, serving in over 60 countries. Ann-Marie Javouhey was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1950.
- November 10, 1874 – Idabelle Smith Firestone born, American composer and songwriter; “If I Could Tell You.”
- November 10, 1884 – Zofia Nałkowska born, Polish novelist, dramatist, and essayist; executive member of the Polish Academy of Literature (1933-1939); known for Medaliony (Medallions), a collection of eight stories published in Warsaw in 1946 describing the fate of people who survived the Nazi persecution, based on materials she collected while working at the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland.
- November 10, 1887 – Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu born, Romanian who was one of the first women engineers; at the Geological Institute of Romania, she started as an assistant, but later led several geology laboratories and participated in various field studies, including some that identified new resources of coal, shale, natural gas, chromium, bauxite, and copper. She also taught physics and chemistry.
- November 10, 1891 – The Woman's Christian Temperance Union meeting was held in Boston, and Frances Willard was elected as it second president. When the WCTU was founded in 1874, abstinence from alcohol was its sole goal. Willard called for the addition of woman’s suffrage to its mission, and later expanded the WCTU platform to include labor laws and prison reform.
- November 10, 1899 – Kate Seredy born in Hungary, Hungarian-American children’s book author and illustrator; she wrote most of her books in English, which was not her first language; noted for The Good Master, a 1936 Newbery Honor Book; The White Stag, winner of the 1938 Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award; and The Singing Tree, a 1940 Newbery Honor Book.
- November 10, 1908 – Noemi Gerstein born, Argentine sculptor, illustrator, and plastic artist; won the 1982 Konex Foundation Platinum Award, known for non-figurative sculpture.
- November 10, 1911 – California Amendment 8 (proposition 4), the most elaborate campaign ever mounted for woman suffrage, succeeds by just 3,587 votes.
- November 10, 1914 – Barbara Polk Washburn born, American mountaineer and cartographer; in 1947, she became the first woman climber to summit Denali (then called Mount McKinley) in Alaska. She was the only woman member of the team of mountaineers, scientists, photographers, and military men on the expedition. With her husband, Bradford Washburn, she completed a large-scale map of the Grand Canyon, published as a supplement in National Geographic magazine in July 1978. In 1980, the Washburns received the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the National Geographic Society. In 1981, the Washburns produced the most detailed and accurate map ever made of Mount Everest. Her memoir, The Accidental Adventurer: Memoir of the First Woman to Climb Mt. McKinley, was published in 2001. She died at age 100 in 2014.
- November 10, 1929 – Marilyn Bergman born, lyricist and songwriter with her husband-partner Alan Bergman; they they have two Academy Awards for Best Song, for the lyrics of “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind.” They were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980.
- November 10, 1931 – Lilly Pulitzer born, American fashion designer, known for bright prints and warm-weather clothing.
- November 10, 1949 – Ann Reinking born, American musical theatre dancer, singer, and choreographer; best known for her performances in Broadway musicals. Reinking made her professional debut at age 12 in an English Royal Ballet production of Giselle. She moved to New York at age 18, and was part of the corps de ballet at the Radio City Music Hall. At age 19, she made her Broadway debut in Cabaret. She was a chorus dancer in Coco and Pippin, where she was noticed by show's director and choreographer Bob Fosse. Reinking became Fosse's protégée and romantic partner until 1978. She was in the film All That Jazz, playing a character loosely based on her relationship with Fosse. She retired from performing in the mid-1990s, and began working as a choreographer and director. She won the 1907 Drama Desk Award for Best Choreography for the Broadway revival of Chicago, was co-nominated for a 1998 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for Fosse, and later was the co-winner of an Olivier Award for Best Theatre Choreographer when Fosse was produced in the London’s West End. Her son has Marfan syndrome, so Reinking became an active supporter of the Marfan Foundation, producing the 2009 documentary In My Hands: A Story of Marfan Syndrome. Reinking died in her sleep at age 71 in 2020.
- November 10, 1950 – Debra Hill born, American film producer and screenwriter whose best-known films are in the horror and action genres; noted for The Fog, Halloween II, and Halloween III.
- November 10, 1957 – Maria Grazia Spillantini born, Italian molecular neurologist; lecturer on molecular neurology at the University of Cambridge; research work on mechanisms that cause Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia; member of the Royal Society; won the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Research in 2000.
- November 10, 1958 – Deborah Cameron born, British linguist, professor in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford; her interests are in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and the relationship of language to gender and sexuality; author of Verbal hygiene, and The Myth of Mars And Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?
- November 10, 1960 – Maeve Sherlock born, Baroness Sherlock, British Labour Party Life Peer; Member of the House of Lords since 2010; Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (2007-2010); Chief Executive of the Refugee Council (2003-2006).
- November 10, 1971 – Holly Black born, American author and editor; noted for her children’s fantasy series, The Spiderwick Chronicles and the Modern Faerie Tales trilogy.
- November 10, 1971 – Nikki Karimi born, Iranian director, screenwriter, and actress; best known for writing and directing To Have or Not to Have, and as the director of One Night, screened at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section.
- November 10, 2015 – UK Women Members of Parliament are campaigning for new mothers to be allowed to breastfeed in the House of Commons, which they say is necessary to get more women to run for parliament. “This place is not representative at the moment. This is simply a fact. All of the people today speaking who have caring responsibilities – be that children, elderly relatives or partners – have made that perfectly clear,” said Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, as she called for the change, and for expanded parental leave for both women and men, during a Westminster Hall debate on how to encourage more women to enter politics. Currently, almost half of women MPs are childless, compared to less than a third of male MPs. In January, 2020, Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle said, “I’m of the view there isn’t a policy, my view is that it is up to a mother. I think it would be wrong for me as a male to dictate on that policy. If it happens, it happens. I wouldn’t be upset by it, let’s put it that way.”
- November 10, 2019 – Ilham Ehmed, president of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Council and member of the Syrian Women's Initiative for Peace and Democracy, criticized Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops supporting Kuridish allies, giving a green light to the Turkish invasion of north-east Syria which killed at least 250 Kurds, and displaced over 300,000 people, as an historic betrayal which will leave the U.S. struggling for allies across the Middle East. “If the U.S. presence in the area is not going to benefit us when it comes to stability, security, and [stopping] the genocide and ethnic cleansing, they won’t be welcomed,” Ehmed said through a translator. She also accused Britain of being almost invisible in its condemnation of the Turkish invasion, saying the UK appeared unwilling to offend Ankara because it fears isolation after leaving the European Union. “By occupying itself so much with Brexit, Britain seems to have isolated itself from the rest of the world,” Ahmad declared.
- November 10, 2020 – In another incident in Mexico where police opened fire on feminist protesters, four journalists were injured, including two who suffered bullet wounds, and eight protesters were detained. The protesters were trying to force their way into the Cancún City Hall during a demonstration against femicide, this time sparked by discovery of the dismembered body of 2o-year-old Bianca Lorenzana, the latest in a series of unsolved grisly crimes against women and girls in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. About 10 women are murdered every day in Mexico, causing the growth of an increasingly outspoken and confrontational feminist movement, while Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has continued to disparage gender issues and accuse feminist critics of allying with his conservative political opponents. According to Carlos Joaquín, governor of Quintana Roo, the gunfire was the responsibility of the local police chief, who allegedly ordered officers to open fire to disperse the crowd. “I completely reject any intimidation or attack against protesters,” Joaquín said in a tweet. “I gave orders that there be no attacks and no guns at the marches scheduled for today. I will investigate the irresponsible person who gave orders that contradicted that.” In mid-September, 2020, police in the municipality of Atizapán had attacked and beat a group of protesters. On September 28, Mexico City police teargassed and beat protesters marching for International Safe Abortion Day, and in early November police in Cuautitlán teargassed a group of about 40 people protesting against the femicide of 17-year-old Amber Viridiana Uicab.
- November 10, 2021 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif.) called for a series of investigations into Representative Paul Gosar after the Arizona Republican took to Twitter this week to show an animated video depicting violence against Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and President Joe Biden. The Speaker also urged House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to join Democrats in backing investigations into Gosar by both the House Ethics Committee and outside law enforcement agencies. “Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated,” Pelosi tweeted. “@GOPLeader should join in condemning this horrific video and call on the Ethics Committee and law enforcement to investigate.” The video features characters from a Japanese-style anime series, their faces replaced with pictures of Gosar, other Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez, and Biden. In one scene, Gosar’s character executes a character with the face of Ocasio-Cortez superimposed, by striking her in the back of the neck with a sword. In another scene, Gosar confronts a Biden figure head-on with two swords drawn.
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- November 11, 1441(?) – Charlotte of Savoy born, she became the second wife of Louis, Dauphin of France in 1451, but it was not a happy marriage. When Louis succeeded his father, Charles VII, in 1461, he abandoned Charlotte in Burgundy, and she had to borrow from Isabella of Bourbon the entourage and carts needed to travel to the French court, but Charles secluded her household at the Château of Amboise. Her library there would become the genesis of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France. She nevertheless served as regent during his absence in 1465, and she was a member of the royal regency council during the minority of her son, Charles, until her death at age 42 in December, 1483. Her daughter Anne took control of France until the coronation of Charles VIII in 1484.
- November 11, 1866 – Martha Annie Whiteley born, English chemist and mathematician; she was an advocate for women’s acceptance in the field of chemistry, and campaigned for their entry into the Chemical Society. She graduated from the Royal Holloway College for Women in 1890 with a B.Sc. in chemistry from the University of London, and remained there to earn an honor in an undergraduate degree in mathematical moderations from University of Oxford. Whiteley was science mistress as Wimbledon High School (1891-1900). She became science lecturer at a college for women teachers, St. Gabriel’s Training College, Camberwell (1901-1902), while also working on the organic chemistry of barbiturate compounds at the Royal College of Science, and earned her D.Sc. in 1902 from the Royal College of Science; her dissertation was on the preparation and properties of amides and oximes. In 1904, she joined the staff at the College of Science, one of only two women to stay on the professional staff when the college merged with the newly formed Imperial College in 1907. In 1912, Whiteley founded the Imperial College Women’s Association with help from rector Sir Alfred Keogh, an association devoted to helping the women of the college gain equal treatment in the field of chemistry. Whiteley fought for everything from women’s cloakroom facilities at the college to admittance of women into the Fellowship of the Chemical Society, but had only limited success with the society until the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 ended prohibiting women from professions because of their gender. During WWI, the chemical laboratories at the Imperial College were utilized to analyze samples collected from battlefields and areas that had been bombed. Whitely and her colleagues focused on analyzing lachrymators and irritants. She worked with Frances Micklethwait and six other women scientists in an experimental trench testing mustard gas and explosives. The work was hazardous: Whiteley wounded her arm while testing mustard gas on herself. She also worked on developing syntheses of drugs that had previously been imported from Germany including beta-Eucaine, Phenacetin and Procaine. In 1920, Whiteley received the honor of the Order of British Empire for her scientific contributions to war efforts. Whiteley retired from the Imperial College in 1934, but continued work in editing and contributing to Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry with co-author Sir Jocelyn Field Thorpe. After Thorpe’s death in 1939, Whiteley became the principal editor of twelve volumes of the fourth edition of Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry. She completed her contributions at the age of 88 in 1954, and died in 1956 at age 89. The Royal Society of Chemistry identified her as one of the society’s 175 Faces of Chemistry.
- November 11, 1891 – Grunya Sukhareva born, Soviet child psychiatrist; noted for being the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. It was published in German in 1926, and Sula Wolff translated it into English in 1996; Sukhareva founded a Faculty of Pediatric Psychiatry in the Central Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education. In 1938, she led a clinic specializing in childhood psychosis under the Russian SFSR Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
- November 11, 1895 – Wealthy Consuelo Babcock born (Wealthy is her first name, not an adjective), American mathematician; received a master’s in 1922 and a doctorate in 1926, both from the University of Kansas, where she taught for 30 years; the university’s Wealthy Babcock Mathematics Library was named in her honor.
- November 11, 1896 – Shirley Graham Du Bois born, African-American author, playwright, composer, and civil and human rights activist; director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project of the WPA; member of Sojourners for Truth and Justice, which worked for global women’s liberation, and the American Communist Party. She married her second husband, W.E.B. Dubois, in 1951, and they emigrated to Ghana, where he died in 1963. After a coup d’état in 1967, she left, and later became a citizen of Tanzania. Noted for her books There Was Once a Slave, about Frederick Douglass, and Zulu Heart.
- November 11, 1914 – Daisy Gatson Bates born, American civil rights activist, publisher, and journalist. She and her husband founded the Arkansas State Press, a statewide weekly newspaper in 1941, which ran civil rights stories on its front page, highlighted achievements of black Arkansans, covered all the Black Arkansas social news, and reported on violations of the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings. In 1952, she was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches. Because of their newspaper, and because she was the spokesperson for the Arkansas NAACP, during the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957, white advertisers withdrew their ads from the paper, and the KKK twice burned large crosses on their front lawn. She became an adviser to the Little Rock Nine, who were harassed by mobs and kept out of Little Rock High School by the Arkansas National Guard, called out by Governor Orval Faubus. According to U.S. Attorney for the Eastern Arkansas District Orso Cobb, “Mrs. Daisy Bates and her charges arrived at the school … admitted through one of the less conspicuous entrances. Seconds later, a white female student climbed through a first-story window and yelled that she wasn’t going to school with ‘niggers’… television cameras showed a crowd that was calm. None was visibly armed in any way … some eight agitators known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation ... were there for no good purpose but to create as much chaos as possible. They had no children in the school; they were provocateurs … “Let’s get those niggers out of there.”… The agitators first tried to bully the police into defecting … Tempers began to rise … The leaders of each assault on the police lines were collared and put into police wagons and taken to jail. More than forty persons were taken into custody. No one in the crowd tried to intervene to prevent the arrests and removal of the troublemakers. No one in the crowd had clubs or weapons of any kind. These two points convinced me that 98 percent of the people there were not part of an organized mob.” “The perseverance of Mrs. Bates and the Little Rock Nine during these turbulent years sent a strong message throughout the South that desegregation worked and the tradition of racial segregation under ‘Jim Crow’ would no longer be tolerated in the United States of America.”
- November 11, 1915 – Anna Jacobson Schwartz born, American economist, monetary expert, and author. She worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City, and as a writer for the New York Times. She was the co-author with Milton Friedman of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, considered one of the most influential economics books of the 20th century.
- November 11, 1917 – Madeleine Damerment born, a WWII French spy who served in the French Resistance and was trained by Britain’s Special Operations Executive as a courier. She was arrested by the Gestapo, who had captured SOE wireless operators and used their equipment to discover the operation that landed her and two other agents by parachute in France in 1944. She was sent to Karlsruhe Prison for four months, then transferred to Dachau with SOE agents Yolande Beekman, Noor Inayat Khan, and Eliane Plewman, where they were all executed on September 13, 1944. After the war, Damerment was posthumously honored by the French government with the Légion d'honneur, and the Croix de guerre, and the British awarded her the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct.
- November 11, 1926 – Maria Teresa de Filippis born, Italian woman pioneer in auto racing, the first woman to race in Formula One. She was active in 1958-1959, participating five times in the World Championship Grand Prix.
- November 11, 1930 – Mildred Dresselhaus born, American physicist and academic, known for work on graphite and carbon nanotubes; first woman Institute Professor and professor emerita of physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She won numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the Vannevar Bush Award.
- November 11, 1937 – Alicia Ostriker born, American Jewish feminist, poet, and scholar; professor of English at Rutgers University since 1972; noted for her poetry collections: Once More Out of Darkness, which featured poems about pregnancy and childbirth; A Dream of Springtime; and the feminist classic The Mother-Child Papers, inspired by the birth of her son during the Vietnam War, just weeks after the Kent State shootings. Her collection, The Imaginary Lover, won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her non-fiction work includes Writing Like a Woman, which explores the poetry of contemporary poets like Anne Sexton, May Swenson, and Adrienne Rich; and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Vision and Revisions, which takes a look at the Torah, which was followed by For the Love of God. In 2018, she was named as the New York State Poet.
- November 11, 1940 – Barbara Boxer born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Senator from California (1993-2017), who served on the Senate Environment Committee (2015-2017), and as Chair the Senate Ethics Committee (2007-2015). She was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1983-1993). Boxer was on the Marin County Board of Supervisors (1976-1982), and was the board’s first woman president. She is the author of two novels, A Time to Run, and Blind Trust.
- November 11, 1942 – Diane Wolkstein born, American folklorist and children’s author; she was New York City’s official Storyteller (1968-1971), and hosted a radio show, Stories From Many Lands (1968-1980). Noted for The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales; White Wave: A Chinese Tale; The Red Lion: A Tale of Ancient Persia; and The Magic Wings: A Tale from China. Wolkstein was in Taiwan to research Chinese folk tales when she underwent emergency heart surgery, and died at age 70.
- November 11, 1954 – Mary Gaitskill born, American novelist, essayist, and short story writer; noted for her short story collection, Bad Behavior, and her novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Because They Wanted To, and her essay in Harper’s magazine, “On Not Being a Victim,” about rape.
- November 11, 1958 – Kathy Lette born in Australia, became a British citizen in 2011; novelist, newspaper columnist and sitcom writer; noted for her novels Mad Cow, and How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints).
- November 11, 1960 – Cristina Odone born in British Kenya, British-Italian journalist, editor, and author; Founder and CEO of the National Parenting Organization. She had been Editor of The Catholic Herald, Deputy Editor of the New Statesman and director of the Centre for Character and Values at the Legatum Institute. Known for her novels: The Shrine; A Perfect Wife; and The Good Divorce Guide.
- November 11, 1964 – Margarete Bagshaw born, American artist, a descendant of the Tewa people of the Santa Clara Pueblo, granddaughter of noted artist Pablita Velarde; known for her paintings and pottery. She died at age 50 in 2015, after a stroke and being diagnosed with brain cancer.
- November 11, 1977 – Marsha Mehran born Mahsa Mehran in Tehran; Iranian novelist who wrote in English. Her parents were member of the Baháʼí faith, and the family left Iran in 1979 to escape persecution, and migrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina. When her parents divorced in 1990s, she and her mother moved to New York. At age 17, Mehran’s permanent visa was revoked for an infraction, and she moved to Ireland. Her debut novel, Pomegranate Soup, was published in 2005. Rosewater and Soda Bread, the sequel to her first book, was published in 2008. She was found dead in her rented house in 2014, but the autopsy was inconclusive. Her third novel, The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty, was published posthumously.
- November 11, 1979 – The Bethune Museum and Archives opens in Washington D.C., a center for African-American women’s history, named in honor of Mary McLeod Bethune.
- November 11, 1992 – The General Synod of the Church of England votes to ordain women priests. The first women are ordained in 1994.
- November 11, 1993 – The Vietnam Women’s Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C., after being conceived by former army combat nurse Diane Carlson Evans and sculpted by Glenna Goodacre to honor the thousands of American women who voluntarily served during the Vietnam era. One Army nurse, 1st Lt. Sharon Lane, was killed by enemy fire during a rocket attack in 1969, and seven other U.S. nurses died in-country of illness or injury.
- November 11, 2013 – Red Lipstick Day is launched to support the survivors of sexual violence around the world.
- November 11, 2013 – Malala Yousafzai’s memoir, I Am Malala, is an international best-seller, but it was banned in private schools in Pakistan, her home country. School administrators complained that the book degrades Islam and that its teenage author acted like a “propaganda tool of the West.”
- November 11, 2019 – Lindy West’s book, The Witches Are Coming, appeared in bookstore windows across the U.S. Noted as “one of the funniest feminists alive today,” West took on the backlash against the #MeToo movement, and a whole lot of other contemporary issues, and combined them with episodes from her life.
- November 11, 2020 – Georgia became a major battleground state in the 2020 election, mainly because of hard work and fundraising efforts by black women like Stacey Abrams, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, then founded the Fair Fight Initiative; Helen Butler of Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda; Nsé Ufot of NewGAProject; Deborah Scott of @GA_STANDUP; and Tamieka Atkins of ProGeorgia – leaders of the campaigns that registered 800,000 voters, key to building a new Democratic coalition in Georgia.
- November 11, 2021 – President Joe Biden announced a number of nominees to serve in key roles in his administration, including Amanda Bennett, for Chief Executive Officer at the United States Agency for Global Media; Geeta Rao Gupta, for Ambassador at Large for Global Women’s Issues at the Department of State; Glenna Gallo, for Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services at the Department of Education; and Erin McKee, for Assistant Administrator for Europe and Eurasia at the United States Agency for International Development. As of October 2022, only Amanda Bennett and Erin McKee are currently serving in the offices to which they were nominated.
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- November 12, 1028 – Zoe Porphyrogenita became empress consort to Romanos III Argyros, Byzantine Emperor. When he died in 1034, she married the next Emperor, Michael IV, who promptly exiled her, causing a popular revolt which dethroned him. Zoe served as co-ruler with her younger sister in their own right from April 21 to June 12, 1042. Zoe then married a third time, and her new husband became her co-ruler as Constantine IX, until her death in her 70s in 1050.
- November 12, 1606 – Jeanne Mance born, French Canadian settler and nurse who was one of the founders of Montreal. After taking patients into her home (1642-1645), she received a contribution that enabled her to found the city’s first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal in 1645. She returned to France twice to seek financial support for the hospital, and recruited three sisters of the Religieuses hospitalières de Saint-Joseph to provide care for the patients so she could devote more time to directing the operation of the hospital.
- November 12, 1651 – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz born, Hieronymite nun of New Spain, self-taught scholar, feminist philosopher, composer, and poet; called “The Mexican Phoenix”; Her criticism of misogyny and the hypocrisy of men led to her condemnation by the Bishop of Puebla, and in 1694 she was forced to sell her collection of books and focus on charity towards the poor; she died the next year from the plague while treating her sister nuns.
- November 12, 1815 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton born, American suffragist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the women’s rights movement. She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which launched the woman suffrage campaign. Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1892-1900), but she was also an advocate for women’s parental and custody rights, property, wage, and employment rights, divorce, and birth control. Stanton was the author/editor of the controversial The Woman’s Bible, a challenge to the traditional view that women should be subservient to men.
- November 12, 1887 – Bertha McNeill born, African-American civil rights activist, newspaper columnist, and educator. She was chair of the Interracial Committee of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF) from 1932 to the late 1950s, and also served as national vice president of WILPF. McNeill was a co-editor of the Journal of the National Association of College Women, and a board member of the Jane Addams Peace Association.
- November 12, 1905 – Louise McPhetridge Thaden born, American aviation pioneer; she held the women’s records for altitude, endurance, and speed; won the first Women’s Air Derby, nicknamed the Powder Puff Derby in 1929, but one pilot was killed, so women were barred from racing from 1930-1935. In 1936, the first year women are allowed in the race, she won the Bendix Trophy Race, setting a new world record of 14 hours, 55 minutes from New York City to Los Angeles, and the pilot Laura Ingalls (not the author) came in second.
- November 12, 1914 – Sylvi Saimo born, member of the Finnish parliament (1966-1978); the first female Finnish Olympic Champion at the 1952 Summer Olympics, held in Helsinki, where she won a gold medal in the K-1 500 meter single-person canoe sprint.
- November 12, 1939 – Lucia Popp born as Lucia Poppová, Slovak lyric coloratura soprano. She gave performances at the Vienna State Opera, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, and La Scala, and was also highly regarded as a recitalist and lieder singer. She died of brain cancer at age 54 in 1993.
- November 12, 1941 – Carol Gluck born, American historian, author, and authority on Japan; books including Rekishi de kangaeru (Thinking with History) and Showa: the Japan of Hirohito; a founding member of the Committee on Global Thought.
- November 12, 1941 – Jenny McLeod born, New Zealand composer and music theorist known for her compositions for orchestra and chorus Earth and Sky, Under the Sun, and The Emperor and the Nightingale, and for her opera Hohepa.
- November 12, 1945 – Judith Roitman born, American mathematician specializing in set theory, topology, and Boolean algebra; has run workshops for elementary and high school teachers on teaching mathematics; served in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics writing group which produced Principles and Standards for School Mathematics; received the Louise Hay Award in recognition of her work as a math educator; she is also a poet, her collection No Face: Selected and New Poems was published in 2008.
- November 12, 1946 – Alexandra Charles born Thyra Margareta Gefvert, Swedish owner of a series of nightclubs where many Swedish entertainers made their debuts. She is the chair of several charitable foundations, and was awarded a medal in 2015 by King Carl XVI Gustaf for her work for women’s health.
- November 12, 1958 – Megan Mullally born, American actress, comedian, singer, and co-author with husband Nick Offerman of the New York Times bestseller The Greatest Love Story Ever Told. She is best known for playing Karen Walker on the sitcom Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-2020), winning two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series out of eight nominations. She also hosted the talk show The Megan Mullally Show (2006-2007), and appeared in the films Smashed, The Kings of Summer, and Why Him?
- November 12, 1961 – Nadia Comăneci born, Romanian gymnast and coach; at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, she became the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0, and won three gold medals. She went on to win a total of nine Olympic gold medals before retiring from competition. In 1989, she defected to the U.S., but after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania welcomed her on a visit as a national hero. She has had dual Romanian and U.S. citizenship since 2001, is a sports ambassador for Romania, and a member of the International Gymnastics Federation Foundation. She and her husband Bart Conner own and operate the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy and the Perfect 10 Production Company. She was an analyst for the 2016 Olympic Games. Comăneci is the founder and main fundraiser for the Nadia Comăneci Children's Clinic in Bucharest, which provides low-cost and free medical and social support to Romanian children, and is also involved with the Special Olympics.
- November 12, 1962 – Mariella Frostrup born in Norway, Norwegian-Scottish journalist and presenter, best known as a British television and radio presenter of arts programmes. She is an active supporter of Oxfam, Comic Relief, and The Children’s Society. Frostrup is a co-founder of the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust, which works in partnership with grassroots organizations like Femmes Africa Solidarité, which supports women’s empowerment and leadership in building peace.
- November 12, 1962 – Naomi Wolf born, American author, journalist, feminist, and former political advisor to Bill Clinton; she was written for The Nation, The New Republic, and The Huffington Post, and is noted for her books The End of America, and Vagina: A New Biography.
- November 12, 1964 – Barbara Stühlmeyer born, German musicologist, church musician, and authority on Hildegard of Bingen; since 1995 she has been a contributor and editor of the journal Karfunkel; co-author of Tugenden und Laster (Virtues and Vices), and author of many books on Hildegard von Bingen.
- November 12, 1964 – Paula Murphy set the women’s land speed record 243.44 MPH in Walt Arfon’s 10,000 horsepower, J-46 jet-powered ‘Avenger’ at the Bonneville Salt Flats. “I had to sit with a pillow behind me so I could reach the pedals, which meant that my head was sticking out of the cockpit, and at over 200 mph the pressure on your neck muscles is incredible,” she said. “That was a scary ride.”
- November 12, 1967 – Iryna Khalip born in Belarus when it was part of the USSR; Belarusian journalist, reporter, and editor in the Minsk bureau of Novaya Gazeta, known for her criticism of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. She has been regularly harassed, detained, and beaten by the Belarusian KGB and authorities. In 2011, she was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for her role in protests following the 2010 Belarus election. In 2009, she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.
- November 12, 1976 – Judith Holofernes born as Judith Holfeder-Roy, German singer-songwriter known for her lyrics, which often address social issues; lead singer of Wir sind Helden. She is an active supporter of Tibet Initiative, a German campaign for human rights and self-determination in Tibet, and of Viva con Agua, a German charity for global clean drinking water. She performed at an anti-nuclear power demonstration following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
- November 12, 1982 – Anne Hathaway born, American actress and activist for gender equality and against child marriage. She won the 2013 Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA Award for her supporting role in Les Misérables. She is a board member of the Lollipop Theatre Network, which brings films to children in hospitals, a UN Goodwill Ambassador for gender equality, and was honored by the Human Rights Campaign for her efforts. In 2010, she teamed with the World Bank on The Girl Effect, a development program to empower girls to continue their education and increase their employment options. She is a supporter of LGBTQ rights, a supporter of Freedom to Marry, an advocacy group for same-sex marriage, as well as speaking out against the bullying of gay students, and discrimination toward transgender children. Hathaway was one of the prominent women in Hollywood who set up the Time’s Up initiative. In 2022, after the Russian invasion, she made donations to the Red Cross of Ukraine, UNICEF, and Save the Children.
- November 12, 2004 – During the Iraq War, battle captain Tammy Duckworth and four others, on the last run of the day ferrying troops in a Blackhawk helicopter, were hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The explosion vaporized her right leg, blew her left leg into the instrument panel, and badly damaged her right arm. Her co-pilot managed to get the helicopter down on the ground in an open space, only about 500 yards from where they had been hit. Her injuries were the most severe – but all the crew survived. Another helicopter which was flying with them, picked everybody up, and got them to Baghdad in less than an hour. Fast action by both crews saved her life and she went on to serve as Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2009-2011) and since 2017, as U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
- November 12, 2010 – Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera, G20 adviser, is the co-developer with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa of the Africa Free Trade Area initiative. The G20 is a group of twenty of the world's largest economies that meets regularly to coordinate global policy on trade, health, climate, and other issues. Vadera and Zuma’s proposal would replace the current three distinct free trade areas within Africa with a single free trade entity spanning 26 countries. A battle earlier in 2o10 – in part waged by Vadera – has ensured that the issue of international development is now appearing on the G20's agenda, having previously been seen exclusively as the preserve of the G8. Leaders are expected to agree on a "nine-pillar" plan that to guide in strengthening cooperation between developed and emerging economies. The nine pillars are infrastructure building, trade promotion, human resources development, private investment, job creation, domestic resources mobilisation, growth with resilience efforts, financial inclusion, and knowledge sharing. Vadera, a former investment banker, points out that South Korea is one of only two countries that transformed itself from a low income country to a high-income country in just one generation. She argues that it achieved this not by following the traditional prescriptions of the World Bank or the IMF, but by using international trade as an essential component of its development policy. She argues that it is not enough to rely on aid over the long term; instead, greater reliance on domestic resources is critical to build a more resilient economy and implement a home-grown development agenda.
- November 12, 2019 – Ekiti State in southwest Nigeria has adopted a policy to ban the expulsion of girls from schools during and after pregnancy, an important step in ending the longstanding discriminatory practice. Most of Nigeria’s staggering 10.5 million out-of-school children are girls, because of the high adolescent pregnancy rates in Nigeria, with girls between the ages of 15 and 19 accounting for 145 out of every 1,000 births. Ekiti State’s adoption of the “Operation Keep Girls in School” policy is a major first step, but more efforts are needed to create awareness of the policy among communities, school management officials, teachers, and girls, and to monitor all the schools to ensure that they are enforcing this important new policy.
- November 12, 2020 – Carrie Gracie, former BBC China Editor, called the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation into pay discrimination at the BBC a “whitewash” after the broadcaster was cleared of wrongdoing. She won substantial back pay in 2018 after going public with details of how she was out-earned by equivalent male journalists at the BBC. Since her win, the BBC has given raises to over 700 women employees who complained. Most cases were settled through internal processes, but some women were forced to take lengthy legal action. Gracie said the methodology used by EHRC in its investigation was baffling. Earlier in 2020, BBC presenter Samira Ahmed won a £700,000 employment tribunal case against the corporation after the BBC was unable to explain why she was paid less than her male counterpart Jeremy Vine for doing equivalent work. Despite this, the EHRC concluded its 18-month investigation by saying it had found no evidence of unequal pay, having carried out in-depth re-examinations of just 10 pay complaints against the BBC. Rebecca Hilsenrath, EHRC’s chief executive, said, “We did not find any unlawful acts where we looked.” The EHRC acknowledged that illegal unequal pay may have happened elsewhere but as a publicly funded body it was limited in the number of case studies it could look into. Suzanne Baxter, who oversaw the investigation, said her team tested whether the BBC had complied with equality legislation in each of the 10 pay grievance cases. and concluded, “We found that the decisions that they’d made did stand up and were compliant with the legislation.” The BBC Women group said it was disappointed with the limited nature of the investigation: “Out of over 1,000 complaints, the EHRC looked in depth at only 10 cases and accepted the BBC’s excuses for why these were not ‘likely’ to be equal pay cases ... New cases are coming forward and women are still heading to court. We fight on.” Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said, “There will be many NUJ members who read this report and feel it doesn’t address their lived experiences. The fact that so many individual settlements, including Samira Ahmed’s NUJ-backed tribunal win, have taken place underlines the clear problems that have existed.”
- November 12, 2021 – Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny terminated Britney Spears' conservatorship effective immediately, freeing the 39-year-old pop star from the legal binds that allowed her father and his team to make decisions about her work, who she could have contact with, and how to spend her money since 2008.
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- November 13, 1715 – Dorothea Erxleben born, first woman medical doctor in Germany, instructed from an early age by her father, she was inspired when Italian scientist Laura Bassi became a university professor to fight for her right to practice medicine. In 1742, she published a tract arguing that women should be allowed to attend university. She became the first German woman to receive a PhD in 1754. After being admitted to study by a dispensation of Frederick the Great, Erxleben received her M.D. from the University of Halle. She went on to analyze the obstacles preventing women from studying, among them raising children and housekeeping.
- November 13, 1869 – Helene Stöcker born in Germany, head of the Bund für Mutterschutz (League for The Protection of Mothers), a pioneering reproductive rights organization that advocated equality under the law for illegitimate children, homes for unwed mothers, sex education, access to contraceptives, legalization of abortion, and the right to divorce. In 1908 it was renamed Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (adding ‘Sexual Reform’). In 1923, Stöcker founded War Resisters International; she was also a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
- November 13, 1869 – Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams born in Russia, liberal politician, writer, and feminist – a leading campaigner for the All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality. She left Russia in 1920, disillusioned with communism and socialism, and lived in the UK and the U.S., founding the Russian Liberation Committee, and raising money for Russian orphans.
- November 13, 1876 – Anne Dallas Dudley born, American leader in the Southern U.S. of the campaign for women’s suffrage; in 1911, she became a co-founder and first president of the Nashville Equal Suffrage League; as the league’s president, she organized and led large May Day suffrage parades, and was a major player in bringing the National Suffrage Convention to Nashville in 1914, one of the largest conventions ever held in Nashville up to that time. In 1915, she was elected president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, and she helped get a suffrage amendment introduced in the legislature to change the state constitution. In spite of the determined campaign she led, the amendment was defeated, but a later measure to give women the right to vote in presidential and municipal elections was eventually passed by the state legislature in 1919. In 1917, Dudley became the 3rd Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she contributed significantly to advancing legislation on the issue of women’s suffrage. In 1920, Dudley, along with Catherine Talty Kenny and Abby Crawford Milton, led the “Yellow Rose” campaign in Tennessee to approve ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On August 18, Tennessee became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the amendment, giving women the right to vote throughout the country. Following the success of the suffrage campaign, Dudley became the first woman associate chair of the Tennessee Democratic Committee. She was also selected as the first woman delegate-at-large to the Democratic National Convention in 1920. After that, Dudley’s involvement in politics declined, and she focused on civic and charitable causes. She was an active worker for the American Red Cross during WWII, and later served as board chair of the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities. She died in 1955 of a coronary occlusion at age 78.
- November 13, 1886 – Mary Wigman born Marie Wiegmann, German choreographer and dancer, a pioneer of modern dance and of dance therapy. Considered a major figure in the history of modern dance, and an iconic figure of Weimar German culture.
- November 13, 1906 – Eva Zeisel born in Hungary, American industrial ceramics designer whose work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and many other museums around the world. She had been working in the Russian ceramics industry for several years when she was arrested in 1936, falsely accused of participating in an assassination plot against Joseph Stalin. She was held in prison for 16 months, 12 of them in solitary confinement. In September 1937, she was deported to Vienna, Austria. A few months after her arrival in Vienna the Nazis invaded, and she took the last train out. She reunited with her husband-to-be, Hans Zeisel, in England, where they married. They sailed for the U.S. with $67 between them. She got a position teaching at the Pratt Institute in New York. Then in 1942, she was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and Castleton China to design a set of modern porcelain, undecorated china that would be worthy of exhibition at MoMA, and then produced commercially for sale by Castleton. "New Shapes in Modern China Designed by Eva Zeisel," the first one-woman exhibition at MoMA, opened in 1946, and was widely praised. It established her reputation in the U.S., but wartime constraints on materials delayed production until 1949. It was followed by several decades of very popular modern designs commissioned by international manufacturers of dinnerware and tableware accessories. In the 1980s, a 50-year retrospective exhibit of her work organized by Musée des Arts Décoratifs in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution traveled through the US, Europe, and Russia. In 2005, Zeisel won the Lifetime Achievement award from the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum.
- November 13, 1914 – Mary Phelps Jacobs received a U.S. patent for a “backless brassiere,” but she was unable to market it successfully on her own, so she sold the patent to Warner Company for $1500. She divorced her first husband, Richard Peabody, and later married Harry Crosby, changed her name to Caresse Crosby, and co-founded Black Sun Press.
- November 13, 1920 – Guillermina Bravo born, Mexican ballet dancer, choreographer, and theatrical director, co-founder of Academia de la Danza Mexicana.
- November 13, 1931 – Joan Lestor born, British Labour Party MP (1966-1983 and 1987-1997); Chair of the Labour Party (1977-1978). In June 1997, Lestor was created a life peer as Baroness Lestor of Eccles, of Tooting Bec in the London Borough of Wandsworth. In March 1998, she died at age 66 of motor neuron disease.
- November 13, 1955 – Whoopi Goldberg born Caryn Johnson, American comedian, actress, author, and television host; one of the few entertainers to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony, and an Oscar; advocate for human rights and LGBT rights, and against the use of children in armed conflicts.
- November 13, 1959 – Caroline Goodall born, English screenwriter and actress; has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre; noted for her screenplays for The Bay of Silence and Dreams of Leaving.
- November 13, 1961 – Kim Polese born, American technology executive; Chair of CrowdSmart Inc, a technology-based seed stage investment company, and Chair of ClearStreet Inc, which develops products and tools to help reduce employer and employee spending on healthcare; co-founder and CEO of Marimba with the creators of the Java programming language; recipient of the 2010 Innovator Award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
- November 13, 1966 – Susanna Haapoja born, Finnish politician, who served two terms as a Centre Party MP (2003-2009) before her death from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 42.
- November 13, 1967 – Bonnie Ntshalintshali born, South African Artist, noted for ceramic works and paintings; she had polio as a child, so her mother encouraged her to develop her artistic skills to earn a living; she won the Corobrik National Ceramic Award in 1988; she died from an AIDS-related illness in 1999.
- November 13, 1969 – Ayaan Hirsi Ali born in Somalia, Dutch-American author, scholar, activist, feminist, and politician, known for her vocal criticism of Islam, and as an advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor killings, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. She is the founder of the AHA Foundation, an organisation for the defense of women’s rights. Hirsi Ali immigrated to the U.S. and became a U.S. citizen in 2013. Her 2006 autobiography, Infidel, which chronicles her escape from an arranged marriage and early years in the Netherlands, was followed by Nomad in 2010, which tells the story of her journey from an Islamic childhood to America.
- November 13, 1974 – Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, is killed in a suspicious car crash.
- November 13, 1981 – Rivkah born as Rivkah Greulich, American cartoonist and graphic novelist; noted for her teen series Steady Beat.
- November 13, 2014 – Over a three year period, five New Orleans police detectives in charge of investigating sex crimes dismissed 840 out of 1,290 sex crime calls as “miscellaneous” and did no follow-up, according to a city inspector general report; in New York, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced that he would dedicate $35 million for helping U.S. prosecutors clear a backlog, testing tens of thousands of rape kits.
- November 13, 2017 – A fifth woman came forward to accuse Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager and he was a prosecutor in his 30s. The new accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, said in a news conference that Moore was a regular at the restaurant where she worked at age 16, and that one night he offered her a ride home. She said Moore parked the car and groped her as she fought, and squeezed her neck “attempting to force my head onto his crotch.” Moore called the allegation false and part of a partisan “witch hunt.” The New Yorker reported that Roy Moore was once banned from an Alabama mall, allegedly for bothering teenage girls.
- November 13, 2019 – In the UK, the Center for Women’s Justice, and the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), brought legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), alleging covert changes in practice adversely impacted rape prosecution rates. The Law Gazette published findings of evidence which supports the charges made by the two women’s rights groups. Despite record numbers of rape allegations reported to the police, prosecution rates have fallen to their lowest since records began. In the last three years, the number of convictions has more than halved. This shocking failure of the criminal justice system promoted calls for investigation from women’s organisations throughout the UK, fully supported and endorsed by Rape Crisis England and Wales and Trafford Rape Crisis. In light of the evidence uncovered, the CPS acknowledges the use of ‘conviction levels of ambition’ for rape cases of 61-62%, in a bid to improve their rape conviction rates. The code of practice for prosecutors usually sets this at 50% as standard: “The test ought to be ‘more likely than not’… they are in violation of their own code,” observes Harriet Wistrich, director at the Centre for Women’s Justice. In practical terms, this means that prosecutors were being given a ‘perverse incentive’ to drop ‘weak’ cases and pursue fewer, but stronger, cases in a bid to increase their conviction rate. Tens of thousands of cases may have been dropped as a result of this. Rebecca Hitchen, for EVAW, said: “This is a shocking admission from the CPS, as it acknowledges what we have repeatedly claimed – that performance targets linked to conviction rates will result in CPS prosecutors charging ‘stronger’ cases and dropping ‘weaker’ ones in order to make itself look better. This is why the numbers of rape cases reaching trial has plummeted and why we are judicial reviewing the CPS.” Shadow Attorney General Baroness Shami Chakrabarti declared: “We’ve got to understand that yes, rape cases are some of the hardest, but they are also some of the most serious under criminal law: after murder, what could be more serious? ... We need a proper investigation into what’s been going on. This is an absolute scandal … I am almost shaking in shock at this.”
- November 13, 2020 – The Miami Marlins announced that Kim Ng would be the new general manger of the team, making her the first woman general manager of a Major League Baseball team in the league’s history, and the second person of Asian descent to manage an MLB team. Her career in baseball began in 1990 as an intern/research assistant at the Chicago White Sox, but she was on the University of Chicago’s women’s softball team during her four years there, and her senior thesis for her Public Policy major was on Title IX. The White Sox hired her on a full-time basis in 1991, and by 1995 she was the club's assistant director of baseball operations. She remained with Chicago through 1996, at which point she started working for the American League as director of waivers and records, approving transactions and helping with the application of rules. In 1998, the New York Yankees hired her as their assistant general manager. She was 29 years old, so she was the youngest person hired for the job. After the 2001 season, Ng joined the Dodgers organization as vice president and assistant general manager. She worked for the team through the 2010 season, and gained experience handling arbitration cases, was part of the decision-making on trades and free agency, and oversaw pro scouting. In 2011, she joined MLB as senior vice president of baseball operations – the highest-ranking woman working in the Commissioner’s Office.
- November 13, 2021 – Fatima Ahmadi only stopped yelling when the Taliban held a knife to her child’s throat, and told her: “Shut up, or we will kill your son.” They burst into the former policewoman’s Kabul home on a September morning, demanding she hand over her weapons. She told them she had no guns at home, but they said she was lying, ransacked the house, then began beating her, pulling out handfuls of hair, and when she would not stop shouting, they grabbed her nine-year-old son. The knife was pressed so violently into his throat it left a red welt. Ahmadi’s back was covered with bruising from an assault so vicious that she lost control of her bodily functions. The men eventually left, but warned her: “We will come back.” A divorced single mother of two young children, Ahmadi knew there at been several murders of female police officers since the Talban returned to power, so she went into hiding, then managed to flee with her two boys to Pakistan. But their visa was only valid for 60 days and she was terrified about what would come next; Pakistani authorities were deporting Afghans without documents. She tried to apply for refugee status in Pakistan through the United Nations, but had no response. Asylum applications to western countries that sponsored police training, and encouraged women to join the force, have met with silence, despite the documented evidence of threats to her and her children’s lives. “I don’t care about myself, I am already done. All I think about is a future for my children, somewhere peaceful where they can study,” she said. “I don’t want their lives to be like mine.” Despite an official amnesty for anyone who worked in the security forces or for the last government, there are regular reports of reprisal killings. Thousands of people are still in hiding inside Afghanistan and thousands more like Ahmadi are clinging to precarious safety in neighbouring countries. “There are a lot of people out there who are in this kind of limbo like Fatima Ahmadi. They are really stuck and have claims to needing asylum in some of the countries that contributed troops to the Afghan mission, just as much as those who were evacuated, or those still trying to escape Afghanistan,” says Barr.
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- November 14, 1449 – Sidonie of Poděbrady born, she and her twin sister Catherine were Bohemian princesses. In 1464, Sidonie was married at age 14 to Albert, the son of Frederick II, Elector of Saxony. Four months later, he became Albert III, Duke of Saxony, when his father died, and Sidonie became Duchess consort of Saxony, and later Margravine consort of Meissen. She was against warfare and violence, refusing to accompany Albert when he started wars against Groningen and Friesland, and protested by removing their children from the court to Albrechtsburg Castle. Many of her letters of correspondence have been preserved, in which she pleads for the release of prisoners. In September 1500, Albert died, leaving Sidonie a widow. She withdrew from the Saxon court and spent the rest of her years in Tharandt, near Dresden, where she died in February 1510 at the age of 60.
- November 14, 1501 – Anna of Oldenburg born, Countess consort of East Frisia who became Regent of East Frisia (1540-1561) as the guardian of her sons during their minority. She tried to maintain religious tolerance, allowing Catholics and Spiritualists to practice their faith. Only under pressure from Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was the Baptist faith banned in East Frisia in 1549. Anna also founded the police force (1545) and reformed the legal system in East Frisia. In addition to its administrative tasks, the Chancellery was given judiciary tasks. Councillors and legal scholars were added to the Chancellery to carry out these tasks. The Chancellery was mostly a court of appeals, but would also act a court of first instance in cases involving the nobility. In 1558, Anna abolished the law of primogeniture (the firstborn son’s right of succession), and established that each of her three sons would share power. This was an attempt to maintain religious balance, and to limit the growing influence of Sweden during protracted negotiations for the marriage of her eldest son Edzard and princess Katharina Vasa of Sweden, which finally took place in 1559. When Count John II “the Mad” of Harlingerland seized a strip of East Frisian land at the Accumer Deep, she took her case to the Reichskammergericht and to the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle. The Circle arrested John, who had made many enemies, and he died in captivity in 1562. Anna’s division of power was not a success. Her middle son died in 1566, and the remaining brothers were locked in a power struggle, which weakened their rule, but strengthened the nobility, and the citizens of Emden, center of the Protestant Reformation in East Frisia. Anna died in September 1575 at the age of 73.
- November 14, 1805 – Fanny Mendelssohn born, German pianist and composer who composed over 460 pieces of music, mostly lieder and piano pieces. Her younger brother was Felix Mendelssohn, and a number of her pieces were published under his name because of her family’s reservations, and the societal bias against women. In 1846, she published a collection of songs under her own name as Opus 1. She died suddenly of a stroke in 1847, at age 41.
- November 14, 1856 – Madeleine Lemoyne Ellicott born, American woman suffragist; she wanted to be a doctor, but her father disapproved, and she studied chemistry at Rushe Medical School, and the Polytechnic in Zurich Switzerland, but after her return, was unable to find an American school which would accept a woman student in the field. She turned to the cause of women’s rights, especially getting the vote. Ellicott was one of the organizers of the Pan-American Conference of Women in 1922. She was a founding member of the League of Women Voters in 1920, then founded the LWV chapter in Maryland, serving as its president for 20 years. Ellicott also campaigned for the creation of a Juvenile Court system in Maryland. She died in 1945, at age 88.
- November 14, 1878 – Julie Manet born, French painter, artist’s model, art collector and diarist; Growing Up with the Impressionists.
- November 14, 1881 – Ida Holdgreve born, American dressmaker who answered a “Plain Sewing Wanted” ad in the Delphos Herald in 1910. It turned out what was wanted was plane sewing, and Holdgreve sewed the panels for the Wright Brothers’ planes at the Wright Company factory, making her the first woman aerospace worker.
- November 14, 1889 – Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochrane) begins her challenge: to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record, going around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes.
- November 14, 1903 – The U.S. Women’s Trade Union League is established, after it became clear at a Boston meeting of the American Federation of Labor that the AFL had no intention of including women within its ranks. Labour leaders Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Leonora O’Reilly, with settlement workers Lillian Wald and Jane Addams, helped found the WTUL, and by 1904 the organization had branches in Chicago, New York City, and Boston. From the beginning the organization had a strong reformist agenda, working to provide working women with educational opportunities while also striving to improve working conditions. The organization achieved its greatest successes during the presidency of social reformer Margaret Dreier Robins. From 1907 to 1922, under Robins’s leadership, the organization fought for an eight-hour workday, the establishment of a minimum wage, the end of night work for women, and the abolition of child labour. During the garment industry strikes of 1909-1911, league members marched side by side with striking workers and helped set up strike funds. After the disastrous 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York City, league members conducted a four-year investigation of factory conditions that helped establish new regulations. The league was seriously weakened by financial problems during the Great Depression, and never fully recovered. In 1950, the WTUL had to be dissolved.
- November 14, 1906 – Louise Brooks born, actress, dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and silent film star in American and German films (Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both for G.W. Pabst in 1929); her iconic bobbed hairstyle was much copied by her fans in the 1920s. Her career began a downslide in the 1930s, and she went through a period of obscurity, alcoholism, and suicidal depression in New York before being “rediscovered” in 1953 by French film historian Henri Langlois. Brooks began a new career as a film critic, and her book Lulu in Hollywood was published in 1982. She died of a heart attack in 1985, at age 78.
- November 14, 1907 – Astrid Lindgren born, Swedish children’s author, best known for her Pippi Longstocking series.
- November 14, 1920 – Mary Greyeyes born, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the first First Nations woman to join the Canadian Armed Forces, serving in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1942-1946); a publicity picture of her in uniform brought her much attention; at the end of WWII, Indigenous people who served in the Canadian military were offered the choice to give up their treaty rights and Indian status in return for the right to vote, and she was urged to visit a polling station and have her picture taken voting, but she pointed out the unfairness of the voting laws and refused. First Nations people didn’t get the right to vote in Canada until 1960.
- November 14, 1921 – Ea Jansen born in Estonia, Finno-Ugric historian; most of her research focused on the national awakening of Estonia, and she made substantial contributions to the knowledge of this period; taught at the Tallinn Pedagogical University.
- November 14, 1922 – Veronica Lake born, American actress whose long ‘peek-a-boo’ hair was so copied that she changed her hairstyle during WWII to help prevent women working in wartime factories from catching their hair in the machinery. Her struggles with alcohol hurt her later career. In 1946, she earned a pilot’s license, and later flew solo between Los Angeles and New York. Noted for her frank memoir, co-written with Donald Bain, Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake.
- November 14, 1934 – Catherine McGuinness born, Irish jurist and politician; represented the University of Dublin in the Seanad Éireann (Ireland’s Senate – 1979-1981 and 1983-1987); first woman Judge of the Circuit Court (1994-1996); Judge of the High Court (1996-2000); Judge of the Supreme Court (2000-2006); President of the Law Reform Commission (2005-2011); Member of the Council of State since 2012.
- November 14, 1939 – Wendy Carlos, born Walter Carlos, American musician and composer noted for electronic music and film scores, particularly featuring the Moog synthesizer.
- November 14, 1942 – Mamoni Raisom Goswami born as Indira Goswami, Indian writer, editor, poet, and scholar; several of her works have been translated from her native Assamese to English, including The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker; Pages Stained With Blood; and The Man from Chinnamasta.
- November 14, 1944 – Karen Armstrong born, British author and commentator; a former Roman Catholic religious sister; noted for her books on comparative religion, and as a writer and presenter for BBC Channel Four; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
- November 14, 1945 – Louise Ellman born, British Co-operative Member of Parliament for Liverpool Riverside since 1997; as a member of the Labour Party, she was elected as a councilor on the Lancashire County Council in 1970, and was its leader from 1981 to 1997.
- November 14, 1946 – Emily Greene Balch, co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
- November 14, 1950 – Sarah Radclyffe born, British film producer; co-founder of Working Title Films; noted as executive producer on Caravaggio, Wish You Were Here, A World Apart, Les Misérables (1998), and The War Zone.
- November 14, 1956 – Babette Babich born, American philosopher; noted for her studies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Anders, Adorno, and Hölderlin, and work in aesthetics, including philosophy of music, life-size bronzes in antiquity (Greek sculpture), and continental philosophy, especially the philosophy of science and technology. Babich has also made substantive contributions to scholarly discussion of the role of politics in institutional philosophy (the analytic/continental divide) as well as gender in the academy.
- November 14, 1956 – Valerie Jarrett born, American public servant in the Obama Administration; Director of the U.S. Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs (2009-2017), and Senior Advisor to the President (2009-2017); previously served in various positions in the mayor’s office in Chicago (1987-2005); was a member of the Chicago Stock Exchange (2000-2007), and served as its chair (2004-2007).
- November 14, 1960 – Six-year old Ruby Bridges becomes the first black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school, in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2005, the William Frantz Elementary School was put on the National Register of Historic Places.
- November 14, 1962 – Laura San Giacomo born, American actress, noted for her portrayal of Maya Gallo in the TV series Just Shoot Me! (1997-2003), and for the films Sex, Lies and Videotapes; Pretty Woman; and Quigley Down Under. San Giacomo is an active supporter of several charities for people with disabilities (her son Mason has cerebral palsy). She is a founder of the CHIME Charter Elementary School, an inclusion school for all children of all abilities, which provides free public education to 600-700 students, Kindergarten through 8th grade, who are admitted through a lottery system.
- November 14, 1967 – The Columbian Congress declares the “Day of the Columbia Woman” in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the death of ‘La Pola’, Policarpa Salavarrieta, a Neogranadine seamstress-turned-spy for the revolutionary forces fighting against the Spanish, who was caught and executed.
- November 14, 1972 – Lara Giddings born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Tasmania (2011-2014); Deputy Premier of Tasmania (2008-2011); Treasurer of Tasmania (2010-2014); Member of the Tasmanian Parliament (1996-1998 and 2002-2018).
- November 14, 1983 – The British government announces that 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles, part of a planned NATO deployment, were arriving at Greenham Common air base; thousands of women protesters who were camped outside the gate staged a massive lie-in to block the entrance.
- November 14, 2017 – Australians overwhelmingly supported gay marriage in a historic non-binding vote, clearing the way for Parliament to make same-sex marriage legal in the country. In the survey, 61.6 percent voted yes and 38.4 percent voted no, officials announced. Turnout was 79.5 percent. “The Australian people have spoken, and they have voted overwhelmingly ‘yes’ for marriage equality,” said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Supporters burst into cheers in public squares as the result was announced. “Finally I can be proud of my country,” said Chris Lewis, 60, an artist from Sydney. “No” advocate Lyle Shelton, a Christian lobbyist, said he would “accept the democratic decision.”
- November 14, 2019 – Representatives in the Ohio state legislature, Ron Hood and Candice Keller, sponsored House Bill 413 which, among other provisions, seeks to legally recognize unborn fetuses as people, and define abortion as murder, according to a news release from the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, obtained by The Washington Post. Anyone who performs an abortion, according to the release, would be “subject to already existing murder statutes.” It was referred to the legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee, which took no further action.
- November 14, 2019 – In Florida, a state Senate committee delayed a vote on legislation that would require minors to obtain parental consent before receiving an abortion, but the delay appears temporary, even though similar legislation passed in 1988 was ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court under the Florida state constitution’s right to privacy, which is stronger than in the U.S. Constitution. But Republican Governor Ron DeSantis appointed three new justices to the court shortly after taking office in January 2019, and Republicans see the court’s shift to the right as an opportunity to pass anti-choice legislation. In 2021, an anti-abortion bill called the “Florida Heartbeat Act” was filed, which would require a physician to conduct a test for, and inform a woman seeking abortion of, the presence of detectable fetal heartbeat. It also prohibits physicians from performing or inducing abortion if a fetal heartbeat is detected, or, if a physician fails to conduct a test to detect fetal heartbeat. The measure would make an exception if physicians believe that an abortion is necessary because of a medical emergency that threaten a woman’s life, but doesn’t include exceptions in cases of rape or incest.
- November 14, 2020 – Scientists Ozlem Tureci and her husband Ugur Sahin started the Light Speed project in January, 2020, after he read an article in The Lancet about a strange new disease that appeared to spreading rapidly in Wuhan, China. He researched the air links between Wuhan and other cities, and realized the potential for a global pandemic. They approached Pfizer, the US pharmaceutical company, and got help with funding. They built on their previous research. “The first decision was to use our mRNA technology for the pandemic setting. It is very versatile,” says Dr. Tureci. Soon 600 of their employees were focused on finding a vaccine. “We realized it might become a big threat. We talked about different scenarios and what has emerged is one of the more serious and frightening scenarios,” she said. The team worked in shifts night and day, ensuring that all its experiments could continue round the clock. “Many of us have not had vacations and have worked through the weekends, that is why we have been able to do it. We are available for different time zones too; we are in constant meetings with Pfizer in America and with our Chinese partner.” The couple never contemplated defeat. “We have been in the innovation field for many years, we are habitualized not to think about the scenario that it might not work but rather to ensure that we address all potential flaws,” Dr. Tureci explains. “This very sober and scientific way of doing it allows us to stay away from the pessimistic mind-wandering mode.” As soon as the trial results began to come in, they knew they were on to something. “I had not expected it to be 90 percent effective but after seeing the immunology data I thought we will have some sort of effect except if the virus is very different from what we have encountered.” The vaccine has been tested on the elderly, the young, and the vulnerable, she says, but added, “They also have robust immune responses. We can’t for moral reasons expose people who are severely ill, but we have people who have cardiological disease, lung disfunction, cancer, diabetes, obesity.”
- November 14, 2021 – Afaf al-Najar, a 19-year-old Palestinian woman living in Gaza, filed a suit to challenge a travel ban imposed by her father. Although most Palestinians in Gaza are unable to travel outside the territory due to Israeli and Egyptian restrictions, al-Najar was prevented from pursuing her studies in Turkey, where she had received a scholarship, because of a male guardianship law. In February 2021, Gaza’s Supreme Judicial Council ruled that a male relative could file a petition preventing an unmarried woman from traveling outside Gaza. Al-Najar’s father filed such a petition, and al-Najar was immediately barred from traveling while the court considered the petition. Al-Najar responded by filing a suit to overturn the travel ban, but a series of delays have prevented a final decision from being reached.
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- November 15, 1607 – Madeleine de Scudéry born, French writer and salon host; often published her work under her brother’s name; her 10-volume novel Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus, which contains over two million words, is believed to be the longest novel ever published; acknowledged as the foremost “bluestocking” of Paris in the last half of the 17th century.
- November 15, 1849 – Mary E. Byrd born, American astronomer who used photography to determine cometary positions, and a pioneer in astronomy teaching at the college level, designing a method of teaching astronomy as a laboratory science combined with field work, and writing one of the first teacher training manuals on the subject; she was the director of the observatory at Smith College (1887-1906), but resigned her position because she disapproved of Smith College accepting money from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
- November 15, 1873 – Sara ‘Doctor Jo’ Baker born, American physician and medical inspector for the New York City Department of Health. She fought against urban poverty and ignorance to save newborns and children, and was a pioneer in preventative medicine. Baker invented a safe infant formula which helped women return to work and support their families, an eye drop system to prevent infants from becoming blind as a result of transmitted gonorrhea, and safety lessons and licenses for midwives which reduced childbirth fatalities. She said it was more dangerous to be a child in Hell’s Kitchen than it was to be a soldier on the front lines of World War I, as their mortality rate was three times higher; she tracked down Mary Mallon, better known as ‘Typhoid Mary,’ twice. She was the author of Fighting for Life, a memoir about her crusade to transform New York from an incubator for disease into the “healthiest city on earth.”
- November 15, 1887 – Georgia O’Keeffe born, one of America’s foremost 20th century painters, known for landscapes and oversized, close-up paintings of flowers; called the “mother of American modernism.” In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Jimson Weed sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any woman artist.
- November 15, 1887 – Marianne Moore born, influential American poet and translator; in 1952, her book, Collected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award for Poetry.
- November 15, 1916 – Dame Nita Barrow born, Barbadian nurse, midwife, instructor, humanitarian activist, public servant, and politician; the first woman Governor-General of Barbados (1990-1995). She was Ambassador to the UN (1986-1990); served as a public health advisor to the World Health Organization and the Pan-American Health Organization (1963–1975). Barrow was Jamaica’s first Principal Nursing Officer (1956); the first West Indian Matron of the University College Hospital (1954); and an instructor at the West Indies School of Public Health (1945-1950).
- November 15, 1930 – Olene Walker born, Republican politician; first woman governor of Utah (2003-2005), filling out the term of Mike Leavitt when George W. Bush nominated him to be head of the Environmental Protection Agency; during her time in office, she focused on public education, a child literacy program, affordable housing, and preserving Utah’s wilderness. She previously served as Utah’s Lieutenant Governor (1993-2003).
- November 15, 1932 – Petula Clark born, English vocalist, composer, and actress; her singing career began at age nine, during WWII, performing for the studio audience at a BBC radio broadcast delayed by a bombing raid; she became part of a WWII troupe entertaining the troops, making hundreds of appearances, often with another child performer, Julie Andrews.
- November 15, 1934 – Joanna Barnes born, American actress, novelist, and columnist; she appeared in over 20 films, including playing Gloria Upson in 1958’s Auntie Mame, and later was a frequent guest star on series television shows in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, she wrote several novels, including The Deceivers and Pastora, was a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, and wrote a syndicated column called, “Touching Home.”
- November 15, 1939 – Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde born, Finnish physician and author; her family fled to Sweden during WWII, and she was raised in Helsinki. She studied medicine at the universities of Oulu and Turku, graduating in 1967. She was at one point the only medical practitioner at the hospital in Pelkosenniemi, performing dental and veterinary work as well. In March 1975, she became a provincial medical officer in Rovaniemi, Lapland, where she later became chief medical officer. After a car accident in 1995, she wrote books about UFOS, and claimed to have been rescued from danger by extraterrestrials.
- November 15, 1945 – Anni-Frid born Anni-Frid Lyngstad; Dowager Countess of Plauen since the death of her husband, Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss Count of Plauen, in 1999; Norwegian-Swedish singer-songwriter and environmental activist; best known as a founding member and lead singer of ABBA. In 1990, she became a member of the committee of the Swedish environmental organization Det Naturliga Steget (The Natural Step). In 1991 she was chair of the organization Artister För Miljö (Artists For The Environment). In 1992, Lyngstad founded her Children and Environment Foundation which runs Summer Camps for underprivileged children. Also in 1992, she performed live at the Stockholm Water Festival at the Kings Castle and released the environmental single with her cover of Julian Lennon's song "Saltwater." All proceeds went to charity.
- November 15, 1954 – Emma Dent Coad born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Kensington (2017-2019). Dent Coad has been a Kensington and Chelsea Borough Councilor for Golborne since 2006.
- November 15, 1958 – Lesley Laird born, Scottish politician; Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party since June 2018; Member of the Scottish Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath since 2017.
- November 15, 1960 – Dawn Airey born, British media company executive, CEO of Getty Images (2015-2018); she held senior positions at ITV, and was CEO and Chair of Channel 5 (2000-2002).
- November 15, 1962 – Judy Gold born, American comedian, television writer, and producer; won 2 Daytime Emmys for her writing and producing on The Rosie O’Donnell Show.
- November 15, 1967 – Cynthia Breazeal born, computer scientist known for her pioneering work in social robotics and human-robot interaction; Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
- November 15, 1996 – Vanessa Nakate born, Ugandan climate activist; founder of the Rise Up Climate movement who has spearheaded the campaign to save Congo’s rainforest, the second-largest rainforest in the world, which is undergoing massive deforestation. She is the author of A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis.
- November 15, 2011 – Rock Your Mocs Day started by Jessica Jaylyn Atsye, enrolled with Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, as a day during Native American Heritage Month for all Native peoples to show unity and cultural pride. It is now a Rock Your Mocs Week in Mid-November.
- November 15, 2013 – Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chair, testifies before the Senate Banking Committee. The Senate confirmed her nomination, and she served as Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018.
- November 15, 2018 — Protests erupted in Belfast, Cork, Dublin, and Limerick, with hundreds of women and men calling for a national reckoning over how sexual assault cases are handled after Irish defense lawyer Elizabeth O’Connell in her closing argument asked the jury to consider a 17-year-old’s underwear. “Does the evidence out-rule the possibility that she was attracted to the defendant and was open to meeting someone and being with someone? You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.” Prosecutors said the teen was raped in a muddy alley by the accused, a 27-year-old man who was unanimously acquitted by a jury of eight men and four women.
- November 15, 2019 — Marie Yovanovitch, American Ambassador to Ukraine (2016-2019) and senior member of the U.S. Foreign Service until she retired in 2020, told impeachment investigators that she was “shocked and devastated” by Trump’s personal attacks on her, and “amazed” that corrupt elements in Ukraine had found willing American partners to take her down in a conspiracy-driven smear campaign. Yovanovitch was respected within the national security community for her efforts to encourage Ukraine to tackle corruption, and during her tenure had sought to strengthen the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which had been created to bolster efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine; these efforts earned Yovanovitch some enemies within the country. The U.S. State Department said that allegations claiming Yovanovitch was interfering with efforts to combat corruption in Ukraine were "an outright fabrication" and a "classic disinformation campaign." In May 2019, Trump abruptly recalled Yovanovitch from her post following claims by Trump surrogates that she was undermining Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rival, former vice president and 2020 U.S. presidential election candidate Joe Biden. Yovanovitch's removal preceded a July 2019 phone call by Trump in which he attempted to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden. Following a whistleblower complaint about the phone call and attempts to cover it up, an impeachment inquiry against Trump was initiated by the House of Representatives. The State Department sought to stop Yovanovitch from testifying before Congress, in line with Trump's policy of refusing to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. The House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena, stating that "the illegitimate order from the Trump Administration not to cooperate has no force …" Yovanovitch proceeded to give closed-door deposition testimony before the House Oversight and Reform, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence committees. Yovanovitch testified, “My parents fled Communist and Nazi regimes. Having seen, firsthand, the war and poverty and displacement common to totalitarian regimes, they valued the freedom and democracy the U.S. offers and that the United States represents. And they raised me to cherish those values.”
- November 15, 2020 — The 2020 election results are in, and the analysts wade through them to find the reasons that Joe Biden won and Trump lost. The ‘Gender Gap’ rejection of Trump by U.S. women was not as big as predicted, but it is still clear that if only men had voted, Trump would have won. Black women and suburban women were crucial to Biden’s victory. In Congress, there were significant gains for Republican women, and overall a record number of women will serve in the 117th Congress —148, including 106 Democrats and 38 Republicans. Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University called the results “a moving target.” But it was in sum “a good year,” she said, “both for the election of women candidates on both sides, and for the participation of women voters.“ And a huge glass ceiling was shattered with the election of the first woman vice president, Kamala Harris. AP VoteCast showed a 9 percentage point difference between men and women in support for Biden and Harris: 55% of women and 46% of men. That was essentially unchanged from the 2018 midterms, when VoteCast found a 10-point gender gap, with 58% of women and 48% of men backing Democrats in congressional races. The gender gap in support for Democratic candidates has averaged about 8 percentage points in the last 10 presidential elections, according to data from the American National Election Studies. Feminist leader Eleanor Smeal said the increase in Republican women in Congress is an important gain, even though she doesn’t agree with the GOP platform. “If we’re going to get to half of Congress, we’re going to have to have more Republicans as well as more Democrats,” said Smeal, who is president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.
- November 15, 2021 — Chinese feminist groups and international tennis stars and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) are raising concerns over the whereabouts of the former Chinese doubles pro Peng Shuai after her November 2nd Weibo post in which she accused China’s former vice premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex. Peng, one of China’s biggest athletic stars, was not publicly heard from in the days that followed, and her post was taken down by China’s censors but still went viral. Subsequent posts and reactions, even keywords such as “tennis,” also appeared to be blocked, and numerous references to Peng were scrubbed from China’s internet. WTA chair and chief executive, Steve Simon, called for a “full, fair and transparent” investigation by the Chinese government. “Peng Shuai, and all women, deserve to be heard, not censored,” he said. The WTA was told by several sources, including the Chinese Tennis Association (CTA), that Peng was “safe and not under any physical threat.” However, Simon said no one involved with the WTA tour was able to reach her. The IOC later said it held two video calls with her, and in an interview with the French magazine L'Équipe, Peng said she had not accused anyone of sexual assault, but some skepticism persists. She did appear at several events at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but revelations and subsequent events remain censored within China.
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- November 16, 1528 – Jeanne d’Albret born, became Jeanne III, queen regnant of Navarre; a spiritual and political leader of the French Huguenots; after the Huguenot defeat in 1569, she negotiated the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Catherine de’ Medici, arranging a marriage between her son, Henry, and Catherine’s daughter, Marguerite; she died during preparations for the wedding in 1572, which started an unsubstantiated rumor that Catherine de’ Medici had her assassinated by means of poisoned gloves.
- November 16, 1806 – Mary Tyler Peabody born, one of the Peabody sisters of Massachusetts; author, teacher, translator, abolitionist, and suffragist; she taught young children in her school in Salem, and wrote educational works for children and parents, including The Flower People: Being an Account of the Flowers by Themselves; Illustrated with Plates, a popular storybook which introduced children to horticulture; married at age 36, she was the second wife of the education reformer and politician Horace Mann; she promoted the writing and speaking career of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who was the first Native American woman known to copyright and publish work in the English language.
- November 16, 1851 – Minnie Hauk born as Amalia Mignon Hauk, American operatic soprano; she made her New York debut in 1866, and appeared as Juliet in the American premiere of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette in 1867. She then went to Europe, singing at London’s Covent Garden, in Paris, and at the Grand Opera in Vienna. In Brussels, she played Carmen in the first major successful production of Bizet’s opera, and reprised the role in its English and American premieres in 1878. Hauk's enormous repertory included approximately one hundred roles, and she sang Carmen in four languages. She died in Switzerland at age 78 in 1929.
- November 16, 1896 – Joan Lindsay born, Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist; best known as the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
- November 16, 1897 – Leonore Goldschmidt born, German Jewish teacher who had earned a doctorate from Heidelberg University, and taught languages. In 1933, she lost her position at the Sophie-Charlotte-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of the ban on Jews and “politically unreliable” people from civil service, including teaching in public schools. In 1934, she worked at private Jewish school. There was a loophole in the repressive laws, which meant she could teach Jewish children privately. In 1935, she used an inheritance, which sadly came to her after her cousin, Dr. Alexander Zweig, was murdered by the Nazis, to set up her own private school for Jewish children, which had 520 students and 40 teachers by 1937. The school had an intense focus on teaching the children English, which was vital for their coming life in exile. After much red tape, the Private Jüdische Schule Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt (Private Jewish School Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt) was granted an official license to run Abitur exams in 1936. Realizing that a certificate from an English University would be valuable for her pupils, Goldschmidt contacted Cambridge University, and in 1937, her school became an Examination Centre of the University of Cambridge. The bilingual final examination enabled the students to enter English language universities in Europe and North America, making their emigration easier. After November 9, 1938, when the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht, many of her students fled from Germany with their families. After the school was officially shut down in September 1939, the Goldschmidt family emigrated to England together with 80 students and some teachers. They reopened their school in Folkestone, and continued until May 1940. Afterwards, Goldschmidt worked as a teacher at several private and state-funded schools in England until 1968. After her retirement, she studied Russian and lived in London until her death in 1983.
- November 16, 1899 – Mary Margaret McBride born, radio interview show host and writer; dubbed “the First Lady of Radio,” her popular program, under various names as she changed networks, lasted over 40 years; she accepted advertising only for products she was willing to endorse from personal experience, turned down all tobacco and alcohol products, and “broke the color line” during WWII by bringing black interviewees on to her radio show.
- November 16, 1900 – Eliška Junková aka Elisabeth Junek born, Czechoslovak automobile racer; considered of one the greatest women drivers in Grand Prix history; she was one of the first drivers to walk the course before a race, noting landmarks and the best lines through corners. In 1926, she won the two-liter sports car class at the Nürburgring, in Germany, the first woman to win a Grand Prix event. When her husband was killed in a crash at the German Grand Prix in 1928, she retired from racing.
- November 16, 1903 – Barbara McLean born, pioneering American film editor; she edited 62 films, including Mary Pickford’s early talkies, and The Black Swan (1942), 12 O’Clock High (1949) and All About Eve (1950). She was a six-time nominee for Academy Awards in editing, and won the 1944 Oscar for Best Editing for Wilson; her attitude was, “If you’re going to ask me, then listen to me,” and they did.
- November 16, 1915 – Jean Fritz born to Presbyterian missionaries in China, where she attended a British school until her family emigrated to the U.S. when she was 12; American children’s author, whose career began with short stories published in children’s magazines; her first book, Bunny Hopwell’s First Spring, was published in 1954. Many of her other books were about American history. Her autobiography, Homesick: My Own Story (1983), was a Newbery Honor Book, and won a National Book Award; in 1983, she was honored with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for career contribution to American children’s literature; she lived to age 101.
- November 16, 1921 – Ethel Nagy Gabriel born, American record executive with RCA Victor and record producer. She produced over 2,500 music albums including 15 Certified Gold Records and hits by Elvis Presley, Perry Como, and Henry Mancini. She was the first woman record producer for a major label and the first female A&R producer in the industry. Gabriel was the winner of a Grammy Award in 1982 and also produced six Grammy-winning albums.
- November 16, 1935 – Elizabeth Drew born, American author, journalist, and political pundit; the Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, she was also a panelist on Meet the Press, and made many appearances on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; published 14 books, including On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (1994), an account of his first years in office, and Richard M. Nixon (2007).
- November 16, 1940 – Donna McKechnie born, American musical theatre dancer, singer, actress, and choreographer; best known for her performance as Cassie in the musical A Chorus Line, for which she won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Actress in Musical. In March 1973, she choreographed and performed in the highly acclaimed one-night-only concert Sondheim: A Musical Tribute at the Shubert Theatre in New York. In recent years, she has toured in her one-woman show Inside the Music. McKechnie’s autobiography, Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life, was published in 2006.
- November 16, 1945 – Lynn Avery Hunt born, American historian, author, and academic; wrote several books on the French Revolution, including Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984); her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights: A History, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights.
- November 16, 1946 – Barbara Smith born, African American lesbian feminist, socialist, activist lecturer, author, and publisher. She played a significant role in U.S. Black feminism, and the publishing of women writers of color. In 1980, she was the founder with Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Susan L. Yung, June Jordan, and Gloria Anzaldúa, of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and served as its first editor and publisher. Many of Kitchen Table’s publications became standard texts in women’s studies and Black studies programs. She coined the term “identity politics.” In 2005, she was elected to the Albany, New York, city council (2005-2009). The African American Policy Forum honored her in 2017 with its Harriet Tubman Lifetime Achievement Award. Her twin sister Betty is a Black feminist health advocate.
- November 16, 1948 – Bonnie Greer born in Chicago, black American playwright, novelist, and broadcaster, who has lived in the UK since 1986, and became a British citizen in 1997. Her plays include Munda Negra (1993), Dancing On Blackwater (1994), and the musical Marilyn and Ella (2005), based on Ella Fitzgerald’s exclusion by the color bar and Marilyn Monroe’s help in getting her employment at the Mocambo nightclub. Greer’s musical memoir of growing up in Chicago, Obama Music, was published in 2009.
- November 16, 1952 – Robin McKinley born, noted for The Blue Sword, and for the Newbery Award winner The Hero and the Crown, and Sunshine, which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.
- November 16, 1954 – Andrea Barrett born, American novelist and short story writer; her story collection, Ship Fever, won the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction.
- November 16, 1964 – Valeria Bruni Tedeschi born, Italian-French screenwriter, actress, and film director. Her debut film as a director, It’s Easier for a Camel … , won the 2003 Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film; in 2013, Tedeschi’s film, A Castle in Italy, was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or.
- November 16, 1968 – Shobha Nagi Reddy born, Indian politician from Andhra Pradesh; as a candidate of the Telugu Desam Party, she was elected to a State Assembly seat four times, the first woman to be elected to the legislature in Andhra Pradesh; she lost when she ran for a seat in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s bicameral Parliament. She was killed at age 45, when the vehicle she was traveling in overturned, while she was campaigning for the 2014 state assembly elections.
- November 16, 1970 – Martha Plimpton born, American actress and abortion rights campaigner; known for films The Goonies, The Mosquito Coast, Running On Empty, and Small Town Murder Songs. Among her many theatre credits, she has appeared on Broadway in Shining City, Top Girls, the 2008 revival of Pal Joey, and the 2014 revival of A Delicate Balance. She played Virginia Chance on television in Raising Hope. As a long-time abortion rights campaigner, she has lobbied Congress on behalf of Planned Parenthood, and is on the board of directors of “A Is For” a women’s rights organization. In 2014, Plimpton wrote a lengthy article decrying both U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and McCullen v. Coakley and revealing in part that she herself has had an abortion.
- November 16, 1977 – Maggie Gyllenhaal born, American actress, filmmaker, and progressive activist who has been involved with Artists United to Win Without War, Witness, TrickleUp, Hear the World Foundation, and Planned Parenthood. She is known as an actress for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Mona Lisa Smile, The Dark Knight, Crazy Heart, and as the producer of The Kindergarten Teacher, Best Summer Ever, and The Lost Daughter, which she also wrote and directed.
- November 16, 1985 – Sanna Marin born, Finnish Social Democratic Party MP since 2015; Prime Minister of Finland since 2019, taking office at age 34, she is the youngest prime minister in Finnish history.
- November 16, 1988 – In the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elect populist candidate Benazir Bhutto as the first woman Prime Minister of Pakistan (1988-1990 and 1993-1996).
- November 16, 2018 – Senior women BBC journalists have made a complaint to BCC executives about presenter Andrew Neil, after he failed to apologise for his Twitter post calling Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr a “mad cat woman” and “Karol Kodswallop.” Neil is the host of the BBC late night show This Week. Carole Cadwalladr’s investigation of Cambridge Analytica was a major key in exposing the company’s harvesting of data from 87 million Facebook users without their consent, used in 2016 by both the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign. She was honored for her reporting with the British Journalism Awards’ Technology Journalism Award in 2017, and the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2018. After multiple complaints, Neil deleted his tweet, which echoed the barrage of derogatory names she has been called by Arron Banks, the biggest donor to the Brexit campaign. The BBC women journalists, who declined to be identified because of potential repercussions, said this was not enough and confirmed complaints had been made to executives about the “sexist” comments on Neil’s combative Twitter account, which he often uses to promote pieces published by the rightwing magazine The Spectator.
- November 16, 2019 – Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, founder of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security. She was the keynote speaker at the 5th Annual Women, Peace and Security Symposium at Texas A&M University. “Being underestimated can actually be a benefit because you are challenged and you can rise to the task. We know now that if you always bring the same people to the table, you will get the same results,” she said, then added, “Only 5 of 57 key defense positions in the U.S. are held by women, less than 8 percent of the flag officers in the military are women, only one-third of the positions in the State Department are held by women, and the list goes on and on.” During her 30-year career in diplomacy, Abercrombie-Winstanley was the longest serving U.S. ambassador (to the Republic of Malta), played a key role as the Secretary of State’s Special Assistant for the Middle East and Africa, and was the first woman to lead a diplomatic mission to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
- November 16, 2020 – Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer responded to a tweet from White House coronavirus task force member Scott Atlas, saying she did have the authority to issue a second stay-at-home order to curb the spiking coronavirus if necessary, and declaring the tweet by Atlas urging people to “rise up” against Michigan’s latest restrictions was “incredibly reckless.” The Democratic governor spoke with reporters the day after announcing limits amid a surge of COVID-19 cases that led to increased hospitalizations and deaths. Other Midwest states were facing similar second waves as the weather cooled, and she urged the public to “double down” with precautions to avoid a shelter-in-place order such as that instituted in the spring. Scott Atlas is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Stanford University issued a statement: “Dr. Atlas has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic. Dr. Atlas’s statements reflect his personal views, not those of the Hoover Institution or the university.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious diseases expert, said he “totally disagrees” with Atlas, who is a neuroradiologist with no training in infectious diseases.
- November 16, 2021 – Ireland confronted one of the most painful chapters in its history and agreed an €800m ($796,784,000 USD) compensation package to thousands of unmarried mothers shunned by society and hidden away in church-run mother and baby homes. Announcing the scheme, Children and Equality Minister, Roderic O'Gorman, said: “There is no payment or measure that can ever fully compensate or atone for the harm done through the mother and baby institutions. What we have set out today is the next chapter in the state’s response to the legacy of those institutions, and its commitment to rebuilding the trust it so grievously shattered.” The state will also offer compensation to the children who ended up spending their early years in the religious institutions, some of them forced to work in laundries. Mothers who spent less than three months in a home will be eligible for €5,000 ($4,979.90 USD), with double that for those who spent between three and six months behind closed doors. Those who spent more than 10 years in a home can apply for compensation of up to €65,000 ($64,749.32 USD). The government said about 34,000 survivors in Ireland and abroad would be eligible in “the largest scheme of its type in the history of the state.” The redress scheme comes after an inquiry by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation detailed the horrific experiences of about 56,000 women and about 57,000 children who were placed or born in homes, mostly run by nuns, between 1922 and 1998. The commission had also discovered an estimated 9,000 deaths of babies in the homes and documented the cruelty and neglect they suffered. Many women were forced to take part in work, for which they were not paid, and separated from their babies, who were fostered or adopted.
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Sources
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Important Reminder from the Feminist Cats:
Fight Censorship and Book Banning!
“Because all books are forbidden when
a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the
corners, the list of things you may not read.
These things always go together.”
― Philippa Gregory,
The Queen's Fool