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WOW2: November's Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History - 11-1 through 11-8

by officebss for This Week in the War on Women

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, Nov. 05, 2022 Saturday, Nov. 05, 2022 at 3:29:02pm PDT

March for Womens Lives - 2004 - Feminist Majority Foundation — “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” – Cheris Kramarae, Women’s Studies Scholar

“Women are problem solvers, and often
we don't get much credit for that because
the typical image of a leader is someone
who's loud, obnoxious, chest-pounding.
That's not my vision of what true
leadership is; true leaders are the ones
who work with great commitment to
get something done.”
– Mazie Hirono, first woman elected
to the U.S. Senate from Hawaii

WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers stories from November 1 through November 8.

The next installment of WOW2 will be on Saturday, November 12, 2022.

_________________________

   “A theory in the flesh means one
where the physical realities of our
lives – our skin color, the land or
   concrete we grew up on, our
sexual longings – all fuse to
create a politic born out of necessity.
Here, we attempt to bridge the
contradictions in our experience:
   We are the colored in
a white feminist movement.
   We are the feminists among
the people of our culture.
  We are often the lesbians
among the straight.
   We do this bridging by
naming our selves and
by telling our stories in
our own words.”
― Michelle Cliff,
Jamaican-American author
of Claiming An Identity
   They Taught Me To Despise

_________________________

“I can’t afford the luxury of despair
or pessimism. We still have to hope.
We’re a timeless people, we’ve lived
in a timeless land. We have suffered
the invasion of two hundred years,
and we’ll go on suffering. But we
are going to survive…”
― Oodgeroo Noonuccal,
Australian Aboriginal poet, artist,
educator, activist, and politician

_________________________

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.}

_________________________________

November 1, 1148 – Empress Matilda’s disputed reign (1141-1148) as ‘Lady of the English’ ends as Stephen of Blois retakes the throne of England. She had been married at an early age to Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, but they had no children, and he died in 1125. After her only brother’s death in 1120, she was nominated by her father King Henry I of England as his heir, making his court swear an oath of loyalty to her and her successors, but this was not popular in the Anglo-Norman court. When Henry died in 1135, she was opposed by the barons, and her cousin Stephen of Blois took the throne. After four years with her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, in Anjou and Normandy, she crossed the channel to take the kingdom by force, but the power shifted back and forth battle by battle, and she was never able to fully reign. After Stephen took back the throne in 1148, she returned to Normandy, leaving her eldest son to continue the campaign – he would succeed to the throne as Henry II in 1154. For the rest of her life, she concerned herself with the administration of Normandy, acting on behalf of her son, and founding Cistercian monasteries.

November 1, 1526 – Catherine Jagiellon born, Polish princess who married John III of Sweden, becoming Queen consort of Sweden (1569-1583), and Grand Princess of Finland. She had significant influence over state affairs during the reign of John III. As a Catholic queen in a Protestant nation, she negotiated with the Vatican over a counter-reformation in Sweden, but was unable to persuade either the Pope or the Swedish Protestants to make enough concessions for a workable compromise.

Catherine Jagiellon — by Cranach the Younger

November 1, 1847 – Dame Emma Albani born, Canada’s first international opera star, a leading soprano of the 19^th century. She made her professional debut at London’s Covent Garden in 1872, performed there for four seasons, and made tours in Europe and American before her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1891. She later toured in Canada and Australia. Her last public performance was in 1911.

November 1, 1848 – The New England Female Medical School, the first medical school for women, opens. Twelve women were admitted to the first class, including Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black woman to earn a medical degree. The school became the New England Female Medical College, then later merged with Boston University School of Medicine, becoming one of the first co-educational medical schools. (Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S., earned her degree from Geneva Medical College in 1849, but she was the only woman in her graduating class, and the school did not allow other women students.)

**New England Female Medical School — Rebecca Lee Crumpler**

November 1, 1848 – Caroline Still Anderson born, African-American physician, educator, and social activist. She was one of the first American black women to become a doctor, and was a pioneering physician in Philadelphia’s black community. Her parents were both leaders in the abolitionist movement – her father was the head of the Philadelphia branch of the Underground Railroad. She attended the Institute for Colored Youth, then went to Oberlin College, where she was the only black student in her class, and the youngest graduate of her year, earning her degree at 19. She was elected as the first black president of the Ladies’ Literary Society of Oberlin. She married her first husband in 1869, but he died in 1875. Two years later, she completed her studies at Howard University College of Medicine, then earned her Doctor of Medicine degree at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1878, one of only two black students. In 1878 she applied for an internship at Boston's New England Hospital for Women and Children, but her initial application was rejected by the hospital board because of her race. After she met with the board in person, they appointed her to the internship by a unanimous vote. When her internship ended in 1879, she moved back to Philadelphia, opened a dispensary, and founded a private practice. She married again, this time to a minister, Matthew Anderson. With Anderson, she co-founded the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School, a vocational and liberal arts institution, where she taught classes and acted as assistant principal. Her busy career ended in 1914, when she suffered a paralytic stroke. In her later years, she worked with several Philadelphia organizations, including the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a group opening YMCAs for black men, and was on the board of the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People of Philadelphia. She died in 1919, at the age of 70, after suffering additional strokes.

November 1, 1889 – Hannah Höch born, German Dada artist, painter, and pioneer in photomontage; notable for works exploring changing gender roles, androgyny, and political discourse in the years between WWI and WWII.

‘1926 Cube’ — ‘Hannah Höch Life Portrait’

November 1, 1896 – A picture showing the bare breasts of a woman appears in National Geographic magazine for the first time.

NatGeo-Nov1896issue-firstphoto-womanwithbarebreasts.jpg

November 1, 1897 – Naomi Mitchison born; prolific Scottish novelist, poet, and nonfiction author; she published over 90 books, from historical and science fiction to travel books, essays, and autobiography. Though best known for The Corn King and the Spring Queen, she also wrote non-fiction like African Heroes, and The Moral Basis of Politics, and the controversial and censored We Have Been Warned, about a journey to the Soviet Union, which included information on sexuality, rape, and abortion. She was a committed socialist in the 1930s, but after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, she had misgivings about the direction of Soviet society. Mitchison was an active anti-fascist, and smuggled documents and helped left-wing refugees get out of Austria after Hitler annexed the country in 1938. She was a feminist, and campaigned for women’s rights and access to birth control. In the late 1960s, she was part of the anti-apartheid campaign to stop the white South African rugby and cricket teams tours of Britain. When asked on her 90th birthday whether she had regrets in life, she replied, "Yes, all the men I never slept with. Imagine!" She died at age 101 in January 1999.

November 1, 1898 – Sippie Wallace born, American blues singer-songwriter, called “The Texas Nightingale.” She made recordings for Okeh records with her brother George, and with a young Louis Armstrong. She retired from show business in the 1930s, and became a church organist, until her friend Victoria Spivey, who had founded her own record label, coaxed her out of retirement. Wallace toured folk and blues festivals and recorded two albums, Women Be Wise, and Sings the Blues, in 1966, which brought her to the attention of Bonnie Raitt. They made recordings and toured together in the 1970s and 1980s, but Wallace also continued her solo career. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1983. After a concert at a jazz festival in Germany in 1986, she suffered a severe stroke, and returned to the U.S., where she died that year on her 88^th birthday.

YouTube Video

November 1, 1915 – Margaret Taylor-Burroughs born, American painter and poet; co-founder and first Executive Director (1961-1985) of the Ebony Museum of Chicago, now the DuSable Museum of African American History. In 2010, the Leadership Advisory Committee of the Art Institute of Chicago honored her with its Legends and Legacy Award.

November 1, 1917 – Zenna Henderson born, American science fiction and fantasy author; nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novella Captivity; unlike many other women authors of science fiction at the time, she never used a male pseudonym.

November 1, 1921 – Ilse Aichinger born, Austrian novelist, writer of short stories, radio plays, and poetry, known for her accounts of persecution by the Nazis because of her Jewish heritage. Her mother’s family had been assimilated, and Ilse and her twin sister Helga were raised Catholic. Her parents divorced, and her mother moved to Vienna with her daughters. After the 1938 annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, as a "half-Jew" Ilse was not allowed to continue her studies and became a slave labourer in a button factory. Her sister Helga escaped from Nazism in July 1939 through a Kindertransport to England where she later gave birth to a daughter, the English artist Ruth Rix. During WWII, Aichinger was able to hide her mother in her assigned room, in front of the Hotel Metropol, the Viennese Gestapo headquarters. Most of the relatives from her mother's side, including her beloved grandmother Gisela, were killed in the Maly Trostenets extermination camp near Minsk. After the war, Aichinger began to study medicine at the University of Vienna, while writing in her spare time. In her first publication, Das vierte Tor (The Fourth Gate), she wrote about her experience under Nazism. In 1947, she and her mother were able to travel to London and visit Helga and her daughter Ruth. The visit was the inspiration for a short story, "Dover." She gave up her studies in 1948 in order to finish her novel, Die größere Hoffnung ("The greater hope", translated as Herod's Children). The book, a surrealist account of a child's persecution by the Nazis, went on to become one of the top German-language novels of the twentieth century. In 1951, she joined Gruppe 47, a writer’s group aimed at spreading democratic ideas in post-war Austria. In 1952, she became the first woman writer to be awarded the Gruppe 47 Literature Prize. She won many other literary awards, including the 1971 Nelly Sachs Prize, the 1987 Europalia Literature Prize, and the 1995 Grand Austrian State Prize. She died at age 95 in 2016.

November 1, 1938 – Nicholasa Mohr born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, one of the few Latina women authors in the 20th century to be published by major commercial publishing houses; her first book, Nilda (1973), which she also illustrated, won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; her second book, El Bronx Remembered, was published by Harper & Row in 1975, and she became the first Latina woman to win the New York Outstanding Book Award.

November 1, 1938 – Emily England Clyburn born, librarian and longtime wife of South Carolina’s U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn. She was a public school librarian in Columbia and Charleston, then spent 29 years as a medical librarian at the Charleston Naval Base and Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia. She and Clyburn met during college at a courthouse, after he had been arrested with several others for staging sit-in protests against segregated businesses. The protesters had not been fed at the jail, and when she heard him say how hungry he was, she bought a hamburger and split it with him. They were married a year later, and celebrated their 58^th wedding anniversary in June before she died in September, 2019. In his memoirs, Jim Clyburn gave his wife much credit for being the motivator behind his political career, and the person he asked for advice on his most vexing decisions in Washington. The two of them raised millions of dollars for scholarships to their alma mater, South Carolina State University.

November 1, 1942 – Marcia Wallace born, American comedian and actress, known for playing Carol, the receptionist on The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978), and as the voice of Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons, (1989-2013). She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, and became a cancer activist for the rest of her life. She died of complications from cancer in 2013.

November 1, 1946 – Yuko Shimizu (清水侑子 Shimizu Yūko) born, Japanese designer; creator of Hello Kitty and Angel Cat Sugar.

November 1, 1949 – The U.S. Department of Commerce declares Author’s Day an official national day. First proposed in 1928 as a tribute to American authors by schoolteacher Nellie Verne Burt McPherson to members of the Bement Illinois Women’s Club and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

November 1, 1953 – Jan Davis born, American astronaut and aerospace engineer; first worked for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center as an engineer, then named team leader in the Structural Analysis Division in 1986, where she worked on the Hubble Space Telescope; she became an astronaut in 1987, assigned to the Astronaut Office Mission Development Branch, then handled communications with Shuttle crews at Mission Control, and flew on three space shuttle missions, logging over 673 hours in space between 1992 and 1997.

November 1, 1959 – Susanna Clarke born, English author; her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, won a Hugo Award; also noted for her short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Her second novel, Piranesi, won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was also a World Fantasy Awards finalist.

November 1, 1961 – Louise Boije of Gennäs born, Swedish feminist writer; noted for best-selling semi-autobiographical novel, Stjärnor utan svindel (Stars Without Vertigo).

November 1, 1964 – Nita Ambani born, influential Indian businesswoman and philanthropist; co-founder and chair of Reliance Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in India, which sponsors Braille materials for the blind and a cornea transplant program, among several other programs.

November 1, 1967 – Carla van de Puttelaar born, Dutch fine art photographer, noted for portraits and nude studies.

from ‘Lucid Dreams’ series — by Carla van de Puttelaar

November 1, 1972 – Toni Collette born, Australian actress, singer-songwriter, and producer; noted for her performances in Muriel’s Wedding, The Sixth Sense, About a Boy, In Her Shoes, and Little Miss Sunshine. In 2017, she formed Vocab Films with Jen Turner. She is an animal rights supporter, and has campaigned against the Australian sheep farm practice of mulesing, the removal of wool-bearing skin on sheep buttocks.

November 1, 1973 – The Woman’s Building (1973-1991) opened in downtown Los Angeles, home of the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW), one of the first independent art schools for women. Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture was also founded, in 1977, at the Woman’s Building by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, with artist Judy Chicago and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Brettville (see also November 4, 1940).

November 1, 1978 – Helen Czerski born, English physicist and oceanographer; Research Fellow in the department of mechanical engineering at University College London; previously at the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton; much of her research focuses on ocean bubbles; regular presenter on science programs for the BBC, and has columns in BBC Focus magazine and the Wall Street Journal; author of Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life; won the 2018 Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics.

November 1, 1979 – Griselda Álvarez becomes Governor of the state of Colima (1979-1985), the first woman governor in Mexico.

November 1, 2014 – AkiraChix hosted its first Women in Technology Conference, discussing women’s participation and their contributions to the tech field in Africa. AkiraChix was founded in 2010 by Linda Kamau and Marie Githinji to teach young African women the skills they need for careers in the technology field. The organization teamed up with Making All Voices Count to co-sponsor a competition open to Kenyan women, to submit ideas that promote gender equality by using technology for change.

November 1, 2016 – Pope Francis said that the Catholic Church would probably never allow women to serve as priests. Pope John Paul II wrote in 1994 that Jesus chose only men as his apostles, and that, "The exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church." Francis said the letter indicated that the ban would likely endure forever. The pope raised hopes of advocates for ordaining women when he created a commission earlier in 2016 to study the possibility of women serving as deacons, who perform many of the functions of priests. Women served as deacons early in the church's history.

CatholicwomenbarredfrompriesthoodinspiteofparticipationinearlyChristianChurch.jpg

November 1, 2019 – Alison Rose, the first woman CEO of a major British Bank, the Bank of Scotland, pledged to make the climate crisis a priority, and to build a more “open, accessible and inclusive” bank. She took over after years of scandal at the state-owned lender. “... if our customers do well, if our economy does well and if our communities do well, then we all succeed together ... Shared success also means playing our part to help tackle the problems that can hold the country back, like the threat from climate change, a lack of financial confidence and barriers to enterprise and growth.”

November 1, 2019 – In a national address, Lebanese President Michel Aoun acknowledged the need for reforms, including establishing a unified personal status law. Women in Lebanon are at the forefront of protests against their country’s bewildering sectarian system of governance. There are 15 separate personal status laws for the country’s recognized religions, but all of them discriminate against women. Autonomous religious courts administer these laws with little or no government oversight, making it more difficult for women than men to terminate unhappy or abusive marriages, to ensure their rights to their children after divorce, or to secure financial support or settlements from a former spouse. Under religious personal status laws, Lebanon allows child marriage – including for girls as young as nine. The nationality law denies citizenship to children and spouses of Lebanese women married to foreigners, but not to the children and spouses of Lebanese men.

November 1, 2020 – Myanmar has been coping with the return of hundreds of thousands of workers – some 650,000 returning from Thailand alone – by setting up quarantine facilities for returning migrants, awareness-raising programs on COVID-19 health protocols, and prevention of gender-based violence – a key concern among the women migrant returnees. Sandi Swe, who began working as a volunteer in a COVID-19 quarantine facility for women in March, 2020, said, “Before the pandemic, I didn’t have any experience of this type of work, but the fact remains that nothing could have prepared me or anyone else for this global emergency – Before COVID-19, I stayed home most of the time, but working in this environment has shown me that I like to work with other people. I pray every day for the pandemic to end quickly. I know I am okay, and it has not affected me too much, but there are others who have lost income and opportunities. I pray for them as well.” UN Women, partnered with the Women’s Organization Network (WON), has supported the authorities in Myanmar, under an EU-UN funded Spotlight Initiative, a joint program with the International Labour Organization (ILO), to prevent and respond to violence experienced by migrant women.

SandiSwe-MyanmarvolunteerinCovid-19quarantinefacilities.jpg — Sandi Swe — Myanmar volunteer in Covid-19 quarantine facilities

November 1, 2021 – At Cop26, the UN climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, Mia Mottley, Barbados Prime Minister, pulled no punches in speaking to her fellow world leaders, “I ask to you: what must we say to our people, living on the frontline in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Latin America, in the Pacific, when both ambition and, regrettably, some of the needed faces at Glasgow, are not present? What excuse should we give for the failure? When will leaders lead? Our people are watching, and our people are taking note. And are we really going to leave Scotland without the resolve and the ambition that is sorely needed to save lives and to save our planet? Are we so blinded and hardened that we can no longer appreciate the cries of humanity?”

_________________________________

November 2, 1709 – Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange born; second child of King George II of Great Britain, she was educated in languages – German, French and English, and was taught music by Georg Friedrich Händel. She married William IV, Prince of Orange, in 1734, and Handel composed music for the wedding. In 1747, William became Stadtholder of the Seven United Provinces, but he died at the age of 40 in 1751, and Anne was appointed as regent for her 3-year-old son, William V. She was hard-working but imperious, and unpopular with the Dutch, especially since she was the defender of the authority established in her husband’s reign of the central hereditary Stadtholder government over the traditional rights of the Dutch states. Her rule was resented, but her consolidation policy effectively secured the hereditary Stadtholder rule in the Netherlands for her son. She died at age 49 in 1759, and her mother-in-law, Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel became regent. When Marie Louise died in 1765, Anne’s daughter Caroline became regent for her brother until he reached the age of 18 in 1766.

November 2, 1879 – Marion Jones Farquhar born, American tennis player and musician. She was the first Californian to reach the finals at the Women’s U.S. Tennis Championships in 1898. Her first win was in 1899, and her second win came in 1902. At the 1900 Olympics, she was the first American woman to win a medal in Tennis. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2006. After retiring from tennis, she became well-known as a violinist and voice coach. She also translated opera librettos for English-language productions.

November 2, 1890 – Moa Martinson born, Swedish author of proletarian literature who portrayed conditions of the working class, especially the lives of working-class women. She started work at age 15, as a kitchen maid and apprentice pantry chef (responsible for refrigerated foods); her difficult first marriage, living in an area so isolated she gave birth to one of her sons alone on the kitchen floor, and the time’s economic hardships were vividly depicted in her semi-autobiographical books; Kvinnor och äppelträd (Women and Apple Trees), Kungens rosor (The King’s Roses), and Rågvakt (Rye Guard).

November 2, 1905 – Isobel Andrews born as Isabella Smith Young in Glasgow, Scotland; New Zealand writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter. Her family moved to New Zealand when she was five or six years old, and she attended Wellington Girls’ College. Andrews was a founding member in 1932 of the New Zealand Women Writers and Artists Society. In 1938, her play Endeavour won a radio competition. She was married to Ernest Stanhope Andrews, a public servant who became the founding director of the National Film Unit in 1941. She became the founder and resident playwright of the Strathmore Players, and wrote some 60 plays, often one-acts, tailored for the small company and its limited financial resources. Her play, The Willing Horse, won the Drama League’s original play award, and was published in 1943, then reprinted in 1962. She also wrote some radio plays which were aired by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and the BBC.

November 2, 1921 - Margaret Sanger's National Birth Control League combines with Mary Ware Dennett’s Voluntary Parenthood League to form the American Birth Control League, which later becomes Planned Parenthood.

November 2, 1936 – Rose Elizabeth Bird born, first woman California Secretary of Agriculture, allowed workers to unionize; she was appointed Chief Justice of California Supreme Court in 1977; became the only California justice not to be reconfirmed by voters, in the 1987 election, primarily because of her opposition to death penalty.

November 2, 1939 – Pauline Neville-Jones born, career member of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service (1963-1996) in Rhodesia, Singapore, Washington DC, and Bonn; seconded to the European Commission (1977-1982); 1991-1994, Head of Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet; appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1987, then raised to Dame Commander in 1995, and The Baroness Neville-Jones in 2007.

November 2, 1942 – Shere Hite born in the U.S., became a German citizen in 1995; sexologist and sex educator whose work focuses primarily on female sexuality. Known for The Hite Report on Female Sexuality.

November 2, 1942 – Stefanie Powers born, American actress and wildlife conservationist; best known for the television series Hart to Hart (1979-1984), in which she co-starred with Robert Wagner. She is the director of the Mount Kenya Game Ranch and Wildlife Conservancy in Nanyuki, Kenya, and works with the Cincinnati Zoo and the Atlanta Zoo. Powers is an international campaigner and speaker for wildlife preservation.

November 2, 1946 – Michelle Cliff born in Jamaica, Jamaican-American author, noted for Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior, which feature the complex identify problems of people in the post-colonial age, and also address racial, gender and sexual identity issues. Cliff was a lesbian and a feminist, whose partner was poet Adrienne Rich. She was an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press.

November 2, 1949 – Lois McMaster Bujold born, American speculative fiction author; known for The Mountains of Mourning, and Paladin of Souls (both winners of Hugo and Nebula awards), as well as her Hugo Best Series winners – The Vorkosigan Saga, and World of the Five Gods. The Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 36th SFWA Grand Master in 2019.

November 2, 1951 – Lindy Morrison born, Australian rock drummer, activist for Aboriginal rights and musician’s rights, and music educator; in the 1970s, she was a field officer for the Aboriginal Legal Service, and since 2000, she has worked part-time for the music industry benevolent society, which provides grants for industry workers when they are ill. She has been in several bands, but is most associated with the Go-Betweens (1977-1989). Morrison was an artist-in-residence at South Sydney Youth Service (1998-2001), and teaches contracts, copyright, and music business modules at TAFE (technical and further education). She stood for election as a candidate for the Australian Democrats in New South Wales in 2003 and 2004. In 2007, Morrison was appointed a Lifetime Honorary Member of the Music Council of Australia. In 2013, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services as a performer and advocate.

November 2, 1961 – k.d. lang born, Canadian pop-country singer-songwriter, 4-time Grammy winner.

November 2, 1964 – Britta Lejon born, Swedish Social Democratic politician; member of the Riksdag, and in the cabinet of Göran Persson (1996-2006).

November 2, 1974 – Sofia Polgár born, Hungarian chess player, the middle sister between Susan and Judit Polgár. All three of the Polgárs are Chess Grandmasters. Sofia became the World Under-14 Girls Champion in 1986, but her highest performance rating of 2879 came at a tournament in Rome. She was once ranked as the world’s sixth-strongest woman player.

November 2, 1977 – Emma Reynolds born, British Labour Politician; Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton North East since 2010.

November 2, 1993 – U.S. Senate calls for full disclosure of Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in a sexual harassment probe. 18 women had come forward by 1992 saying he had sexually harassed them. The Senate Ethics Committee had to get a court order to enforce a subpoena for the voluminous diaries kept by Packwood. The inquiry went on behind closed doors until 1995. Barbara Boxer, Democratic Senator from California, started a floor fight that year over holding public hearings, but Republicans in the Senate blocked public hearings. Ultimately, the bi-partisan Ethics Committee report concluded, “Senator Packwood engaged in a pattern of abuse of his position of power and authority as a United States Senator by repeatedly committing sexual misconduct, making at least 18 separate unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances between 1969 and 1990. “In most of these instances, the victims were members of Senator Packwood’s staff or individuals whose livelihoods were dependent upon or connected to the power and authority held by Senator Packwood. These improper acts bring discredit and dishonor upon the Senate and constitute conduct unbecoming a United States Senator.” The Committee voted unanimously for expulsion, but Packwood resigned just before the full Senate would have voted to expel him.

Senator Barbara Boxer — Bob Packwood with staffer

November 2, 2006 – Hilde Lysiak born, American journalist who publishes the Orange Street News (founded, with some help from her father, and her sister Izzy as a contributor and proofreader, in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania 2014-2019, and then in Patagonia, Arizona since 2019). She is the youngest member of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2016, she was at the police station working on a vandalism story, when she overheard the police chief saying he was going out on something important. She went to the crime scene, and became the first reporter to cover the story of a murder that happened just blocks away from her house, scooping other news sources on her website by several hours. But her newspaper’s Facebook page got negative comments about a nine-year-old covering such a gruesome story, and challenging her parents for allowing her to “pretend to be a reporter.” She posted a response on her website and on YouTube: “I don't think people should be able to decide for me who I should be and what I should be doing. I never began my newspaper so that people would think I was cute. I started the Orange Street News to give people the information they need to know ... I want to be taken seriously. I'm sure other kids do, too ... If you want me to stop covering news, then you get off your computers and do something about the news. There, is that cute enough for you?” A lot of people have been taking her seriously since then – in 2019, at the age of 12, she gave the commencement speech at West Virginia University, and Home Before Dark, a TV series loosely based on her life story, premiered on April 3, 2020. She’s also published a Hilde Cracks the Case series of books to inspire other kids to follow their dreams.

November 2, 2019 – The Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services worked on finalizing rules to expand religious and “moral” exemptions for employers, universities, and insurers opposed to providing contraceptive coverage. In spite of statements by most major U.S. religious groups indicating their support for healthcare coverage including contraception at no cost, the Trump administration continued to use “religious liberty” as a cover for expanding discrimination against women and transgender people. Various district courts quickly halted the new rules, and the legal battle landed in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, where in July, 2020, the right-wing majority decided that the rules would remain in effect.

November 2, 2020 – A study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) indicates that pregnant women infected with SARS-CoV-2 are at higher risk for developing severe cases of COVID-19. The CDC study found pregnant women “were significantly more likely to require intensive care, to be connected to a specialized heart-lung bypass machine, and to require mechanical ventilation than nonpregnant women of the same age who had Covid symptoms.” In addition, “pregnant women with COVID-19 symptoms faced a 70% increased risk of death, when compared to nonpregnant women who were symptomatic.” The risk of neonatal complications also increased. While the risk of death was 22 times higher for pregnant women over non-pregnant women in the study, the overall increased risk of maternal mortality caused by COVID-19 was 1.6%.

November 2, 2021 – In October 2019, Philippa Day, a 27-year-old single mother in the UK with longstanding mental health issues, died. She had been in a coma for two months after taking an overdose. When she was found unconscious, a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was lying next to her which rejected her plea for a benefits assessment to be carried out in her home. Day’s community psychiatric nurse team had already asked the DWP for a benefit assessment to take place at her home because of her poor health and agoraphobia. Officials rejected the request, insisting that she travel to a nearby assessment centre. Day went through months of stress and anxiety caused by her benefits being cut off because of missing paperwork. After an inquest into her death identified 28 instances where “systemic errors” by both the DWP and Capita, a private company contracted by the DWP as a payment assessment provider, had led to failures in the handling of Day’s claim, the coroner ruled that these failures were a “stressor” in her decision to take the overdose. Day’s family issued a compensation claim for negligence to both the DWP and Capita. Capita agreed to settle out of court. The sum was not disclosed but is understood to be in line with what the family asked for. Philippa’s sister, Imogen Day said, “Our family has always maintained that my sister’s treatment by Capita, on behalf of the DWP, directly impacted her mental state and in the end is the reason for her death. Capita’s wall of bureaucracy, with no consideration for Philippa’s mental state, exacerbated her despair at her debt and poverty. She was met with cold, uncaring call operators who would not listen to her cries for help. This settlement will in some measure provide for Philippa’s family and a materially stable upbringing for Philippa’s son, but he has lost his mother, and there is nothing Capita can do to put right the wrong that contributed to Philippa’s death.”

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November 3, 1793 – Olympe de Gouges, a French playwright, abolitionist, and feminist, is guillotined for her opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, and her poster which demanded a plebiscite so the people could choose between a unitary republic, a federalist government, or a constitutional monarchy; she had also written Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizeness), which was published in 1791.

November 3, 1878 – Bangalore Nagarathnamma born; Indian singer, cultural and feminist activist, history scholar, patron of the arts, and a third-generation courtesan. She was a Carnatic singer, a vocal musical tradition of southern India, one of the two main subgenres of Indian classical music. She built a temple over the Samadhi of the Carnatic singer Tyagaraja at Thiruvaiyaru and helped establish the Tyagaraja Aradhana festival in his memory. Within a male dominated festival, she fought to ensure that women artists were given equal participation. She was among the last practitioners of the devadasi tradition in India. A devadasi was a girl who was dedicated to the worship and service of a deity or a temple for the rest of her life. Devadasis were temple prostitutes. In addition to taking care of the temple and performing rituals, these women also learned and practiced classical Indian artistic traditions, and had high social status. They had children by high officials or priests, who were then also taught the music and dance that were an essential part of temple worship. Nagarathnamma was the first president of the Association of the Devadasis of Madras Presidency. She also edited and published books on poetry and anthologies, and was a linguist who held religious discourses in Kannada, Telego, Tamil and Sanskrit.

November 3, 1887 – Eileen Lind Hendricks born, British geologist specializing in the geology of Devon and Cornwall. Her father was a surveyor, and she developed an early interest in geology when she attended public lectures by Charles Lapworth, a pioneer in identifying animal bone fossils in rock strata. Hendricks graduated in 1919 with a BSc from Aberstwyth University, and went on to complete a PhD at Imperial College London. Between 1926 and 1928 she was temporarily employed by the Geological Survey of Great Britain (GSGB) to assist in the preparation of a catalogue of the Survey's photographs. This work resulted in the publication, in 1928, of Classified Geological Photographs: From the Collection of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. She applied in 1930 for a regular position with the GSGB, but her application was rejected. She had difficulty in finding paid work, writing in 1941 about “the absolute dearth of openings in her main subject.” In spite of this, she maintained her geological research, and published a number of papers. Hendricks was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1945, and in 1965, she was awarded the R. H. Worth prize by the Geological Society of London, given to amateurs who have made distinguished contributions to geology.

November 3, 1905 – Lois Mailou Jones born, influential African American painter and teacher; she was a Harlem Renaissance artist, and the best known black woman artist outside the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s. She was North Carolina’s Palmer Memorial Institute Art Department founder and its first chair.

Loïs Mailou Jones in her Paris Studio in the 1930s — ‘Ubi Girl from Tai Region’ painted by Jones

November 3, 1906 – Julia Boyer Reinstein born, American historian and teacher; she taught in the history department of the University of Buffalo, became the first town historian of Cheektowaga, New York, and a founder and president of the Erie County Historical Federation, made up of local historical societies in the county. Though she was a lesbian, she accepted a proposal of marriage from Dr. Victor Reinstein in 1942, and they were married until his death in 1984. She and her husband donated the property for the Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve, and built the Anna M. Reinstein Library in Cheektowaga. Reinstein made donations to her alma mater, Elmira College, to establish a Department of Women’s Studies.

November 3, 1917 – Annapurna Maharana born, Indian pro-independence activist; prominent social reform and women’s rights advocate; a close ally of Mahatma Gandhi.

November 3, 1918 – Elizabeth Paschel Hoisington born, U.S. Army officer, one of the first two women to attain the rank of brigadier general; director of the Women’s Army Corps (1965-1971).

November 3, 1919 – Květa Legátová, born Věra Hofmanová, Czech novelist and short story writer, noted for her collection of interconnected short stories in a fictional village, Želary, which won the Czech State Prize for Literature in 2002, and includes her novella, Jozova Hanule (Joza’s Hanule).

November 3, 1920 – Oodgeroo Noonuccal born Kathleen Walker, Australian Aborigine activist who campaigned for Aboriginal rights; poet, artist, and educator; Queensland state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and a key figure in the campaign to reform the Australian constitution to give Aborigines full citizenship; first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse.

November 3, 1924 – Violetta Elvin born as Violetta Prokhorova, Russian prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, then at Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) in Great Britain.

November 3, 1930 – Mable John born, American blues vocalist; the first woman signed by Berry Gordy for Motown’s Tamia label.

November 3, 1935 – Ingrid Rüütel born, Estonian folklorist and philologist; she was Estonia’s First Lady during her husband’s term as President (2001-2006).

November 3, 1946 – The Constitution of Japan adopted with the Emperor’s assent. It was mostly written by American civilian officials working under the Allied Occupation of Japan. Lt. Ethel Weed was in charge of the Women’s Affairs program, and worked tirelessly with Japanese feminists to establish the Women’s and Minor’s Bureau, and reform the Civil and Criminal Codes to establish legal rights for Japanese women. Among the Constitution’s provisions are equality before the law, banning discrimination based on "race, creed, sex, social status or family origin," the right to vote for all Japanese aged 20 and older, equality between the sexes in marriage (forced marriage is banned), and equality in childhood education.

Lt Ethel Weed with Japanese Womens Rights Advocates

November 3, 1947 – Mazie Hirono born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Congresswoman from Hawaii (2007-2013); U.S. Senator for Hawaii since 2013.

November 3, 1947 – Siiri Oviir born, Estonian politician and Member of the European Parliament. She had been a prominent member of the Estonian Centre Party until 2012, when she and seven other high-ranking party members left, citing frustration with the lack of openness and transparency of the party’s leaders, and the expulsion of MP Kalle Laanet for his criticism of the leadership.

November 3, 1949 – Anna Wintour born in England, American journalist and editor; editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988, and Global Chief Content Officer for Condé Nast since 2020; one of her former personal assistants, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the 2003 best seller, The Devil Wears Prada.

November 3, 1953 – Vilma Santos-Recto born, Filipina actress and politician; Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives since 2019; Member of the House for the Batangas 6^th District since 2016, where she served on the Committee on Civil Service and Professional Regulation until she was removed by the House leadership because of her rejection of re-imposing capital punishment. She is vice chair of the Committee on Globalization; the first woman to be Governor of Batangas (2007-2016); and the first woman Mayor of Lipa (1998-2007). In the House, she co-authored the SOGIE Equality bill (Anti-discrimination bill), Magna Carta for Day Care Workers, Maternity Leave Increase bill, Cancer Awareness bill, expanded Senior Citizens bill, and Post-graduate Education for Teachers bill. Before entering politics, she had a long and very successful career as a Filipina film and television star, beginning as a child actress, and was dubbed the “Star for all Seasons.”

November 3, 1956 – Cathy Jamieson born, Scottish Labour Party politician, MP for Kilmarnock & Loudon (2010-2015); Minister for Justice in the Scottish Executive (2003-2007); Minister for Education and Young People (2002-2003); Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party (2000-2008).

November 3, 1962 – Jacqui Smith born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Redditch (1997-2010); she served as Britain’s first woman Home Secretary (2007-2009).

November 3, 1965 – Ann Scott born, French novelist; noted for her 2000 book Superstars, which has gained a cult following.

November 3, 1970 – Jeanette J. Epps born, American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut; former Technical Intelligence Officer for the CIA.

November 3, 1987 – Elizabeth Ann Smart Gilmour born, American activist for missing persons, child safety, and victims of sexual assault. She was kidnapped at age 14 in June 2002 by a mentally unstable “preacher” and his wife, held captive and repeatedly raped for nine months. Elizabeth’s younger sister, who shared a bedroom with her, had pretended to be asleep when her sister was taken at knifepoint, and later realized that the abductor’s voice was that of an unemployed man the family had hired for a day to do some chores before her sister was taken. Though the police were skeptical, her family got a sketch artist to draw the face of the hired man from the family’s descriptions, which was released to the media. The drawing was recognized by relatives of the man, who gave police photographs of him, which were also widely shown on the media. In March, 2003, the man was spotted with a woman and a girl in Sandy, Utah, by two separate couples who had seen his photos on the news, and both couples reported sighting the man to the police. Elizabeth was disguised in a gray wig, sunglasses, and veil, but officers dispatched to the scene recognized her during questioning, then arrested her captors, and returned her to her family.

November 3, 1992 – Carol Moseley-Braun becomes the first African-American woman elected as a U.S. Senator, as a Democrat from Illinois (1993-1999), after serving as a Representative for Illinois in the U.S. House (1983-1988).

November 3, 2010 – As part of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's two-week Asia-Pacific tour, Clinton stopped in Papua New Guinea (PNG) to promote “human rights and women's empowerment in a South Pacific nation suffering from an epidemic of rape and police brutality." Clinton told an audience during a visit to the country’s parliament, "No country in the 21st century can advance if half the population is left behind. Giving women access to education, health services, economic opportunities, and the structures of power is critical for alleviating poverty and disease in every part of the world."

November 3, 2019 – Ola Salem as a teenager stood up to the managers of an amusement park after she was not allowed on rides because she was wearing a head scarf. She worked out at a boxing gym and was considered a fierce protector at the domestic violence shelter where she volunteered. On October 24, 2019, the body of the 25-year-old activist was found in Bloomingdale Park on Staten Island, partially covered by leaves and fully dressed, according to police. But her death was initially not ruled a homicide. News outlets reported that there were no signs of blunt-force trauma to the body, only marks consistent with having been dragged into the underbrush. A spokesman for the New York Police Department, Al Baker, said there is an ongoing investigation into the death but would not comment further. The city’s medical examiner’s office said the cause of death had not been determined because it is awaiting results of toxicology tests, which could take weeks. The New York Post reported that at the time of her death, Salem had a restraining order against her estranged husband, but police declined to confirm the report. Almost a month later, her death was ruled homicide by asphyxiation. Sources with knowledge of the investigation said it was “unlikely” her killing was random, and investigators believe she was killed elsewhere, then dumped in Bloomingdale Park. In December, 2020, Salem’s father, a former pro boxer, was arraigned on a seven-count indictment charging him with second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, concealment of a human corpse, first-degree strangulation, and related offenses.

November 3, 2020 – Chief Inspector Doreen Malambo, Gender Adviser at the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), was presented in a virtual ceremony with the 2020 UN Woman Police Officer of the Year Award, in honour of her work supporting vulnerable groups, including women, girls, children, and people with disabilities. She has been posted with UNMISS since 2019, participating in community consultations, and mobilization on crime prevention/reduction. In previous postings with the UN, Chief Inspector Malambo was deployed with the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) from 2008 to 2009, where she assisted the Liberia National Police in preventing and investigating sexual and gender-based and domestic violence. “Knowing that I am making a difference by working to empower women and promote their active inclusion and participation in society motivates me”, said Chief Inspector Malambo. “Women’s empowerment is the key to increasing the visibility of their interests, concerns, needs and contributions.” Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary General for UN Peace Operations said Malambo “exemplifies the best of United Nations policing ... Greater women’s participation in peacekeeping sends a strong message to our host populations. This message is amplified when women police officers like Chief Inspector Malambo take the lead to empower and protect others, even more so in a pandemic context.”

November 3, 2021 – Michelle Wu became the first woman and first person of color to be elected as mayor of Boston. “From every corner of our city, Boston has spoken. We are ready to meet this moment. We are ready to become a Boston for everyone,” Wu told her supporters. “I want to be clear, it wasn’t my vision on the ballot, it was ours, together.” After launching her political career in 2013 when she was first elected to Boston’s city council, Wu has worked as a progressive, supporting policies like a Green New Deal for Boston and has been endorsed by other high-profile Massachusetts progressives, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. Wu’s mayoral platform also included proposals like free public transit, improving housing in Boston through rent stabilization and rent control, as well as abolishing the Boston Planning and Development Agency, with Wu saying it was time to “empower a planning department to create a master plan for updated zoning and clear, consistent rules.” After 199 years of white male mayors, Wu’s win signals the changing values and increasingly diverse demographics in Boston.

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November 4, 1429 – Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) liberates Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, which was being held by the Burgundians under Perrinet Gressart, a mercenary in the pay of Duke Philippe of Burgundy.

November 4, 1631 – Mary, Princess Royal of England born, became Countess of Nassau by marriage to Prince William II of Orange at the age of nine. She was co-regent (1651-1660) for her son William, born shortly after his father’s death, during his minority as Sovereign Prince of Orange. Her son would become William III of England in 1689, better known as William of Orange. Mary died of smallpox at age 29 on Christmas Eve in 1660.

November 4, 1853 – Anna Bayerová born, the second Czech woman medical doctor, but her doctorate was from the University of Bern in 1881, so Czechoslovakia refused to recognize it (the first Czech woman to get a medical degree faced the same problem, but she became a midwife in her hometown); Bayerová set up her medical practice in Bern; in 1889, seven hundred Czech women signed an open letter to her, which appeared in the women’s magazine Ženské Listy, expressing hope that she could return and practice in her homeland.

November 4, 1897 – Janaki Ammal born, Indian botanist who researched cytogenetics and phytogeography; did notable work on sugarcane and the eggplant; strong supporter of Gandhi and India’s independence; the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of India instituted the Janaki Ammal National Award of Taxonomy in her honor in 2000; the 'Magnolia Kobus Janaki Ammal' is named for her.

November 4, 1909 – Evelyn Bryan Johnson born, dubbed “Mama Bird,” American pilot with the greatest number flying hours of any woman pilot in the world; Colonel in the Civil Air Patrol; after learning to fly in 1944, she logged 57,635.4 flying hours, becoming the oldest flight instructor in the world, training a record number of pilots and giving the most FAA exams; she lived to age 102.

November 4, 1915 – Marguerite Patten born, English home economist, food writer, and broadcaster; during WWII, she worked for the Ministry of Food, giving recipes making use of available rationed food on a BBC programme called The Kitchen Front; debuted her first television cookery show on the BBC in 1947; author of dozens of cookery books, including the first cookbook in England with colour illustrations, Cookery in Colour.

November 4, 1921 – Mary Sherman Morgan born, American rocket fuel scientist and engineer, who invented the liquid fuel Hydyne in 1957, which powered the Jupiter-C rocket.

November 4, 1924 – Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first U.S. woman governor, in Wyoming.

November 4, 1925 – Doris Roberts born, American television, film, and stage actress, author, and philanthropist; in a career that spanned seven decades, she was nominated for Emmy Awards 18 times, and won five Best Supporting Actress Emmy Awards, and also won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Everybody Loves Raymond. Among her many charities, Roberts was an animal rights advocate, working with Puppies Behind Bars, a program for prison inmates to train guide and assistance dogs, and dogs used in explosives detection. She also served as a chair of the Children with AIDS Foundation. Roberts co-authored with Danelle Morton a combination recipe collection and memoir titled Are You Hungry, Dear? – Life, Laughs and Lasagna, published in 2003. She died at age 90 in 2016 following a stroke.

November 4, 1928 – Hannah Weiner born, American poet; part of the New York “happenings” of the 1960s; in later years, she wrote journals about her experiments with automatic writing and her struggles with schizophrenia.

November 4, 1929 – Shakuntala Devi born, Indian polymath, mental calculator, author of both fiction and non-fiction on mathematics, puzzle designer, as well as The World of Homosexuals, a sympathetic study of homosexuality in India, considered the first serious work on the subject.

November 4, 1939 – Gail E. Haley born, American children’s book author-illustrator, winner of the 1971 Caldecott Medal for A Story a Story, and the 1976 Kate Greenaway Medal for The Post Office Cat.

November 4, 1940 – Sally Baldwin born as Sarah Marie Kilday in Scotland. She earned a first in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, then in 1973 earned a diploma in social administration at the University of York, where she became part of York’s Social Policy Research Unit, and its director in 1987. She was a professor by 1990, and then head of the university’s Social Policy and Social Work Department until her retirement in 2002. She was killed at age 62 in 2003 in Rome, Italy, when a moving walkway collapsed and she was crushed. The buildings of the University of York’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences were renamed The Sally Baldwin Buildings, and a Sally Baldwin PhD Studentship set up, in her memory.

November 4, 1940 – Marlène Jobert born in Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, French actress and author who left acting in the late 1970s to concentrate on writing children’s books and books about classical composers, including Mozart, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky.

November 4, 1940 – Sheila Levrant de Bretteville born, American feminist graphic designer, artist, and educator. She founded the first design program for women at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971, then left two years later to co-found the Woman's Building, a public center in Los Angeles dedicated to women's education and culture, and ran the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Women’s Building. In 1990, she became director of the Yale University Graduate Program in Graphic Design, the first woman to become tenured at the Yale University School of Art. In 2004, she was honored with a Design Legend Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

November 4, 1941 – Kafi Benz born, American artist, author, environmental and historical preservationist, and art association director. In 1959, she was a key member of the Jersey Jetport Site Association, which teamed up with the North American Wildlife Federation to successfully prevent the building of a major regional airport to accommodate large jet aircraft on the Great Swamp, a pristine watershed area in New Jersey, which is now the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. In the late 1960s, she became director of the Somerset Art Association, a regional art center with a comprehensive studio art school and professional exhibition program. In the 1980s, she was active in environmental and historic preservation in Sarasota, Florida, becoming an early member of the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation, Inc. She was part of an archaeological investigation to document historical and pre-historical evidence at two endangered properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Benz founded Friends of Seagate, an advocacy group which campaigned for acquisition of the 1920s estate by the state of Florida in the early 1990s, which saved it from commercial development.

November 4, 1941 – Lyndall Gordon born, South African-English biographer and academic; senior research fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford; noted for Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Eliot’s Early Years, which won the British Academy’s 1978 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, winner of the 1984 James Tait Black Prize for Biography; and Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life, which won the 1994 Cheltentham Prize for Literature.

November 4, 1942 – Patricia Bath born, American ophthalmologist, inventor, and humanitarian; the first black person to serve as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University; first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose, she held five patents, including one for the Laserphaco Probe; first woman member of the Jules Stein Eye Institute; first woman to lead a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology, and first woman elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center. In 1976, Bath co-founded the non-profit American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, and served as its first president. She died at age 76 in 2019. In 2021, Bath was announced as one of the first two black women (along with Marian Croak) to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

November 4, 1948 – Alexis Hunter born in New Zealand, contemporary painter and photographer who worked in London; member of the Women’s Workshop of Artists Union (1972-1975) and the Woman’s Free Arts Alliance; explored the importance of tattoos as cultural art and commentary, and did several series of photographs related to feminist theories, including a photograph in her 1978 How to Make it in a Man’s World series entitled The Marxist Housewife (Still Does the Housework), showing a manicured hand cleaning a poster of Karl Marx, referencing both class issues and Marx’s lack of recognition of domestic labour in his writing. She died at age 65 in 2014.

November 4, 1958 – Anne Sweeney born, American business executive; from 1996 to 2014, she was co-chair of Disney Media, President of the Disney–ABC Television Group, and the President of Disney Channel; won the Lucy Award from Women in Film in Los Angeles in 2002; inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame in 2005.

November 4, 1960 –Dr Jane Goodall, at Kasakela Chimpanzee Community in Tanzania, observes chimpanzees creating tools, the first scientifically recorded observation of tool-making in non-humans.

JaneGoodallchimpanzee-Zambia-Chimfunshi-Wildlife-Orphanage.jpg

November 4, 1960 – Kathy Griffin born, American comedian and social commentator who has been frequently in hot water because of her ‘nothing off-limits’ style, actress, and outspoken supporter of LGBT rights; she has also done two USO tours to entertain U.S. troops. Her career took a nosedive over a 2017 photograph that went viral in which she showed a mask of Donald Trump’s head covered in ketchup. In addition to appearances being canceled, she also received death threats, and was investigated by the Secret Service. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2021, and underwent surgery, but then returned to performing on television.

November 4, 1965 – Lee Ann Roberts Breedlove is the first woman to exceed 300 mph, a record 308.5 mph driving the Spirit of America–Sonic 1, a jet-powered vehicle, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

November 4, 1970 – Malena Ernman born, Swedish opera singer and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. She and her husband, actor Svante Thunberg, are the parents of two daughters, Greta and Beata. Yes, that Greta Thunberg, who convinced the family to shrink their carbon footprint. Ernman gave up performing internationally to avoid flying.

November 4, 2012 – Fauzia Yusuf Haji Adan is nominated as Somalia’s first woman Foreign Minister. She is confirmed, and serves in the cabinet both as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister from 2012 to 2014.

November 4, 2019 – E. Jean Carroll, widely respected New York journalist, filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump for defamation, after he ridiculed her assertion that he raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s because, he claimed, she was “not my type.” In her suit, filed in the supreme court of New York state, she argues that Trump’s vociferous denials and characterization of her as a money-grubbing liar have damaged her reputation and career. After Carroll went public with her allegations, she received several online death threats, and now sleeps with a loaded gun by her bed. Carroll said “I am filing this lawsuit for every woman who’s been pinched, prodded, cornered, felt-up, pushed against a wall, grabbed, groped, assaulted, and has spoken up only to be shamed, demeaned, disgraced, passed over for promotion, fired and forgotten,” adding, “No one, not even the president, is above the law.”

November 4, 2020 – While the 2020 Presidential race and control of the U.S. Senate were still unsettled, these women won their races to become members of the U.S. House of Representatives: Marie Newman (IL), Cori Bush (MO), Kathy Manning (NC), Deborah Ross (NC), Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM), Chrissy Houlihan (PA), Lizzie Pannill Fletcher (TX), Elaine Luria (VA), and Jennifer Wexton (VA).

November 4, 2021 – In the UK, Preet Chandi, a 32-year-old Sikh woman who is a British army physiotherapist, set her sights on becoming the first woman of colour to complete a solo unsupported trek across Antarctica to the South Pole. In 2020, she spent 27 days trekking on the ice cap in Greenland as part of her preparation. Chandi says, “I am an Asian woman, I’m not the image that people expect to see out there.” In recent weeks, she has been dragging tyres around the streets near her home in a suburb of Derby, which has caused curious stares from passersby. “People say the outdoors is for everyone and yes, it is. But if you come from a community that is not involved in it at all, or you don’t know anybody that does outdoorsy things, or you don’t see anybody that looks like you doing it, it can be really hard,” she said, adding that a number of people thought she said she was going to Southall, in west London, not to the south pole. “It’s just so out of the norm for them.” On January 3, 2022, she announced that she had completed the 700 mile trek, skiing solo, in 40 days.

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November 5, 1607 – Anna Maria van Schurman born, Dutch painter, scholar, engraver and poet; highly educated, proficient in 14 languages, and excelling at art, music and literature; she argued in Dissertatio De Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam, & meliores Litteras aptitudine (The Learned Maid or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar) in favor of educating women, but not for women to use their education to enter a profession, because she was against allowing it to interfere with their domestic duties.

November 5, 1831 – Anna Edwards Leonowens born in India, British educator, travel writer, and feminist. She was governess (1862-1867) to children of King Mongkut of Siam; her memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, published in 1870, was the basis for the play on which the 1951 smash-hit Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I was based.

November 5, 1850 – Ella Wheeler Wilcox born, American author and popular poet. Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death.

November 5, 1857 – Ida Tarbell born, ground-breaking pioneer in investigative journalism, writer, biographer, editor, and lecturer; best known for The History of the Standard Oil Company, an exposé on Standard Oil that led to federal investigation and break-up of the company. Historian Daniel Yergin called it "the single most influential book on business ever published in the United States."

November 5, 1872 – Susan B. Anthony determines to test the limits of the 14th Amendment, which declares “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," and the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” On this day, with 14 other women, she votes in the presidential election. All the women will later be arrested, accused of voting illegally, but only Anthony, the best-known suffragist of the day, will be tried.

November 5, 1899 – Margaret Atwood Judson born, American historian and author. She started at Douglass College at Rutgers University as an instructor in 1928, and progressed to full professor in 1948. She was chair of the history department (1955-1963), retired, but returned temporarily as acting dean of the college (1966-1967). The Margaret Atwood Judson Professor of History chair was created in her honor. She was a member of the American Historical Association for 61 years, and received an Award for Scholarly Distinction from association. The Crisis of the English Constitution; From Tradition to Political Realty; and Breaking the Barrier: A Professional Autobiography are among her notable published works. She died at age 91 in 1991.

November 5, 1900 – Ethelwynn Trewavas born, British ichthyologist; over a dozen fish species are named in her honor.

November 5, 1901 – Etta Moten Barnett born, American actress, contralto singer, and civic activist in Chicago after retiring from performing. As a singer and actress, Bess in Porgy and Bess became her signature role when she starred in the show’s 1942 revival on Broadway. While she primarily appeared live or on the radio, she sang “The Carioca” in the film Flying Down to Rio, and played a war widow in Gold Diggers of 1933. In Chicago, she was a fundraiser and supporter of cultural, social, and church institutions, including serving as a board member of The Links, a service organization for African-American women. Barnett also hosted a radio show in Chicago called I Remember When. She lived to the age of 102, and died of cancer in 2004.

November 5, 1911 – Marie Osborne Yeats born, “Baby Marie” the first major child star of American silent films; she later worked as a costumer for Western Costume, a major clothing supplier for the motion picture industry.

November 5, 1917 – Jacqueline Auriol born, French aviator and test pilot, one of the first women to break the sound barrier; she also set five world speed records in the 1950s and 1960s; her autobiography, I Live to Fly, was published in 1970.

November 5, 1922 – Violet Barclay born, who also used the name Valerie Barclay, American illustrator and pioneering female comic-book artist; her career started as an inker at Timely Comics, which would later become Marvel Comics, doing work that was unsigned and uncredited. In the early 1940s she worked on several successful series, including the career-girl humor series, Nellie the Nurse. She left Timely Comics in 1949, and worked as a freelance artist, but left the field in the mid-1950s during an industry slump, and segued into fashion illustration for national retail chains. She retired with the advent of computer graphics, and by 2004 was painting reproductions of John Singer Sargent portraits. She died in 2010 at the age of 87.

November 5, 1931 – Diane Pearson born, British book editor and novelist. In 1994, she won the British Book Award for the Editor of the Year. As an author, she is known for Whitman Saga, several one-off novels, including Csardas, and short stories which have often been included in collaborative anthologies with other authors.

November 5, 1945 – Aleka Papariga (Αλέκα Παπαρήγα) born, Greek Communist Party politician; Member of the Parliament of Greece for Athens B since 1993; the first woman to head a major political party in Greece (1993-2013).

November 5, 1952 – Vandana Shiva born, Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, anti-globalization author, and advocate for women in leadership positions; noted for her book Vedic Ecology.

November 5, 1953 – Joyce Maynard born, American novelist and newspaper and magazine journalist; noted for her 1992 novel, To Die For, drawn from the Pamela Smart murder case.

November 5, 1958 – Mo Gaffney born, American comedian, writer, and activist; co-wrote and starred with Kathy Najimy in two off-Broadway ‘Kathy and Mo’ shows, which both won Obie Awards; activist for same-sex marriage.

November 5, 1962 – Turid Birkeland born, Norwegian Labour Party politician; Norwegian Minister of Culture (1996-1997); Member of Norwegian Parliament (1986-1989); Oslo City Councilwoman in 2015, until her death from complications of myelofibrosis.

November 5, 1964 – Famke Janssen born, Dutch film and television actress, best known for playing a villain in the Bond film Goldeneye, and as Jean Grey in the first X-Men movie; she made her independent film producer-director and co-writer debut in 2011 with the comedy-drama Bringing Up Bobby, which was launched at the Cannes Film Festival. She co-starred with her dog as part of a PETA campaign for animal rights, was appointed in 2008 as a Goodwill Ambassador for Integrity by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and has been an outspoken critic of Hollywood’s double-standard age prejudice toward actresses, which often sinks the careers of “leading ladies” in their late thirties or early forties, while many leading men continue to be hired for leading roles well into their sixties.

November 5, 1973 – Gráinne Seoige born, Irish journalist, news anchor, television presenter and Irish language advocate; she is the only television presenter to have worked on Irish television’s TG4, TV3, RTÉ One and RTÉ2. She has also read the inaugural news bulletins on three separate channels—TG4, TV3, and Sky News Ireland, and also appeared on the BBC One series That’s Britain.

November 5, 1974 – Ella T. Grasso elected as governor of Connecticut, the first U.S. woman elected as a state governor without succeeding her husband (1975-1980); previously served Connecticut’s 6^th District in the U.S. House of Representatives (1971-1975).

November 5, 1982 – Leah Culver born, computer programmer and co-author of OAuth and oEmbed API specifications; co-founder of the micro-blogging site Pownce in 2007, acquired by Six Apart in 2008; also co-founder of real time chat site Convore in 2011, which pivoted into Grove, a chat service for workgroups, and was sold to Revolution Systems in 2012. After working as an engineer at Dropbox, she co-founded Breaker with Erik Berlin in 2016, where she is currently CTO.

November 5, 1983 – Anne Leilhua Lanzilotti born, a Kananka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) composer and sound artist. In 2018, the Noguchi Museum on Long Island, NY commissioned her to write music for a celebration of the light sculptures of Isamu Noguchi, which are made of washi paper and bamboo. She composed Postcards I, II, and III: Akari for the exhibit. She was a finalist in 2022 for the Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time.

November 5, 2016 – FBI Director James Comey told Congress that a review of “new documents” linked to Hillary Clinton’s email server has not changed the agency’s conclusion that there were no grounds for charges over Clinton’s handling of sensitive material. The emails were personal, or duplicates of messages already reviewed. Comey had told Congress in July that Clinton had been “careless” with her emails as secretary of state, but there was no evidence she intentionally mishandled classified information. Yet Comey had alerted Congress just 11 days before the November 8 election that “new emails possibly related to the server” had been found, and the news hurt Clinton’s presidential campaign. In May, 2016, the conservative online magazine American Thinker had estimated that the FBI bill alone for the investigation had cost over $20 million – and that did not include what was spent by the State and Justice Departments.

Clinton had been grilled for hours by a Republican-controlled Congress about her emails, but no charges were ever filed

November 5, 2019 – In Ireland, a judge in the central criminal court in Dublin sentenced two teenage boys, known only as ‘Boy A’ and ‘Boy B,’ in the murder of Ana Kriégel, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, that they lured to an abandoned house, where she was savagely beaten and sexually assaulted. ‘Boy A’ was sentenced to life in detention, with a review after 12 years, and ‘Boy B’ was sentenced to 15 years, with a review after 8 years. Kriégel had a crush on ‘Boy A,’ who was the one that assembled a murder kit: zombie mask, black gloves, shin guards, knee pads, a long stick, and a concrete block. The convicted killers will remain in Oberstown, Ireland’s only child detention campus, until they turn 18, when they will be moved to an adult prison to serve out the balance of their sentences.

November 5, 2020 – The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) expressed alarm about the deteriorating health of Loujain al-Hathloul, a leading Saudi women’s rights activist, who has been on a hunger strike in protest of her long incarceration without trial. CEDAW also called on the government “to ensure her right to a fair trial without further delay, with full respect for the procedural guarantees established by international human rights law, and free from gender bias.” Al-Hathloul, who has been an outspoken campaigner for an end to the ban on Saudi women driving, and their life-long guardianship by male relatives, was arrested and detained in May, 2018, on “national security” grounds. Her testimony before a CEDAW committee in February, 2018, was used in the charges against her. She has remained imprisoned while her trial has been repeatedly postponed, so she started a hunger strike on October 26, 2020, in protest. Contrary to the UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners, al-Hathloul has not been allowed regular contact with her family, or regular exercise activities. Human rights defenders are entitled to “free and unhindered access” to communication without “fear or retribution,” CEDAW upheld. “We urge the Saudi authorities to protect her rights to life, health, and liberty and security of person at all times, while fully respecting her freedoms of conscience and expression, including by going on hunger strike.” CEDAW monitors the 189 States parties' adherence to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and is made up of 23 independent human rights experts from around the world, who serve in their personal capacity and not as representatives of States parties.

Before being detained in 2018— and in 2020

November 5, 2021 – Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg led a massive protest of young activists outside the United Nations' COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Thunberg, who called the conference a "failure," said world leaders should be taking bold action to prevent catastrophic climate change. Instead, "history will judge them poorly" because they are turning the potentially pivotal conference into "a global greenwash festival" and "a two-week long celebration of business as usual." Leaders at the conference have touted pledges made by dozens of nations during the first week to end deforestation, phase out coal power plants, and halt public investment in fossil fuel projects abroad, but many youth activists demanded more radical action. "We don't need any more empty promises," Thunberg said.

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November 6, 1856 – Scenes of Clerical Life, three short stories by the author later known as George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), are submitted for publication.

November 6, 1867 – Marie Bregendahl née Sørensen born, Danish novelist and short story writer; best known for her 1912 novel En Dødsnat (translated as A Night of Death), based on the death of her mother when she was only 12, and her 8-volume Billeder af Sødalsfolkenes liv (Pictures from the Life of the People of Sødal), which showed the day-to-day lives of West Jutland farmers in a 19^th century village community.

November 6, 1881 – Marie-Louise Dissard born; a dressmaker with her own shop in Toulouse before WWII, she became a member of the French resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. She first worked as part of the O’Leary network, helping downed Allied aviators evade German capture and return to the UK. In 1943, when the network was uncovered, and most of its members arrested by the Gestapo, Dissard created a new escape network called the Françoise Line, which helped more than 250 Allied airmen escape occupied France and escape back to Great Britain. She received financial support from Britain’s M19 intelligence agency. Including her work with the O’Leary network, she helped over 700 Allied airmen get safely out of France. She was honored with the French Legion of Honor, the UK’s George Medal, and the U.S. Medal of Freedom. She was one of the few women to head a resistance organization in France, and one of the most successful leaders.

November 6, 1884 – May Brahe born, Australian composer, best known for songs and ballads, including “Bless This House” (lyrics by Helen Taylor).

November 6, 1886 – Ida Barney born, American astronomer and mathematician; produced 22 volumes of astrometric measurements on 150,000 stars; worked at the Yale University Observatory as a researcher (1922-1955); awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1952.

November 6, 1894 – Opal Kunz born, American aviator; first woman pilot to race men in an open competition; chief organizer of the Betsy Ross Air Corps, and charter member of the Ninety-Nines, a women pilots’ organization; during WWI, was a flight instructor for Navy cadets and the Civilian Pilot Training Program.

November 6, 1900 – Ida Lou Anderson born, pioneer in radio broadcasting, and professor; after graduation from college, she became a professor of speech and drama, a radio station advisor and broadcasting coach. Edward R. Murrow was one of her students, and she became his mentor and advisor. Anderson suggested the opening phrase “This is London” for Murrow’s broadcasts from the city during the Nazi Blitz early in WWII, with the slight pause after “This” which made the phrase so memorable. She died at age 40 of complications from polio, which she had suffered as a child.

November 6, 1917 – New York State adopts a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote in state elections.

November 6, 1919 – Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen born, Portuguese poet, short story writer, and children’s book author; she had some Danish ancestry on her father’s side, and the family prospered in Porto, where she was raised at Quinta do Campo Alegre (now the Porto Botanical Gardens). She took classes in Classical Philology at the University of Lisbon (1936-1939), but did not complete her studies. She contributed to the magazine Cadernos de Poesia, where she made friends with influential and well-known authors. She became well known as a liberal and a progressive Catholic. Her song "Cantata da Paz" became something of an anthem for the opposition to the regime of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. Andresen married in 1946, and began writing children’s books for her five children in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1964, Andresen received the Grand Prize of Poetry from the Portuguese Society of Writers for her book Livro Sexto. After the Revolution of 25 April in 1974, she was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1975 by the Porto circle on a Socialist Party list while her husband joined the Social Democratic Party. Ten years after her death in 2004, the Assembly of the Republic voted unanimously to honor Andresen by entombing her remains in the Portuguese National Pantheon.

November 6, 1933 – Else Ackermann born, German physician and pharmacologist who became an East German politician in the Christian Democratic Union party. While chair of the local branch of the party in her hometown of Neuenhagan, she drafted a report on the power relationships between the citizen and the state, and in 1988 she presented what came to be known as the “Neuenhagen Letter,” to the national party, a significant precursor of the 1989 changes leading to the end, in the early summer of 1990, of the one-party dictatorship, followed by German reunification later that same year.

November 6, 1938 – Diana E. H. Russell born in South Africa, educated in Britain and the U.S.; feminist writer, sociologist, and anti-apartheid activist; Her book The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective (1975) was one of the earliest books published linking rape with sexual discrimination. She was a pioneer in Women’s Studies, offering one of the earliest courses as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mills College; organizer of the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976; advocate for the use of ‘Femicide’ to describe violent murders of women by men because they are female, and adding it as a category to legislation against hate crimes.

November 6, 1940 – Ruth Messenger born, New York City liberal political leader and advocate for public education, ran unsuccessfully for mayor against incumbent Rudy Giuliani in 1997; president and CEO of American Jewish World Service (1998-2016).

November 6, 1946 – Sally Field born, American actress and director; Oscar-winner for Best Actress for Norma Rae and Places in the Heart; director and co-author of the TV movie The Christmas Tree (1996), and the feature film Beautiful (2000); advocate for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. In December, 2019, Field was arrested for taking part in Jane Fonda's weekly Friday climate change protests outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

November 6, 1947 – The first show of NBC’s Meet the Press; Martha Rountree, co-creator of Meet the Press, was the first moderator (1947-1953), and to date still the only woman to host the show.

governor-thomas-e-dewey-on-meet-the-press-with-moderator-martha-rountree.jpg

November 6, 1954 – Catherine Crier born, American journalist, author, and attorney. Her legal career began in 1978 in the Dallas County District Attorney’s office, where she rose from Assistant District Attorney to Felony Chief Prosecutor (1982-1984). At age thirty, she became the youngest elected state judge in Texas, serving as Texas State District Judge for the 162^nd District Court (1984-1990). She switched to television journalism at CNN in 1990, then in 1993 she joined the 20/20 news magazine team at ABC. In 1996, she was at Fox News Channel for The Crier Report, then moved in 1999 to Court TV as an Executive Editor, and host of Catherine Crier Live (1999-2007). As an author, her books include The Case Against Lawyers; Deadly Game; Contempt – How the Right is Wronging American Justice; Final Analysis; and Patriot Acts –What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic.

November 6, 1955 – Catherine Asaro born; science fiction and fantasy author; former ballet and jazz dancer; PhD in chemical physics from Harvard who privately teaches math, physics, and chemistry to gifted kids; advocate for getting more women in STEM fields; best known for her series Saga of the Skolian Empire.

November 6, 1962 – Nadezhda Kuzhelnaya born, Russian Cosmonaut (1994-2004); she graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1988, and worked as an engineer for RKK Energia, designing equipment for spaceflights, before applying for the training programme at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. Between 1999 and 2004, she was the only Russian woman cosmonaut. In 2004, after it was announced that female cosmonauts would not be flying for several years, she left the service and became a commercial pilot for the Russian carrier Aeroflot, where she was one of two women pilots to fly the Tupolev Tu-134.

November 6, 1966 – Stephanie Vozzo Coronado born, American comic book colorist, who worked on Archie’s Weird Mysteries, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series, and other projects at both Marvel and DC Comics. She is the VP on the board of the Folk Alliance Region Midwest (FARM), which promotes traditional, contemporary, and multi-cultural folk music and dance, and the owner of Ginger Roots Agency, a boutique talent agency and resource center.

November 6, 1971 – Laura Flessel-Colovic born, French politician, newspaper columnist, and former Olympic épée fencer. She won two gold medals in the 1996 Atlanta games, and a total six gold medals in the World Championships in 1998, 1999, 2005, 2007, and 2008. She served as the French Minister of Sport (2017-2018). She is a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO promoting tolerance in sports.

November 6, 1988 – Emma Stone born, American film and stage actress, known for The Help, The Amazing Spider-Man, Birdman and LaLaLand, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar, a Best Actress Golden Globe and a BAFTA award. After her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she did fundraising for Stand Up to Cancer, Gilda’s Club, and hosted the Entertainment Industry’s Revlon Run/Walk from 2012 to 2014, which raises awareness and helps fund research. Stone also supports the World Wide Fund for Nature, and did fundraising for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, which aids people in the industry who are in need. In 2018, she joined with 300 other women in Hollywood to set up the Time's Up initiative and the Times’ Up Legal Defense Fund, for women who have been subject to sexual harassment or gender discrimination.

November 6, 2012 – Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic candidate, wins her race to be the junior U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, becoming the first openly LGBT woman elected to the Senate, and the first woman U.S. Senator from Wisconsin.

November 6, 2015 – A Mormon spokesman confirmed that the new policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declares those in a same-sex marriage are considered apostates, and children living in a same-sex household may not be blessed as babies, or baptized until they are 18, and then only if they disavow same-sex cohabitation and marriage, stop living within the household and request to join the church. In 2019, the church announced that children of parents who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender may now be blessed as infants and baptized. The 2015 policy had divided the church, and many members felt it punished children. However, the church reiterated that it considers same-sex marriage by a member to be "a serious transgression."

MormonChurchrevisesbanonbaptizingchildrenofLGBTQandtransexualparents.jpg

November 6, 2019 – Members of the Westfield Matildas, Australia’s national women’s soccer team, will now earn the same as the men’s team, part of an historic four-year deal between the Football Federation Australia, and the Professional Footballers Australia union.

November 6, 2020 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern appointed veteran politician Nanaia Mahuta as her country’s Foreign Minister, coming as a surprise to political watchers – but also to Mahuta. She has been in parliament for 24 years, holding portfolios in trade, customs, Māori affairs, and youth development. She is New Zealand’s first woman and second Māori foreign minister. “When she put the opportunity to me, I was really, really pleased with the offer; I didn’t hesitate,” Mahuta says. “It’s one of the portfolios where you’d love to make a contribution but it’s highly contested, so it was on my long list. But I was on her short list ... It’s satisfying to be given the opportunity to serve in a way we can lift the glass ceiling, in offices that have often not been open to women. And important [to] blaze a trail that can be different and unique, and carve out a real sense of opportunity as a country, but also for Indigenous people ... So that’s what I am going to do.” Her tribe, Waikato-Tainui, says she “brings tremendous mana (power) and skills” to her new role.

November 6, 2021 – At the new Centre for Plural Masculinities in Barcelona, Spain, Laura Pérez, the Barcelona city councillor for feminism and LGBTI, who has overall responsibility for the project, says, “This isn’t a place for men to come and beat themselves up for being bad men. It’s a place to talk about sexuality, without taboos, a place to explore masculinity. It’s all to do with how boys are educated to be men. Men have to be heroes, they’re not allowed to be afraid, boys don’t cry. This doesn’t allow for the many different versions of masculinity that are possible.” While the centre aims to confront misogyny and homophobia, the emphasis is on encouraging men to explore other ways of being, beyond traditional role models. Spain, after all, is the country that gave us the word “machismo.” The centre also has an outreach program through exhibitions and events in libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions which Pérez hopes will open up debate about masculinity. There will also be connections with the city’s numerous sporting associations, and outreach to schools involving teachers and parents. Some of the programmes pre-date the centre and one of the most successful and popular of them prepares fathers-to-be with discussions about fatherhood, childcare and sharing domestic chores. Some of the impetus for the innovative program comes from the nation’s shock over the la Manada (wolf pack) case in 2018, when three judges acquitted five men of gang-raping an 18-year-old woman at the running of the bulls festival in Pamplona on the grounds that the video the men recorded on their phones showed the woman offering no resistance. One judge even said they should only be found guilty of stealing the victim’s mobile. “The case marked a turning point in Spain, especially as Trump was in power, and when someone is so blatantly misogynist it helps people to understand how laws and policies are so anti-women,” says Viviana Waisman, president of Women’s Link Worldwide. “Here was a young woman who was the victim of a crime and the judges’ focus was on her and not the defendants. She was being asked to explain her behaviour although she was the victim. It broke the collective silence about how women experience violence and discrimination in society.” Tens of thousands of women and men taking to the streets all over Spain in protests that forced the government to introduce new legislation on consent. Laura Pérez says, “Barcelona has been promoting feminist policies since 2015, and it’s important we consolidate the topic of masculinity within these. If not, it’s just the sound of one hand clapping.”

CentreforPluralMasculinities-andLauraPrez-VivianaWaismanBarcelona.jpg — Laura Pérez — Barcelona Centre for Plural Masculinities — Viviana Waisman

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November 7, 1834 – Lucy Lloyd born, English linguist and folklorist who worked in South Africa with her brother-in-law William Bleek on an archive of the oral histories of Cape bushmen, and the ǀXam and ¡King languages. Several bushmen of the San people were prisoners at Robben Island because of attacks on white farmers, but their prosecutions were eventually waived by the Attorney General. Bleek compiled a list of words and sentences and an alphabetical vocabulary, and both he and Lloyd worked to learn the language in order to record the men’s personal narratives and folklore. After Bleek’s death in 1875, Lloyd continued and expanded their work. She also played an important part in the founding of the South African Folklore Society, and its Folklore Journal. In 1913, Lloyd received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Cape of Good Hope in recognition of her contributions. The citation read: “… an original production worthy of the highest praise. It is not only a masterly exposition of the folklore of a vanishing race that has remained primitive, but the philological value of the work is greater still, and the work will remain an authority on the language of the Bushman and kindred races.” She was the first woman to receive this degree in South Africa. She died at age 79 in August 1914.

November 7, 1867 – Marie Curie born as Marie Sklodowksa, Polish chemist who did most of her pioneering work in France. First she separated polonium, and then radium a few months later. The quantity of radon in radioactive equilibrium with a gram of radium was named a curie (subsequently redefined as the emission of 3.7 x 10¹⁰ alpha particles per second). With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. Later, she also was sole winner of a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. Her family won five Nobel awards in two generations. She died of radiation poisoning from her work before the need for protection was known.

November 7, 1872 – Leonora von Stosch Speyer, Lady Speyer, born in America, poet who won the Pulitzer 1927 Prize for Poetry for her book Fiddler’s Farewell; she played violin professionally before her first marriage, which ended in divorce; her second husband was Sir Edgar Speyer, a British banker.

November 7, 1878 – Lise Meitner born in Austria-Hungary, Austrian-Swedish physicist; co-leader with Otto Hahn of the scientists who discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron, a process which was the basis of the WWII nuclear weapons developed by the U.S. at Los Alamos. She was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1938, and went to Sweden, but Meitner refused to work on the atom bomb. In 1966, she shared the Enrico Fermi Award with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research that led to uranium fission.

November 7, 1878 – “Cissy” Eleanor Medill Patterson born, editor and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald; early crusader for home rule for the District of Columbia; novelist, known for Glass Houses and Fall Flight.

November 7, 1893 – Margaret Leech born, American historian and fiction writer; won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize in History in 1942 for Reveille in Washington, the first woman to win for history, and again in 1960 for In the Days of McKinley, also awarded the Bancroft Prize; married Ralph Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer's son.

November 7, 1893 – Women in Colorado win the right to vote, the second state in the U.S. where woman suffrage passed, and the first state where it was enacted by popular referendum. In 1894, three Republican women – Clara Cressingham, Carrie Clyde Holly and Frances Klock– became the first women to be elected to any U.S. legislature when they were elected to the Colorado House of Representatives. They each served one term (1895-1896). Newspaperwoman Helen Robinson was the first woman Colorado state senator (1913-1916), and chaired the Colorado State Senate Education Committee. She traveled the U.S. making speeches in favor of national woman suffrage, and introduced a bill for a minimum wage for women in Colorado, but it failed to pass.

November 7, 1900 – Nellie Campobello, born as Maria Moya Luna, Mexican writer and poet who wrote Cartucho, a novel that chronicles the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), one of the few published works to document the revolution from a woman’s perspective; she was also a ballet dancer, choreographer, and director of la Escuela Plástica Dinámica (now the Mexican National School of Dance). Among her other works are the novel, Las manos de mama (The Hands of Mama) and Tres poemas (Three Poems). In 1985, Campobello suddenly disappeared, along with her belongings, including paintings by Orozco and Diego Rivera. She had given power of attorney to Claudio Fuentes Figueroa and his wife Maria Cristina Belmont, who took care of her house. Her whereabouts were unknown until 1998, when the Commission of Human Rights of the Federal District ruled that Nellie had died on July 9, 1986, after a death certificate for her was found, and the gravestone on a nameless grave at the Progreso de Obregón Cemetery of Hidalgo was discovered with her initials on it. The death certificate had been witnessed by Claudio Fuentes Figueroa.

November 7, 1901 – Norah McGuinness born, modern Irish painter and illustrator; she was also a designer for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, then later worked in London and New York, before returning to Ireland in 1939.

‘Cottage by the Coast of Ireland’ — by Norah McGuinness

November 7, 1909 – Ruby Hurley born, administrator for the NAACP, setting up and running their first office in the Deep South, in Birmingham Alabama. She was on the committee that arranged Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial after Anderson was barred from Constitution Hall. As the NAACP Youth Secretary, she increased youth membership to 25,000; she also investigated the 1955 Emmitt Till murder in Mississippi despite personal danger. In 1955, Jet magazine said, “she has had the toughest job in fighting for Negro rights in the South.” Her accomplishments were recognized by the U.S. Postal Service in 2009 with the release of a commemorative stamp in the Civil Rights Pioneers stamp series.

November 7, 1915 – M. Athalie Range born in Bahamas, American civil rights activist and Florida politician; the first black person to serve on the Miami City Commission, where she campaigned to have garbage collection improved in black neighborhoods, which sometimes went three weeks between garbage pickups, while white neighborhoods got twice a week pickups. After a vote on her proposed ordinance to equalize garbage service was twice postponed, Range had her neighbors bring bags of garbage to the commission meeting and dump them on the commissioners' desks. After that, the ordinance was passed. She was the first African-American since Reconstruction, and the first woman, to head a Florida state agency, as Secretary of the Department of Community Affairs (1971-1973). President Jimmy Carter appointed Range to a two-year term on the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (AMTRAK) governing board. Range was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame in 1997. She died in 2006, at age 91.

November 7, 1916 – Jeannette Rankin becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, from Montana (1917-1919).

November 7, 1917 – Helen Suzman born, South African politician and anti-Apartheid activist; Member of the South African Parliament for Houghton (1953-1989), where she used every opportunity to speak out against discriminatory legislation and to defend the right of freedom of expression for all South Africans. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party in 1959, and its sole representative in parliament for the next 16 years. She visited prisons to inspect living conditions of prisoners, including those on Robben Island, and met with Nelson Mandela several times. Her reports improved prison conditions for several ANC prisoners, and she used her parliamentary privilege to evade government censorship, and pass information about the worst abuses of apartheid to the media. She was frequently reviled and derided as a Jew and as a woman by other members of Parliament and by Prime Minister P.W. Botha, both in Parliament and in the government-controlled press. Suzman was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.” The UN honored her with its Human Rights Award in 1978, and the Medallion of Heroism in 1980, and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

November 7, 1919 – Ellen Stewart born, influential American theatre director-producer, the founder of La MaMa, an experimental theatre company in NYC, which produced the first plays of many new playwrights, including Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and Harvey Fierstein, and also gave performers like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Bette Midler some of their first roles.

November 7, 1920 – Elaine Morgan born, Welsh writer for television, and author of several books on evolutionary anthropology, especially the aquatic ape hypothesis, as a corrective to theories she saw as based on gender stereotypes. The Descent of Woman, published in 1972, became an international bestseller translated into ten languages, but was more popular with the lay public than with anthropologists.

November 7, 1921 – Lisa Ben born as Edythe Eyde, American LGBT rights activist, writer, and singer-songwriter; while working as a secretary at RKO Studios in Los Angeles, she became the founder and publisher of the lesbian magazine Vice Versa in 1947, but was forced to stop publishing when she lost her job at RKO in 1948, and her new position left her no opportunity to type the magazine articles at work. In the 1950s, she was a contributor to the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, The Ladder. Noted for her song, “Cruisin’ Down the Boulevard,” one of the first recorded lesbian songs. Inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Hall of Fame in 2010.

November 7, 1921 – Susanne Hirzel born, a German music student who became a member of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group; she was arrested and convicted in 1943 of distributing leaflets, but sentenced to six months in prison, because the prosecution was unable to establish that she had knowledge of the leaflets’ contents; after 1945, she became a cello teacher, and wrote a series of books on cello technique.

November 7, 1925 – Barbara Wertheimer born, author; We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America; a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women.

November 7, 1926 – Joan Sutherland born, internationally acclaimed Australian-Swiss dramatic coloratura soprano. In 1962, she was the first Australian to win a Grammy Award, for Best Classical Performance – Vocal Soloist (with or without orchestra).

November 7, 1936 – Dame Gwyneth Jones born, Welsh operatic dramatic soprano, regarded as one of the great Wagnerian sopranos of the 20^th century.

November 7, 1937 – Mary Daheim born, American journalist, historical romance and mystery author; noted for the Bed & Breakfast series; her first mystery, Just Desserts, was nominated for an Agatha Award.

November 7, 1939 – Barbara Liskov born, American computer scientist; one of the first U.S. women to be granted a doctorate in computer science; developer of the CLU programming language, important primarily for its specification of abstract datatypes. She won the Turing Award for the Liskov Substitution Principle; Institute Professor at MIT.

November 7, 1941 – Madeline Gins born, American architect, artist, and poet; with her husband, artist Shusaku Arakawa, she co-founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation, to support projects built in harmony with their “Mechanism of Meaning” principles, involving the expertise of practitioners from many disciplines to enhance life-extending properties of the building designs; unfortunately, their ideas did not extend their lives – her husband died at 73, and Gins died at 72.

November 7, 1943 – Joni Mitchell born, Canadian singer-songwriter; winner of nine Grammy awards; regarded as one of the most important and influential women recording artists of the late 20^th century.

YouTube Video

November 7, 1943 – Silvia Cartwright born, New Zealand jurist; served on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and played a major role in the drafting of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; presided over the 1988 inquiry into issues relating to treatment of cervical cancer at Auckland’s National Women’s Hospital, known as the Cartwright Inquiry; first woman Chief District Court Judge (1989-1993) and first woman appointed to New Zealand’s High Court (1993); the second woman appointed as New Zealand’s Governor-General (2001-2006); she was one of four women appointed, out of 16 international judges, by Cambodia’s Supreme Council of Magistracy to the Trial Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal investing war crimes and human rights abuses (2006-2014); appointed to the UN Human Rights Council investigation into war crimes and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in 2014.

November 7, 1944 – Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish poet, at age 23 became one of 37 Mandate Palestine paratroopers dropped into Hungary by British Army during WWII to rescue Hungarian Jews about to be deported to Auschwitz; she was arrested near the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal any details of her mission, and after a pro forma trial, was executed by firing squad on this day. A national heroine of Israel, where her poetry is widely known; Israel Hatzeira headquarters and several streets are named for her.

November 7, 1947 – Rebecca Eaton born, American television and film producer; best known as the executive producer since 1985 of the PBS Masterpiece series; her productions have been awarded 62 Primetime Emmy Awards, 16 Peabody Awards, 6 Golden Globes, and 2 Academy Award nominations.

November 7, 1950 – Alexa Canady born, the first African-American woman to become a neurosurgeon. She earned a B.S. degree in zoology from the University of Michigan in 1971, and graduated from the medical school there in 1975. As a young black woman completing her surgical internship at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1975, on her first day of residency, she was tending to her patients when one of the hospital's top administrators passed through the ward. As he went by, she heard him say, "Oh, you must be our new equal-opportunity package." Working as a neurosurgeon at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (1981-1982), her fellow physicians voted her one of the top residents. Dr. Canady was chief of neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Michigan from 1987 until her retirement in June 2001. During her twenty-year career in pediatric neurosurgery, most of her patients were age ten or younger, and facing life-threatening illnesses, gunshot wounds, head trauma, hydrocephaly, and other brain injuries or diseases.

November 7, 1953 – Maire Aunaste born, Estonian journalist, television presenter and politician; news reporter for Aktuaalne kaamera (Current camera), the Estonian language daily news program; member of the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) since 2015; currently on the Social Affairs Committee and Study Committee to Solve the Demographic Crisis.

November 7, 1956 – Judy Tenuta born, American comedian, actress, voiceover performer, comedy musician, and author. Tenuta was nominated for two Grammy Awards for “Best Comedy Album.” She is an outspoken an outspoken advocate for gay rights, and often performs at Gay Pride festivals and events. Tenuta’s first book, The Power of Judyism, was published in 1991, and Full Frontal Tenudity was published in 2014.

November 7, 1964 – Bonnie St. John born, African-American Paralympic skier, author, and public speaker. Her right leg was amputated below the knee when she was five years old, but in 1984, she became the first black American to win a medal in any event at the Winter Paralympics. After graduating from Harvard and earning a Rhodes Scholarship, she had a successful career as a corporate consultant. She is the author of several inspirational books, including Getting Ahead at Work Without Leaving Your Family Behind.

November 7, 1965 – Sigrun Ludwigs Wodars Grau born, East German middle distance hurdler, who won gold medals at the 1998 Seoul Olympics, and the 1987 World Championships on Rome. Wodars Grau became a physiotherapist after retiring from competition in 1992.

November 7, 1969 – Hélène Grimaud born, French classical pianist, and co-founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York. She now divides her time between her musical career, and saving wolves.

Hélène Grimaud with wolf — photo by Thorge Huter

November 7, 1989 – ‘Nadya Tolokno’ born as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Russian conceptual artist and political activist, member of the Anarchist Feminist group Pussy Riot.

November 7, 1990 – Mary Robinson becomes the Republic of Ireland’s first woman President (1990-1997).

MaryRobinsonfirstwomanPresidentoftheRepublicofIreland.jpg

November 7, 2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected to the U.S. Senate, as a Democrat for New York State (2001-2009), the first First Lady elected to public office.

November 7, 2019 – In Yei Town, South Sudan, Women for Women International had been forced to suspend their work in 2016 because escalating violence by armed militia groups made the region unsafe for both participants and Women for Women staff. Many Sudanese women fled to Uganda to escape rape, kidnapping, and murder. After over two years, Women for Women re-opened their empowerment training program, and the community enthusiastically welcomed them back. 250 women began taking business classes, health and well-being courses, and Village Savings and Loan Associations have given women new opportunities as they support each other. Women for Women staffers also meet with men who are community leaders to talk about the benefits of women contributing to income generation and household decision making, in order to gain the support of these important figures in their lives.

November 7, 2020 – American women politicians reacted to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris becoming the first woman, first Black and first South Asian U.S. vice president. Stacey Abrams, who worked tirelessly to register black voters in Georgia and make sure their votes counted, said, "It is a privilege in this nation to be able to see yourself reflected in the face of leadership and for both the African-American community and the Indian American community and for women of color at large. Kamala Harris' election signals that the face of leadership does change, that we do have a role to play beyond being supporters and advocates and adjutants that we can be the leaders of this country and I think it is an exceptional moment that we are experiencing in this country.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said, "For so many of us, especially women, we have grown up – I know my entire childhood, we grew up being told women are too emotional and that this country would never elect, first, a Black president – and luckily that happened with the election of Barack Obama -- but now a woman of color and no less a Black woman to the second highest seat in the land. It's really remarkable ... you can't be what you can't see. That is very often said and it's so amazing that so many little girls are growing up with this being a norm for them." Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who watched Harris speak on television with her 8-year-old daughter, reported, "And the first thing Ilwad said to me was, 'This is someone who looks like me, Mama.’ We can't lose sight of the fact representation is powerful, that she has now allowed so many little girls, not just in our country but around the world, to see themselves as somebody who can ascend to one of the highest offices in our nation and as she said, that anything can be possible if you're willing to work for it."

November 7, 2021 – Libya’s chronic political instability continues, with the foreign minister, Najla El-Mangoush, one of the few women in a position of power in Libya, suspended from office and banned from leaving the country by the president, only for the disciplinary action to be rejected by the prime minister. The power struggle comes days before a major conference in Paris at which world powers hope to speed up the departure of foreign mercenaries and troops from Libya ahead of the planned December presidential and parliamentary elections, which are hanging in the balance. The foreign minister was suspended by the interim president, Mohamed al-Menfi, a former diplomat with a support base in the east, “as a precaution” to investigate “administrative violations.” During Libya’s 2014-2020 civil war the country was divided east and west between rival governments and warlords. Mangoush has been accused of carrying out foreign policy without coordination with the Presidential Council, including by suggesting in an interview with the BBC that a former Libyan intelligence officer implicated in the Lockerbie bombing might be extradited to the U.S. She gave a commitment only that the extradition would be examined, not carried out, but her remarks were enough for her political opponents to try to oust her, which they have been trying to do since her surprise appointment in February 2021. The suspension of Mangoush by Menfi was supported by 80 members of the House of Representatives, the eastern-based parliament. But Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh said the power to appoint or suspend ministers in his government was his exclusive preserve. A suspension would debar her from travelling to the Paris conference hosted by Emmanuel Macron, in support of the implementation of a Libyan-led and owned political process facilitated by the United Nations, leading to a political solution to the Libyan crisis. The Libyan government rejected her suspension, and she accompanied Mohamied al-Menfi, head of the transitional presidency council, to the conference. In 2022, Magoush was honored by the U.S. Department of State with the International Women of Courage Award.

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November 8, 1342 – Julian of Norwich born, English anchoress and mystic; her Revelations of Divine Love is the first theological book in the English language attributed with certainty to a woman; venerated in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, but not beatified by the Roman Catholic church, probably because of her vision of God as being both masculine and feminine.

November 8, 1543 – Lettice Knollys born, Countess of Essex and Countess of Leicester; a grandniece of Anne Boleyn and close to Elizabeth I since childhood, she became part of the court early. At 17, she married Walter Devereux, who became Earl of Essex, but she became involved with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester while her husband was in Ireland on military duty. Two years after her husband died in Ireland, Lettice and Robert Dudley, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, were secretly married. When the queen found out, she banished the Countess from court. When Robert died in 1588, she unexpectedly married Sir Christopher Blount, 12 years younger, and a Catholic, who was one of Dudley’s household officers, but also a secret agent involved in the attempt to put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. He was beheaded for treason in 1601, as was her son from her first marriage, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who had attempted to force his way into the court with his followers, demanding an audience with Elizabeth, which was declared to be treason. In 1604-1605, Lettice successfully defended her widow’s dower rights in court when her possessions and her good name were threatened by the Earl's illegitimate son, Robert Dudley, who claimed that he was his father's legitimate heir, implicitly declaring her marriage bigamous. She was still walking a mile a day until she turned 90, and died at age 91 in December 1634.

November 8, 1710 – Sarah Fielding born, English author; her book, The Governess, or the Little Female Academy, was the first novel aimed specifically at children.

November 8, 1715 – Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern born, Queen consort of Prussia (1740-1786); since her husband, Frederick II of Prussia, disliked ceremonial court life and public representation of the royal house, these duties fell more and more to Elisabeth Christine, who handled almost all the visible representation duties, and had a virtually separate court from her husband, where she was hostess to foreign dignitaries and royal birthdays and weddings, as well as sponsoring concerts and dinners, and holding card parties. During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the king was absent from the capital for six years. Elisabeth Christine became the symbol of Prussian resilience in Berlin during the crisis, and she oversaw the evacuation of the royal house and the court when the city was twice threatened with invasion, in 1757 and 1760. Frederick made no attempt to hide his lack of interest in his wife, which made it difficult for her to be treated with the respect her position should have commanded. After his death in 1786, as the Queen Dowager, she continued to be influential in non-political matters at court, and very popular with the people, since hers was the most familiar public face of Prussian royalty, and she was well-known for her many charities, to which she gave over half of her allowance. She was interested in literature, and wrote several works of her own, as well as a translation of Le Chrétien dans la Solitude (The Christian in Solitude), which she published under the pseudonym “Constance.” She introduced silk cultivation to Prussia, and was also a support to the French émigré community in Berlin. She died at the age of 81 in 1797.

November 8, 1837 – Mary Lyon, American pioneer in women’s education, founds Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which becomes Mount Holyoke College in 1893.

November 8, 1878 – Dorothea Bate born, English paleontologist and pioneer in archaeozoology; studied fossils of extinct mammals to understand how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved; first known woman to be employed as a scientist by the Natural History Museum in London; made many expeditions to Mediterranean Islands and elsewhere to find prehistoric fauna remains.

November 8, 1892 – Therese Benedek born, pioneer in psychoanalysis, fled Nazi Germany for U.S., and was a pioneer in research on female sexuality, and in psychosomatic medicine.

November 8, 1897 – Dorothy Day born, American journalist, social reformer, anarchist, suffragist, and peace activist; co-founder in 1933 of the Catholic Worker movement, and editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper. In 1917 she was jailed as a member of suffragist Alice Paul's nonviolent ‘Silent Sentinels’ who picketed the White House. Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published in 1952.

November 8, 1900 – Margaret Mitchell born, American author of Gone With the Wind (1936). During WWII, she was a volunteer for the American Red Cross, made public appearances to sell war bonds, and sponsored two U.S. Navy light cruisers, which both saw active service in the Pacific. Mitchell also wrote dozens of letters to men in uniform, sending them humor, encouragement, and sympathy. She quietly paid tuition for dozens of black students at Morehouse College to become doctors, and helped establish the first black hospital in Atlanta. Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see a movie, and died five days later on August 16, 1949, without ever fully regaining consciousness. She was 48 years old.

November 8, 1908 – Martha Gellhorn born, journalist, war correspondent and author; one of two little girls representing “future voters” at a demonstration for woman’s suffrage at the 1916 national Democratic convention in St. Louis; went to Europe in 1930, worked as a foreign correspondent for the United Press Paris bureau; returned to the U.S., worked with photographer Dorothea Lange for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, documenting hungry and homeless people; went with Ernest Hemingway to Barcelona in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, then reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany; covered WWII from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore to England; posed as a male stretcher bearer to cover D-Day, the only woman to land at Normandy; one of the journalists who covered the liberation of Dachau; her four-year marriage to Hemingway ended in divorce in 1945, in part because of conflict over her career; worked for Atlantic Monthly, covered the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israel conflicts and civil wars in Central America; retired in 1995 at the age of 87 because of failing eyesight; The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was created in her honor in 1999.

November 8, 1910 – The state of Washington passes an amendment to its constitution that guarantees woman suffrage.

Seattle Washington women campaign for suffrage in 1910

November 8, 1917 – Kamal Jayasing Ranadive (née Samarath) born, Indian biomedical researcher, known for her work on links between cancers and viruses. In the 1960s, she established India's first tissue culture research laboratory at the Indian Cancer Research Centre in Mumbai. Ranadive published more than 200 scientific research papers on cancer and leprosy. She was a founding member of the Indian Women Scientists’ Association, and was awarded the first Silver Jubilee Research Award in 1964 by the Medical Council of India.

November 8, 1920 – Esther Rolle born, actor, founding member of the renowned Negro Ensemble Company, Florida Evans on “Maude,” starred in “Good Times.”

November 8, 1920 – Sitara Devi born, Indian singer, dancer, and choreographer of the classical Kathak form of dance, raised in the tradition by her parents, which was a scandal at the time because Kathak dancing had declined into dancing done by nautch girls and boys. Her father persisted in reviving the ancient form, and re-connecting Kathak with its roots in religious ceremonies. She resisted an arranged marriage proposed when she was 8 years old, wanting to continue her education. While attending Kamachhagrh High School, she was cast as the leading dancer in a dance drama, and also taught the steps to the other student performers. The performance was acclaimed in the local papers, and led to her solo performances, which brought her to the attention of the Rabindranath Tagore, a highly influential figure in the Bengali literature and music. He dubbed her Nritya Samragni (empress of dance), and she was recruited by Niranjan Sharma, a filmmaker and dance director to perform dance sequences in many Hindi movies, but gave up cinema performing in 1957 to concentrate on classical dance forms, while also doing some study of Russian ballet. Devi taught Kathak dancing to several Bollywood celebrities, and had begun work on compiling the research done by her father on the traditions of classical dance shortly before her final illness, but did not complete the book she was planning before her death in 2014.

November 8, 1922 – Thea Drell Hodge born, American computer scientist, a pioneer in the field; founded the Minnesota chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, and mentored countless young women in computer science; member of the Association for Computing Machinery, which inducted her into their hall of fame in 2004.

November 8, 1926 – Darleane C. Hoffman born, American nuclear chemist; in the 1950s she applied for a position with the Los Alamos National Laboratory radiochemistry group, but was told, "We don't hire women in that division." She persisted, and was hired by an enlightened male group leader, becoming a division leader of the isotope and nuclear chemistry division, the first woman to head a scientific division there; senior faculty scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; one of the researchers who confirmed the existence of Seaborgium, element 106; won the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1997.

November 8, 1934 – Roberta L. Hazard born, third woman line officer to be promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy.

November 8, 1947 – Margaret Rhea Seddon born, American physician, researcher on the effects of radiation therapy on nutrition in cancer patients, and NASA astronaut (1979-1997); she was the seventh woman in space, and flew on missions in 1985, 1991 and 1993. Seddon is currently assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group in Nashville, Tennessee.

November 8, 1951 – Dame Laura M. Cox born, English, Queen’s Bench High Court judge (2002-2016). In 2018, she was appointed to lead an independent inquiry into allegations of bullying and sexual harassment of House of Commons staff.

November 8, 1952 – Alfre Woodard born, African-American actress, producer and political activist; four-time Emmy winner. She began her career in theatre. After her break-through role in the 1977 Off-Broadway production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, she made her film debut in a small role in the 1978 film, Remember My Name. She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1983 for Cross Creek. Woodard is a founder and board member of Artists for a New South Africa, which has raised over $9 million USD to provide healthcare for South African AIDS orphans. She is an active member of the Democratic Party, and supported Barack Obama in his run for president and for re-election. She is a supporter of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.

November 8, 1965 – Patricia Poleo born, award-winning Venezuelan investigative journalist, known for her opposition to the government of Nicolás Maduro, who has been accused of crimes against humanity, and whose presidency has been under dispute since the 2018 elections. Opposition leaders had been jailed, exiled, or forbidden to run for election, there were no international observers at the polls, and tactics were used that suggested voters could lose their jobs or social welfare if they did not vote for Maduro. Multiple nations did not recognize the Constituent Assembly election – all those elected were Maduro supporters - or the validity of Maduro's reelection. The governments of Canada, Panama, and the U.S. sanctioned Maduro. In 2001, Poleo won the King of Spain Journalism Award for her investigation into the whereabouts of Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori's right-hand man, Vladimiro Montesinos. In 2002, the offices of Así es la noticia (This is the news) were hit by an explosive a day after she published online a video about conversations between the Venezuelan Army and the Colombian guerrilla FARC with journalists from Así es la noticia. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a protection measure for the journalists.

November 8, 1978 – Emma Lewell-Black born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for South Shields since 2013, the first women to represent South Shields; member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee since 2013, and of the Work and Pensions Select Committee since 2015.

November 8, 198o – Holly Walsh born, English comedian and comedy writer; noted for writing and appearing on The Now Show on BBC Radio 4 (2009), and as co-author with Sharon Horgan of the BBC sitcom Dead Boss (2012), and as a writer for the BBC2 series Motherland (2016-2019).

November 8, 1983 – Danielle Valore Evans born, American fiction writer; her first short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, won the 2011 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize. In 2014, she became an assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her short story collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, was released in November, 2020.

November 8, 1984 – Dr. Anna L. Fisher, physician on NASA shuttle Discovery, becomes the third American woman in space — and first Mom in space — there were six stars on the crew patch, five for the crew, and one more for her daughter.

November 8, 2019 – Japanese women are demanding the right to wear glasses at work, the latest protest against the rigid rules enforced by many Japanese employers about the appearance of women in the work force. One restaurant worker tweeted that she was repeatedly told not to wear her glasses because they did not go with the traditional kimono she wore as a uniform, and it would appear “rude.” Kanae Doi, the Japan director at Human Rights Watch, said, “If the rules prohibit only women to wear glasses, this is a discrimination against women.” The right-to-glasses protest follows an earlier protest in 2019, dubbed the #KuToo movement, against companies requiring their female staff to wear high heels to work. An online petition started by Yumi Ishikawa calling for a ban on compulsory high heels was signed by over 31,000 people.

November 8, 2019 – The United Arab Emirates announced legal reforms to “consolidate the UAE’s principles of tolerance,” including tougher sentencing for so-called honor killings, lifting a ban on unmarried couples living together, decriminalizing alcohol, tougher punishments for men who harass women, and allowing foreigners living in the UAE to follow their home country’s laws on divorce and inheritance, rather than the nation’s laws which are based on Islamic religious requirements. UAE citizens are outnumbered 9-t0-1 by migrants, and has long presented itself to the rest of the world as a modern business and tourist destination. No changes were mentioned to UAE laws that ban homosexual relationships, cross-dressing, or public displays of affection. Some tourists have been arrested for such offenses as kissing in public if a complaint was made.

November 8, 2020 – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the Democratic party leadership for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections. Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election. The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns. “There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she said. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.” Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and won re-election in 2020 in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, is part of the four-women group dubbed “the squad, who all won reelection. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging. “If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for All.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.” Citing grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Georgia which was crucial to Biden’s win, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout ... If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.” Kasich, a former Republican governor of Ohio campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha, but Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.

November 8, 2021 – Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan, who was detained by the government since May 2020, has been nominated for a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom Award for Courage, recognising her work reporting from Wuhan in the early weeks of the pandemic. Calls are growing for her release. The former lawyer turned citizen journalist was convicted in December of “picking quarrels and causing trouble,” a ubiquitous catch-all accusation frequently used against journalists, lawyers, and dissidents in China. Zhang was sentenced to four years in jail. She had already been in detention since her initial arrest in 2020, and has been on hunger strike. Her family said the 38-year-old was “close to death,” amplifying global calls for her immediate release. The Reporters Without Boarders citation said Zhang had withstood “constant threats from the authorities” in order to livestream her video reports. “Widely shared on social media, her reporting was one of the main sources of independent information about the health situation in Wuhan at the time,” the citation said. Zhang is among a number of journalists arrested in Wuhan, but she was the first to be convicted. As of March 2022, she was still in prison, but had suspended her hunger strike. Her family feared that she was not getting adequate medical care.

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Sources

www.historyplace.com/...
www.onthisday.com/...
Women Trailblazers of California: Pioneers to the Present, © 2012 by Gloria G. Harris and Hannah S. Cohen — The History Press
todayinsci.com
A Book of Days for the Literary Year, edited by Neal T. Jones
The Music-Lover’s Birthday Book, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thanks to WineRev — www.dailykos.com/…
The Guardian newspaper — Top Stories and International sections
www.unwomen.org/...

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