WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from February 1 through 8.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, February 12, 2022.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
February is Black History Month
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 thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- February 1, 1857 – Lucy Wheelock born, pioneer in kindergarten education and teacher training, founded Wheelock College.
- February 1, 1859 – Lydia M. DeWitt (née Adams) born, American experimental pathologist who investigated the chemotherapy of tuberculosis. Prior to 1910, she made studies in microscopic anatomy. The remainder of her career she worked in pathology, bacteriology, and chemotherapeutics. She searched for dyes that would penetrate tuberculosis lesions, and especially with dyes modified by the incorporation of metal atoms such as copper, gold, and mercury. These were tested in animal studies for their potential as an anti-tuberculosis drug. She also conducted influential investigations on the anatomy of the nervous system and on public health practices. She started the Women’s Research Club at the University of Michigan to encourage research by women, and served as its president for several years.
- February 1, 1862 – Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is first published in the Atlantic Monthly.
- February 1, 1866 – Agda Meyerson born, Swedish nursing pioneer, lecturer, and advocate for improving the wages, education and working conditions of nurses. She worked for the Swedish Red Cross (1898-1907), and was the first deputy chair of the Swedish Nursing Association in 1910.
- February 1, 1872 – Dame Clara Butt born, English contralto, noted for her agile singing technique. She was a recitalist and concert singer rather than an opera performer, in part because she was 6’ 2” tall, and overshadowed most of the male opera singers of the day. Sir Edward Elgar composed a song-cycle with a solo part for her. She also made numerous recordings. During WWI, she organised and sang in many fundraising concerts for service charities, including several performances at the Royal Albert Hall. During the 1920s, she became seriously ill with spinal cancer, but continued to give concerts and make records. Clara Butt died in 1936, a week before her 64th birthday.
- February 1, 1878 – Hattie Wyatt Caraway born, American Democratic politician; the first woman elected to a full term as a U.S. Senator, representing Arkansas (1931-1945). She was the first woman Senator to co-sponsor the Equal Rights Amendment. Caraway was nicknamed ‘Silent Hattie’ because she so seldom spoke on the Senate floor, and once joked, “I haven’t the heart to take a minute away from the men. The poor dears love it so.” After losing her 1944 bid for reelection in the primaries to J. William Fulbright, she was appointed to the Employees' Compensation Commission, and in 1946, to the Employees' Compensation Appeals Board, where she served until she suffered a stroke in 1950, and died later that year.
- February 1, 1888 – Gertrude Caton Thompson born, influential English archaeologist who distinguished two prehistoric cultures in the Al-Fayyum depression of Upper Egypt, the older dating to about 5000 BC and the younger to about 4500 BC, and also worked in Malta, Zimbabwe, and South Arabia. She was one of the first archaeologists to look at the full-time spectrum from the Palaeolithic through to Predynastic Egypt, and she developed a technique for excavating archaeological sites and information on Paleolithic to Predynastic civilizations in Zimbabwe and Egypt. Author of The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and Reactions; The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha (now known as Hadhramaut); and Kharga Oasis in Prehistory. She hired Mary Nicol in 1932, and introduced her to Louis Leakey, who was in need of an illustrator for his book Adam’s Ancestors. Caton Thompson was the first woman President of the Prehistoric Society (1940-1946), and also was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1944. She was vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1944. Caton Thompson retired from field work after WWII. She wrote her memoir, Mixed Metaphors, published in 1983, and died at age 97 in 1985.
- February 1, 1897 – Denise Robins born as Denise Klein; prolific English romantic novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She began her writing career as a journalist for the D.C. Thomson Press, then became a freelance writer. Her first novel was published in 1924. She used several pen names, including Denise Chesterton, Eve Vail, Hervey Hamilton, Harriet Gray, and Julie Kane, as well as publishing novels under Denise Robins, the last name of her first husband. Robins was the first president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (1960-1966). She published her autobiography, Stranger Than Fiction, in 1965. At the time of her death in 1985, her books had sold over a hundred million copies.
- February 1, 1898 – Dr. Leila A. Denmark born, pioneering American pediatrician and medical researcher; co-developer of the pertussis (aka whooping cough) vaccine, for which she received the 1935 Fisher Award; she was the world’s oldest practicing pediatrician when she retired at age 103, after 73 years of practicing medicine. Dr. Denmark died at age 113 in 2012.
- February 1, 1907 – Melba Newell Phillips born; American physicist and pioneer in science education. She was one of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, where Phillips completed her PhD in 1933, when few women pursued careers in science. In 1935, Oppenheimer and Phillips co-published their description of the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect, an early contribution to nuclear physics that explained the behavior of accelerated nuclei of radioactive hydrogen atoms. Phillips was also known for refusing to cooperate with a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee’s investigation on internal security during the McCarthy era, which led to dismissal from Brooklyn College, where she was a professor of science (1938-1952). The college publicly and personally apologized to Phillips for the dismissal in 1987. Phillips also taught at the University of Minnesota (1941-1944), and served as associate director of a teacher-training institute at Washington University (1957-1962) in St. Louis, Missouri, before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago (1962-1972) as a professor of physics. She was active in the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), which established the Melba Newell Phillips Medal in her honor in 1981 to recognize her outstanding service to the organization. She died at age 97 in 2004.
- February 1, 1910 – Ursula Nordstrom born, children’s book editor at Harper & Brothers, director of Department of Books for Boys and Girls (1940) where she edited landmark books, including Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
- February 1, 1915 – Mrs. Blanche Payson, a widow, is appointed by the San Francisco Police Commission as the city’s first policewoman. She stood over six feet tall, and was assigned to the Toyland exhibit at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. But by 1916, she had moved to Los Angeles, and started a new career in as an extra and bit player in the movies, originally hired at the Mack Sennett studio in short films. Payson appeared in nearly 160 films between 1916 and 1946, usually uncredited, often as a comic foil for Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang and The Three Stooges. She died in 1964 at age 82.
- February 1, 1918 – Muriel Spark born, Scottish author, playwright, and poet; best known for her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Among her many honors was the 1965 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel The Mandelbaum Gate.
- February 1, 1921 – Renata Tebaldi born, Italian lirico-spinto soprano; one of the stars at both La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera. Arturo Toscanini praised Tebaldi's voice as "la voce d'angelo" ("the voice of an angel").
- February 1, 1921 – Patricia Robins born, daughter of author Denise Robins, British author of children’s books, historical novels, and fiction series; during WWII, she was a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer, and used her knowledge of German, acquired as a student in Switzerland and Germany, as well as tracking Nazi bombers with Britain’s early radar system; known for Frost in the Sun, and her trilogies, Women of Fire Saga, and The Rochford Trilogy.
- February 1, 1921 – Teresa Mattei born, Italian partisan, politician, and feminist; in 1938, she was expelled from school for openly criticizing the Racial Laws passed that year, which excluded Jews from the civil service, the armed forces, and the National Fascist Party, and restricted Jewish ownership of certain companies and property, and also banned intermarriage. She graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Florence in 1944, then joined the partisans. Her nom de guerre was Partigiana Chicchi, and she took part in the murder of Fascist minister Giovanni Gentile. After the war, Mattei was a candidate for the Communist Party to the Constituent Assembly, in which she served as a bureau secretary. Mattei was the youngest to be elected to the Constituent Assembly, and was called “the girl of Montecitorio.” In 1957, she was expelled from the Italian Communist Party because of her opposition to Stalinism, and to the politics of the party’s General Secretary Palmiro Tigliatti. She later became national director of the Italian Women Union (UDI), and introduced the use of mimosa flower for Women’s Day, because she felt that the IWD symbols in France of violets and lilies of the valley, were too scarce and expensive to be used in poor, rural Italian areas, so she promoted the mimosa as an alternative.
- February 1, 1930 – Ruth Ross born, American magazine editor; in 1970, she left her job as assistant editor at Newsweek to be the first editor-in-chief of Essence, a magazine aimed at 18-to-40-year old African-American women, which included articles by leading African-American scholars and writers; however, fears of advertising losses because some content was controversial caused her removal; she was also a founding member of Black Perspective, support group for black journalists and advocate for inclusion of African-American viewpoints in ‘mainstream’ media.
- February 1, 1936 – ** Azie Taylor Morton born, the first African American and the eighth woman appointed as U.S. Treasurer (1977-1981); she was a special assistant (1972-1976) to Robert Scharz Strauss, then chair of the Democratic National Committee. She served as an election observer for elections in Haiti, Senegal, and the Dominican Republic. Taylor Morton was appointed to President Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (1961-1964). Her first job after graduating from Huston-Tillotson College, a black college in Austin, Texas, was teaching delinquent girls. In April 2018, Robert E. Lee Road in Austin, Texas, was renamed Azie Morton Road in her honor.
- February 1, 1939 – Ekaternina Maximova born, Soviet Bolshoi ballet star (1958-1980), named a People’s Artist of the USSR in 1973.
- February 1, 1947 – Jessica Savitch born, American TV journalist; one of the first women to anchor an evening network news broadcast alone, on NBC Nightly News; she was the original host of the PBS public affairs documentary program Frontline until she was killed an automobile accident in October 1983.
- February 1, 1967 – Meg Cabot born, American young adult author and screenwriter; known for The Princess Diaries; Cabot has teamed with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to mentor seriously ill children, and held a Tiara Auction to benefit the New York Public Library’s teen programs.
- February 1, 1972 – Leymah Roberta Gbowee born, Liberian leader of the grassroots women’s peace movement which helped end the 2nd Liberian Civil War; Gbowee was a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
- February 1, 1978 – Harriet Tubman becomes the first black woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp, as the first of her stamps are issued in Washington, DC.
- February 1, 1998 – ** Lillian E. Fishburne becomes the first African American woman Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy. Commissioned as an ensign upon completion of the Women Officers School at Newport RI in 1973; Master of Science degree in Telecommunications Systems Management, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA (1982). By 1984, she was Assistant Head, Joint Allied Command and Control Matters Branch, then was Executive Officer, Naval Communications Station in Japan (1985-1987), then Special Projects Office at the Command, Control and Communications Directorate (1987-1990). Next, Commanding Officer, Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station, Key West, FL (1990-1992), then studied at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (1992-1993). Next, assigned as Chief, Command and Control Systems Support Division, The Joint Staff, Washington, D.C. (1994). Commanded Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, Eastern Pacific (1995). Final assignment was Director, Information Transfer Division for the Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control Directorate, Chief of Naval Operations, Washington, D.C. (1996-2001).
- February 1, 2003 – NASA astronauts Kalpana Chawla, the first woman of Indian heritage to go to space, and Laurel Clark M.D., were two of the seven crew members who died this day in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The shuttle’s thermal protection tiles were damaged during re-entry, and the shuttle disintegrated. All of the crew members were posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
- February 1, 2009 – The first cabinet of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is formed in Iceland, as she takes her place as the country’s first woman prime minister, and the world’s first openly LGBTQ woman head of state.
- February 1, 2018 – The Humane Society of the United States decided not to push out CEO Wayne Pacelle over sexual harassment complaints against him, prompting seven of its 31 board members to quit in protest. The resignations came after a seven-hour meeting in which Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm hired to investigate three separate allegations of sexual harassment, presented its findings. The investigation also uncovered settlements offered by the charity to three additional individuals who alleged they were dismissed or demoted after reporting instances of harassment by Pacelle, and statements by female leaders within the organization who alleged their “warnings about his conduct went unheeded.” Major donors had told the Humane Society they would withdraw their support unless they cut ties with Pacelle. “I want the money that I donate to go toward helping animals,” said Rachel Perman, director of charitable giving and engagement at Tofurky, a vegetarian food company that had donated $30,000 to the Humane Society in the previous two years. Pacelle denied all of the allegations, but he chose to resign in the face of internal and external dissent.
- February 1, 2019 – In a landmark case welcomed by activists, the mother of a 3-year-old girl became the first person to be convicted of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. The Ugandan woman, 37, and her Ghanaian partner, 43, living in east London, were accused of cutting their daughter over the 2017 summer bank holiday. FGM was made illegal in the UK more than three decades ago but prosecutors have struggled to secure a conviction. The two defendants were jointly accused of subjecting the girl to FGM by “deliberate cutting with a sharp instrument” at her mother’s home in the presence of her father. They were also changed with failure to protect a girl from risk of genital mutilation. Medics raised the alarm when the girl was taken to Whipps Cross hospital in north London with severe bleeding and a surgeon concluded the child had been cut with a scalpel. The defendants claimed their daughter had been reaching for a biscuit when she fell and cut herself on the edge of a kitchen cupboard. Medical experts confirmed the cause of her injuries were consistent with cutting rather than a fall. The mother cried in the dock as she was found guilty of FGM after the Old Bailey jury deliberated for less than a day. Her partner was cleared of all charges. Lynette Woodrow, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “We can only imagine how much pain this vulnerable young girl suffered and how terrified she was. A three-year-old has no power to resist or fight back. Her mother then coached her to lie to the police so she wouldn’t get caught but this ultimately failed. We will not hesitate to prosecute those who commit this sickening offence.”
- February 1, 2021 – The American Library Association’s prestigious Caldecott Medal was awarded for the first time to an indigenous artist. Sitka illustrator Michaela Goade, who is Tlingit, was honored for her vivid illustrations in the children’s book We Are Water Protectors, written by Carole Lindstrom, which was “inspired by Standing Rock, and all indigenous peoples fighting for clean water.”
- February 1, 2021 – In a coup d'état in Myanmar, democratically elected members of the ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), were deposed by the Tatmadaw—Myanmar's military—which then vested power in a stratocracy. Acting president Myint Swe proclaimed a year-long state of emergency and declared power had been transferred to Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services Min Aung Hlaing. It declared the results of the November 2020 general election invalid and stated its intent to hold a new election at the end of the state of emergency. The coup d'état occurred the day before the Parliament of Myanmar was due to swear in the members elected at the 2020 election, thereby preventing this from occurring. President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi were detained, along with ministers, their deputies, and members of Parliament. Aung San Suu Kyi was charged with breaching emergency COVID-19 laws and for illegally importing and using radio and communication devices, specifically six ICOM devices from her security team and a walkie-talkie, which are restricted in Myanmar and need clearance from military-related agencies before acquisition. She was later charged with violating the National Disaster Act, and with additional charges for violating communications laws, for intent to incite public unrest, and for violating the official secrets act. In August, 2021, the nation went under a caretaker government, the State Administration council.
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- February 2, 1141 – Battle of Lincoln: Empress Matilda (also known as Maude) was chosen by her father, Henry I of England, as his heir after the death of her brother, and made his court swear an oath of loyalty to her. When her father died, the Anglo-Norman barons and the English church sided with her cousin Stephen of Blois, and he was crowned king. Matilda crossed from Normandy to England with an army to take the crown by force, her claim supported by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester and her uncle King David I of Scotland. Her attempt to be crowned at Westminster collapsed in the face of bitter opposition from the London crowds, but her army on this day captured Stephen with a decisive victory at the Battle of Lincoln, and imprisoned him. Matilda was declared Lady of the English, but when her brother Robert was captured during the Rout of Winchester, she agreed to exchange Stephen for him. Matilda became trapped in Oxford Castle by Stephen's forces that winter, and to avoid capture was forced to escape at night across the frozen River Isis to Abingdon. The war degenerated into a stalemate, with Matilda controlling much of the south-west of England, and Stephen the south-east and the Midlands. Large parts of the rest of the country were in the hands of local, independent barons. In 1148, Matilda returned to her (second) husband, Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, in Normandy, and her eldest son came to the throne of England as Henry II after Stephen’s death in 1154.
- February 2, 1426 – Eleanor of Navarre born, proclaimed as regent of Navarre (1455-1479), and was crowned Queen Regnant of Navarre on January 28, 1479, but died on February 12, 1479, and was succeeded by her grandson, Francis Phoebus.
- February 2, 1576 – Alix Le Clerc born, who became Mother Teresa of Jesus, French foundress, and first prioress of the Canonesses of St. Augustine of the Congregation of Our Lady, a Catholic religious order founded to provide free education for girls, especially those living in poverty. She offered members of the order a choice: they could either take public vows as canonesses, wearing the religious habit and observing full monastic enclosure, or they could take private vows as daughters of the congregation, and be free to leave the monastery for works of charity or on business for the order; Mother Teresa of Jesus was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1947; currently, there are missions and related offshoots in 43 countries; the work has expanded to include human rights advocacy, and assistance to migrants.
- February 2, 1841 – Sarah Ann Hackett Stevenson born, American physician, the first woman member of the American Medical Association.
- February 2, 1883 – Julia Nava de Ruisánchez born, Mexican writer, feminist, educator, and Zapatista. She graduated as a teacher from the Special School for Teachers of Nuevo Leon. In 1904, she was a founding member of La Sociedad Protectora de la Mujer, considered Mexico City’s first feminist society. In 1910, she was co-founder with Dolores Jiménez Muro of Club Femenil Antirreeleccionista Hijas de Cuauhtémoc (Anti-Reelectionist Women’s Club: Daughters of Cuauhtémoc). She also founded the Centro Feminista Mexicano. When the Zapatistas were formed in 1910, an armed group led by Emiliano Zapata that took part in the Mexican Revolution, Nava joined them, raising funds, and working in communication. From 1915 to 1920, she published articles on women’s rights, and participated in the 1916 women’s conference in Mérida, Yucatán, the second women’s conference in Latin America, and was part of the Mexican delegation at the 1922 Pan-American Conference of Women in Baltimore, MD. In 1926, she began work on establishing the first educational institution in Mexico for social work, Escuela de Enseñanza Doméstica, which received official recognition in 1933. Graduates of the school became the first women social workers in Mexico.
- February 2, 1897 – Gertrude Blanch born in Russia, American mathematician, and pioneer in numerical computation; she was the mathematical leader of the Mathematical Tables Project (MTP) from its inauguration, started during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1938, which kept 450 clerks working on tabulating higher mathematical functions (their results were later published in 28 volumes by Columbia University Press); MTP clerks also did calculations for a variety of war-related projects during WWII, and continued after the war, with a much smaller group, until 1948; in 1947, her career was temporarily hampered by FBI suspicions that she was secretly a communist. Their ‘evidence’ was tenuous at best, including comments on her never having married or had children. In a remarkable showdown, the diminutive fifty-year-old mathematician demanded, and won, a hearing which cleared her name; went on to work for the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA and the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; a founder of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
- February 2, 1900 – Elena Sánchez Valenzuela born, one of Mexico’s first silent film stars, who also directed a documentary for the Mexican government, and campaigned successfully for the Filmoteca Nacional (Mexican National Film Library), founded in 1942 to collect and preserve the work of Mexican filmmakers; also an ardent feminist and suffragist, who participated in the 1947 Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres (First Inter-American Congress of Women), called together by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
- February 2, 1901 – United States Army Nurse Corps established as a permanent organization, the first women in the U.S. military. Women had been nurses during the Civil War and the Spanish American War, but they were volunteers or paid contractors, not a branch of the service.
- February 2, 1912 – Millvina Dean born, British civil servant, cartographer, and the youngest passenger, at two months old, aboard the RMS Titanic when it hit the iceberg and sank. Her parents had decided to emigrate to the U.S., and were supposed to take a different ship, but due to a coal strike, they were transferred with Millvina and her two-year-old brother, to the Titanic as third-class passengers in April, 1912. Her father, Bertram Frank Dean, was on deck and felt the collision when the ship hit the iceberg. He woke his wife and told her to dress the children and go up on deck. Millvina, her brother, and her mother were placed in Lifeboat 10, and were rescued. Her father went down with the ship. Brokenhearted, and having lost everything, Georgette Light Dean returned to England with her two children. Millvina Dean was the last remaining survivor of the disaster when she died at age 97 in May, 2009.
- February 2, 1918 – Hella Haasse born, Dutch author, the “Grand Old Lady” of Dutch literature.
- February 2, 1920 – Maddalena Cerasuolo born, Italian patriot, anti-fascist partisan, and SOE agent, also used the code name Lenuccia and “Maria Esposito.” When WWII broke out, she was a 20-year-old craftswoman working in a small Naples shoe factory. She took part in armed battles against German troops plundering the shoe factory, and defended her neighborhood with partisans led by her father. They helped keep an entrance to the city open, and protected the aqueduct that supplied water to the city center. She was recruited by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), trained briefly in Italy, then went on missions behind enemy lines, and was part of an attempt to sabotage German sites on the Italian coast. She also parachuted behind enemy lines to collect information by pretending to be the maid of the artist Anna d'Andria, who was collaborating with the Allies by giving high society parties to gather intelligence on the strategy of the German army. Cerasuola played a significant part in the revolt against the occupying Nazi army during the Four Days of Naples, an insurrection from September 27 to 30, 1943. She helped build barricades and took part in the fighting with a rifle and hand grenades. Cerasuola was discharged by the SOE on February 8, 1944. She was honored with the Italian Bronze Medal of Military Valor.
- February 2, 1922 – Sylvia Beach, owner of the English-language Shakespeare & Co bookstore in Paris, publishes Ulysses by James Joyce.
- February 2, 1923 – Liz Smith born, American columnist and author; she wrote columns for the New York Daily News, the Washington Post, and Newsday. She first broke into the media business as a news producer for Mike Wallace at CBS Radio; co-founder with Joni Evans, Leslie Stahl, and Mary Wells Lawrence of wowOwow.com, a website for women.
- February 2, 1925 – Elaine Stritch born, American actress and singer, best known for her work on Broadway, particularly for her performance of the song ‘The Ladies Who Lunch” in the Sondheim musical Company. She was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1995. Her autobiographical one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, won the 2003 Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event. The author’s credit read: "Constructed by John Lahr. Reconstructed by Elaine Stritch." Stritch, who was 76 years old when she was performing in the show, remarked, "The reconstruction means I had the last say. Damn right I did." She died at age 89 in 2014.
- February 2, 1929 – Věra Chytilová born, avant-garde Czech filmmaker, whose films were banned by the Czechoslovak government in the 1960s; noted for Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), and Ovoce stromů rajských jíme (Fruit of Paradise, 1969).
- February 2, 1931 – Judith Viorst born, journalist and author; known for her humorous aging series, including It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty and Nearing 90 (and Other Comedies of Late Life), and children’s books, including Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
- February 2, 1939 – Mary-Dell Chilton born, American chemist, inventor, and one of the founders of modern plant biotechnology; with collaborators, she produced the first genetically modified plants; member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
- February 2, 1948 – Ina Garten born, American entrepreneur, cookbook author, and host of the Food Network program, Barefoot Contessa, which debuted in 2002; she began as an aide in the White House, starting in 1972, and worked her way up to a budget analyst in the White House Office of Management and Budget until 1978, when she started Barefoot Contessa as a gourmet store.
- February 2, 1949 – Yasuko Namba born, Japanese mountain climber; the oldest woman, at 47, to complete the Seven Summits, and to climb Mount Everest; she and seven others were caught in a blizzard on Everest during their descent in 1996, and all of them died.
- February 2, 1950 – Libby Purves born, British radio presenter, journalist, and author of Adventures Under Sail; Holy Smoke; and Mother Country.
- February 2, 1963 – Eva Cassidy born, American vocalist-guitarist; she was almost unknown until her recordings were played on BBC Radio 2, after her death at age 33 from melanoma.
- February 2, 1970 – Jennifer Westfeldt born, American actress, screenwriter, director, and producer; known for co-writing, co-producing, and co-starring in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein. Westfeldt made her Broadway debut in 2003 in the revival of Wonderful Town opposite Donna Murphy, and was nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, and won a Theater World Award for Outstanding Broadway Debut. She wrote her first solo screenplay for Ira & Abby, and played the title role of Abby. The film was released in 2007. She made her directorial debut, and also wrote, produced, and starred in the 2012 film Friends with Kids.
- February 2, 1977 – Shakira born as Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, Columbian singer-songwriter who has recorded successful albums in both Spanish and English, including Laundry Service, which sold over 13 million copies worldwide. In 1997, she founded the Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) Foundation, to help displaced and vulnerable children get an education, and built five schools in Columbia which provide classes and meals for 4,000 children. She is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and was honored with a medal by the UN International Labor Organization in recognition of her work with children and for social justice.
- February 2, 1986 – Gemma Arterton born, English actress and producer; known for her performances on stage in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and in the films Quantum of Silence, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, the 2010 version of Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Summerland. Since 2016, Arterton has run her own production company, Rebel Park Productions, which creates female-led content in front of and behind the camera. She executive-produced four feature films and two short films. Arterton is also a prominent supporter of Time's Up; the #MeToo movement; and ERA 50:50, a UK equal pay campaign.
- February 2, 1995 – Arfa Karim Randhawa born, Pakistani computer prodigy who became the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in 2004 at the age of 9. At age 10, she earned a pilot’s license. She represented Pakistan on various international forums including the TechEd Developers Conference, and received the President’s Award for Pride of Performance in 2005. In 2012, she died at age 16 following cardiac arrest after an epileptic seizure.
- February 2, 2005 – The Canadian government introduced the Civil Marriage Act. It went into effect July 20, 2005, legalizing same-sex marriage.
- February 2, 2009 – Hillary Rodham Clinton is sworn in as the U.S Secretary of State. She traveled 956,733 miles, and visited 112 countries during her tenure, a record for a U.S. Secretary of State, giving her maximum face-to-face time with leaders, in and out of government, across the globe.
- February 2, 2016 – The top officers in the Marine Corps and Army said it was time for women to start registering for future military drafts. The Pentagon recently decided to open all combat jobs to women. Gen. Mark A. Milley, chief of staff of the Army, and Gen. Robert B. Neller, the Marine Corps commandant, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that including women in the draft would help integrate them into the military. “Every American who’s physically qualified should register,” Neller said.
- February 2, 2019 – Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington DC ruled that the 2012 death of Sunday Times Correspondent Marie Colvin in the enclave of Baba Amr in Syria was murder. “She was specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country,” Jackson added, “the murder of journalists acting in their professional capacity could have a chilling effect on reporting such events worldwide,” and noted that the Syrian government regarded journalists as ‘enemies of the state.’ Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed in an artillery barrage. Photographer Paul Conroy, a former British soldier who was badly injured in the attack, described how the makeshift media centre where they were staying was “bracketed” – a technique for centering on a target. “It won’t bring Marie back but it will hold someone accountable,” said her sister, Cathleen Colvin, who brought the civil case. “I hope it sends a message to the world about the targeting of journalists.” It was a civil case because Syria is not a signatory to the Rome Statute enforced by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and President Bashar al-Assad’s protector, Russia, vetoed any attempt to set up a special tribunal. U.S. law allows prosecution if the accused state is deemed a sponsor of terrorism. The judge awarded punitive damages of more than $300 million to Cathleen Colvin, not just because she and her children would be deprived of a beloved sister and aunt, but because “a targeted murder of an American citizen whose courageous work was not only important, but vital to our understanding of war zones and of wars generally, is outrageous.” It is unlikely the Colvins will ever see any of the money, although they may pursue frozen Syrian assets, but they hope that a precedent has been set for Syrian civilians.
- February 2, 2021 – Saima Mohsin became acting U.S. attorney for Michigan’s Eastern District, the first woman, first immigrant, first Muslim, and first Pakistani American to serve as a U.S. Attorney. She had previously served for three years as an assistant U.S. attorney.
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- February 3, 1763 – Caroline Lengefeld von Wolzogen born, German author of the novels Agnes von Lilien, originally published anonymously, and Cordelia. She also wrote Schillers Leben (Schiller's Life) in 1830, the first published biography of Friedrich Schiller, who was her brother-in-law. She had extensive access to his letters and papers, and her book is still regarded as the primary source for most biographical work on Schiller.
- February 3, 1821 – Elizabeth Blackwell born in Bristol England; she was the first woman in the United States to graduate from medical school and earn a medical degree. She was also an abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Blackwell was rejected by all the major medical schools in America because of her sex, before her application to Geneva Medical School (now Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York) was referred to the student body. They voted unanimously to accept her, thinking her application was a spoof from a rival school. She worked with quiet determination, and earned her medical degree in 1849, ranking among the best students in her graduating class. She founded the N.Y. Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, which also served as a nursing training facility, sending a number of nurses to Dorothea Dix while Dix was Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War.
- February 3, 1874 – Gertrude Stein born, expatriate American literary stylist living in Paris, modern art critic, and influential modern art collector, famous for her phrases, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” “What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there,” and “America is my country, and Paris is my home town.”
- February 3, 1900 – Mabel Mercer born, influential English-American cabaret singer (a young Frank Sinatra went to shows to hear her phrasing of lyrics).
- February 3, 1909 – Simone Weil born, French philosopher, labor activist, and mystic; in spite of frail health, she spent a year working factory jobs to better understand the laborers she organized. She escaped from France during the WWII German occupation, and worked in London for the French resistance, refusing to eat more than the rations of resistance agents in France. She died of malnutrition and tuberculosis at age 34.
- February 3, 1918 – Helen Stephens born, American athlete dubbed the “Fulton Flash.” Her athletic career, at a time when few schools had any athletic programs for girls, started when Burton Moore, the coach for the boys’ track team, noticed how fast she was in a pick-up basketball game. He asked her to run a 50-yard dash on the high school’s driveway. With no training on technique or form, in a pair of beat-up sneakers, she was clocked at a mind-blowing 5.8 seconds — then the women’s world record. He asked her to do it again, and she again made the record time. Moore asked her to start running with his boys’ track team, and tried to figure out what to do with her. After about a year of training with Moore, sixteen-year-old Helen Stephens borrowed track shoes and sweats from one of her male teammates and traveled nearly four hours in Moore’s Ford to the girls National Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Championships in the St. Louis Arena. There, Stephens stunned the crowd by beating Olympic gold medalist Stella Walsh, one of the most well-known women athletes of the time, in the 50-meter dash. Stephens went on to win two gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for the 100 meter sprint and the 4 x 100 metre relay. She was six feet tall, and had to undergo a medical examination before the Games to prove she was a woman, but after she won, she was felt up by Adolf Hitler and invited to spend the weekend with him, which she declined. Walsh retired from amateur competition shortly after the Olympics, played professional softball and baseball, and went to William Woods University. From 1938 to 1952, she was the first woman to own and manage a semi-professional basketball team. She worked as a technical librarian (1950-1976) for the Research Division of the U.S. Aeronautical Chart and Information Service in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She died at age 75 in 1994.
- February 3, 1930 – Gillian Ayres born, English abstract painter and printmaker. She was awarded a bursary by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975. She had a number of solo exhibitions, including one in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and some of her paintings are in collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ayres died in 2018 at age 88.
- February 3, 1936 – Elizabeth Peer born, American pioneering journalist; worked for Newsweek from 1958 to 1984, starting as a copy girl. She was promoted to writer in 1962, dispatched to Paris in 1964 as the magazine’s first woman foreign correspondent, then worked in their Washington D.C. bureau, and later returned to Paris as bureau chief. In 1977, as Newsweek’s first woman war correspondent, she covered the Ethio-Somali War, but was seriously injured there, and never fully recovered, leaving her in constant pain. Peer's relationship with her colleagues deteriorated, as did the quality of her work. New editor William Broyles, Jr. met with her on April 22, 1983 to inform her that Newsweek was firing her, effective July 31, 1984. For someone whose entire career had been at the same magazine and whose identity was bound up with that institution, it was a terrible shock. After her termination she would be on permanent disability, at considerably reduced pay. Elliott, her former editor who had taken a chance on her in the 1960s, recommended her for the curatorship of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, but the job went to Howard Simons, managing editor of The Washington Post. She committed suicide at age 48, in May 1984.
- February 3, 1943 – Blythe Danner born, American actress, primarily known for her stage and television work. She is also an environmental activist. Danner won the 1970 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in the Broadway production of Butterflies Are Free, and two Primetime Emmys for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama series for playing Izzy Huffstodt on the television drama Huff (2004-2006). Danner is active with INFORM, an environmental non-profit which educates the public, and is on the Board of Environmental Advocates of New York, a member of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Media Association, and a member of Moms Clean Air Force.
- February 3, 1965 – Maura Tierney born, American actress and producer; best known for her series television roles on NewsRadio (1995-1999), ER (1999-2000), and The Affair (2014-2019). She has also appeared in numerous films, and in 2010, joined New York’s experimental theatre company, The Wooster Group. She appeared with Frances McDormand in the group’s 2010 remounting of North Atlantic, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. From 2016-2019, she played the feminist Germaine Greer in The Town Hall Affair, also directed by LeCompte. Tierney conceived the idea for this play, which recreates a raucous debate on Women's Liberation that Norman Mailer organized with prominent feminists in 1971. In 2011, Tierney made her debut at the Gate Theatre in the Dublin in the English-language premiere of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage (translation by Christopher Hampton) with Ardal O’Hanlon. In 2019, Tierney originated the role of Elizabeth in the West Coast premiere of Jen Silverman's play Witch in Los Angeles.
- February 3, 1973 – Ilana Sod born, Mexican multimedia journalist and producer; noted for her work on social issues and youth-oriented programming; co-producer of the 2014 TV news special, Hecho en America; MTV Latin America’s newscaster and Editor-in-Chief for Public Affairs Programming (2004-2012); host and producer of MTV’s Agentes de Cambio/Agents of Change (2005), which was initially sponsored by the government of Finland; columnist for the Mexican newspaper Excélsior.
- February 3, 1984 – The first live birth resulting from an embryo transfer from one woman who was artificially inseminated to another woman who gave birth. The sperm used in the artificial insemination came from the husband of the woman who bore the child.
- February 3, 1995 – NASA Astronaut Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, as Discovery blasts off on its STS-63 mission to rendezvous with the Russian Mir Space Station.
- February 3, 2003 – The first ‘National Wear Red Day’ is started by the American Heart Association as part of its ongoing educational efforts about the risks of heart disease and stroke facing American women.
- February 3, 2016 – ‘National Women Physicians Day’ is launched on Elizabeth Blackwell’s birthday (see entry for 1821, above) by the Physician Mother Group (PMG) a support group for women doctors to collaborate and support each other as they face the challenge of balancing their medical and family commitments.
- February 3, 2018 – Actress Uma Thurman became the latest in a long list of women to accuse disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault in a New York Times report. "He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things," Thurman said of Weinstein, whom she says later made a "half-assed apology" after he was confronted about the incident by director Quentin Tarantino. Thurman also recounted and shared footage of an incident on the set of Kill Bill in which Tarantino required her to drive an unsafe car that crashed into a tree, and she alleged that both he and Weinstein tried to cover up the car crash, which gave her a concussion and permanent damage to her knees and neck.
- February 3, 2020 – In the UK, a man who stalked Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis for over 25 years was finally sentenced to three years in jail after breaching a restraining order for the 12th time. The judge told the defendant: “For whatever reason, you have an obsession with Emily Maitlis and it is your belief that you have been wronged by her and you have been wronged by the law … you have made her life, in many ways, a misery … She can’t live a free life because of you. She is forever looking over her shoulder to see if you are there. If you keep breaching the order, all the court can do is lock you up … All the court can do is try to protect Ms Maitlis and her family as best as it can.” Stalking was not a crime in England and Wales until 2012. In the U.S., California passed the first anti-stalking law in 1990, and the Interstate Anti-Stalking Act was passed in 1996 as part of the Violence Against Women Act.
- February 3, 2021 – Pop singer ** Rihanna angered the Indian government by tweeting “Why aren’t we talking about this?! #FarmersProtest” in reference to a news report about the heavy-handed measures being used against Indian farmers. Her tweet helped bring more international media attention to the farmers’ protest against three new agricultural laws they say were passed by the government without their consultation and which will leave them at the mercy of big corporations. The farmers say the changes, which allow big retailers to buy directly from growers, will mean the end of longstanding guaranteed prices for their crops and leave them vulnerable to the whims of big business. Environmentalist Greta Thunberg responded to Rihanna’s tweet: “We stand in solidarity with the #Farmers Protest in India.” The Indian government issued a statement criticizing foreign individuals for “rushing to comment on such matters” without a “proper understanding of the issues.” The statement by the Ministry of External Affairs declared, “The temptation of sensationalist social media hashtags and comments, especially when resorted to by celebrities and others, is neither accurate nor responsible.” Water and food supplies to the protesting farmers had been disrupted, paramilitary troops and police in riot gear deployed, and access to mobile internet was suspended at the protest sites after a government order. The Indian government then threatened Twitter with legal action after the firm unblocked most of the 250 accounts that the electronics and information technology ministry had reported for using the hashtag #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide and for tweeting allegedly “fake, intimidatory and provocative tweets” connected to the farmer protests. The original decision by Twitter to temporarily suspend the 250 accounts – including those of the Indian independent news magazine Caravan, the farmers’ collective Kisan Ekta Morcha, political commentator Sanjukta Basu, and activist Hansraj Meena – had led to accusations that the firm was silencing dissenting voices on behalf of the Indian government. After the accounts were restored, a statement from the Indian government accused Twitter of violating its authority and said the company “cannot assume the role of court and justify non-compliance.”
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- February 4, 1865 – Lila Meade Valentine born, Southern U.S. suffrage leader, introduced kindergartens and vocational training into public education in Virginia. She recognized health needs and worked with the Visiting Nurse Association on fighting tuberculosis. Valentine supported the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, after visiting England and realizing that many health issues required women’s voices. She made over 100 speeches in Virginia advocating for suffrage and health issues.
- February 4, 1868 – Constance Markievicz born in England, Irish revolutionary, nationalist, politician, socialist, and suffragette; a founding member of Fianna Éireann, Cumann na mban and the Irish Citizen Army, and a member of Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland). She took part in the violent Easter Rising in 1916, when Irish republicans tried to end British rule and establish an Irish Republic. She was sentenced to death but it was commuted to life in prison because she was a woman. She told her captors, “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.” She was released in 1917 as part of a general amnesty, but Markievicz was jailed again in 1918 for anti-conscription activities. In December 1918, she was the first woman elected to the UK House of Commons, but she did not take her seat and, along with the other Sinn Féin members, formed the first Dáil Éireann (Parliament), of which she was a member (1918-1922). She was also one of the first women in the world to hold a cabinet position, as Minister for Labour (1919-1922).
- February 4, 1899 – ** Virginia M. Alexander born, African-American physician, obstetrician, gynecologist, and public health official; in spite of financial hardship, she graduated in three years from the University of Pennsylvania; applied to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, with the second highest application score, and received a scholarship from a WWI veteran’s mother which helped with her expenses; although she faced racial prejudice and discrimination, she graduated, but had a very difficult time getting an internship, turned away by many hospitals because of her race and gender. Kansas City General Hospital reversed their policy of not allowing women, so she and another woman could be accepted there. After completing her internship, she went back to Philadelphia, and began a private practice. She opened the Aspirant Health Home in 1931, which provided health services to poor members of the black community in North Philadelphia, offsetting the costs with income from her private practice, and sharing medical responsibilities with her colleague Helen O. Davis. In 1937, she got a master’s degree in Public Health, the first black student to attend the Yale School of Public Health. During WWII, she worked for the U.S. Department of Health; after the war, she worked at local Philadelphia hospitals, taught classes at Howard University, and later at the Women’s Medical College Hospital.
- February 4, 1906 – Letitia Dunbar-Harrison born, a Protestant graduate of Trinity College in Dublin. Catholics were admitted to Trinity from 1793 on, but professorships, fellowships, and scholarships were reserved for Protestants. These restrictions were lifted by Act of Parliament in 1873. However, from 1871 to 1970, the Catholic Church in Ireland forbade its members from attending Trinity College without permission. Women were first admitted to the college as full members in January 1904. In 1930, a vacancy opened for county librarian in County Mayo, a Catholic stronghold with the smallest Protestant minority of any county in Ireland. Letitia Dunbar-Harrison was recommended for the job by the Local Appointments Commission. The Library Committee of Mayo County Council, mostly consisting of prominent local Catholics including a bishop, refused to endorse the recommendation, claiming her grasp of Irish was inadequate. During the debate, it was asked “could a Protestant be trusted to hand out books to Catholics?” The government, dominated by Protestants, dissolved the County Council, and replaced it with a Commissioner who appointed Dunbar-Harrison to the position. This move was roundly condemned by prominent Catholic clerics and politicians, including Opposition leader Éamon de Valera, and locals began a boycott of the library. W. T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council, and Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, Dr. Thomas Gilmartin, came to an agreement to transfer Dunbar-Harrison from Mayo to Dublin, for a Department of Defence post, in January 1932.
- February 4, 1913 – ** Rosa Parks born, American civil rights activist; her refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white person led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), and to the federal ruling in Browder v. Gayle, which led to a United States Supreme Court decision declaring the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Many leaders and soon-to-be leaders in the civil rights movement took part in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.
- February 4, 1918 – Ida Lupino born, actress, director, and producer; first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953; and the only woman to direct episodes (one uncredited) of the original Twilight Zone series; one of the first producers to use product placement to help offset the cost of her movies.
- February 4, 1921 – Betty Friedan born, American feminist leader and author; noted for The Feminine Mystique; she was co-founder and first President (1966- 1970) of the National Organization for Women (NOW).
- February 4, 1931 – Isabel Martínez de Perón born as María Estela Martínez Cartas; in 1961, she became the third wife of Juan Perón (his second wife, Eva “Evita” Perón, died in 1952). First Lady of Argentina (1973-1974); Vice President of Argentina (1973-1974); President of Argentina (1974-1976), the first woman leader to be a “President” rather than a queen or prime minister. Her tenure as President was a time of increasing violence by leftist extremists and escalating brutality by law enforcement and the military. She was deposed and arrested in March, 1976, by a military junta.
- February 4, 1943 – Wanda Rutkiewicz born, Polish mountain climber; first woman to successfully climb K2; she had reached the summit on eight of the fourteen ‘eight-thousanders’ on her list of mountains to conquer before she went missing on Kanchenjunga; there is no evidence to show whether she reached the summit or not; her body has not been found.
- February 4, 1952 – Jenny Shipley born, New Zealand’s first woman Prime Minister (1997-1999); Leader of the Opposition for the National Party (1999-2001); New Zealand Parliament member for two different constituencies, Rakaia (1990-2002) and Ashburton (1987-1990).
- February 4, 1959 – Tsitsi Dangaremgba born, Zimbabwean novelist, playwright, and filmmaker; winner of the 2021 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the 2021 Pen Pinter Prize. Her book This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), was the first published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, and won the 1989 African Region Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
- February 4, 1960 – Siobhan Dowd born, British author who worked for the worldwide association of writers, PEN International, became PEN’s Program Director of the Freedom-to-Write Committee in New York City, and co-founded the English PEN Readers and Writers Program for disadvantaged young people; she died of breast cancer in 2007; her last completed book, Bog Child, won the 2009 Carnegie Medal for best British juvenile book. Dowd established the Siobhan Dowd Trust before her death, which receives all the proceeds from her literary work, using to help disadvantaged children with their reading skills.
- February 4, 1983 – Rebecca White born, Australian Labor politician; Member of the Tasmanian House of Assembly for Lyons since 2010; Leader of the Opposition in Tasmania since 2017; she campaigned for restoring funding for abortion clinics which the Liberal government had cut.
- February 4, 2013 – Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, French Minister of Women’s Rights, announces that a law passed on November 17, 1800, which banned women in Paris from wearing trousers, unless they had the permission of local police to “dress like a man,” had finally been formally rescinded. The law was modified in 1892 and 1909, to allow women to wear trousers if they were “holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse.”
- February 4, 2018 – In the UK, a study undertaken by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that women who work part-time after having children are likely to suffer the extremes of the gender pay gap. The study found that by the time a first child has reached age 20, mothers earn almost a third less per hour, on average, than similarly educated fathers. The stark difference in pay according to gender comes as a consequence of the poorer levels of pay progression open to part-time workers – with women making up the vast majority of people taking temporary jobs, as they look to find more flexible working arrangements after having children. As a result, they miss out on earnings growth associated with staying in a permanent job. There are fears that progress in closing the gender pay gap has stalled, with the latest figures showing that the average female employee currently earns around 9.1% less per hour than the average male employee. While that has come down from about 30% in the early 1990s, the difference remains high. About a quarter of the wage gap identified by the IFS comes as a result of mothers taking part-time work, while just a tenth of the gap is down to women taking time out of the labour market altogether for a prolonged period of time. The report also highlights how women’s pay suffers at the hands of a cultural norm among nuclear families whereby women more typically juggle work with looking after children than their male partners. For men, part-time employment rates were essentially unaffected by the arrival of a first child, while women were shown to be significantly more likely than men to still be in part-time jobs when their first child reaches adulthood. The lack of earnings growth in part-time work has a particularly big impact for graduate women, because they would typically stand to gain the most from rising levels of pay from remaining in full-time paid work. The report found that the wage gap has not fallen at all in the last 25 years for the highest-educated women due to this trend. Monica Costa Dias, Deputy Research Director of the IFS, said: “It is remarkable that periods spent in part-time work lead to virtually no wage progression at all. It should be a priority for governments and others to understand the reasons for this.”
- February 4, 2020 – In the UK, government figures show that in June 2019, almost 24,000 people were made homeless in England directly because of domestic abuse. For those fleeing, it is increasingly difficult to find a space in a refuge, which offers temporary accommodation and intensive support. Councils cut funding for domestic violence refuges by almost a quarter between 2010 and 2017, and last year, Women’s Aid found that 64% of all referrals to refuges were declined. Its 2018 study showed 45% of people fleeing domestic abuse end up sofa surfing, and almost 12% sleep rough while waiting for a space to become free. Finding settled accommodation can be even harder. Government figures show just 2% of households made homeless because of domestic abuse between April and December 2018 were offered social housing. As a result, survivors can face homelessness or returning to their abusers when their time is up at a refuge. This is because councils are only required to provide housing for domestic violence survivors if they can prove they are more vulnerable than the average homeless person. “It’s actually incredibly difficult to prove vulnerability because the evidence required is hard to obtain,” says Hannah Gousy, head of policy at Crisis. One woman who fled her home says she was asked by her housing officer to get a letter signed by her abuser stating that he had raped and attacked her. In Wales and Scotland, cuts to refuges have been less extreme and, crucially, anyone fleeing from or threatened with domestic violence automatically has a legal right to housing. This means the situation is much less acute for the 94,000 people who became homeless in those countries following domestic violence in the year to April 2018. The Welsh government decided in 2001 that anyone fleeing domestic abuse would be considered in priority need for housing. “The amount of resources that councils spend investigating vulnerability – in essence, working to find reasons not to help people – would be much better spent directly helping people to avoid homelessness,” says Heddyr Gregory of Shelter Cymru. Scotland abolished priority need altogether in 2012. Alison Watson, the deputy director at Shelter Scotland, says: “[That] means women fleeing domestic abuse will be considered homeless and given temporary accommodation and help to find a new permanent home. For some this creates a safe escape route where none existed before.”
- February 4, 2021 – The United Nations called for collaboration at all levels, and across all sectors of society, to protect millions of girls and women at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) every year. Amid concerns that two million additional cases of FGM may occur over the next decade as the pandemic shutters schools and disrupts programmes that help protect girls from the harmful practice, UN Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted that by working together, “we can eliminate female genital mutilation by 2030.” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore and UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem said in a joint statement: “Simply put, if gender equality were a reality, there would be no FGM. This is the world we envision.” They urged strong collaboration and unity, at all levels and across all sectors, as well as adequate funding and decisive action to protect girls and women at risk. “We know what works. We tolerate no excuses. We have had enough of violence against women and girls. It is time to UNITE around proven strategies, FUND them adequately and ACT,” they stressed.
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- February 5, 1626 – Marie de Rabutin-Chantal born, marquise de Sévigné, noted for her wit and vivid descriptions in her voluminous correspondence, especially with her daughter; an orphan from the age of seven, she received a good education from her uncle, Christophe de Coulanges, abbé of Livry, who was instrumental in making terms for her marriage which kept most of her fortune separate from her philandering and expensive husband, Henri, marquis de Sévigné, who was killed in a duel over his mistress when Marie was 24 years old; she never remarried, and wrote about 1500 letters to her daughter about Parisian society and the events of the day.
- February 5, 1903 – Joan Whitney Payson born, American heiress philanthropist, patron of the arts and businesswoman; co-founder of the New York Mets, the first woman to buy majority control of a major-league baseball team in North America instead of inheriting it; president of the Mets organization (1968-1975); she was also involved in thoroughbred horse racing, as a partner with her brother in the highly successful Greentree Stable.
- February 5, 1905 – Mirra Komaroysky born in Russia, sociologist who was a pioneer in gender studies. She born into a privileged Jewish family which fled to the U.S. during the Russian Revolution in 1917. After graduation from Barnard College in 1926, one of her male professors advised her not to pursue higher education because of prejudice against her sex and anti-Semitism. She ignored his advice, earning her master’s degree from Columbia University, and then went on to get her PhD from Columbia in 1940, with a dissertation on “The Unemployed Man and His Family." She built her legacy on studying the social and cultural attitudes of families, focusing on “cultural lag,” a resistance to change in attitudes toward women’s roles even as technological and social advances make them outdated. She spent 32 years on the faculty of Barnard College before retiring in 1970, but returned to Barnard in 1978 as chair of its women’s studies program (which became a department in 1988) until 1992. Komaroysky published Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas in 1953, predating Betty Friedan by 10 years.
- February 5, 1907 – Birgit Dalland born, Norwegian Communist Party (NKP) politician; deputy representative (1945-1949) from Bergen to the Stortinget, Norway’s Parliament; she lived to the age of 100.
- February 5, 1909 – Grażyna Bacewicz born, Polish composer-violinist; won gold medal at 1965 International Competition for Composers in Brussels for Violin Concerto No. 7.
- February 5, 1914 – Hazel Smith born, Mississippi journalist, first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing (1954). Although a segregationist, she supported the rule of law, writing society must follow the law on integration, which led her to bankruptcy and extreme poverty.
- February 5, 1919 – Mary Pickford with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith launch United Artists, the first Hollywood studio founded to allow actors and directors to control their own interests, rather than being under contract to a commercial studio which set the financial terms and controlled which projects they were assigned to work on.
- February 5, 1939 – Jane Bryant Quinn born, American financial journalist and author; Making the Most of Your Money; adviser on the development of Quicken Financial Planner.
- February 5, 1947 – Mary L. Cleave born, American engineer and NASA astronaut; she worked in NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in the Laboratory for Hydrospheric Processes as the Project Manager for SeaWiFS (Sea-viewing, Wide-Field-of-view-Sensor, from 1991 to 2004); Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (2004-2007).
- February 5, 1953 – Giannina Braschi born, Puerto Rican poet, novelist, playwright, and scholar. Notable for Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes cross-genre literature and political philosophy in Spanish, Spanglish, and English.
- February 5, 1959 – Jennifer M. Granholm born in Canada, American Democratic politician, political commentator on CNN(2017-2021), and a graduate of Harvard Law School; Attorney General of Michigan (1999-2003), and the first woman Governor of Michigan (2003-2011); President Biden appointed her as U.S. Secretary of Energy in 2021.
- February 5, 1960 – Bonnie Crombie born, Canadian Liberal Politician; Mayor of Mississauga, Ontario, since 2014; Mississauga City Councillor (2011-2014); Canadian Parliament Member for Mississauga-Streetsville (2008-2011).
- February 5, 1962 – Jennifer Jason Leigh born, American actress; in 2001, she co-wrote and co-directed with Alan Cumming the independent film, The Anniversary Party.
- February 5, 1964 – Laura Linney born, American actress and singer of stage, screen, and television; recipient of two Golden Globes, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and nominations for three Oscars and five Tony Awards. In 2009, Linney took part in We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial. She read passages from Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
- February 5, 1972 – Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark, born as Mary Elizabeth Donaldson in Hobart, Australia. She had been working primarily in advertising when she met Frederik, the heir apparent to the throne of Denmark, during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Australia. They were married in 2004. She became popular in Denmark by sharing publicly her efforts to become fluent in the Danish language, and has become a patron of the charities Save the Children, the Danish Cancer Society, and the Danish Refugee Council, and of groups supporting humanitarian aid, research and science, and social and health initiatives. In 2007, she established the Mary Foundation, to improve lives compromised by environment, heredity, illness, or other circumstances which can isolate or exclude people socially. In 2016, on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, Mary gave a speech on LGBT rights at a forum hosted by the Danish government. She called for an end to discrimination, oppression, and violence against people because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2018, she spoke about LGBTQ+ equality at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. She was the first member of the Danish royal family to attend the Danish Rainbow Awards, where she presented an honorary award to the group LGBT Danmark. In 2019, she became the patron of WorldPride Copenhagen, a Danish LGBTQ annual event.
- February 5, 1980 – Jo Swinson born, British Liberal Democratic Politician; Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats and the party’s Spokesperson for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs since 2017; Under-Secretary of State for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs (2012-2015); Deputy Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats (2010-2012); Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Scotland (2006-2007); Member of Parliament for East Dunbartonshire (incumbent since 2017, and previously 2005-2015).
- February 5, 1981 – Mia Hansen-Løve born, French film director and screenwriter; noted for All is Forgiven; Father of My Children (which premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard section and won the Special Jury Prize); Goodbye First Love; Eden; and L’Avenir (Things to Come), for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival.
- February 5, 2019 –Pope Francis publicly acknowledged for the first time the scandal of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and bishops. The Vatican has long been aware of nuns being sexually abused by priests and bishops in Asia, Europe, South America, and Africa, but it has done very little to stop it, the Associated Press reported in 2018. "It's not that everyone does this, but there have been priests and bishops who have," he told reporters while flying from the United Arab Emirates to Rome. "And I think that it's continuing because it's not like once you realize it that it stops. It continues. And for some time we've been working on it. Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it's a path that we have already begun." In November, 2019, the International Union of Superiors General said there is a "culture of silence and secrecy" that keeps nuns from reporting their abuse, and urged them to come forward and speak with their superiors and law enforcement.
- February 5, 2020 – When Donald Trump came up to the podium to deliver his State of the Union address, on the eve of the verdict in his impeachment trial, he refused to shake hands when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held out her hand. His 81-minute speech wasn’t about the state of the union – it was a re-election rally, punctuated with Republicans shouting “Four more years!” Political pundit David Smith wrote, “This is always the busiest night of the year for the nation’s factcheckers, but Trump delivered a State of the Union address overflowing with untruths.” Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib walked out in protest during the speech. However, it was Speaker Pelosi who had the most memorable moment of the evening. When Trump finished speaking, she immediately tore up her copy of the address, because she couldn’t find “one page with truth on it.”
- February 5, 2021 – In the UK, the Guardian reported a story about Angela Jenner, age 78, who was only getting 86 pence (close to 86 cents US) a week as her state pension. She says she was unaware that when her husband retired in 2008, “I should have automatically received 60% of the basic state pension. This never happened, which I assume was a computer error by the Department for Work and Pensions.” For more than 12 years she had been underpaid each week – and the government owed her £42,700 (about $57,710 USD) as a result. After she saw on television that there had been a number of cases of women’s pensions being underpaid, she made a claim. Jenner is one of thousands of women who may collectively be owed more than £100m in state pension payments after being underpaid for years. The problem affects women who reached state-pension age before April 6, 2016. They fall under the older-style pension system, which enabled women with a reduced national insurance contributions record to claim a proportion of their husband’s state pension. Although the uplift should have been automatically applied since March 17, 2008, before that, women had to apply to receive it, and many missed out because they were unaware of the rules. Others, like Jenner, have been subject to DWP errors, and remained on a lower rate. “If I hadn’t heard about the issue, I’d never have known,” says Jenner, who received her arrears payment in September 2020, three months after making the claim.
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- February 6, 1577 – Beatrice Cenci born, victim of ongoing incestuous assaults by her father Francesco, who also beat the rest of the family; she reported him to authorities, but they do nothing, so she, her mother and two brothers plot his murder, but carry it out so ineptly they are quickly arrested, tried, found guilty, and all but the youngest son executed. The 12-year-old boy’s entire inheritance went to the Pope’s family, while he was condemned to forced labor. Beatrice became a heroine to Rome’s common people for her courage in reporting her father, a symbol of resistance against an arrogant aristocracy that was not held liable for their crimes.
- February 6, 1665 – Anne born, who succeeded William, husband of her sister Mary, after his death as Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. She reigned from 1702 to 1714, becoming Queen of Great Britain and Ireland in 1707, after England and Scotland were united under the Acts of Union. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, was her consort after she became queen. She endured 17 pregnancies, many of them resulting in miscarriages, and all the other infants either died in less than a month, or were stillborn. Her health was greatly impaired, and she had to deal with constant power plays by the Whig party after it became the dominant power in Parliament. Nevertheless, Great Britain became a major military power, and the economic and political base for the golden age of the 18th century was established during her reign. Anne died at age 49, after a long period of illness culminating in a stroke. She was succeeded by George I, the first British monarch from the House of Hanover.
- February 6, 1694 – Dandara, an Afro-Brazilian farmer and warrior skilled in the martial art of capoeira, commits suicide after being captured rather than be enslaved again. She was a member of Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of people who had freed themselves from slavery, and became a haven for escaped slaves. There were frequent attacks on the settlement, so Ganga-Zumba, the first big chief of Quilombo dos Palmares, negotiated a peace treaty in 1678 with the government of the state of Pernambuco, which would make anyone born in Palmares a free person, not a slave, with the right to engage in commerce, and provided that Palmares people who previously been arrested would be released. The catch was that the Palmarinos had to stop giving refuge to any new runaway slaves, and hand them over to the Portuguese authorities. Dandara and her husband Zumbi opposed the treaty because it did not end slavery, and in fact made Palmares complicit in its perpetuation. After Ganga-Zumba was killed by one of the Palmarinos who opposed his proposal, a government force was sent to round up the dissidents.
- February 6, 1842 – Mary Rudge born, English chess master, first woman accepted as a member of the Bristol Chess Club; winner of the first Women’s International Chess Congress (1897). In a simultaneous display, world champion Emmanuel Lasker concedes his unfinished game against her when he runs out of time because he would have lost against best play. Her highest rating was 2146.
- February 6, 1866 – Annie Warburton Goodrich born, American nurse and educator; chief nursing inspector for US Army hospitals, organized the US Army School of Nursing; first Dean of the Yale School of Nursing.
- February 6, 1887 – Florence Luscomb born, architect and reformer, first woman graduate from MIT (1909), gave 222 speeches for woman suffrage in 14 weeks, learned to drive and repair her party’s touring car, sold copies of “The Woman’s Journal.” She was an outdoorswoman, joined ACLU in 1919, helped to derail an anti-communism crusade in Massachusetts, was NAACP official (1948), and ardent Vietnam War opponent.
- February 6, 1895 – María Teresa Vera born, Cuban singer, musician, and composer; prominent in the 20th century Trova movement, inspired by a group of 19th century itinerant musicians called trovadores, who sang and played on guitar songs which they or their friends composed. Trovadores greatly influenced the evolution of Cuban popular music.
- February 6, 1905 – Irmgard Keun born, German novelist; a significant author of the Weimar period noted for her portrayals of women in books like Gigli, Nach Mitternacht (After Midnight), Scherzartikel (Joke Object), and Blühende Neurosen (Neuroses in Full Flower); her books were banned by the Nazis.
- February 6, 1905 – ** Merze Tate born, African American historian, political author, expert on U.S. diplomacy, and philanthropist; after she earned her degree in education, she taught at a segregated black high school, while earning a master's degree from Columbia University, and taking night courses at Indiana University to expand her language skills. In 1932, she won a scholarship to study at Oxford University, where she was the first African-American to earn a degree, a Bachelor of Letters in international relations, from Oxford. She then earned a Ph.D. from Radcliffe (when it was the female coordinate institution of all-male Harvard College). In 1936, she became the history and social science department chair at Bennett College, a school for black women in North Carolina, where she taught for four years. In 1942, Tate joined the faculty of Howard University, becoming one of the first two women in Howard’s Department of History, where she remained for 35 years. While continuing to teach, she also traveled extensively, was a Fulbright Scholar in India, and a researcher for the U.S. State Department. In 2008, the Merze Tate Explorers was founded in her honor, to give African American girls the opportunity to widen their horizons through travel and meeting women who are leaders in their fields.
- February 6, 1912 – Madeleine Rejeuny Lavigne born; she married at 19 and had two children; her husband was a prisoner of war early in WWII, but was released by the Germans in 1943, and they divorced. She worked in the town hall of Lyon, and became part of the French Resistance, making false identity cards and other documents for Allied airman shot down over France, and SOE agents. She allowed SOE agent Henri Borosh to keep his wireless set in her house. When Borosh and Lavigne discovered they were about to be arrested by French police, they were evacuated to England with other compromised agents of the SOE. Lavigne was tried and convicted in absentia in Lyon as a terrorist and sentenced to life imprisonment. Though she spoke little English, Lavigne received paramilitary, parachute, and wireless training. Her training, however, was cut short due to a shortage of SOE agents in France. She returned to France as a half-trained wireless operator in May, 1944, to establish communications for the Silversmith network in Reims, which was headed by Henri Borosh. She rented a house to serve as a base. For the next several months she worked as a courier delivering messages and arranging with SOE in London for air drops of weapons and supplies to the French resistance. Bernard O’Connor, in his book, SOE Heroines, said, "The Germans were everywhere and [she] often had to pass through areas under fire, showing great courage and common sense." Lavigne had to hide from the Germans in a safehouse when the Silversmith network was compromised. The American army liberated Reims in August, 1944. She finished her mission with SOE in September. Her two sons had lived with her parents while she worked for SOE and she reunited with them in Paris. Lavigne was unable to return to her home in Lyon because the life sentence for terrorism had not been commuted by the court. She died in Paris of an embolism (blood clot) on February 25, 1945.
- February 6, 1913 – Mary Leakey born, British archaeologist and paleoanthropologist; among her important finds are the discovery of the first fossilized Proconsul skull, an extinct ape believed to be ancestral to humans, and fossilized hominid footprints 3.6 million years old, proving humans were bipedal 3.6 million years ago, which was much earlier than previously estimated.
- February 6, 1918 – The Representation of the People Act 1918 grants British women over the age of 30 the right to vote if they “were either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register, a property owner, or a graduate voting in a University constituency.” Because over 700,000 British men were killed in WWI, this meant that the women who qualified under the act became 43% of the electorate.
- February 6, 1937 – Kuma Elizabeth Ohi becomes the first Japanese American woman lawyer when she receives her degree from John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois.
- February 6, 1942 – Sarah Brady born, American gun control activist, and author of A Good Fight. Her husband James Brady, who was the White House Press Secretary in 1981, was shot and permanently disabled during an attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan.
- February 6, 1952 – Elizabeth II becomes queen regnant of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth upon the death of her father, King George VI.
- February 6, 1957 – Kathy Najimy born, American comedian, actress and activist for equal rights for women and the LGBTQ community, and for raising awareness of AIDS and domestic violence; noted for her feminist play, The Kathy and Mo Show, which she wrote and performed with Mo Gaffney, and for writing and producing Gloria: A Life, about Gloria Steinem. She has spoken at events for the Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood and PFLAG, and was a speaker at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives. Najimy is also an active member of Time’s Up.
- February 6, 1958 – Cecily Adams born, American comedian and casting director; she studied improvisational comedy at the Groundings, and became a member of the Acme Comedy Theatre in Los Angeles, where she also coached actors. She had guest roles on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Just Shoot Me!; and Murphy Brown. Adams was a casting director for television series, including 3rd Rock From the Sun; Home Room; and That 70s Show. Though a non-smoker, she died of lung cancer at age 46 in 2004.
- February 6, 1967 – Anita Cochran born, American country music singer-songwriter and guitarist. In 2017, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and finished chemotherapy in 2018. Her inspirational song “Fight Like a Girl” was released in October 2018, and she sang the song on Good Morning America with Robin Roberts to an audience of breast cancer survivors.
- February 6, 1987 – Mary Gaudron becomes the first woman to be appointed as a Justice to the High Court of Australia (1987-2003); previously served as Solicitor-General of New South Wales (1981-1987).
- February 6, 2000 – Foreign Minister Tarja Halonen is elected as Finland’s first woman president.
- February 6, 2000 – Hillary Clinton formally declares her candidacy for U.S. Senator from New York. “Politics is the art of making possible what seems to be impossible,” she told a cheering crowd.
- February 6, 2003 – The first International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation is sponsored by the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the global movement Every Woman, Every Child; Stella Obasanjo, Nigerian First Lady and spokesperson for the campaign, announces the Zero Tolerance effort at the Inter-African Committee (IAC) Conference on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children.
- February 6, 2020 – NASA astronaut Christina Koch, age 41, set a new record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman astronaut, spending 328 days on the International Space Station. Returning on this date, she landed in Kazakhstan, and told reporters, “I am so overwhelmed and happy right now.” The previous women’s record-holder, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, had been on the International Space Station for 289 days, and still holds the record for cumulative total days spent in space, 665 days.
- February 6, 2021 – The case of “Julie,” a French girl who was allegedly raped by 20 firefighters for two years between the ages of 13 and 15, sparked demonstrations across France in November 2020, when a French court rejected an appeal to classify the attacks on her as rape. Her case is being examined in the highest French court, and activists hope it will lead to an age of sexual consent in French law as it is in the rest of the European Union. Julie (not her real name) says she was groomed by Pierre, a firefighter who assisted her during a severe anxiety seizure when she was 13 years old. Based at the Bourg-la-Reine fire station in Paris, Pierre got Julie’s phone number from her medical file, in which her age was also recorded. Julie says he bombarded her with “affectionate messages.” Later, he asked Julie to undress via webcam and, when the child complied, passed her number to another firefighter who demanded the same. Three of the accused firefighters admitted they had sex with her but claim it was consensual. Shortly afterwards, Julie wrote in a journal that she was “terrified and paralysed with fear” at the time. Julie’s lawyers argue that all 20 firefighters, who were from various stations, should be charged with rape. Currently only three men are charged with “sexual violation.” French law says that it is an offence for someone in a position of authority to have sex with a person under the age of 18. Under the law, in order to bring rape charges, the complainant must prove she was forced or violently coerced; otherwise the accused may only be charged with sexual violation. The maximum sentence for sexual violation is seven years, compared with 20 years for rape. Julie’s mental and physical health began to deteriorate after the assaults, which resulted in more seizures, and firefighters attended her home 130 times over two years. Julie became scared of going out and was prescribed anti-anxiety medication. She made several suicide attempts. In November 2009, Pierre, in full uniform, took 14-year-old Julie to his apartment, where she told investigators he raped her again. Two colleagues came over and Julie says she was gang-raped while the men watched pornography. In 2018, following protests from feminists, a change in the law was proposed that would introduce an age of consent at 15. This would mean that sex with someone younger would be considered rape. But the law was not passed after a government report concluded it would result in “an assumption of guilt.” Julie was taken off medication in July 2010 as part of a treatment review and, having a clearer mind, disclosed the abuse to her mother, who filed an official complaint with the police. Six months later, the three men accused of raping Julie at Pierre’s home were placed under investigation, but no action was taken against the remaining 17. During questioning, two of the accused men admitted they’d had “group sex” with Julie while on duty and wearing their uniforms. Another admitted to a sexual act in a toilet cubicle of a Parisian hospital where Julie had been admitted, yet claimed to have not noticed that the child displayed any signs of vulnerability. In March 2011, a judge was appointed to investigate the case regarding the three accused of gang rape. The investigation took eight years, at the end of which, in July 2019, the judge decided to drop the rape charges and replace them with “consensual penetrative sex with a minor under 15.” Given the difficulty of proving that a minor was forcibly or violently coerced, only about one percent of such cases result in convictions. Marguerite Stern and her feminist group l’Amazone are among several women’s groups in France staging public demonstrations in solidarity with Julie. “For 10 years they were fighting alone, now thousands of feminists from all over France are joining them,” said Stern. “We are demanding that the firefighters be tried for rape and not ‘sexual violation’. This culture of misogyny in our courts must end.” The public prosecutor in Julie’s case hoped that, if successful, it would lay down new case law to remove the necessity to prove use of force or additional violence to secure a conviction for rape of a minor under the age of 15. But in March, 2021, France’s top court rejected the bid to pursue rape charges against the firefighters. The men will only be charged with sexual assault. Attorneys for Julie’s family plan to contest that decision and bring the case before Europe’s Court of Human Rights.
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- February 7, 1102 – Matilda (also called Maud) born, Holy Roman Empress by marriage to her first husband Henry V of Germany. Matilda was designated by her father, King Henry I of England, as his heir after her brother, William Adelin, died in the White Ship disaster in 1120. She married a second time, to Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, in 1128. Matilda ultimately lost the civil war over the succession, to her cousin Stephen of Blois, who had usurped the throne in 1135. This period of civil war has been termed “The Anarchy.” She died in September 1167 at age 65. (See also entry for February 2, 1141.)
- February 7, 1726 – Margaret Fownes-Luttrell born, English artist; two of her paintings are part of the Dunster Castle collection, now property of the National Trust. She was the heiress of Dunster Castle, under the stipulation in her father's will that her husband should take the additional surname of Luttrell, and the property automatically became her husband’s upon their marriage.
- February 7, 1802 – Louisa Jane Hall born, American poet, essayist and literary critic; some of her early poems were published anonymously in the British magazine, The Literary Gazette. Noted for Miriam, a Dramatic Sketch; Joanna of Naples, an Historical Tale; and Hannah, the Mother of Samuel the Prophet and Judge of Israel.
- February 7, 1867 – Laura Ingalls Wilder born, American author of the Little House on the Prairie series, published between 1932 and 1943, based on growing up in a family of homesteaders, who lived in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa before finally settling in De Smet, South Dakota, east of the Missouri River.
- February 7, 1885 – Anita Stewart born, American silent film actress, producer, composer-lyricist, and novelist; she became a star in films like 1911’s huge box office hit, A Tale of Two Cities, the 1913 films The Forgotten Latchkey and The White Feather. She left her lucrative career at Vitagraph Studios to accept a contract from fledging mogul Louis B. Mayer in order to have control over her films, and produced seventeen of her films under Anita Stewart Productions for Mayer studios, including Playthings of Destiny and Rose o’ the Sea. The songs she wrote were often published in conjunction with the release of her motion pictures. Ralph Ince was her brother-in-law from her first marriage, and directed her in many of her films. Stewart was horrified when he was indicted for the savage beating of her younger brother, actor George Stewart, who suffered brain damage. Her brother was an invalid for the rest of his life, and she took over his care. She wasn’t successful in making the transition from silent movies to sound, and retired from the screen after her 1932 film, The Hollywood Handicap. Stewart wrote a mystery novel, The Devil’s Toy, which was published in 1935. Most of her films have been lost, or only fragments remain. In 1961, Stewart died at age 66 of a heart attack.
- February 7, 1918 – Ruth Sager born, American geneticist, pioneer in cytoplasmic genetics, who altered the prevailing view of where genetic material was within the cell, and originated cancer research on tumor suppressor genes. She recognized that a second set of (mitochondrial) genes were found outside of the cell's nucleus. Even though they were non-chromosomal, these genes also influenced inherited characteristics. Previously, only the chromosomal genes had been considered to control genetic behaviour. Her research in later life turned to the study of genetic mechanisms involved in cancer. She was among the first to study the role of mutations in suppressor genes that neutralized their restraint on cell reproduction. Her contributions were not acknowledged by the academic community until the 1970s during the second wave of feminism. In 1975, she joined the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a professor of cellular genetics, where she served as chief of the Division of Cancer Genetics at the affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her research there focused on the genetic and molecular causes of cancer, including investigation of the roles of tumor suppressor genes, DNA methylation, and chromosomal instability in tumor growth and spread. Sager was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of such genes. She identified over 100 potential tumor suppressor genes and performed extensive research into a specific tumor suppressor gene called maspin (mammary serine protease inhibitor). She developed cell culture methods to study normal and cancerous human and other mammalian cells in the laboratory and pioneered the research into "expression genetics," the study of altered gene expression. She was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 1977 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979. Sager published two classic textbooks: Cell Heredity (1961), co-written by Francis Ryan, often considered the first molecular biology textbook; and Cytoplasmic Genes and Organelles (1972).
- February 7, 1947 – Darlene Clark Hine born, American author, professor, and African-American history expert, noted for her theory of a “culture of dissemblance.” She defined dissemblance as “the behavior and attitudes of Black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.” Author of Black Women in Whites; A Shining Thread of Hope; and the two-volume Black Women in America. In 2010 the Organization of American Historians presented the inaugural Darlene Clark Hine Award for best book in African American Women and Gender History. She was presented with a National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2013 for her work on understanding the African-American experience.
- February 7, 1950 – Karen Joy Fowler born, American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction; The Jane Austen Book Club; 2010 World Fantasy Award for What I Didn’t See, and Other Stories.
- February 7, 1963 – Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper born, American Naval officer and NASA astronaut. She achieved the rank of USN Captain, and became the recipient of two Navy Commendation Medals. She retired from NASA in 2009, and returned to naval duty. In 2011, she became commander of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center.
- February 7, 1969 – Diane Crump becomes the first woman jockey to race at a major U.S. racetrack, Hialeah Park in Florida.
- February 7, 1973 – Tanya Monro born, Australian physicist known for her work in photonics. She has been Australia's Chief Defence Scientist since March 2019. Prior to that she was the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research and Innovation (DVCR&I) at the University of South Australia. Monro was awarded the ARC Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2013. She was the inaugural chair of photonics, the inaugural director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics, as well as the inaugural director of the Institute for Photonics & Advanced Sensing (IPAS), and the inaugural director of the Centre of Expertise in Photonics (CoEP) within the School of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Adelaide (now known as the School of Physical Sciences).
- February 7, 1979 – Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman born, Yemeni journalist and human rights activist; founder-leader of “Women Journalists Without Chains”; co-recipient of 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, the first Arab woman, first person from Yemen, and second-youngest Nobel Laureate.
- February 7, 1983 – Elizabeth Dole sworn in as first woman U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
- February 7, 1987 – National Girls & Women in Sports Day is founded in remembrance of Olympic volleyball player, Flo Hyman, who died at age 31 from a dime-sized weak spot in her aorta, not discovered until the autopsy after her sudden death; also celebrates the success of Title IX in expanding access to sports for girls and women, by the NGWSD coalition: Women’s Sports Foundation; National Women’s Law Center; The President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition; and girls inc.
- February 7, 2017 – Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law decriminalizing some forms of domestic violence. The legislation, known as the "slapping law," downgrades a first offense of domestic violence that does not cause serious injury, making it just an administrative offense with a fine of up to about $500, up to 15 days in jail, or up to 120 hours of community service. Conservatives said the bill reinforced traditional values by respecting the authority of family heads, and brought family law in line with 2016 reforms easing punishment for other minor assaults. One of the bill's sponsors was conservative senator Yelena Mizulina, who wrote Russia's controversial law against "gay propaganda." Human Rights Watch called the law "dangerous."
- February 7, 2017 – During the Senate hearings on the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions (Republican – Alabama), Republican Senators voted to formally silence Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat - Massachusetts), preventing her from finishing reading a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King, which criticized the record of Senator Sessions on civil rights, accusing him of using “his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican - Kentucky) invoked the little-used Rule XIX, which prohibits debating senators from ascribing to other senators “any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” He then said the now-infamous words, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Male Democrats later read Coretta Scott King’s letter into the Senate record with no objections. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as U.S. Attorney General, 52-47, with only one Democrat siding with the Republican majority. More than 1400 law school professors had signed a letter urging the Senate to reject the nomination, and there was an NAACP sit-in to protest it.
- February 7, 2017 – The U.S. Supreme Court blocked Louisiana from enforcing an abortion law requiring providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, which could leave just one doctor legally allowed to do the procedure in the state. Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the court's liberal members in the 5-4 vote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced longtime abortion swing vote Anthony Kennedy, sided with the conservatives, writing that he would have let the law take effect to see whether it burdened women's access to abortion. The decision did not address the legal merits of the challenge to the law, although it showed the majority questioned whether it was constitutional. The court, with Kennedy joining the majority, had struck down a similar Texas law in 2016.
- February 7, 2020 – Dame Karen Pierce, the UK’s permanent representative to the UN, was appointed as Britain’s ambassador to the U.S., the first woman to hold the position, one of the most prominent posts in the UK’s diplomatic service. Pierce, a career diplomat who joined the Foreign Office in 1981, faced the arduous task of restoring frayed relations with Donald Trump’s administration after the previous ambassador, Kim Darroch, felt forced to resign over leaked cables that revealed he made uncomplimentary personal remarks about Trump. Since joining the Foreign Office, Pierce had been posted to Tokyo, the Balkans and Geneva. She served as the UK’s ambassador to Afghanistan in 2015 and 2016. Pierce became political director at the Foreign Office, a leading domestic diplomatic position, before heading to the UN. There she regularly crossed swords with Russia over its conduct in the Syrian civil war, arguing its support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime has weakened Vladimir Putin’s moral authority. Pierce said she was “honoured” to have been asked to take up the post, “I think it is the UK’s single most important relationship. There is a deep bond between Britain and the US, built on many pillars.” On November 7, 2020, she tweeted, “Congratulations to @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris on their historic victory to become the next President and Vice President of the United States. I look forward to working with the new administration to forge a common purpose in meeting the major challenges ahead such as Covid recovery and climate, on the basis of our common values and shared endeavors.”
- February 7, 2021 – The Air Force flyover at Superbowl 55 in Florida brought together three bombers – the B-1B Lancer, the B-2 Spirit, and the B-52 Stratofortress, because their numbers added up to 55 in honor of the 55th Super Bowl. There was also another innovation: Air Force Captain Sara Kociuba led the flyover in a B-2 Spirit. She is a B-2 instructor who has flown over 90 combat missions. And for the first time, a woman was a Super Bowl official on the field. Sarah Thomas was hired by the NFL as the first full-time woman official in 2015, then became the first woman on-field official in 2019, and for Super 55, she achieved another first as Super Bowl 55’s down judge.
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- February 8, 1587 – Mary, the deposed Queen of Scots, was executed, after being held prisoner in England since 1568. The Babington Plot was a conspiracy to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England and put Mary on the English throne, in order to restore Catholicism as the state religion of England. It was the second plot discovered by Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s chief advisor on state security and foreign affairs, and he used it to convince Elizabeth that she would not be safe as long as Mary was the focus of English Catholic plotters, the Catholic League in France, and Catholic monarchs urged on by Pope Pius V, who had denounced Elizabeth as “the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime,” and issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating her and releasing her Catholic subjects from obedience to her. A letter from the conspirators was smuggled to Mary, informing her of their plans, and then Mary’s response was intercepted, which consented to the plan and urged them to rescue her. Mary was tried and condemned. Elizabeth reluctantly ordered her death, not wanting to set the precedent of executing a queen.
- February 8, 1831 – Rebecca Lee Crumpler born, African-American physician and author; she became a Doctor of Medicine in 1864, after studying at the New England Female Medical College, the first African-American woman to become a physician in the United States. She first practiced medicine in Boston, where most of her patients were poor black women and children. After the American Civil War, she moved to Richmond, Virginia, believing it to be "a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children." There, she worked for the Freedmen's Bureau to provide medical care to freed slaves who were denied by white physicians. She worked under the Assistant Commissioner, Orlando Brown, but was subjected to "intense racism" by both the administration and other physicians. Men doctors snubbed her, druggists balked at filling her prescriptions –a majority of pharmacists would not acknowledge the prescriptions she wrote, and some people wisecracked that the M.D. behind her name stood for nothing more than 'Mule Driver'. She returned to her practice in Boston. In 1883, Crumpler published her reference work, A Book of Medical Discourses, from the notes she kept over the course of her medical career.
- February 8, 1850 – Kate Chopin born, pseudonym of Katherine O’Flaherty, pioneering American feminist and lesbian writer; her novel, The Awakening, depicts women’s conflicts between marriage-motherhood and their own desires seriously.
- February 8, 1860 – Adella Brown Bailey born, American suffragist and politician; she was active in the Republican Party, and served in 1920 as an alternate delegate from Colorado to the Republican National Convention. She was a four-term president of the Women’s Club of Denver, and an active member of the Equal Suffrage Association.
- February 8, 1876 – Paula Modersohn-Becker born, early German expressionist painter, who died from postpartum embolism at age 31; noted as first woman known to paint nude self-portraits.
- February 8, 1879 – Maud Slye born, pathologist, received American Medical Association gold medal, American Radiological Society honor for cancer research. Developed new care and breeding regimens for lab mice – so devoted to her mice that she cared for them personally, buying their food with her own money when times were lean, and taking them to conferences with her. Her work was critical in establishing that genetics play a part in some forms of cancer. She was also a historian of women in science.
- February 8, 1879 – Elizabeth Langdon Williams born, American mathematician, human computer and astronomer; her work helped lead to the discovery of Pluto (‘Planet X’). In 1903, she became one of the first women to graduate from MIT with a degree in physics. Graduating at the top of her class, she was the first women to have an honor part during graduation. She was ambidextrous, writing cursive with her right hand, and printed with her left hand. She was hired in 1905 by Percival Lowell, initially as an editor for his publications, but in 1910, she became a ‘human computer’ when Lowell began his search for ‘Planet X’ – he theorized that there was an unknown planet which affected the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, and he predicted where it might be, based on Williams’ calculations. The project was shelved when Lowell died in 1916, but it was resumed by Clyde Tombaugh, who would find the location of Pluto in 1930, by studying a photograph taken in 1915 of that region of the sky. Williams continued to work on calculations and handled correspondence at Lowell Observatory after Lowell's death, moving from Boston to the observatory itself at Flagstaff in 1919, but after she married astronomer George Hall Hamilton in 1922, she was dismissed by Lowell’s widow who thought it was inappropriate to employ a married woman. She and her husband both went to work at an observatory in Mandeville, Jamaica run by the Harvard College Observatory. In 1935, her husband died, and she retired from the Mandeville observatory. She moved to New Hampshire, where she and her younger sister, Louise, ran a summer retreat home called Peaceful Acres. In 1981, Williams died at age 101.
- February 8, 1906 – Gisela Kahn Gresser born, American chess player who won a record 9 national titles from 1944 to 1969. She was the first U.S. woman to earn the title of master, and one of the first 17 players in the world awarded the title of Woman International Master in 1950 when the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE - the international chess federation) created official titles. She won the U.S. Women's Chess Championship in 1944 (scoring 8-0), 1948 (co-winner with Mona May Karff), 1955 (with Nancy Roos), 1957 (with Sonja Graf), 1962, 1965, 1966 (with Lisa Lane), 1967, and 1969 (at age 63). She studied classics at Radcliffe, and won a fellowship to continue her studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She married William Gresser, a NYC attorney and musicologist, and they had two sons. Most successful chess players begin to play in tournaments when they are children and reach their peak between ages 35 and 45, but Gresser didn’t play at all until she was in her thirties. She traveled frequently, and it was on a cruise ship in the late 1930s that she borrowed a chess manual from another passenger, and taught herself the game. In 1938, she was a spectator at the first U.S. Women's Chess Championship, organized by Caroline Marshall, and held at the Rockefeller Center, which Adele Rivero won. Mrs. Gresser, as she preferred to be called, first played in the U.S. championship in 1940, and in 1944 she won it with a perfect score. In April 1963, she became the first woman in the United States to gain a master title, with a rating of 2211. In addition to her U.S. wins, she also played in five Women's Candidates' tournaments (for the Women's World Chess Championship) and three Women's Chess Olympiads. In 1950, when Lyumilla Rudenko won the Women’s World Championship, the only player who won a game against her was Gisela Gresser. Her rating was 2090 when she died at age 94. Gresser was the first woman to be inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame. Her record 9 wins in the U.S. Women’s Chess Championships still stands, although Grandmaster Irina Krush, who first won the U.S. title in 1998 at age 14, has won it 8 times so far, including in 2020.
- February 8, 1911 – Elizabeth Bishop born, author, poet, and painter; Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry 1949-1950. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1956 for Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring. Bishop struggled with depression, alcoholism, and asthma; best-known for Geography III.
- February 8, 1913 – Danai Stratigopoulou born, Greek writer, academic, and singer; though born in Athens, she grew up in Paris and in Marseilles, where she studied political science, orthophony (voice training in speaking and enunciation), and phonetics, while pursuing a singing career; noted for her interpretations of Greek folk and popular songs. During WWII, she fought with the anti-Fascist/Nazi resistance. After the war, she taught phonetics and Greek folklore at the University of Santiago de Chile, and became friends with Pablo Neruda. She was an important translator of Neruda’s Spanish poetry into Greek, and was decorated by the Chilean Republic for her work.
- February 8, 1920 – Swiss men vote against women’s right to vote. Swiss women do not vote in Federal elections until 1971.
- February 8, 1921 – Nexhmije Hoxha born to Albanian parents in what is now the Republic of Macedonia. She joined the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, and was elected in 1942 to the General Council of the Albanian National Liberation Movement. She fought in the 1st Division of the National Liberation Army (1943-1945), and was elected in 1943 to the Secretariat of the Albanian Women’s League, then served as its chair (1946-1952). She married Albanian Prime Minister and Communist Party leader Enver Hoxha after WWII, but was one of the few spouses of a Communist Party boss to have power in her own right. In 1966, she became director of the Institute of Marxist–Leninist Studies, and in 1985, she was elected as Chair of the Democratic Front, serving until 1990.
- February 8, 1922 – Audrey Meadows born, American actress best known for playing Alice Kramden on the 1950s television show The Honeymooners. She was also the first woman to serve as a director of the First National Bank of Denver, for 11 years. Meadows was also an advisory director (1961-1981) of Continental Airlines, working on marketing programs, and on design elements in aircraft interiors and Continental’s President’s Club VIP airport lounges. Love, Alice: My Life as a Honeymooner, her memoir, was published in 1994. She died of lung cancer in 1996, at age 73.
- February 8,1940 – Sophie Lihau-Kanza born, Congolese sociologist and public servant; she was the first Congolese woman to receive a secondary education, first to graduate from university (earning a degree in sociology from the University of Geneva), then earned a master’s and PhD in sociology in 1976, both from Harvard University. In 1966, she became the first woman to hold government office in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when she was appointed as Minister of Social Affairs, then served as Minister for Community Development and Minister for Work, Social Welfare and Habitat. Kanza was a member of the Board of Trustees of the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR, 1973-1977), Deputy Assistant Director-General at UNESCO (1981-1985), and Head of Mission to the Director-General of UNESCO (1985-1988). After a 1998 car accident in Paris left her a paraplegic, Kanza left UNESCO to become an advocate for the disabled. She died of cardiac arrest in 1999.
- February 8, 1953 – Mary Steenburgen born, American actress and singer-songwriter; she won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Melvin and Howard. She is a member of the Democratic Party, and has been a guest lecturer at the Clinton School of Public Service discussing the foundations and humanitarian causes ranging from human rights to the environment with which she is involved. She campaigned for Hillary Clinton during her 2008 Presidential primary campaign, and was a speaker at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
- February 8, 1957 – Karine Chemla born, French historian and sinologist; she is a senior fellow at the New York University Institute for the Study of the Ancient World; noted for her research on Chinese mathematics and 19th century French geometry.
- February 8, 1957 – Katherine Freese born in Germany and came to the U.S. at age nine; America theoretical astrophyphysicist, and professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics. She is known for her work in theoretical cosmology at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics. As one of the first to propose ways to discover dark matter, she contributed to early research on dark matter and dark energy. Her idea of indirect detection in the Earth is being pursued by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory experiment, and the "wind" of dark matter particles felt as the Earth orbits the Milky Way (working with David Spergel), now being searched for in worldwide experiments. Her work decisively ruled out MACHO (Massive compact halo object) dark matter in favor of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). She has proposed a model known as "Cardassian expansion," in which dark energy is replaced with a modification of Einstein's equations. Recently she proposed a new theoretical type of star, called a dark star, powered by dark matter annihilation rather than fusion. Freese has served on the board of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara and the board of the Aspen Center for Physics. From 2008-2012 she was a councilor and member of the executive committee of the American Physical Society, and from 2005-2008 she was a member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC). She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009. She was awarded the 2019 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society "For ground-breaking research at the interface of cosmology and particle physics, and her tireless efforts to communicate the excitement of physics to the general public." In 2020 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Author of The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter.
- February 8, 1958 – Marina Silva born, Brazilian politician and environmentalist; Spokesperson of Sustainability Network since 2015; Senator from Acre (2008-2011); Minister of the Environment (2003-2008).
- February 8, 1964 – Representative Martha Griffiths (Democrat-Michigan) makes an address to the House which helps sway votes to add civil rights protection for women to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
- February 8, 1969 – Mary Robinette Kowal born, prolific American science fiction/ fantasy author, and puppeteer; noted for Shades of Milk and Honey; “Evil Robot Monkey” (nominated for a 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), “For Want of a Nail,” and “The Lady Astronaut of Mars,” winner of the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. She also won the 2008 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
- February 8, 1984 – Cecily Strong born, American comedian and actress; hired for Saturday Night Live while performing improv at The Second City in Chicago, and has been with SNL since 2012. Strong was the featured entertainer at the 2015 White House Correspondents' Association dinner (cracking that she was the first straight woman to do so in twenty years). She appeared in an SNL ‘Weekend Update’ sketch in November 2021 as “Goober the Clown Who Had An Abortion When She Was 23" during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in cases challenging the Texas six-week abortion ban. Her first book, a memoir titled This Will All Be Over Soon (2021), developed from an essay she wrote about grieving the loss of her cousin to brain cancer during the pandemic. In December, 2021, she made her theatrical debut in New York in a revival of Jane Wagner’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the one-woman show which originally starred Lily Tomlin in the 1980s, for which Tomlin won the 1986 Tony for Best Actress in a Play.
- February 8, 1986 – Oprah Winfrey becomes the first African American woman to host a nationally syndicated talk show.
- February 8, 2019 – A second woman, Meredith Watson, came forward accusing Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (Democrat) of sexually assaulting her. Through her legal team, Watson alleged she "was raped by Justin Fairfax in 2000, while they were both students at Duke University" in a "premeditated and aggressive" assault. She says former classmates have corroborated her account. Fairfax was previously accused of sexual assault by Vanessa Tyson, who says he forced her to perform oral sex at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Fairfax denied both allegations, denouncing Watson's claims as evidence of a "vicious and coordinated smear campaign." He refused to resign, and stayed in office until the end of his term. However, as a Democratic candidate for Governor of Virginia in 2021, he finished fourth in the primary, with only 3.54% of the vote.
- February 8, 2020 – The non-profit initiative #GiveHerABreak created an online portal to replace commercials during the broadcast of the 2020 Oscars with a showcase for women-directed films. Mo Said, the project’s founder, declared that there are so many “... women who create incredible films, but just don’t get the same break by this misogynistic industry. We wanted to fix that.” The idea came from frustration at the lack of visibility for women within the best director category. Last month’s nominations were criticised for yet another all-male set of nominees and what was seen as an egregious snub for Little Women’s director, Greta Gerwig. When announcing the nominations, Insecure star and creator Issa Rae quipped: “Congratulations to these men.” As of 2020, the Academy has only nominated five women filmmakers in 92 years. The lack of women in the category came after a record-breaking year for female filmmakers, who were behind 10.6% of 2019’s 100 highest-grossing films, up from 4.5% the year before, according to a study by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
- February 8, 2021 – In Radio Times magazine, Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and the presenter on BBC Two’s Inside Culture, draws a parallel between the witch trials of the past and the kind of online abuse she gets now. “Throughout many periods of history in the west there has been a real worry about what you do with women who are past their childbearing years. As I can confirm, women with long grey hair can make people anxious. In the ancient Greek and the ancient Roman world they worried that old women were sexual predators. We’ve inherited many of their anxieties and these still fuel the insults some men throw at women today. I know that well, as I have frequently been called a witch on Twitter.” Beard added, promoting a forthcoming episode of her show that examines the dark arts, “We all know what used to happen to witches, and for centuries the charge of witchcraft was used to disempower and punish what seemed to be the threat of women in society. There was a fear of female agency, a fear of women communing with a supernatural world where – perish the thought! – the patriarchy was not fully in place and, perhaps most profoundly, a fear of older women.” Beard has long spoken out against the vitriolic abuse she frequently receives when she appears on BBC One’s Question Time. When it first happened in 2013, she said it showed classic signs of playground bullying. Writing on her blog, A Don’s Life, she said: “It would be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public, contributing to political debate.” She has since named and shamed some of her online abusers, prompting at least one to take her to lunch to apologise.
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Egalitarian Foxes
Male red foxes are very attentive to their mates after
the females give birth. The males find and bring food to
their partner and newborns, entertain The babies, and
Take an equal parenting role with their OFFSPRING.