I believe that the rights of women and
girls is the unfinished business of
the 21st century.
— Hllary Clinton
“We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too,
But very human beings, human just as much as you.
It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime
When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.”
― Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People?
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 July 25 through July 31.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on August 6, 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.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- July 25, 1291 – Hawys Gadarn born, “the Hardy” Lady of Powys; Welsh noblewoman whose father had the forethought to insure she was a subject of the crown of England in his will. When her father died in 1293, her brother was the heir, but when he too died in 1309, he designated Hawys as his heir, but she was still 17, so her four uncles became her guardians. They disputed her claim on the grounds that women could not inherit under Welsh law, and sought take the land for themselves, and force Hawys into a nunnery. She went to the Parliament of Shrewsbury to petition King Edward II of England in person, as an English subject loyal to the Crown. He asked her to nominate a champion of her rights, and she named John Charleton, who was one of Edward’s knights. Charleton led a company of English knights escorting her back to Powis Castle. The knights ably defended the lady’s claim, capturing three of her uncles. Hawys and John Charleton were married shortly thereafter, and she became known for her support of monasteries, including the building of the Franciscan monastery in Shrewsbury.
- July 25, 1806 – Maria Weston Chapman born, America abolitionist and editor of the anti-slavery journal Non-Resistant and The Liberty Bell, an annual gift book featuring works donated by notable writers and used as a fundraiser for the cause; served on the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1839-1865).
- July 25, 1840 – Flora Adams Darling born, American author and organizer, instrumental in the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in 1890, but the DAR does not recognize her as one of its founders, probably because she left less than a year later to found the General Society of Daughters of the Revolution. She went on to help found several other patriotic societies, apparently leaving them because of disagreements with other founders. Darling wrote articles and short stories for magazines and newspapers, and several novels, including The Bourbon Lily.
- July 25, 1871 – Margaret Floy Washburn born, American psychologist, known for her work in animal behavior and motor theory, first woman granted a PhD in psychology in the US, second woman to serve as American Psychological Association President.
- July 25, 1873 – Anne Tracy Morgan born, American philanthropist and author; spearheaded and supplied funds for relief efforts to aid France during and after WWI and WWII; the first American woman appointed a commander of Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur (French Legion of Honor).
- July 25, 1881 – Crystal Eastman born, American lawyer, suffragist, socialist, and writer. Co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max of the radical arts and politics magazine, The Liberator. She was a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and of the American Civil Liberties Union. She managed the hard-fought but unsuccessful 1912 Wisconsin suffrage campaign, when the Wisconsin Federation of Women's Clubs and teachers (80% of the state’s teachers were women) lobbied the state legislature for a statewide referendum on woman suffrage. They had already gained the right to vote in school board elections, and they were pushing to extend the vote to all offices. Eastman then joined with Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others in founding the militant Congressional Union, which became the National Women’s Party. Though most socialists at the time opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, she endorsed it, and warned that “protective” legislation for women would be used to discriminate against women. Eastman said you could judge the importance of the E.R.A. by the intensity of the opposition to it.
- July 25, 1896 – Josephine Tey born as Elizabeth MacKintosh, Scottish author of mystery novels; also author of historical plays under the pen name Gordon Daviot, such as Richard of Bordeaux; notable for her remarkable novel The Daughter of Time, and other books in her Alan Grant detective series.
- July 25, 1898 – Kay Sage born, American Surrealist artist and poet; her paintings often contain architectural elements.
- July 25, 1900 – Zinaïda Aksentieva born, Ukrainian-Soviet astronomer, worked on mapping gravity and tidal deformation of the earth; Director of the Poltava Observatory (1951-1969).
- July 25, 1901 – Ruth Krauss born, American author, known for children’s books, including The Carrot Seed, I Can Fly, and The Happy Egg, and poems for adults, as well as her collaboration with Maurice Sendak on I’ll Be You and You Be Me.
- July 25, 1901 – British feminist, pacifist, and welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse begins addressing public meetings across Britain to raise money to improve the appalling conditions which were causing thousands of deaths in the segregated concentration camps during the second Anglo-Boer War, where the British held Boer women and children, and black African non-combatants. She was called a “traitor” by British supporters of the Second Boer War. South Africa made her an honorary citizen for her humanitarian work there. When she died in Kensington in 1926, her death went unreported in the British press, but her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women’s Memorial Monument at Bloemfontein, South Africa.
- July 25, 1912 – Ann Gregory born, African-American amateur golfer. In 1956, she competed in the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship, the first African-American woman to play in a national championship conducted by United States Golf Association. She also played in the 1959 Women’s Amateur, but was denied entry to the player’s banquet after the tournament at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. In the 1960s, she was living in Gary, Indiana, where the South Gleason Park Golf Course was designated whites-only. Gregory declared, "My tax dollars are taking care of the big course and there's no way you can bar me from it,” and played the course. Other Black golfers followed her example, ending the ban on non-white players. In 1971, Gregory was runner-up at the USGA Senior Women's Amateur, making her the first African-American to finish as runner-up in a USGA women's competition. In 1989, at age 76 and competing against a field of 50 women, she won the gold medal in the U.S. National Senior Olympics, beating her competitors by 44 strokes.
- July 25, 1918 – Jane Frank born, American painter and sculptor, also known for work in mixed media and textile art.
- July 25, 1920 – Rosalind Franklin born, British physical chemist and X-ray crystallographer; she made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structure of DNA which was foundational for the work of Watson and Crick, co-recipients of the Nobel Prize for their studies of DNA’s double helix form. She didn’t receive the recognition her independent work deserved, but she had died of cancer four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick and Watson. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
- July 25, 1923 – Maria Gripe born, Swedish author children’s and young adult books, recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Her Hugo and Josephine books from the 1960s were translated into 30 other languages, including English.
- July 25, 1925 – Jutta Zilliacus born in Finland, Swedish-language Estonian author, journalist, and politician. Member of the Finnish Parliament for the Swedish People’s Party (1975-1986) and member of the Helsinki City Council (1968-1984). Among her books are Vägskäl (Crossroads), and Gå över gränser (Across Borders).
- July 25, 1930 – Alice Parizeau born in Poland to Jewish parents who died in the Holocaust; French Canadian author, journalist, criminologist, and essayist; associated with the sovereignty movement in Quebec. She was with the Polish Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising during WWII, and was interned in the Bergen-Belsen prisoner of war camp. Following the war, she was awarded a war medal. After earning degrees in literature, law, and political science at the Sorbonne, she went to visit a classmate in Quebec, where she accepted a short contract which turned into a lifelong stay. She wrote for several Canadian publications, including La Presse, Le Devoir, La Patrie and Maclean’s. She won the Prix européen de l'Association des écrivains de langue française in 1982 for her novel Les lilas fleurissent à Varsovie (translated as The Lilacs are Blooming in Warsaw).
- July 25, 1944 – Sally Beauman born, English journalist and novelist; worked for New York magazine, and was an editor at Queen magazine and The Sunday Telegraph magazine; also worked as an investigative journalist for several leading British publications; author of eight best-selling novels, including The Visitors.
- July 25, 1954 – Sheena McDonald born, Scottish journalist and broadcaster; producer and presenter for BBC Radio Scotland (1978-1981), then worked for STV (a Scottish television channel – 1981-1986), then worked on several different programmes until she was struck by a police van responding to an emergency, and seriously injured in 1999. She was out of broadcasting for almost five years while painfully recovering; currently, she presents a news programme for the cable channel Teachers’ TV.
- July 25, 1955 – Iman born as Zara Abdulmajid, Somali fashion model, founder of an ethnic cosmetics company, and philanthropist; a Supermodel active from 1976 to 1990, she went on to start her own cosmetics firm in 1994, specializing in difficult-to-find foundation shades for women of color, and expanding into the home shopping fashion market in 2007. She is actively involved with several children’s charities, including Keep a Child Alive, Children’s Defense Fund, and Save the Children’s East African programs. She played a key part in the Enough Project’s campaign against blood diamonds, including terminating her contract with the De Beers diamond conglomerate over ethics conflicts.
- July 25, 1964 – Anne Applebaum born, American-Polish journalist and author; 2004 Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction) for Gulag: A History; 2012 National Book Award Nonfiction finalist for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, was published in 2020.
- July 25, 1965 – Illeana Douglas born, American actress, producer, director, and screenwriter; noted for writing and directing the comedy short The Perfect Woman, the documentary Everybody Just Stay Calm—Stories in Independent Filmmaking, and Boy Crazy, Girl Crazier. She produced several projects for the Sundance Channel, including Illeanarama, in which she also wrote and acted.
- July 25, 1966 – Diana Johnson born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Kingston Upon Hull North since 2005, Hull’s first woman MP; Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (2009-2010); Member of the London Assembly for the Labour Party (2003-2004); in 2014, she proposed a Bill that would require sex and relationships education, including discussions around issues such as consent, to be made a compulsory part of the National Curriculum.
- July 25, 1967 – Ruth Peetoom born, Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) politician, CDA Party Chair since 2011.
- July 25, 1969 – Annastacia Palaszczuk born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Queensland since 2015; Labor member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland since 2006; as Leader of the Opposition of Queensland (2012-2015), the first woman Premier of a state from an Opposition party; first Australian premier to have a majority of women ministers (8 out of 14); served as Minister for Disabilities (2009-2011), and for Multicultural Affairs (2009-2012).
- July 25, 1970 – Ariel Gore born, American author, editor-publisher of Hip Mama, alternative press publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood.
- July 25, 1974 – Lauren Faust born, American animator, director, producer, and screenwriter; known for creating the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
- July 25, 1974 – Nisha Ganatra born in Canada of Indian subcontinent ancestry, film director, producer, screenwriter, and actress, best known for her films Chutney Popcorn and Cosmopolitan.
- July 25, 1978 – Louise Joy Brown, first in-vitro fertilization baby, is born in England. The procedure was developed by Dr. Robert Edwards, Dr. Patrick Steptoe, and nurse-embryologist Jean Purdy. Only Edwards was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine because Steptoe died in 1988, and Purdy died in 1985, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Purdy’s contributions were ignored, in spite of Edward’s repeatedly acknowledging her importance to the project, until 2015, when a plaque was unveiled which showed the names of all three developers.
- July 25, 1984 – Svetlana Savitskaya becomes first woman to perform a spacewalk as a cosmonaut aboard Salyut 7.
- July 25, 2007 – Pratibha Patil sworn in as India’s first woman president (Indira Gandhi was India’s first woman Prime Minister).
- July 25, 2018 – Elin Ersson, a 21-year-old Swedish student activist, was on board a Turkish airline flight at Gothenburg airport when she prevented the deportation from her country of an Afghan asylum seeker by refusing to sit down until the man was removed from the flight. She livestreamed the standoff after learning that the man would be dispatched on arrival in Istanbul to another plane bound for war-torn Afghanistan. The footage went viral and got over half a million hits. Struggling to maintain her composure, Ersson said, “I don’t want a man’s life to be taken away just because you don’t want to miss your flight. I am not going to sit down until the person is off the plane.” When asked by a steward to stop filming, she said emphatically, “I am doing what I can to save a person’s life. As long as a person is standing up the pilot cannot take off. All I want to do is stop the deportation and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal and I have not committed a crime.” Replying to an irate English-speaking man who attempted tried to snatch her phone, she said: “What is more important, a life, or your time? . . . He is not safe in Afghanistan. I am trying to change my country’s rules, I don’t like them. It is not right to send people to hell.” Some passengers applauded when the asylum seeker was taken off the plane. Ersson was also escorted off. The German international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, reported that the man was still in custody. He was later deported. In Sweden, opinion has been split on the issue of giving asylum to an increasing number of asylum seekers, with the government taking a harder line on expelling them as the numbers have risen. Ersson was fined 3,000 krona ($324 USD) for failing to comply with the instructions of the flight crew.
- July 25, 2020 – The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in South Sudan passed the 2,000 mark. Social distancing rules, curfews, and the closure of non-essential business, had a drastic impact on small businesses, especially in the informal sector where women make up the majority of the work force. When businesses were allowed to re-open with social distancing measures in place, women worked to adapt their businesses and get back on their feet. For Margret Raman, a 38-year-old single mother of five, the COVID-19 pandemic and prevention measures cost over 50 per cent of her income. She supports her family by selling beans and groundnuts in Yambio, South Sudan. Before the pandemic, her business had been growing, helped since 2018 by UN Women, in partnership with Change Agency Organization (CAO), which runs livelihood and gender-based violence protection programs to help women grow their small businesses. Funded by the German government, the programme had reached 2,980 women before the pandemic. UN Women Deputy Country Representative Paulina Chiwangu said, “UN Women is currently supporting 52 all-women tailoring groups to produce masks; in this way women are not only earning income from selling face masks, but they are directly contributing to efforts preventing further spread of COVID-19.” Raman and sister small-business owners also turned to each another for support during the hard times through the Anigi Village Savings Group. Members voted for just its executive board members to continue meeting to help its members, so the smaller group could maintain social distancing. They provide short-term, low-interest loans to members. Normally, loans to members would be interest-free, but with fewer members able to put money into savings, they needed the interest to fund more loans.
- July 25, 2021 – Since May 1, when international forces began their pulling out troops, 783 civilians were killed and 1,609 injured in Afghanistan during a major offensive by the Taliban. The heavy toll so far comes largely from rural areas, according to the UN. “I implore the Taliban and Afghan leaders to take heed of the conflict’s grim and chilling trajectory and its devastating impact on civilians,” said Deborah Lyons, the UN secretary general’s special representative for Afghanistan. Improvised mines were the leading cause of casualties, responsible for more than one in three deaths and injuries. Recent fighting appears to have led to more being placed on roads and inside homes in areas the Taliban seized. Women and girls have been particularly badly hit by the violence. Casualties for both groups reached record highs over the six months of the year, a trend the report described as sickening. The most shocking single incident was an attack on a girls’ school in Kabul in which at least 85 people were killed and more than 200 injured, the majority of them schoolgirls.
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- July 26, 1745 – First record of a women’s cricket match takes place near Guildford, England. It was a match “between eleven maids of Bramley and eleven maids of Hambledon, all dressed in white,” according to The Reading Mercury. It was soon taken up by women of the upper classes as well.
- July 26, 1869 – Donaldina Cameron born, social justice advocate in San Francisco. At age 25, she became head of the Presbyterian Mission Home for Girls, and began her battle to end the illegal smuggling of Chinese girls and young women by the Tongs to be used as prostitutes or slave labor. She rescued over 3,000 Chinese women held by the traffickers, developing a network of informers to discover the brothels and opium dens where they were held, then leading police to raid them, sometimes carrying an axe and chopping down doors or panels hiding the victims herself. The traffickers called her Fahn Gwai, “white devil.” Enlisting support from church and civil groups, as well as working with lawyers and legislators, she is credited with breaking the back of the early 20th century Chinese slave trade in the city.
- July 26, 1875 – Ernesta Di Capua born, Italian Jewish botanist, taxonomist, and explorer; executed at Auschwitz in 1943 at age 68. The species Caralluma dicapuae, part of the Apocynaceae family, was named in her honor.
- July 26, 1895 – Gracie Allen born, American comedian and vaudevillian, best known as part of the comic duo Burns and Allen, with her husband George Burns, on stage, radio, film, and television. She always wore sleeves long enough to cover scars from a severe scalding accident in her childhood. Burns downplayed his own comic brilliance, crediting Allen with their success, “All I had to do was say, 'Gracie, how's your brother?' and she talked for 38 years.”
- July 26, 1900 – Sarah Kafrit born in the Russian Empire, Israeli teacher and politician; member for Mapai of the Knesset (Israeli legislature) between 1951 and 1959; a founding member in 1927 of the moshav (farmers’ collective) Kfar Yehoshua; member of the secretariat of Women’s Councils.
- July 26, 1906 – Irena Morzycka-Iłłakowicz born in Berlin, Polish 2nd Lieutenant of the National Armed forces, and an intelligence agent working with the Polish resistance movement during WWII. She lived separately from her husband under assumed names to make it more difficult for the Gestapo to find either one of them. She was fluent in seven languages: Polish, French, English, Persian, Finnish, German and Russian. Between 1941 and 1942, her section was systematically destroyed by the Nazis, and numerous other underground activists were arrested. She was arrested in 1942, undergoing harsh interrogations without revealing anything. Her husband arranged for a guard to be bribed to put her in a group of non-political prisoners being transported to the Majdanek concentration camp. A group of fighters dressed in Gestapo uniforms presented a falsified document claiming her for further interrogation in Warsaw. She moved from Lublin to Klarysek-Janówek, then returned to Warsaw to work with the Soviet intelligence network in Poland, while her husband was sent to London in 1943 as a representative of the National Armed Forces. He wanted her to come with him, but command decided she should go separately later. Nine days before she was to leave, she was summoned to a meeting, but was murdered in unknown circumstances. Her husband eventually found her body, and she was buried under an alias, as Barbara Zawisza. To prevent the Gestapo from capturing them, her husband was at the funeral disguised as a gravedigger, and her mother posed as a cemetery helper. She was posthumously decorated with the Krzyż Narodowego Czynu Zbrojnego, one of Poland’s highest honors.
- July 26, 1918 – ‘Emmy’ Noether's paper, which became known as Noether's theorem, is presented by a colleague at a meeting the Royal Society of Sciences (because she was not a member of the society), at Göttingen, Germany. Her theorem, from which conservation laws are deduced for symmetries of angular momentum, linear momentum, and energy, is regarded by many physicists as one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved, which guided the development of modern physics. Even though the importance of her paper was recognized, Noether was not appointed to a paid position, as a lecturer, until 1923. Before that, her family supported her while she worked as an untenured professor without being paid.
- July 26, 1923 – Jan Berenstain born, author and illustrator, co-author with her husband Stan of children’s book series The Berenstain Bears, and cartoons for magazines.
- July 26, 1923 – Bernice Rubens born, Welsh novelist; noted for Madame Sousatzka, and The Elected Member, which won the 1970 Booker Prize for Fiction.
- July 26, 1925 – Ana María Matute born, Spanish author and member of the Real Academia Española; honored with the prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize for lifetime achievement Spanish letters in 2010; Fiesta al noroeste (Celebration in the Northwest) won the 1952 Café Gijón Prize.
- July 26, 1939 – Jun Henmi born as Mayumi Shimizu, Japanese author and poet; known for her fiction and nonfiction works about people affected by WWII. She won the Nitta Jirō Culture Prize in 1984 for her book Otoko-tachi no Yamato (published in English as Yamato: The Last Battle).
- July 26, 1945 – Dame Helen Mirren born, notable English actress, began her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967; one of the few actors to achieve acting’s ‘Triple Crown’ – a 2007 Oscar and an Olivier Award for Best Actress as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen; and a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, for the same role in the play The Audience, which inspired the film. In 2017, Mirren narrated Cries from Syria, a documentary film about the Syrian Civil War, directed by Evgeny Afineevsky. She has publicly stated that she is an atheist, and a naturist, and is “happiest on a nude beach with people of all ages and races.”
- July 26, 1950 – Anne Rafferty born, Lady Justice Rafferty, British justice; Lady Justice of Appeal of England and Wales since 2011, member of the Privy Council; first woman Chair of the Criminal Bar Association of England and Wales; also Chancellor of the University of Sheffield since 2015; High Court Justice 2000-2011; Deputy High Court Justice (1999-2000); Recorder (1991-1999); Queen’s Counsel (1990-1991).
- July 26, 1952 – Dame Glynis Breakwell, British social psychologist and an active public policy adviser and researcher specialising in leadership, risk management and identity process. She has been a Fellow of the British Psychological Society since 1987 and an Honorary Fellow since 2006. Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2012, and is also a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Somerset.
- July 26, 1964 – Anne Provoost born in Belgium, Flemish author of novels for young adults, and essays; noted for her novels My Aunt is a Pilot Whale, which deals with sexual abuse, and Falling, which examines the allure of Neo-Nazi rhetoric, and has won Belgian, Dutch and French literary awards.
- July 26, 1964 – Sandra Bullock born, American actress, producer, and philanthropist; she was twice nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for The Blind Side and Gravity, and won the Oscar for The Blind Side. She is the founder of Fortis Films, and was an executive producer on the sitcom George Lopez (2002-2007). Fortis Films produced the movie All About Steve in 2009. Bullock is a supporter of the American Red Cross, donating $1 million USD each for least five different disasters, including the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquakes and tsunamis, the Haiti earthquake, and Hurricane Harvey in Texas. She did a public service announcement urging people to sign a petition for clean-up efforts after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Bullock made a large donation to Warren Easton High School in New Orleans, which was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina. She is also a supporter of the Texas non-profit The Kindred Life Foundation, which assists struggling teen parents and their children.
- July 26, 1969 – Tanni Grey-Thompson born, Baroness Grey-Thompson of Eaglescliff, British Life Peer in the House of Lords since 2010, and an academic. She was born with spina bifida. She became a successful wheelchair racer (1984-2007), winning many gold and silver medals in the Paralympic Games and World Championships; after a stint as a BBC television presenter, she became Chancellor of Northumbria University (2015 to present); created a Life Peer in 2010, she took her oath of office for the House of Lords in English and Welsh.
- July 26, 1970 – Joan Wasser born, aka Joan As Police Woman; American rock violinist, guitarist, singer-songwriter, and producer; she has worked with Elton John, Lou Reed, Sheryl Crow, and the Scissors Sisters.
- July 26, 1973 – Lenka Kotková born, Czech astronomer, discovered numerous main-belt asteroids, and the Mars-crossing asteroid 9671; also known for her research on variable stars.
- July 26, 1980 – Jacinda Ardern born, New Zealand Labour politician; Prime Minister of New Zealand and leader of the NZ Labour Party since 2017; Member of the New Zealand Parliament for Mount Albert since 2017, and Leader of the Labour Party since 2017; Member of Parliament for the Labour Party List (2008-2017). When Ardern took office as Prime Minister, she was 37 years old, New Zealand’s youngest PM since Edward Stafford in 1856. She is also New Zealand's first prime minister to be pregnant in office; when her daughter was born in June, 2018, she became the second head of state after Benazir Bhutto to give birth while in office. Ardern has drawn international praise for her response to the deadly terrorist attacks on two Christchurch mosques in 2019, and her leadership of New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic, rated one of the most effective responses in the world, with 1,504 cases, and only 22 deaths out of a population of 4.886 million as of July 2020.
- July 26, 2016 – Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman nominee for
President of the United States by a major political party at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
- July 26, 2017 – An investigation by USA Today reveals that the U.S. is the most dangerous developed county in which to give birth. Every year, over 50,000 American women are severely injured giving birth, and about 700 women die. An estimated 50% of these injuries and deaths can be presented if hospitals would provide better care. There is no tracking system for doctors to record childbirth issues, while doctors and hospitals alike regularly miss or ignore obvious signs of both pre-natal and post-natal complications. The negligence has resulted in a sharp increase in maternal mortality rates, up from 17 deaths in 100,000 births in 1990 to 26.4 deaths per 100,000 in 2015. The rest of the developed world saw steady or improved death rates, with many below 10 deaths per 100,000 births, according to statistics kept by the World Health Organization (WHO). The average cost of delivering a baby without complications in the U.S. is also much higher than many other countries – almost $11,000, compared to about $3,200 in Canada, or just over $2,500 in Germany or France, and the outside the U.S.
- July 26, 2018 – Ahmed Alit Dahir, attorney general of Somalia, announced the nation’s first prosecution for female genital mutilation after a 10-year-old girl bled to death following being cut the previous week. The announcement was described as a “defining moment” in a nation where 98% of all women and girls undergo FGM, the highest rate anywhere in the world. Speaking at a conference on FGM in the capital, Mogadishu, Dahir said he had sent a team of 10 investigators to interview Deeqa Dahir Nuur’s parents and the village cutter who performed the fatal operation. “We are ready to take it to court,” Dahir told an audience of officials, journalists, and religious leaders. Deputy prime minister Mahdi Mohamed Gulaid, who was also at the event co- hosted by the Global Media Campaign to End FGM and the Ifrah Foundation, said: “It is not acceptable that in the 21st century FGM is continuing in Somalia. It should not be part of our culture. It is definitely not part of the Islamic religion.” The announcement was welcomed by campaigners all over the world. FGM survivor and activist Ifrah Ahmed, 26, said the declaration “had taken everyone by surprise.” Ahmed added, “It shows just how quickly things can move when there is political will.” Most girls in Somalia undergo the most severe form of circumcision between the ages of five and nine, during which external genitalia are removed or repositioned and the vaginal opening is sewn up, leaving only a small hole through which to pass menstrual blood. The operation is often performed by untrained midwives or healers using knives, razors or broken glass.
- July 26, 2020 – In Belarus, protests in support of opposition candidates became the biggest challenge in years to Alexander Lukashenko, who has headed an authoritarian regime for 25 years. Anger had been growing over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, along with grievances over the economy and human rights. As well as jailing his main election rivals, he detained hundreds of people in a crackdown on dissent. Three women emerged as the leaders of a maverick movement to throw Lukashenko out of office. Svetlana Tikhanoveskaya became a stand-in for her husband, an opposition candidate who was growing in popularity until he was barred from running and put in jail. She was initially reluctant, but developed an effective campaign, speaking to crowds of thousands in the capital, Minsk, as well as in smaller cities and towns. “Her growth has been colossal. It needs to be said that she’s an extremely brave and courageous woman. She has taken an enormous load on herself,” said Maria Kolesnikova, who allied with Tikhanovskaya after Viktor Babariko, the candidate for whom she was campaign manager, was also barred from the elections and jailed by the government. Tikhanovskaya had to get her children out of the country for their safety after threats were made against them in an attempt to drive her out of the race. “Yes, I was scared at first,” she said in a televised speech. “I know what depths this government can go to in order to preserve its place. But I am no longer scared.” Veronica Tsepkalo became the third woman of the coalition, saying after the public announcement of their decision to unite forces, “We believe that we are not of a second sort, that we stand equal to men and believe that we can win.” This was a dig at Lukashenko, who claimed, “Our constitution is not made for a woman. Our society hasn’t matured to the point to vote for a woman.” The coalition was dubbed ‘Female Solidarity’ by the media. In August, incumbent Lukashenko was declared to have won a sixth term in office with 80% of the vote by the Central Election Committee, which is under his control. Lukashenko has won every presidential election since 1994, with all but the first being labeled by international monitors as neither free nor fair. Opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanoveskaya claimed she won a decisive first-round victory with at least 60% of the vote, and called on Lukashenko to start negotiations. Her campaign subsequently formed the Coordination Council to facilitate a transfer of power and stated that it was ready to organize "long-term protests" against the official results. All seven members of the Coordination Council Presidium were subsequently arrested or went into exile. All opposition candidates have filed appeals to the Central Election Commission calling for the results to be invalidated. The election was marred by claims of widespread electoral fraud. Numerous countries refused to accept the result of the election, as did the European Union, which imposed sanctions on Belarusian officials deemed to be responsible for "violence, repression and election fraud." The announced ‘results’ of the election sparked mass protests across Belarus. A statement by the UN Human Rights Office in September 2020 cited more than 450 documented cases of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, as well as reports of sexual abuse and rape.
- July 26, 2021 – For the first time in its 145-year history, the Bayreuth opera festival was opened by a woman conductor. Oksana Lyniv was enthusiastically applauded by the festival audience after she finished conducting Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. In the audience was the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a Wagner aficionado, whose reaction to a woman at the podium for the first time was simply, “Finally!” Lyniv, a 43-year-old Ukrainian, was previously principal conductor of Austria’s Graz Opera.
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- July 27, 1202 – Battle of Basiani: during the Georgian-Seljuk Wars, the army of Tamar, Queen regnant (1184-1213) of the Kingdom of Georgia wins a decisive victory over the army of Süleymanshah II, Sultan of Rum (Selijuqid ruler of Anatolia), north of Erzurum in what is now Turkey.
- July 27, 1768 – Charlotte Corday born, Girondin assassin of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat; Marat was a key figure in the mass execution of the Girondins, who tried to stem the Reign of Terror.
- July 27, 1841 – Linda Richards born, American nurse and educator, one of the first nurses professionally trained in the U.S.; established training programs in the U.S. and Japan, and created a system for hospital medical records.
- July 27, 1853 – Elizabeth Plankinton born, American philanthropist who inherited a fortune and a tradition of giving from her father, businessman John Plankinton; she never married because her engagement was broken when her fiancé ran off with a dancer whom he married instead; she gave $100,000 (equivalent to over $2.5 million USD today) for the building of the first YWCA hotel in Milwaukee Wisconsin, to provide affordable housing to unmarried working women.
- July 27, 1853 – Lucy Maynard Salmon born, American historian and educator; pioneered the use of artifacts from everyday life – laundry lists, advertisements, bulletin-board notices, architectural plans, ledgers, packing slips – in historical research and in the teaching of history; first woman member of the executive committee of the American Historical Association; professor and founder of the history department at Vassar College. She was active in the National College Equal Suffrage League and on the Executive Advisory Council of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, and led the suffrage movement at Vassar, despite disapproval of the trustees and the college’s male president, James Monroe Taylor (1886-1914). His goals for Vassar’s graduates were characterized by his successor, Henry Noble MacCracken, as: “to be cultured . . . not leaders but good wives and mothers, truly liberal in things intellectual but conservative in matters social.” MacCracken continued, “Throughout Taylor’s term Vassar was a college for women developed by men.” Vassar students were finally given permission to form an on-campus suffrage club in 1914.
- July 27, 1875 – Mary Olszewski Kryszak born, American educator, politician, Polish-language newspaper editor, librarian, and bookkeeper; in 1928, she became the first woman elected as a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, and served seven terms; in spite of her impressive list of accomplishments, when running for office, the national press stated that “Mrs. Kryszak ‘takes in’ hemstitching work at home when not engaged in lawmaking.”
- July 27, 1889 – Vera Karalli born, Russian ballerina, choreographer, and silent film performer.
- July 27, 1891 – Myrtle Lawrence born, sharecropper and labor organizer, worked within the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union from 1936 to 1943, honored at the 1976 Bicentennial Freedom Train Exhibition.
- July 27, 1904 – Lyudmila Rudenko born in the Russian Empire, Soviet chess player, second Women’s World Chess Champion (1950-1953), the first woman awarded a FIDE International Master title, and Woman Grandmaster (1976). During WWII, she organized a train to evacuate children from the siege of Leningrad.
- July 27, 1906 – Helen Wolff born, editor and publisher, published many acclaimed translations under the imprint “A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book” at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, founded Pantheon Books with husband in 1942.
- July 27, 1907 – Irene Fischer born in Austria, American mathematician and geodesist; she and her family fled Nazi Austria in 1939; she worked on stereoscopic projective geometry trajectories for John Rule at MIT; she then began her career (1951-1976) in the Geodesy Branch of the Army Map Service working on what became the World Geodetic System, rising through the ranks to branch chief; her contributions to geodetic science gave scientists a more accurate picture of the size and shape of the earth, and helped determine the parallax of the moon, crucial information for NASA’s Mercury and Apollo moon missions; National Academy of Engineering Member; Fellow of the International Geophysical Union, Inductee of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency Hall of Fame, and the third woman to be honored with the 1967 Distinguished Civilian Service Award, given by the U.S. Army to civilians for outstanding public service which aids accomplishment of the Army’s mission.
- July 27, 1916 – Elizabeth Hardwick born, American author and literary critic, co-founder of The New York Review of Books; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; noted for her novel The Simple Truth, and four collections of her criticism.
- July 27, 1917 – Isabelle M. Kelley born, American social worker; she worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); one of the first to understand the connection between nutrition and cognition and pushed forward the Penny Milk Program in the early 1940s, and helped launch the National School Lunch Program in 1946. In 1961, President Kennedy chose Kelley to head a task force to investigate ending hunger, and she became the primary architect of the Federal Food Stamp Program. The USDA appointed her in 1964 to be the first Director of the administrative division which oversaw the program, making her the first woman who had directed a national social program or led any Division of a federal agency. Kelley retired in 1973, but continued to advise on policies and programs of the USDA. After she died at age 80 in 1997, she was inducted into the USDA’s Hall of Heroes.
- July 27, 1927 – Gisele Halimi born in French Tunisia; Tunisian-French lawyer, Independent Socialist politician, feminist, essayist, and author; France’s Permanent Representative to UNESCO (1985-1986); Member of France’s National Assembly (1981-1984). In 1948, she became a lawyer in Tunis and practiced there for eight years before moving to Paris. Acted as a counsel for the Algerian National Liberation Front, and represented activist Djamila Boupacha in 1960, who was raped and tortured by French soldiers. Simone de Beauvoir wrote the introduction to Halimi’s book, Djamila Boupacha, about the case. She also defended Basque people accused of crimes committed during the conflict in Basque Country, and was counsel in many cases related to women's issues, such as the 1972 Bobigny abortion trial (of a 17-year-old accused of procuring an abortion after having been raped), which attracted national attention. In 1971, Halimi founded the feminist group Choisir (“To Choose”) to protect the women who had signed the Manifesto of the 343 admitting to having illegal abortions, and she herself was one of the 343. In 1972, Choisir formed itself into a reformist body, and their campaign greatly influenced the passing of the laws legalizing contraception and abortion, carried through by Minister of Health Simone Veil in 1974 and 1975. Author of over a dozen non-fiction works, including La cause des femmes (“The Cause of Women”) and La parité dans la vie politique (“Parity in Political Life”). Gisele Halimi died the day after her 93rd birthday, in July, 2020.
- July 27, 1930 – Shirley Williams born, Baroness Williams of Crosby born, British politician and scholar, one of the “Gang of Four” founders of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, served as Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords from 2001 to 2004, still active in the House of Lords and Professor Emerita at Harvard University.
- July 27, 1930 – Joy Whitby born, English radio and television producer, director and writer of innovative children’s programmes for the BBC (1956-1967), including Play School and Jackanory; produced dramas for London Weekend Television (1967-1969); founded her own company, Grasshopper Productions (1970-1975); Head of Children’s Programmes for Yorkshire Television (1975-1985); since 1985, has produced animated films based on quality picture books; first TV producer to win the Eleanor Farjeon Award for contributions to children’s literature.
- July 27, 1940 – Pina Bausch born, German dancer and choreographer, leading influence in modern dance, creator of the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
- July 27, 1948 – Betty Thomas born, American actress, director, and producer of television and motion pictures. Known for her work on the television series Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for the 1984-1985 season. She directed several episodes of TV series like Hooperman, Doogie Howser MD, and Arresting Behavior, then won a Best Director Emmy for her work on the series Dream On. Her feature film debut as a director was 1992’s Only You. Her second feature, The Brady Bunch Movie, was a domestic box office hit, grossing almost $47 million USD, one of the highest grossing movies directed by a woman up to that time. She followed that with other successes, including Dr. Dolittle (starring Eddie Murphy), 28 Days, and 2009's Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.
- July 27, 1951 – Roseanna Cunningham born, Scottish National Party politician, Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform since 2016; Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs (2011-2014); Depute (deputy) Leader of the Scottish National Party (2000-2004); Member of the Scottish Parliament for Perthshire South and Kinross-shire Perth (1999-2011).
- July 27, 1955 – Cat Bauer born, American novelist; known for Harley, Like a Person (2002), which won an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults award.
- July 27, 1960 – Emily Thornberry born, British Labour politician and barrister who specialized in human rights law (1985-2005); Member of Parliament for Islington South and Finsbury since 2005; vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Choice and Sexual Health Group; advocate for affordable housing, the environment and gender equality, and an opponent of detention of terrorist subjects without charge for 90 days, and of the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme.
- July 27, 1968 – Sabina Jeschke born in Sweden, German academic and mechanical engineer; professor at the RWTH Aachen University; member of the management board of Deutschen Bahn AG, a railway company, for digitalization and technology since 2017, and involved with building the think tank “Strong Artificial Intelligence” at the Volvo Car Corporation in Göteborg.
- July 27, 1973 – Cassandra Clare born as Judith Lewis, American author of Young Adult Fiction, best known for her series, The Mortal Instruments. Her book, City of Ashes, was awarded a 2009 ALA Teens Top Ten Title.
- July 27, 1977 – Foo Swee Chin born, Singaporean comic book artist and illustrator; she is noted for A Lost Stock of Children.
- July 27, 1979 – Marielle Franco born, Brazilian PSOL (socialist party) politician, feminist, human rights activist, and an outspoken critic of police brutality and extrajudicial killings. She ran in 2016 as a black bisexual woman and single mother from the favelas (slums), and won a seat on the city council of Rio de Janeiro (2017-2018), where she fought against gender violence, for reproductive rights, and for the rights of favela residents. Franco chaired the Women's Defense Commission, and worked with the Rio de Janeiro Lesbian Front. She and her driver were shot to death in March, 2018. Franco was 38 years old. In 2019, two former police officers were charged with her murder.
- July 27, 1980 – Jessi Combs born, American professional driver and metal fabricator; she set the women’s land speed record, 398 mph with a top speed of 440 mph, in 2013. In August 2019, she was killed when her jet-powered car crashed, likely because it hit an object which caused the front wheel assembly to collapse as it was approaching a speed of at least 522 mph.
- July 27, 2004 – freeculture.org (now called Students for a Free Culture) launched Barbie-in-a-Blender-Day to celebrate artist Tom Forsythe's win in a lawsuit filed by Barbie's maker, Mattel. In 1999, Forsythe created a series of photographs titled "Food Chain Barbie" showing nude Barbies in poses among kitchen appliances, as a critique of consumer culture and the objectification of women. The lawsuit filed by Mattel claimed copyright infringement and demanded that the artist stop selling prints of his Barbie Photos. After five years, on June 30, 2004, a federal judge finally ruled the lawsuit "frivolous" and "unreasonable" and made Mattel pay Forsythe 1.8 million dollars for legal fees and court costs. There have been a disturbing number of adult women who have spent thousands of dollars on plastic surgery in an attempt to become living Barbie dolls.
- July 27, 2006 – In Peru, president-elect Alan Garcia made good on his campaign pledge to draw talent for his cabinet from across the political spectrum by appointing five women, including Mercedes Cabanillas Bustamante as the first woman Minister of Education, and Labor Minister Susana Pinilla. He also appointed Rosario Fernández as a justice.
- July 27, 2019 – Romania's prime minister Viorica Dancila called for a referendum on harsher penalties for crimes like murder, rape, and pedophilia in the wake of the rape and killing of Alexandra Macesanu, a 15-year-old girl, which shocked the country. She also called for reducing the authorities' reaction time in similar cases. On July 25th, police took 19 hours to respond after the victim's first call saying she had been beaten and raped by a man who picked her up in his car as she was hitchhiking. They waited for a search warrant, even though it wasn’t legally required in a life-threatening emergency. She made three separate phone calls for help to the country's emergency hotline. The girl’s uncle released a transcript of one of her desperate calls in which the responder tells the schoolgirl to get off the line because she is blocking it for other emergency calls. Romania's national police chief was fired over the handling of the case. Thousands of people took part in protests, blaming Romanian officials for negligence, incompetence, and a lack of empathy. Protesters in Bucharest marched from Victoria Palace, the government headquarters, to Revolution Square, where they lit candles outside the Interior Ministry. Some taunted police officers with shouts of "Hide, your hands are stained with blood!" while holding up placards saying "I am Alexandra" and "Hello 112, I am Romania. Save me." Authorities detained the suspect in the case on suspicion of trafficking minors and rape. After his arrest, he confessed to the rape and killing, and also to abducting and murdering 18-year-old Luiza Melencu in April, 2019.
- July 27, 2020 – Among the candidates nominated to replace Brazil’s Roberto Azevdo as the director-general of the World Trade Organization were Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a development economist and former finance minister, and Kenya’s Sports, Culture, and Heritage Minister Amina Mohamed, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician who has public service experience at the national and international levels. Okonjo-Iweala, a Harvard-educated economist, with a PhD from MIT, served as Nigeria's foreign minister, two terms as Nigeria’s finance minister, and 25-years at the World Bank in Washington DC as a development economist, rising to the position of managing director. Mohamed, who is from an ethnic Somali family, was Kenya’s foreign minister (2013-2018), the first woman to hold this position and the first Muslim woman in Kenya's Cabinet. She speaks English, Russian, and Swahili, and was admitted to Kenya’s state bar in 2020. On February 5, 2021, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria secured the support of the Biden administration for director-general of the WTO, which was key to election to the post. Okonjo-Iweala assumed office on March 1, 2021. She is both the first woman, and the first African, to hold this position.
- July 27, 2021 – Matthew Rosengart, the new attorney for Britney Spears, filed a petition to remove her father, Jamie Spears, as the conservator but that document was not made public. The petition requested that accountant Jason Rubin be named in his place. Britney Spears recently told the court that she wanted her father immediately removed and charged with conservatorship abuse. Rosengart is the first attorney for Spears that she was allowed to choose herself during her fight to overturn the controversial arrangement that controlled her life for over 13 years. Spears was first placed into a conservatorship while facing apparent mental health struggles amid vicious paparazzi abuse in 2008. She was 27 years old at the time. Spears objected to the indefinite conservatorship and her father’s role in it, and tried to hire her own lawyer to advocate for her. But the courts ruled that she did not have the capacity to select an attorney, and instead gave her a court-appointed lawyer. Even as she continued with her hugely successful career, the arrangement forced her to pay the court-appointed lawyer (who never advocated for ending the conservatorship), her father and his legal team, and others involved in the court case. A judge suspended her father from the conservatorship in September 2021, and the conservatorship was finally terminated in November, 2021, a month before her 40th birthday.
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- July 28, 1347 – Margaret of Durazzo born, married at age 22 to the quarrelsome Charles III of Naples; when her husband was killed in 1386, she became regent (1386-1393) for her son, Ladislaus of Naples, who was 9 years old. Charles was assassinated on orders from Elizabeth of Bosnia, whose daughter, Queen Mary of Hungary, he had deposed, in spite of Margaret being much against toppling Queen Mary. During her regency, Margaret was able to make peace with Pope Boniface IX, who had excommunicated Charles (and Margaret too, just for being married to Charles) for plotting against the papacy.
- July 28, 1609 – Judith Leyster born, Dutch painter during the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch painting. She was one of the first women members of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, the local guild for artists. Within two years of her entry into the Guild, she had taken on three male apprentices. Ironically, her work received more recognition after she filed a lawsuit against the much better-known painter Franz Hals, who accepted a student who left her workshop without Guild permission. Hals settled by paying the fine, and keeping the student. Though her work was highly regarded during her lifetime, it was largely forgotten until 1893, when the Louvre purchased a much-admired painting, The Jolly Companions, purported for over a century to be a ‘Frans Hals’ which turned out to a Judith Leyster painting when the Louvre discovered Leyster’s distinctive monogram under the faked Hals signature.
- July 28, 1819 – Louise A. Knapp Smith Clappe born, American teacher and author, came to California in 1849; her letters to her sister giving her impressions of life in the gold-mining camps, were published as a serial in The Pioneer periodical, from January 1854 to December 1855; taught in San Francisco public schools (1854-1878).
- July 28, 1855 – Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer born, American philanthropist, art collector and patron, feminist, and advocate for women’s suffrage; a supporter of Alice Paul, and patron of the painter Edgar Degas.
- July 28, 1866 – Beatrix Potter born, beloved English author-illustrator of Peter Rabbit, and a total of 23 children’s storybooks. She was also naturalist, especially noted for her studies and watercolours of fungi, and contributions to the understanding of fungi spore germination and hybridisation. Potter used the money earned by her books to purchase Hill Top Farm in the Lake District. She was also a pioneer in land conservation, buying hundreds of acres of farmland to preserve the unique landscape of the English Lake District, which she left in her will to the National Trust. The land she preserved is now a large portion of the Lake District National Park.
- July 28, 1866 – By a vote of Congress, Vinnie Ream receives a commission from the U.S. government for a statue of Abraham Lincoln. She was only 18 at the time, making her the first and youngest woman to receive an artistic commission from the U.S. federal government.
- July 28, 1874 – Alice Duer Miller born, American author, satirist, poet, and suffragist. The New York Tribune published a series of her wonderful satirical poems lambasting the objections to women voting, which were then published in 1915 as a book called Are Women People? Her title became a catchphrase of the women’s suffrage movement. Also known for her play Come Out of the Kitchen, a comedy which had a run on Broadway, and was made into a silent film. Unfortunately, no copies of the film have survived.
- July 28, 1877 – Florence Thorne born, American labor researcher and editor. She earned her PhD from University of Chicago in 1909, taught liberal arts (1899-1912); she worked for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as researcher, writer and executive assistant to president Samuel Gompers (1912-1917), and became the principal writer and editor of the AFL’s publication, the American Federationist. She left the AFL during WWI to work on the Subcommittee on Women in Industry of the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense (1917), then transferred to assistant director of the Working Conditions Service, War Labor Administration, U.S. Department of Labor (1918). She later returned as director of research at the AFL (1933-1953); and served as a delegate to the Federal Advisory Commission for Employment Security during WWII. She was also an adviser to the International Labor Organization (ILO). She wrote Samuel Gompers, American Statesman (1957).
- July 28, 1879 – Lucy Burns born, American suffragist and women’s rights advocate, who formed the National Woman’s Party with Alice Paul; she attended Columbia University, Vassar College, and Yale before becoming an English teacher at Brooklyn’s Erasmus High School (1904-1906), then, supported by her father, she continued her language studies in Germany at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin (1906-1909), and enrolled at Oxford to study English. It was during this time that she became involved with the woman’s suffrage movement after meeting the Pankhursts. She went to work for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU – 1910-1912), and participated in organizing parades and demonstrations. She made numerous court appearances, charged with “disorderly conduct.” During one of her arrests in 1912, she met Alice Paul, also under arrest, at a London Police Station, and they decided to return to the U.S. and apply the tactics they had learned in England to the suffrage cause in America. Their partnership over the next eight years would make woman’s suffrage a national issue in the U.S., and pushed forward passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Burns would endure more time behind bars and with harsher treatment than any other American suffragist, including repeated violent forced feeding, and being chained overnight to her cell bars by her raised arms. She was one of the first people to define the term "political prisoner." By the time Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the Amendment, she was completely exhausted: “I don't want to do anything more. I think we have done all this for women, and we have sacrificed everything we possessed for them, and now let them fight for it ... I am not going to fight anymore." She retired from political life, and devoted herself to Catholic charities and raising her orphaned niece.
- July 28, 1896 – Barbara La Marr born as Reatha Watson, American silent film star and screenwriter. She appeared as an actress in 27 films between 1920 and 1926. She was originally hired as a screenplay writer for Fox Film, where she wrote several scripts which became successful movies before she was “discovered” by Douglas Fairbanks, who cast her in his 1921 film, The Nut, and then as Milady de Winter in his version of The Three Musketeers. But as La Marr‘s fame and success grew, so did her partying and drinking. She was playing the vamp off-screen as well as on. In 1924, after a series of crash diets damaged her health, her attempts at restoring her career failed, and she died of pulmonary tuberculosis and nephritis in 1926, at age 29.
- July 28, 1908 – Dame Annabelle Rankin born, Australian politician, second woman member of the Australian Senate, first woman from Queensland to sit in the Parliament, first woman appointed as Opposition Whip in the Senate, first Australian woman to have a federal portfolio (cabinet position), and first to head a foreign mission, to New Zealand.
- July 28, 1909 – Aenne Burda born, German publisher of the Burda Group, her family’s media company, which expanded into women’s magazines under her direction, including Burda Moden, which was launched in 1950, and is still being published. In 1977, she started Burda CARINA, a fashion and lifestyle magazine targeting younger women. She also started two charitable foundations, to support young academics and senior citizens.
- July 28, 1929 – Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis born, American cultural icon; First Lady (1961-1963), started White House Historical Association; widow of John F. Kennedy, then married to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis; book editor for Doubleday; advocate for historic buildings preservation.
- July 28, 1929 – Shirley Ann Grau born, American novelist and short story writer; her multi-generational novel, The Keepers of the House, won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
- July 28, 1932 – Natalie Babbit born, American author-illustrator of children’s and YA books; Tuck Everlasting and The Eyes of the Amaryllis.
- July 28, 1942 – Tonia Marketaki born, Greek film director and screenwriter; her first short film in 1967 resulted in her imprisonment by the Greek Military Junta (1964-1974); when released, she left Greece, and worked as an assistant editor in the UK, and director of educational films for farmers in Algeria. She came back to Greece in 1971, made three full-length films, Ioannis o Viaios (John the Violent), Krystallines Nyhtes (Crystal Nights), and I timi tis agapis (The Price of Love). She also directed a number of theatrical productions, and the TV series Lemonodasos. She died in 1994 at age 51.
- July 28, 1946 – Fahmida Riaz born, Pakistani Urdu-language writer, poet, human rights activist, part of the progressive writers movement, and a feminist; she has published over 15 books of fiction and poetry, most considered controversial at the time, especially her second verse collection Badan Dareeda, regarded as too shockingly erotic and sensual for a woman poet. Founder and publisher of Awaz, a liberal and politically charged Urdu magazine, for which she was arrested and Awaz shut down. She was bailed out by a fan of her work, and sought asylum in India with her children and sister, where her husband, who had also been arrested, was able to join them after his release. They were in exile in India for seven years (1980-1987), before returning to Pakistan.
- July 28, 1954 – Nnenna Feelon born, American jazz vocalist, composer, producer, and arranger. She met Ellis Marsalis at a jazz conference in 1990, who took her press kit and a tape of her original music to Columbia Records. She was signed by Columbia two years later. She has since worked with some big name talents, including Ray Charles, Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin, Diana Krall, Ramsey Lewis, George Benson, and Herbie Hancock. Feelon is also the national spokesperson for the National Association of Partners in Education, an organization with over 400,000 school and community partnership programs across the U.S., dedicated to arts education.
- July 28, 1966 – Sossina M. Haile born in Ethiopia, Ethiopian-American chemist, whose family fled to America seeking asylum during the 1974 coup in Ethiopia, after her historian father was nearly killed. She is known for developing the first solid acid fuel cells, working in the field of sustainable energy technologies. Currently a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University and an editor for the Journal of Materials Research; previously at Caltech (1996-2015). NSF National Young Investigator Award (1994-1999), Humboldt Fellowship (1992-1993), Fulbright Fellowship (1991-1992), AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship (1986-1992), 2001 J.B. Wagner Award of the High Temperature Materials Division of the Electrochemical Society, 2000 Coble Award from the American Ceramic Society, and 1997 TMS Robert Lansing Hardy Award.
- July 28, 1971 – Ludmilla Lacueva Canut born, Andorran author of fiction and nonfiction, columnist for the Catalan-language newspaper Bondia; her first published book, Los pioneros de la hoteleria andorrana, a history of the hotel industry of Andorra, won the Research Prize from the General Council of Andorra, and became a local best-seller for Saint George’s Day, when it is traditional for Andorran women to give the men in their lives a book.
- July 28, 1986 – Alexandra Chando born, American actress and director; best known for her 2011 role in the horror film The Bleeding House, and television roles on As the World Turns (2009-2010), The Lying Game (2011-2013), and Sneaky Pete (2019). In 2018, she made her directorial debut with a short film, LPM, Likes Per Minute. She has also been the operations manager for the Mammoth Film Festival since its inception in 2018.
- July 28, 2009 – Tanzania Women's Bank, under the leadership of Margaret Chaca, opens in Dar es Salaam. The idea started during the Dar es Salaam International Trade Fair in 1999. Women participants petitioned Tanzanian President H.E Benjamin Mkapa, asking that the government facilitate establishment of a women’s bank, so women could open checking and savings accounts, and apply for loans, more easily than at traditional banks, which were not geared for small accounts and microloans. It took eight years to get the bank listed as a Registered Financial Institution with the Tanzania Central Bank, and two more years before it opened its first office. It now has three more branches.
- July 28, 2018 – In China, out of over 50 million court verdicts from 2010 to 2017 available publicly, only 34 focused on sexual harassment, according to a study by the Beijing Yuanzhong Gender Development Center. Only two of the 34 cases involving sexual harassment were brought by victims suing alleged harassers, and both of those cases were dismissed for lack of evidence. In fact, the majority of the 34 cases were brought by alleged harassers themselves, claiming breach of contract after they were dismissed by employers for sexual harassment, or for defamation-related reasons after accusations were made public by victims or employers. It’s not that sexual harassment isn’t a problem in China, as nearly 40% of women in China say they have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. The absence of court cases indicates instead the difficulties women face seeking legal redress for abuse. But the #MeToo movement is having some effect. In 2018, several university professors were accused on Chinese social media of sexually harassing female students, and a woman accused prominent anti-discrimination activist Lei Chuang of sexual assault. A slew of prominent journalists, intellectuals, and activists have since been accused on social media of sexual misconduct. Some of the accused made public apologies. One journalist, Shangguan Luan, wrote “given the lack of systemic redress,” China’s #MeToo movement is more about “easing depression” than “seeking accountability.” In a telling case, a woman said on July 25 after she reported to the police that prominent TV host Zhu Jun had sexually harassed her, police forced her to withdraw the complaint, claiming that Zhu, as host of the annual Spring Festive gala at the state media, had “enormous ‘positive influence’ on the society.” Soon after the exposé, posts about the case began to be removed from Chinese social media. Chinese law banning sexual harassment of women in the workplace doesn’t clearly define what is meant by sexual harassment, or make provisions creating a specific cause of action against harassment.
- July 28, 2020 – Thelma Pepper, Canadian photographer, celebrated her 100th birthday, and learned that the Remai Modern Museum in Saskatoon was going to open a major retrospective of her work, entitled Ordinary Women, in February 2021. Pepper didn’t begin taking pictures until she was 60 years old, and looking for something to do. Since then, she has published four books of photographs. Many of her subjects are Saskatchewan farm wives.
- July 28, 2021 – In the UK, Amanda Pritchard was confirmed as the new head of National Health Service (NHS) England, the first woman to head the NHS since its creation in 1948. She had served since 2019 as chief operating officer under Simon Stevens, who is leaving the post after seven years on the job, but she has worked for the NHS for over 20 years. Pritchard said, “I have always been incredibly proud to work in the health service but never more so than over the last 18 months as nurses, doctors, therapists, paramedics, pharmacists, porters, cleaners and other staff have responded so magnificently to the Covid pandemic.” NHS England has an annual budget of £150 billion (about $1.8 billion USD) and employs 1.2 million people.
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- July 29, 1742 – Isabella Graham born in Scotland, American philanthropist and educator, leader in founding the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, the Orphan Asylum Society, and the Society for Promoting Industry among the Poor.
- July 29, 1846 – Sophie Menter born, German pianist and composer; one of Franz Liszt’s favorite students, she was a piano virtuoso noted for her electrifying playing style.
- July 29, 1862 – Belle Boyd, Confederate spy, the ‘Siren of the Shenandoah,’ was arrested after the Union officer that she had been vamping for information reported her. She aided General Stonewall Jackson the previous May by eavesdropping on the plans of Union General James Shield, and discovering the number of his troops, then riding through the night to deliver the news. After her arrest in July, she was taken to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington DC, held for a month, then released in a prisoner exchange. Boyd was arrested again in June 1863, but released after contracting typhoid fever. In 1864, she attempted to go to England, but her ship was intercepted by a Union blockade, and she was sent to Canada. There, she met a Union naval officer, and they were married in England. After his death in 1866, she became an actress on the English stage to support their daughter, but returned to the U.S. in 1869, settled in New Orleans, married and divorced, and then married again. In 1886, she began touring the country giving highly colored dramatic lectures on her life as a Civil War spy. She died in 1900 while on tour, of a heart attack in Wisconsin, at the age of 56.
- July 29, 1876 – Maria Ouspenskaya born, Russian actress and acting teacher. She was trained by Konstantin Stanislavsky, and was a founding member of the First Studio, a theatre studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. The company traveled throughout Europe, and came to New York in 1922, where Ouspenskaya decided to stay. She performed regularly on Broadway, and taught acting at the American Laboratory Theatre. With Richard Boleslawski, she co-founded the School of Dramatic Art in New York, and later opened the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dance in Los Angeles. She also appeared in Hollywood films, and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscars for her performances in Dodsworth (1936) and Love Affair (1939). She died in Los Angeles in 1949 at age 73, from a stroke and severe burns after a house fire.
- July 29, 1884 – Eunice Tietjens born, American author, poet, lecturer, WWI correspondent for the Chicago Daily News; editor at Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
- July 29, 1896 – Maria L. de Hernandez born, Latina activist, first Mexican woman radio announcer. Co-founder of Asociación Protectora de Madres in 1933, which helped expecting mothers, including providing financial aid if needed. She was a vocal opponent against injustice and inequality, speaking out for both the Mexican American and African American communities.
- July 29, 1900 – Mary V. Austin born, Australian community worker and political activist; Regional Commandant of the Red Cross Society; National Vice President of the Australian Liberal Party (1947-1976); life member of the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship.
- July 29, 1900 – Teresa Noce born, Italian labor leader, founding member of the Italian Communist Party, politician, journalist, and feminist. Noce was editor of Il Grido del Popolo (The Cry of the People), where she called for better working conditions and the abolition of the Special Tribunals used to imprison anti-Fascists. In the 1950s, she served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, where she was aligned with Unione Donne Italiane (Italian Women's Union), advocating for broad social legislation benefiting working women. Their efforts won the passage of a law in 1950 which protected the jobs of working mothers and gave five months of paid leave to working pregnant women.
- July 29, 1903 – Diana Vreeland born, fashion icon, born in Paris, started as a columnist (1936), then was fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar until 1962, when she became editor-in-chief at Vogue (1962-1971).
- July 29, 1905 – Clara Bow born, American silent film star known as “The It Girl” for her role as the spunky shopgirl in the 1927 film It, but also appeared in Wings the same year, which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Her films were consistent box office hits, and she successfully made the transition to talking pictures, but in 1931, she married, retired from acting and became a rancher in Nevada. She began to suffer from chronic insomnia and became socially withdrawn. In 1944, her husband was running for the U.S. House of Representatives, and she tried to commit suicide, writing a note that she preferred death to a public life. She complained of abdominal pains, which were written off as delusional, underwent shock treatment and a battery of psychological tests, and was labeled schizophrenic, even though she had no auditory or visual hallucinations, considered a major symptom of the disease at the time. She checked herself out, and moved into a bungalow in Culver City, with a full-time nurse to care for her. In 1965, she died at age 60 of a heart attack. Atherosclerosis was discovered in an autopsy, a narrowing of the arteries caused by plaque buildup, which in later stages can cause kidney problems, chest pains, nausea, and arrhythmias.
- July 29, 1905 – Mary Roebling born, first woman president of a major bank (1937), first woman American Stock Exchange governor (1958-1962); she helped establish the first nationally-chartered bank founded by women (1978).
- July 29, 1914 – Dovie Hudson born, African American community and civil rights activist in rural Mississippi. She and her sister Winson filed the first lawsuit to desegregate the public schools in a rural county, and helped establish the county’s first NAACP chapter in 1961.
- July 29, 1918 – Mary Lee Settle born, American author; won 1978 National Book Award for her novel Blood Tie; in 1980, she was a co-founder of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; in 1983, she won Janet Heldinger Kafka Prize for The Killing Ground, the last volume of her Beulah Quintet.
- July 29, 1932 – Nancy Landon Kassebaum born, Republican Senator from Kansas (1978-1997), the first woman to represent Kansas in the U.S. Senate, instrumental in creation of Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve; noted for co-sponsoring the bipartisan Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act with Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy; was a strong supporter of anti-apartheid measures against South Africa in 1980s, and traveled to Nicaragua as an election observer.
- July 29, 1936 – Elizabeth H. Dole born, American conservative Republican politician; first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina (2003-2009), first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of Transportation (1983-1987), also served as U.S. Secretary of Labor (1989-1990), becoming the first woman to hold two different cabinet positions, each under a different president. She was president of the American Red Cross (1991-1999).
- July 29, 1940 – Betty W. Harris born, African American chemist, noted for work on the chemistry of explosives at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; patented a spot test for detecting 1- 3-5-triamino-2-4-6-trinitrobenzene (TATB) in the field. Harris was chief of chemical technology for Solar Turbine Inc., where she managed the technical laboratories and investigated cold-end corrosion of super alloys, which was caused by sulfuric acid and soot in gas turbine engines. She also worked on hazardous waste treatment and environmental remediation; American Chemical Society member.
- July 29, 1940 – Solita Collas-Monsod born, aka “Mareng Winnie,” Filipina broadcaster, economist, academic, and writer; Director General of the National Economic Development Authority (1986-1989); Professor Emeritus at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, where she has taught since 1963; member of the UN Committee for Development Planning (UNCDP – 1987-2000).
- July 29, 1945 – Sharon Creech born, American author of children’s novels; first person to win both the American Newbery Medal, in 1996 for Walk Two Moons, and the British 2002 Carnegie Medal, for Ruby Holler; first American to win the Carnegie Medal.
- July 29, 1946 – Ximena Armas born, Chilean painter, who lives in Paris; notable for the symbolism and mysterious quality of her artwork.
- July 29, 1950 – Jenny Holzer born, American painter and author; noted as a neo-conceptual feminist artist, who works primarily on large-scale installations designed for public spaces. She won the Golden Lion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Blair Award in 1982. In 2018 she was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
- July 29, 1951 – Susan Blackmore born, British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, whose fields of research include memes, evolutionary theory, psychology, parapsychology, and consciousness; best known for her book, The Meme Machine; PhD in parapsychology – her thesis was titled “Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process,” but after years of experiments, she has become a skeptic.
- July 29, 1952 – Marie Panayotopoulos-Cassiotou born, Greek politician; Member of the European Parliament (2004-2009) with the New Democracy, part of the conservative-centrist European People’s Party coalition; was Vice Chair of the EP’s Committee on Petitions, and seated on the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, and the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality.
- July 29, 1958 – Gail Dines born in Britain, radical feminist and academic; Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Boston’s Wheelock College; an outspoken leader of the anti-pornography campaign, founding member of Stop Porn Culture, and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.
- July 29, 1963 – Julie Elliott born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Sunderland Central since 2010; vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on State Pension Inequality for Women; previously a regional organiser for the Labour Party (1993-1998) and for the National Asthma Campaign and the GMB Trade Union.
- July 29, 1970 – Adele Griffin born, American young adult author, noted for The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, Sons of Liberty and Where I Want to Be.
- July 29, 1974 – “Philadelphia Eleven” deacons (Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig) ordained as the first women Episcopal priests.
- July 29, 1978 – Bidisha, born as Bidisha Bandyopadhyay, daughter of Indian emigrants; British filmmaker, broadcaster and journalist, covering international affairs, social justice issues, arts and culture, and international human rights; contributor to The Guardian and The Huffington Post, presenter for the BBC on Woman’s Hour, The Word and other programmes; author of Beyond the Wall and other nonfiction; does outreach work in UK detention centres and prisons for the English affiliate of PEN International; launched her filmmaking career in 2017, directing the short, An Impossible Poison.
- July 29, 2016 – An airstrike on Kafar Takharim in northern Syria hit a hospital offering maternity care supported by Save the Children, killing two people and injuring several others, including a pregnant woman who lost her leg, and several babies when their incubators crashed to the floor. The hospital was the only one providing maternity services in the area, and delivered about 300 babies a month. The hospital was so badly damaged it was barely operational. The nearest working maternity unit is about 70 miles away. Sonia Khush, Save the Children’s Syria director, described the bombing as a “shameful act, whether it was done intentionally or because due care was not taken to avoid civilian areas. There is no excuse, and unfortunately this is only the latest in a series of strikes on health facilities in Syria. We condemn these attacks, which are illegal under international law, in the strongest possible terms. We need an immediate ceasefire across Syria and an end to the appalling bombing of medical facilities.”
- July 29, 2018 – A midwife training centre in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, was attacked by militants, who killed two guards and a driver, and wounded at least eight others. The attackers set off explosives and fired gunshots at the centre. One of the attackers was killed while detonating a bomb, and a second attacker was killed by Afghan security forces, who gained control after a gunfight lasting over six hours. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Islamic State extremists have carried out numerous attacks in the area, and the Taliban has also caused some incidents. Both groups opposed women working outside the home, and some individual midwives have been attacked before. Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal and child mortality rates in the world, and a number of centres have opened to train midwives in recent years.
- July 29, 2020 – The Tunisian-born French feminist MP and lawyer Gisèle Halimi, a rebel against convention and a feminist trailblazer, died one day after her 93rd birthday. She was born Zeiza Gisèle Élise Taïeb in July 1927 to a poor and conservative Jewish family in Tunisia at a time when the birth of a girl was considered bad luck. So dismayed were her parents that they hid her birth for weeks because her father was reluctant to admit he had a daughter. “At each step of my life, there were disadvantages stemming from the fact I was a girl,” she told an interviewer in 2011. Growing up with two brothers who were given preference over her gave Halimi a taste for rebellion. At age 10, she went on hunger strike for more than eight days to persuade her father to allow her to read and not follow traditional religious practices. At 16, she refused an arranged marriage. Halimi would have three sons, but she admitted in a 2011 interview she wished she’d had a daughter, “I would have liked to know if, when raising her, I would be exactly conforming to what I demanded for myself and for all women. It’s not easy being a girl today, perhaps even more so than before because she would be confronted with a world that has not disappeared; that of prejudices and violence.”
- July 29, 2021 – An independent inquiry in Malta into the murder of the anti- corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has found that the state had to bear responsibility after creating a “culture of impunity.” The 437-page report, conducted by a team of judges and released on Thursday, said the state “failed to recognise the real and immediate risks” to the investigative journalist’s life and “failed to take reasonable steps to avoid them.” Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb as she drove away from her home in October 2017. Her death was met with outrage across Europe, and embroiled Malta’s ruling Labour party in a political scandal. Prosecutors believe the businessman Yorgen Fenech, who had close ties with senior government officials, masterminded the murder. Fenech, who is awaiting trial for association to murder, denies responsibility. “The tentacles of impunity then spread to other regulatory bodies and the police, leading to a collapse in the rule of law,” said the panel’s report, which was published by the prime minister, Robert Abela. It was clear, the inquiry board said, that the assassination was either intrinsically or directly linked to Caruana Galizia’s investigative work. The former prime minister Joseph Muscat resigned in December 2019 after Fenech’s arrest. He has never been accused of any wrongdoing. Media later also revealed close links between Fenech, ministers and senior police officers.
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- July 30, 1751 – Maria Anna Mozart born, nicknamed “Nannerl,” older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, she was trained from the age of seven by their father Leopold to play the harpsichord and the fortepiano. She and her brother were taken on tour. She was a talented player, and sometimes received top billing in the early days, but her career was cut short when she reached the age of 18, the age her parents considered her marriageable, at which point she was no longer permitted to perform in public. Dominated by her father, she was forced to turn down a marriage proposal from the man she loved, and was married instead to a magistrate, already twice a widower, with five children from his previous marriages. She returned to her family’s home to give birth to her first child in 1785. Her father Leopold, for whom the boy had been named, took over the infant, raising him in the Mozart household until the elder Leopold died in 1787, and the boy was finally returned to his mother. After her husband died in 1821, she returned to Salzburg, with her two children and four of her stepchildren, to work as a music teacher. In 1825, she became blind, and died in 1829 at the age of 78. Though she and her brother had been very close in childhood, their last visit was in 1783, and she received his last letter to her in 1788, three years before he died.
- July 30, 1818 – Emily Brontë born in Yorkshire, English novelist and poet, best known for Wuthering Heights. She and her sisters Charlotte and Anne had their first book published, a volume of their poetry, using male pennames, calling it Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, to slip past the prejudice against female writers. It sold only two copies, so they switched to writing novels.
- July 30, 1852 – Emma Gillett born, American lawyer and women’s rights activist, co-founder of the Washington College of Law, the first law school founded by women.
- July 30, 1893 – Fatima Jinnah born in British India, dental surgeon, biographer, stateswoman, and one of the founders of Pakistan; she was a close advisor of her older brother Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would become the first Governor General (1947-1948) of the new nation, and was previously a leading member of the All-India Muslim League; after independence in 1947, she co-founded the Pakistan Women’s Association, which did much to help the resettlement of women migrants. But after her brother’s death in 1948, she was banned from speaking on the radio until 1951, and her radio address to the nation then was heavily censored by Liaquat Ali Khan’s administration. She wrote a biography of her brother in 1956, but it wasn’t published until 1987 because of censorship, and accusations that she had written ‘anti-nationalist material.’ Even when it was finally published, several pages were left out. She came out of political retirement in 1965, to run for president against the military dictator Ayub Khan, but the military rigged the election. When she died in 1967, rumors spread that it was not a natural death, and her family demanded an inquiry, but the government quashed any inquiry. Honored by the people for her support of civil rights, her funeral was attended by almost half a million people. She is often referred to as Māder-e Millat (Mother of the Nation).
- July 30, 1920 – Marie Tharp born, American geologist and oceanographic cartographer. In partnership with Bruce Heezen, she created the first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor. Tharp's work revealed the detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom. It also revealed the presence of a continuous rift valley along the axis of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, causing a paradigm shift in earth science that led to acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift. Tharp donated her map collection and notes to the Map and Geography Division of the Library of Congress in 1995, and was honored by the Library as one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century. Her work was exhibited during the 100th-anniversary celebration of its Geography and Map Division. In 2001, Tharp was awarded the Lamont-Doherty Heritage Award for her lifetime achievements as a pioneer of oceanography.
- July 30, 1939 – Eleanor “Ellie” Smeal born, women’s rights activist, grassroots organizer, political analyst, author, and major figure in the modern American feminist movement. Co-founder and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation (1987) and publisher of Ms. Magazine, president of National Organization for Women (1977-1982 and 1985-1987). Smeal coined the term “gender gap” in her 1984 book, How and Why Women Will Elect the Next President.
- July 30, 1940 – Pat Schroeder born, Democratic politician, U.S. Representative from Colorado (1973-1997), first woman to serve in U.S. Congress from Colorado; first woman on the House Armed Services Committee. She was a prime mover behind the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and the 1985 Military Family Act. She briefly ran for U.S. President after Gary Hart dropped out of the 1987 race, but was derailed when she teared-up during a speech, instantly branding her as “weak,” even though male candidates doing the same thing were praised for showing their feelings. After retiring from politics, she was president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (1997-2009), advocating for stronger copyright laws, and supporting the government in Eldred v. Ashcroft in opposing Google's plan to digitize books and post limited content online. But she also pushed for the publishing industry to be more socially responsible, cooperating with organizations for the blind and others with reading difficulties to help make materials more accessible to them, particularly by encouraging publishers to release books so that nonprofit groups can transfer them to electronic formats. She was also on the panel of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award, a $25,000 award which recognizes the protection of free speech as it applies to the written word. Since she and her husband retired to Florida in 2009, Schroeder has been serving on the board of the League of Women Voters of Florida. She was named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1995.
- July 30, 1942 – Pollyanna Pickering born, English wildlife artist and environmentalist; conservation partner to the government of Bhutan; she went on expeditions to study animals in their natural habitat; founder of the Pollyanna Pickering Foundation, which fundraises and campaigns for animal welfare and conservation.
- July 30, 1942 – President Franklin Roosevelt signs bill creating a women's auxiliary agency in the Navy known as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (W. A.V.E. S.).
- July 30, 1947 – Françoise Barré-Sinoussi born, French virologist and Director of Unité de Régulation des Infections Rétrovirales (The Regulation of the Retroviral Infections Division), and a Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Best known for her pioneering work identifying the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. She and Luc Montagnier jointly received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in the discovery of HIV. She has served a consultant for the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UNAIDS-HIV, and initiated collaborations with developing countries and multidisciplinary networks to pool resources and share information. In 2012, she became president of the International AIDS Society.
- July 30, 1948 – Julia Tsenova born, Bulgarian composer and pianist. Noted for symphonic and chamber music, as well as choral works. Her interest in ancient Eastern philosophies, particularly Indian philosophies, has been an influence on her compositions. She died of cancer in 2010.
- July 30, 1949 – Dame Sonia Proudman born, judge of the High Court of England and Wales in the Chancery Division (2008-2017); Deputy High Court Judge (2001-2008); became a Bencher in 1996, and was a Recorder in 2000. Proudman was called to the Bar in 1972, after being one of the first women to win an Eldon Law Scholarship to study for the English Bar, awarded to University of Oxford students who earned either a first class honours degree in the Final Honours School, or a distinction on the BCL or MJur (academic degrees in law).
- July 30, 1950 – Harriet Harman born, British solicitor and Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Camberwell and Peckham since 1982; Harman holds the current record for the longest continuously-serving woman MP in the House of Commons. She was Deputy Leader and Chair of the Labour Party (2007-2015); Acting Leader of the Opposition in 2015.
- July 30, 1956 – Anita Hill born, American lawyer and academic, professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure during the 1991 U.S. Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas when she testified that he had sexually harassed her as her supervisor at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Though initially pilloried for her testimony, public opinion began to shift in her favor as time passed. Congress passed a bill later in 1991 that gave harassment victims the right to seek federal damage awards, back pay, and reinstatement, signed into law by President George H W Bush. By 1992, harassment complaints to the EEOC were up by 50%. Private companies started training programs to deter sexual harassment. The manner in which the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee challenged and dismissed Hill's accusations of sexual harassment angered female politicians, lawyers, and feminists. According to D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Hill's treatment by the panel was a contributing factor to the large number of women elected to Congress in 1992. "Women clearly went to the polls with the notion in mind that you had to have more women in Congress," she said. In their anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, editors Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith described black feminists mobilizing "a remarkable national response to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy.”
- July 30, 1956 – Soraida Martinez born, American abstract expressionist painter and designer of Puerto Rican descent, creator of the art movement, Verdadism, which juxtaposes figurative abstract paintings with written social commentaries.
- July 30, 1960 – Jennifer C. Barnes born, American-English musicologist, university administrator, opera singer, and a leading authority on composers Gian Carlo Menotti, Thea Musgrave, and Ethel Smyth. In 1999 Barnes established a Leverhulme research partnership between Imperial College, Manchester University, and the Royal College of Music. Seeing the potential in wireless EEG biofeedback, she designed a program to analyze the role of alpha, beta and theta waves in musicians and dancers under performance stress. Subsequent findings have been integrated into the curricula of performing arts institutions worldwide.
- July 30, 1964 – Laine Randjärv born, Estonian Reform Party politician; Minister of Culture (2007-2011); Vice-President of the Riigikogu (Parliament) since 2011; Mayor of Tartu (2004-2007); Deputy Mayor (2002-2004).
- July 30, 1974 – Hilary Swank born, American actress and film producer; noted for playing Brandon Teena, a transgender man, in Boys Don't Cry, for which she won the 2000 Academy Award for Best Actress, and Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby, which earned her a second Best Actress Oscar in 2005. She also played real-life teacher Erin Gruwell in 2007’s Freedom Writers, and Alice Paul in the 2004 television movie, Iron Jawed Angels, about the suffragist struggle for the vote. She produced and starred in the films Amelia (about Amelia Earhart), Conviction, You’re Not You, and What They Had. She co-produced and hosted a two-hour television special, Fox’s Cause for Paws: An All-Star Dog Special, in 2014, which celebrated the human-dog connection and rescue dogs. In 2015, she received the Compassion Award from the ASPCA. In 2015, Swank founded a nonprofit organization, The Hilaroo Foundation, which aims to bring at-risk teenagers and rescue dogs together in the hope that the two can heal each other. She was inspired to create the foundation after rescuing a dog called Karoo in South Africa.
- July 30, 2018 – Sexual abuse of vulnerable women and girls by international aid workers is "endemic" and has been happening for years, with perpetrators easily moving around the sector undetected, according to a scathing report by the UK House of Commons International Development Committee. Alleged abuses included sexual harassment, withholding food and supplies sent as aid to extort sex, and rape. The inquiry heard "horrifying" stories of aid staff sexually exploiting the very people they were meant to be helping, including a homeless girl in Haiti who was given $1 by a worker for a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and then raped. Several top NGOs were implicated in the growing scandal, including Save the Children and Oxfam. United Nations workers have also been accused of sexual exploitation.
- July 30, 2020 – In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service faced a barrage of criticism after rape prosecutions and convictions in England and Wales fell to a record low, with police publicly censuring its charging policies and a judge paving the way for a landmark legal challenge. New figures revealed that prosecutions and convictions were down over 50% in three years, even though the number of reported rapes increased. Despite police recording more than 55,000 rapes in 2019-2020, there were just 2,102 prosecutions and 1,439 convictions. For 2016-2017 just over 41,600 rapes were recorded, there were over 5,000 prosecutions, and nearly 3,000 convictions. Questions were raised: Is the CPS refusing to take certain cases to trial because the jurors might be swayed by myths and misconceptions about what a rape victim should look and sound like, especially when alcohol or mental health problems are involved, or in the 90% of cases in which the victim and rapist were acquainted? Fewer rape cases were referred by police to the CPS last year – down 40% in three years – but Max Hill, director of public prosecutions denied the CPS was sending a message to officers not to send them challenging cases. In a joint statement, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s leads for rape, domestic abuse, and charging said the fall in convictions was “very concerning,” adding: “[W]e are hearing from our officers that it is becoming harder to achieve the standard of evidence required to charge a suspect and get a case into court.” Sarah Crew, the most senior police officer for rape in England and Wales, said officers were trying hard to meet the required standard, but the amount of information required had increased, and the process was taking longer. It led to “digital strip searches” – police allowed to request from victims masses of personal records from years before the crime was committed as part of the process of investigating a rape – causing an outcry by women’s and victims’ rights advocates – this invasion of the privacy of victims wasn’t scrapped until June 2020. Crew added, “You join the police service to keep people safe and get justice for victims, and every single one of us wants to achieve that, but there’s an awful lot to do.” Meanwhile, a high court decision not to examine whether the CPS has changed its prosecution policy and practice has been overturned by the court of appeal. The Centre for Women’s Justice, on behalf of the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) coalition, argues that the CPS has become more “risk-averse.” In 2018, the Guardian newspaper revealed that prosecutors in England and Wales had been advised in training seminars to put a “touch on the tiller” and take a proportion of “weak cases out of the system,” because such a move would result in fewer prosecutions but a higher conviction rate. The conviction rate in 2016-2017 was 57.6%, almost the lowest on record, but in 2018-2019, the conviction rate was 68.5% of those cases presented in court. The Centre for Women’s Justice director, Harriet Wistrich, said the decision to grant a judicial review of CPS rape charging policy and practice in the court of appeal was historic, “They have accepted it is arguable that the CPS did change their policy, failed to consult, and their actions ultimately led to a fall in rape prosecutions, which discriminates against women, who are the majority of victims. This may amount to systemic illegality.” Sarah Green, director of EVAW, said: “Today’s figures show starkly that we are right to say rape has been effectively decriminalized. What else can you call a one in 70 chance of prosecution? The DPP’s constant exhortation to victims that they must come forward is frankly too much to take.”
- July 30, 2021 – After the most contentious election in Samoa’s history, and three months of political turmoil and legal battles, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, daughter of her country’s first prime minister, moved into the prime minister’s office in Apia, Samoa’s capital. She is the first woman to hold the office, replacing Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, who held the office for 22 years. Mata’afa is a sa’o fa’apito (high chief) from the island of Upolu, and has been a member of parliament since 1985. Her party, Faatuatua ile Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST), won a 26 seat majority in the election. Mata’afa laid out her priorities: “We want to enable people to build their livelihoods, we want to see and ensure where they are and the current situation. I mean, we are a pretty sick country. So our health systems need to be improved. “If we talk about change, it is about where you choose to invest, through the budget process, through the policy decisions that we make. Overall, I suppose, the thing that we want to do is to make a much bigger investment in people and communities.”
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- July 31, 1811 – Jane Currie Blaikie Hoge born, American nurse, welfare worker; fundraiser for the Union war effort; Chicago Home for the Friendless founder; Chicago Sanitary Commission co-administrator during U.S. Civil War; her Civil War memoir is The Boys in Blue.
- July 31, 1816 – Lydia Moss Bradley born, businesswoman and philanthropist, managed her own fortune after the death of her husband, successful in real estate and banking, endowed the Bradley Polytechnic Institute, first woman member of a national banking board; she is the first American woman known to draw up a prenuptial agreement to protect her assets.
- July 31, 1831 – Sarah J. Thompson Garnet born, American suffragist and educator, first African American woman school principal in the New York City public schools, founder of the Equal Suffrage League in Brooklyn.
- July 31, 1833 – Amelia Stone Quinton born, American social activist, advocate for Native American rights, a founding member of the Women’s National Indian Association.
- July 31, 1858 – Marion Talbot born; when she had difficulty gaining admission to Boston University in spite of her father being the dean of its School of Medicine, she became a tenacious supporter of higher learning for women, and campaigned against efforts to restrict equal educational opportunities. She was Dean of Women at the University of Chicago (1895-1925); established the first Midwestern regional meetings of college deans in 1902, and then Midwestern regional meetings for deans of women, beginning in 1911; co-founder of what became the American Association of University Women, and served as the organization’s president (1895-1897).
- July 31, 1860 – Mary Vaux Walcott born, American painter and naturalist, known for her watercolors of wildflowers, president of the Society of Women Geographers; her illustrations were often published by the Smithsonian.
- July 31, 1879 – Margarete Bieber born, art historian and professor of art and archaeology, second female university professor in Germany (1919) before immigrating to the U.S., taught at Barnard College and Columbia University, published numerous academic texts, named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.
- July 31, 1923 – Stephanie Kwolek born, American chemist whose career at the Dupont company lasted over forty years; best known as the inventor of Kevlar, for which she was awarded the company’s Lavoisier Medal for outstanding technical achievement, the first woman employee to receive this honor; also won numerous awards for her work in polymer chemistry, including the National Medal of Technology, and the Perkin Medal, given by the Society of Chemical Industry “for innovation in applied chemistry resulting in outstanding commercial development.”
- July 31, 1924 – Geraldine Hoff Doyle born, possibly the model for WWII “We Can Do It” poster which came to symbolize Rosie the Riveters, women who became factory workers to support the war effort.
- July 31, 1929 – Lynne Reid Banks born, British author of The L-Shaped Room, The Indian in the Cupboard, Dark Quartet, and Path to the Silent Country: Charlotte Brontë's years of fame.
- July 31, 1939 – France Nuyen (sometimes spelled as Nguyen) born in France to a French mother and Southeast Asian father, was brought up by a cousin who raised Orchids. Nuyen left school at age 11, but studied art, and became an artists’ model. In 1955, while working as a seamstress, Nguyen was discovered on the beach by Philippe Halsman, a LIFE photographer. Her photograph was featured on the cover of the magazine’s October 6, 1958 issue. That same year, she was cast as Liat, Bloody Mary’s daughter, in the film version of South Pacific. She played a number of guest-starring roles on television series, and appeared in films, including A Girl Called Tamiko, Diamond Head, 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and The Joy Luck Club. Nuyen played the character Dr, Klein on the series St. Elsewhere (1986-1988). In 1986, she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and began a second career as a counselor for abused women and children, and for women in prison. She received a Woman of the Year award in 1989 for her psychology work.
- July 31, 1940 – Carol J. Clover born, American academic and author, authority on gender in films; author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
- July 31, 1944 – Sherry Lansing born, American film studio executive; she went from mathematics teacher to actress (in two films) to script reader, then head script reader, at MGM, where she worked on The China Syndrome and Kramer vs. Kramer; Lansing then moved to Columbia Pictures; became a partner with Stanley R. Jaffe in 1979 in Jaffe/Lansing Productions; in 1980, Lansing was appointed as the first woman president of 20th Century Fox; in 1992, she became chair of the Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group, but Lansing left in 2004 when Viacom, after taking over Paramount, decided to split the company into two parts.
- July 31, 1952 – Faye Kellerman born, American author of mystery novels; noted for her Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series, especially its first book, The Ritual Bath, which won the 1987 Macavity Award for Best First Novel.
- July 31, 1956 – Lynne Rae Perkins born, American author and illustrator of books for children and young adults; her novel Criss Cross won the 2006 Newberry Medal.
- July 31, 1958 – Suzanne Giraud born, French contemporary music composer and academic; recipient of the Prix Georges Enesco, and the Prix Georges Bizet; her work is often inspired by poetry, paintings, or architecture.
- July 31, 1965 – J.K. Rowling born as Joanne Rowling, British author of the best-selling book series in publishing history, the Harry Potter fantasy series; film and television producer; and philanthropist. In 1990, she was a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International, and the Harry Potter concept was born while she was stuck on a train which was delayed for four hours; during the next seven years, she persisted in writing through the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and surviving on state benefits, before the runaway success of the first Harry Potter book in 1997; the series made her the world’s first billionaire author, a status she quickly gave up, donating much of her fortune to charity, including Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, the Shannon Trust, the English PEN Charity auction, and her own charity, the Lumos Foundation, which rescues children in orphanages separated from a living parent because of poverty or discrimination, and enables them to be reunited.
- July 31, 1981 – Arnette Hubbard is installed as the first woman president of the National Bar Association.
- July 31, 1991 – U.S. Senate votes to allow women to fly combat aircraft. In 1993, the United States Armed Forces lifted the Combat Exclusion Policy, a 45-year-old practice prohibiting women from serving in combat roles, and Jeannie Marie Leavitt became the first woman fighter pilot in the USAF, and later the first woman to command a USAF combat fighter wing. The change only applied to aviation positions until 2013, when the ban was lifted from all assignments.
- July 31, 2016 – Tokyo voters elected Yuriko Koike as the first woman leader of Japan’s largest city, where the position’s title is governor rather than mayor. She won a resounding victory over 20 candidates, including former regional governor Hiroya Masuda — the chosen candidate of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling party. Koike campaigned promising to enact sweeping reforms and contain spending on preparations for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Koike is a former television journalist and Middle East expert, who was a member of Japan’s House of Representatives (1993-2016), and also served briefly as Japan's first woman defense minister in 2007. Though a conservative nationalist, she is an advocate for sustainable energy and infrastructure, and supports telecommuting and staggered work hours to reduce congestion. She has published essays on international issues — in one she called Donald Trump's presidential campaign "loutish." Koike was re-elected in 2020, winning 59.7% of the vote.
- July 31, 2018 – The percentage of women on Fortune 500 health care executive teams and boards has been nearly flat since 2015, hovering around 22 percent. Another number that hasn’t budged: Only one-third of hospital executives are women. There’s also been little change in the startup world, with women accounting for less than 12 percent of digital health CEOs and venture capital partners.
- July 31, 2020 – In Zimbabwe, novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga whose book This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize just days earlier, was arrested in Harare, the nation’s capital, by security forces in a crackdown attempting to stop widespread anti-corruption protests. She had posted one tweet protesting the arrest of journalists in Zimbabwe, followed by a tweet which said, “Friends, here is a principle. If you want your suffering to end, you have to act. Action comes from hope. This is the principle of faith and action.” One hour later, she was arrested. Harare’s bustling centre was eerily empty throughout the day, helicopters flew low over poor neighborhoods, and British journalists witnessed armed soldiers beating residents. A police spokesman declared the country was “calm and peaceful,” but Melanie Robinson, the UK’s ambassador, tweeted, “Very concerned about reports of abductions, arrests and threats targeting those exercising constitutional rights. Freedom of expression is vital even in times of Covid-19, with social distancing observed.” Tsitsi Dangarembga was later released, without being charged. In 2021, she would win the PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression, and the 2021 Peace Prize awarded by the German book publishers and sellers association.
- July 31, 2021 – The Moroccan Parliament adopted law 19.20, amending law 17-95, affecting public limited companies, to promote balanced representation of women and men in corporate governing bodies. It set mandatory quotas for women on the boards of publicly traded companies, with a target of a minimum of 30% female representation by 2024, and 40% by 2027. It was developed by a task force that UN Women helped set up, which included gender equality advocates and representatives of the ‘Club des Femmes Administrateurs' in Morocco. The measure was also supported by the World Bank.
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Sources
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Hard-Working Single Moms in Nature:
Orangutan Females Raise Their Young Longer
Than Any Mammal Besides Humans
One of the most intelligent creatures in nature, it’s no surprise orangutan mothers would form strong bonds with their young. In the wild, orangutan fathers play no role in childcare, so the mothers have to go above and beyond the call of duty. Of all mammals, orangutans are the slowest to fully develop and gain independence from their mothers.
The first two years of an orangutan's life are spent as a defenseless baby dependent on mom for food and mobility. Throughout their youth, they are extremely dependent on their mothers, often breastfeeding until eight years of age. At age 10, they finally move on and fully embrace independence, giving their mothers a much-needed break.