“… the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights
led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision making over the most personal of life decisions.”
– from dissenting opinion of Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer in Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization
.
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from August 9 through August 16.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on August 20, 2022.
_________________________
“You cannot be neutral. You must either join
with us who believe in the bright future or
be destroyed by those who would return us
to the dark past.”
– Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin,
African-American suffragist, civil rights
activist, and community practitioner
_________________________
“I was the only female in my class. I sat
on one side of the room and the guys
on the other side of the room. I guess
they didn't want to associate with me.
But I could hold my own with them,
and sometimes did better.”
– Mary G. Ross, American Cherokee engineer
and mathematician; the first Native American
woman engineer
_________________________
“Here's the thing: every office I've run
for I was the first to win. First person
of color. First woman. First woman of
color. Every time.”
– Kamala Harris, first woman to be
Vice President of the United States
_________________________
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
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
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.
_________________________________
- August 9, 1757 – Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton born, daughter of a Continental Army General from a wealthy and politically influential Dutch heritage family; she accompanied her father to a meeting of the Six Nations, and met Benjamin Franklin when he stayed at the Schuyler family home. She married Alexander Hamilton, helping with his political articles and correspondence, serving as an intermediary with his publisher, and frequently hosting and attending political and social dinner parties. After her husband’s sudden death in the 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, she was left a widow with seven children, and many debts to pay, so she sold their estate, The Grange. In 1806, she and several other women founded the Orphan Asylum Society, opening the first private orphanage in New York. She was its second vice president, then served as its directress (1821-1848). The New York Orphan Society is now Graham Windham, an agency providing services to over 4500 children and families affected by abuse and neglect in low income New York neighborhoods.
- August 9, 1762 – Mary Randolph born, American author of The Virginia Housewife, an influential domestic “how-to” book. She is the first recorded person buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- August 9, 1861 – Dorothea Klumpke born, American astronomer and astrophotographer, one of the five Klumpke sisters, who all went on to distinguished careers, two in music, one in art, and another in medicine. Dorothea began work at the Paris Observatory in 1887, measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, and studying stellar spectra; she was chosen as the observatory’s Director of the Bureau of Measurements (1895-1901), over 50 male applicants, and worked on astrophotography for the atlas of the heavens proposed by Sir David Gill in 1886; she left Paris in 1901 when she married Welsh astronomer Dr. Isaacs Roberts, and assisted in a British project to photograph 52 of the Herschel “areas of nebulosity.” Sadly, her husband died in 1904, but she inherited all his astronomical equipment and considerable fortune. Later, she returned to the Paris Observatory, working on plates and notes from her husband’s years of work; in 1929, she published “The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel’s Fields of Nebulosity.” She was awarded the Hèléne-Paul Helbronner prize in 1932 from the French Academy of Sciences for this publication.
- August 9, 1865 – Janie Porter Barrett born to a former slave; American welfare worker, reformer, and educator; founded the Locust Street Social Settlement, the first Black settlement house in the U.S. She also founded the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, a pioneer in rehabilitation of African-American female delinquents, now the Barrett Learning Center.
- August 9, 1867 – Evelina Haverfield born, Scottish nurse and woman suffrage activist; active member (1908-1915) of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant suffrage organization; during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), she set up a retirement camp for horses; founder of the Women’s Emergency Corps; during WWI, worked as a nurse in Serbia, and a fundraiser for Serbian relief (1915-1916), then returned after the war with her companion Vera Holme to set up an orphanage in Bajina Bašta in western Serbia.
- August 9, 1878 – Eileen Gray born in Ireland, architect and furniture designer based in Paris; a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture; noted for her design of E-1027, a holiday home near Monaco, and Tempe à Pailla (‘Time and Hay’), a smaller home in Menton, also on the Côte d’Azur; during WWII, while she was interned as a foreign national, the Nazis looted the houses she had designed, which were damaged by bombing, and E-1027 was used for target practice by German soldiers.
- August 9, 1883 – Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin born, African American suffragist, civil rights activist, and community practitioner who was a public speaker, fundraiser, and organizer for the National Association of Colored Women (NACW – she rose to become NACW national board chair); the National Council of Negro Women; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other leading civil rights organizations of the Progressive Era. Beginning in 1912, she became a leader in women’s clubs in the Pittsburgh area, becoming a close friend and colleague of Mary McLeod Bethune. Her leadership and oratorical ability earned her the position of president of the Lucy Stone League, a post she held until 1955. The league was a women’s rights organization which advocated for the right of women to keep their maiden names, and use them legally. After passage of the 19th Amendment, she focused her considerable talents on civic issues and civil rights. She served as Chair of the Allegheny County Negro Women's Republican League, vice-Chair of the Negro Voters League of Pennsylvania and vice-Chair of the Colored Voters Division of the Republican National Committee. In Pittsburgh, she established the first Red Cross chapter among black women and organized local chapters of both the Urban League and NAACP. She also became stockholder and vice-president of the Pittsburgh Courier, which she used to raise funds for social justice causes and events. Her work as writer, editor, and executive helped the paper became the top African-American-run circulating paper during the 1950s. In 1924, she was the only woman among the black leaders who met with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House to discuss racial equality. In 1930, she was recruited to be the first regional Field Secretary for the NAACP, and organized their 1931 national convention in Pittsburg. By 1935, she was promoted from regional to National Field Secretary. Adams Lampkin lobbied in Washington for a federal anti-lynching bill, and is also credited with recruiting a young Baltimore attorney named Thurgood Marshall to join the NAACP's Legal Defense Committee in 1938. She resigned as National Field Secretary in 1947, but continued to serve on the NAACP executive board. She suffered a stroke while at a NAACP membership drive in Camden, New Jersey, and died at age 81 in March 1965.
- August 9, 1899 – P.L. Travers born as Pamela Travers in Australia, English author of the Mary Poppins books.
- August 9, 1908 – Mary G. Ross born, American Cherokee engineer and mathematician with a fascination for astronomy, the first Native American woman engineer; hired in 1942 by Lockheed as a mathematician, she worked with the engineering staff on the P-38 Lightning fighter plane, the first aircraft to exceed 400 mph; after the war, Lockheed sent her to UCLA for professional certification in engineering, where she studied aeronautics, missiles and celestial mechanics – she was one of the few women kept on after the war. Most were laid off so their jobs could go to the men returning home from military service. In 1952, she joined Lockheed’s Advanced Development Program at the then-secret ‘Skunk Works’ working on preliminary design concepts for manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights and satellites, interplanetary space travel, the RM-81 Agena rocket project. She was a co-author of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Volume III, about space travel to Mars and Venus. By 1958, she was ranked as an advanced systems engineer. Ross worked on the U.S. ballistic missile system, and overcoming the problems with launching them from submarines, and the Polaris reentry vehicle; Member of the Society of Women Engineers and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society; after she retired in 1973, she actively recruited Native Americans and women for engineering careers.
- August 9, 1914 – Tove Jansson born, Finnish author who often wrote in Swedish; painter, illustrator, and comic strip artist; noted for The Moomin series for children; she won the 1966 Hans Christian Andersen Medal.
- August 9, 1915 – Mareta West born, American geologist, the first woman geologist hired by the U.S. Geological Survey, in Arizona; then she became the first woman astrogeologist; the only woman on the Geology Experiment Team for Apollo 11. She chose the site for the first manned lunar landing.
- August 9, 1919 – Leona Woods Marshall Libby born, physicist, only woman on the team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor; also worked on the Manhattan Project; professor at New York University and UCLA.
- August 9, 1928 – Camilla Wicks born, American violinist, one of the first women to establish an international career as a violinist.
- August 9, 1931 – Paula Kent Meeham born, American business executive and co-founder of the Redken hair products company; philanthropist who supported Childhelp, a non-profit dedicated to the prevention of child abuse; donated $5 million USD to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and was a large donor to the 9/11 Memorial Garden in Beverly Hills CA.
- August 9, 1940 – Linda Keen born, American mathematician; since 1974, mathematics professor at Lehman College and at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York; noted for work on Riemann surfaces, hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian and Fuchsian groups, and complex analysis; president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1985-1986); a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2012; served on the AMS Board of Trustees (1999-2009).
- August 9, 1944 – Patricia McKissack born, prolific African American children’s and historical fiction writer, many co-authored with her husband Frederick; won three Coretta Scott King Awards for A Long Hard Journey: The Story of the Pullman Porter, Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, and Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters; she was a board member of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance.
- August 9, 1945 – Posy Simmonds born, British newspaper cartoonist and children’s book author-illustrator; worked for The Guardian newspaper, satirizing the English middle classes.
- August 9, 1952 – Prateep Ungsongtham Hata born in a Bangkok slum, Thai activist and politician; noted for work with slum dwellers, and for opening a school in her home for children too poor to pay regular school fees. A newspaper story about her school led to donations, and university students volunteering as teachers. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration gave the school official recognition in 1976, and she was the recipient in 1978 of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service. In 2000, she was elected to the Thai Senate, representing Bangkok. In 2004, she received The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child from Queen Silvia of Sweden. After the coup d’état in Thailand 2006, she was a supporter of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (“Red Shirts”). During the protests of 2010, she belonged to the more moderate wing of the movement and was concerned to see the militant tendencies within the group. The political polarisation in Thailand led to a decline of donations for her Duang Prateep Foundation from within the country, as some regular donors who were affiliated with the opposite political camp stopped their payments.
- August 9, 1964 – Hoda Kotb born, Egyptian American television journalist and author; one of the co-anchors on Today, the NBC News morning show since 2008, she replaced Matt Lauer after he was dismissed; Dateline NBC correspondent since 1998; she has written or co-authored several books, including her 2010 best-selling autobiography, Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee.
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August 9, 1966 – Linn Ullman born, Norwegian author, journalist, and columnist for Norway’s leading morning newspaper; noted for her novels, Before You Sleep and Grace.
- August 9, 1979 – Lisa Nandy born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Wigan since 2010; senior policy adviser on young refugees to The Children’s Society from 2005; researcher for Centrepoint, a homeless charity (2003-2005).
- August 9, 1982 – Yekaterina Samutsevich born, Russian political activist and musician, member of the anti-Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot; convicted in 2012 of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for an appearance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. An international campaign was launched by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and Amnesty International which named her as a prisoner of conscience; on appeal, her sentence was suspended after her lawyer argued that she had been stopped by cathedral guards before she could get her guitar out of its case.
- August 9, 1990 – Sarah McBride born, American transgender rights activist and author; currently the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign; major influence in passage of legislation in Delaware banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity; became the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention when she spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention; published her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality, in 2018.
- August 9, 1995 – Roberta Cooper Ramo becomes first woman president of the American Bar Association.
- August 9, 1995 – In South Africa, National Women’s Day becomes a public holiday to celebrate the 1956 Women’s March on the Union Buildings of Pretoria. Over 2,000 women of all races protested against the Urban Areas Act of 1950 amendments. This law required all South Africans defined as “black” to carry an internal passport that served to maintain segregation, control urbanization, and manage migrant labor during the apartheid. The protest was led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams. They left 14,000 petitions with 100,000 signatures at the office doors of the prime minister, and held a 30 minute silent vigil. After the vigil, they sang the song “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo” which translates to “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock.”
- August 9, 2016 – The longest hunger strike in history, by Indian activist Irom Sharmila, ends after 16 years of protesting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The act gives Indian soldiers sweeping powers to make arrests without warrants and even to shoot to kill in certain situations. Sharmile announced her fast after 10 civilians were killed by soldiers in Manipur. She was arrested, and has been held since in judicial custody under a law that makes attempting suicide a crime, being force-fed through a tube in her nose for over a decade. She said that she was ending her fast because it had not worked, and she was going to enter politics instead, standing in opposition to the government in the elections.
- August 9, 2019 – Carolyn Tuft survived the 2007 mass shooting at the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City, but her 15-year-old daughter Kirsten was killed. Now Tuft has lead poisoning from 300 shotgun pellets still in her body, leaving her with debilitating headaches, nausea, and other serious health problems. Unable to work, she lost her home and her business. She responded to the August 2019 mass shootings in El Paso TX, which killed 23 and injured 23 others, and in Dayton OH, where 9 died and 17 were wounded: “I feel for them because I know that their journey ahead is a rough, rough journey.”
- August 9, 2020 – In the UK, Dawn Butler, a Labour MP, accused police in the London area of being institutionally racist after she and a friend were stopped while driving to Sunday brunch. Butler, a strong critic of police stop-and-search tactics, said the car was being driven by her male friend, who like Butler is black, when two police cars pulled it over in Hackney, East London. After taking the BMW’s keys and checking the registration, the officers admitted there had been a mistake and apologised, Butler told the Guardian. The Metropolitan police later said in a statement that an officer had initially entered the registration number wrongly into a computer system, and mistakenly thought the car was registered in North Yorkshire, and that neither the MP nor her friend were searched. (Why believing the car was registered in North Yorkshire should be grounds for stopping the vehicle was not explained, but the Black population of North Yorkshire is less than 3% of its total population.) It was the third time Butler was stopped by police while serving as a member of Parliament, she said, while her friend had been stopped regularly. One of the police officers asked Butler where she lived and was going, and said the pair had been stopped because “there’s people who have been coming into the area,” without explaining what this meant, Butler said. “I had no intention of speaking about this until the officers became very obnoxious,” said Butler, who made a video recording of the incident on her phone. “I just felt that if I don’t use my platform to talk about this, I’m doing a disservice to everyone who gets wrongly stopped and searched, and all the black people who are constantly unjustly profiled.” Black and non-white people are often stopped and searched, and there are concerns this has been exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdown. It emerged last month that young black men were stopped and searched by police more than 20,000 times in London during the lockdown, the equivalent of more than a quarter of all black 15- to 24-year-olds in the capital. Across England as a whole there were four stop and searches for every 1,000 white people and 38 for every 1,000 black people in 2018-2019.
- August 9, 2021 – A year after the massive protests in Belarus challenging the nation’s authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko over election fraud, opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya recalls from her exile in Vilnius, Lithuania: “People were in a state of euphoria, We also thought: look how many of us there are, there’s no chance the regime can remain in power. Probably we weren’t ready for this level of cruelty.” In the year since, 35,000 Belarusians were jailed, hundreds were tortured, and thousands more forced by Lukashenko’s ruthless crackdown to flee the county. Over 600 political prisoners are now under house arrest, and critics in exile are hounded, including an attempt in July 2021 to force Krystina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian sprinter at the Tokyo Olympics, unto a plane back to Belarus for calling her coaches “negligent.” She was given asylum at the Polish embassy. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has focused on rallying international support for the opposition and for tougher sanction against Lukashenko. Recently, she met with Joe Biden in Washington DC, and with Boris Johnson in London. She entered politics only after her husband Sergei was imprisoned for trying to run against Lukashenko in the 2020 election. She took his place as an opposition presidential candidate, speaking at rallies to thousands of supporters. As a statesperson-in-exile, she says, “I think that people have put too much responsibility on me. People are forgetting that a year ago I was just a mother, not at all involved in politics. I have had to study a lot and I’m trying to do what I can, where I am … But the responsibility isn’t just on me, it’s on all Belarusians.”
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- August 10, 1449 – Bona of Savoy born; she became Duchess consort of Milan when she became the second wife of Galeazzo Sforza. When her husband was assassinated, she became regent during the minority of her son Gian Galeazzo Sforza from 1476 to 1479, when her brother-in-law, Ludivico “Il Moro” Sforza, wrested power away from her, and then seized Gian and imprisoned him, becoming the de facto ruler of Milan. Bona was forced into exile. She died at age 54 in the Piedmont region of northern Italy in 1503.
- August 10, 1858 – Anna Haywood Cooper born into slavery in North Carolina, American Black liberation activist, scholar, author, educator, and lecturer. In 1868, at age 9, she received a scholarship to the new Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, founded by the Episcopal diocese in Raleigh to train teachers to educate former slaves. She distinguished herself as a bright and ambitious student who did well in all subjects. In spite of a two-track system, which relegated females to lower level courses, Cooper fought for and earned her right to take the more demanding courses designed for the men. She tutored younger children to help pay her expenses, then stayed on as an instructor after completing her studies. She taught classics, rhetoric, history, higher English, and music. She married George Cooper, a fellow student, but he died only two years later. She went to Oberlin College in Ohio, where Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs Hunt were classmates, earning her BA in 1884. She taught at Wilberforce College and St. Augustine’s, then returned to Oberlin to earn an MA in Mathematics in 1888. By 1892, she was living in Washington DC, and was a member of the Colored Women’s League, a coalition of black women’s clubs and service organizations. In 1900, she went to London, to participate in the First Pan-African Conference, then went on to Paris for the 1900 World Exposition, and continued her travels in Germany and Italy. In 1901, she was the principal of M Street High School. Her book, A Voice from the South: by a Woman of the South, published in 1892, is one of the first Black feminist books. It brought to the attention of the public, and she became a popular lecturer. In 1924, she was one of the first African American women to earn a PhD, a prestigious one from the Sorbonne in Paris. After retiring from M Street School, she became president of Frelinghuysen University (a college for working black adults who were part-time students, which existed between 1906 and the 1950s.) She retired again in 1954, and died in 1964 at the age of 105.
- August 10, 1894 – Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca born in Latvia, American labor leader; she arrived in the U.S. at age 6, and became a garment worker at 13. She worked to convince men that unionizing women, a majority of the industry, benefited all workers. In 1914, Bellanca was one of only 5 women, out of 175 delegates, to attend the founding convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, where she promoted the need for women organizers. The ACWA clashed with the United Garment Workers, who distrusted their more progressive socialist ideology, and were unwilling to promote women to leadership positions. She was the first full-time woman organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), became Joint Board Secretary (1918 – ?), and then the first woman Vice President (1934-1946) of a national labor union. In the 1930s, Bellanca helped to found the American Labor Party, ran for Congress from Brooklyn, and organized labor and political support for federal housing, national health care, progressive labor laws, and civil rights legislation. She also served on the New York City Mayor’s Commission in Unity, and the Maternal and Child Welfare Committee under U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. She died at age 52 in 1946.
- August 10, 1908 – Rica Erickson born, Australian naturalist, botanical artist, historian, and author; noted for Orchids of the West, and Triggerplants, as well as her work as editor of Flowers and Plants of Western Australia. She was a member of the Royal Western Australia Historical Society; made a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of her work as an author and illustrator in 1987. The Rica Erickson Nature Preserve was founded in her honor, and officially opened in 1996.
- August 10, 1914 – Margaret Morgan Lawrence born, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; first black woman physician certified by the American Board of Pediatrics; Chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Service for Infants and Children at Harlem Hospital for 21 years, as well as associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, retiring in 1984; noted for her research on development of strength in black families; author of The Mental Health Team in Schools, and Young Inner City Families; from 1932 to 1936, she was on a scholarship from the National Council of the Episcopal Church. The only black undergraduate at Cornell University, she was denied a place in the segregated dormitory. At first, she supported herself by working as a maid for a white family, living in the attic, but later worked as a laboratory assistant. In spite of academic excellence, she was refused admittance to Cornell Medical School because of her race, but became the third African American admitted to Columbia Medical School (1936-1940). Then she was rejected from a residency at New York Babies Hospital because of race, and rejected by Grasslands Hospital because she was a married woman. Lawrence completed a two-year pediatric residency at Harlem Hospital (1940-1942). She got her master’s in science at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, where one of her teachers was Dr. Benjamin Spock; in 1948, she was the first African American to join the New York Psychiatric Institute, and the first African American psychoanalysis trainer at Columbia’s Psychoanalytic Center; she also earned certification as a pediatric psychiatrist (1951).
- August 10, 1923 – Dame Gillian Brown born, British diplomat; second woman to become a British ambassador. She joined the Foreign Office in 1944, and served in Budapest, Washington DC, and in Paris, where she was head of the Marine and Transport Department (1967-1970). She was the UK’s Ambassador to Norway (1981-1983), and then retired. From 1988 to 1998 she was chair of the Anglo-Norse Society in London. The society now annually awards the Dame Gilliam Brown Postgraduate Scholarship in her memory. Brown died at age 75 in April 1999.
- August 10, 1931 – Dolores Alexander born, lesbian, feminist, writer, and reporter; in 1960, she was not hired as a copy “girl” at the New York Times after working there as an intern because it would “cause a revolution in the newsroom.” She moved to the Newark Evening News, working up from reporter to copy editor to bureau chief (1961-1964), then worked for Newsday in various capacities (1964-1967). Alexander became chair of a committee of the National Task Force on Image of Women in Mass Media for the newly-formed National Organization for Women (NOW), and was NOW’s first Executive Director (1969- 1970), but resigned in protest of some negative attitudes exhibited towards lesbians during NOW’s early inception. She and Jill Ward borrowed money from friends to renovate a run-down luncheonette in Greenwich Village NY, which opened in 1972 as Mother Courage, the first feminist restaurant in the U.S. Both women and men were served, but wine was poured for women to taste rather than their male guests, and checks were placed within equal distance of diners. It became a popular place for women dining solo, assured of good service and no hassling by men. Alexander lectured on women’s rights, worked with the New Feminist Talent Collective, formed by Jacqueline Ceballos to provide speakers about the women’s movement; she also pushed for integration of want ads, beginning with the New York Times. Alexander died at age 76 in 2008.
- August 10, 1933 – Elizabeth Butler-Sloss born, British judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss; President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice (1999-2005); first woman to serve as Lord Justice of Appeal (1988-1999); Family Division High Court Judge (1979-1988).
- August 10, 1941 – Susan Dorothea White born, Australian painter, sculptor and how-to author of Draw Like Da Vinci.
- August 10, 1956 – Perween Warsi born in India; moved to the UK in 1975; she began her business of making ethnic finger foods in her home kitchen, and won her first major contract in 1986. In 1987, her company was acquired by Hughes Food Group. Warsi was the CBE founder and Chief Executive of S & A Foods until 2015, when the loss of their largest contract forced the company into administration (similar to bankruptcy in the U.S.). Since 2016, she has been a consultant, through her company Succeda, to owner-managed businesses in the food industry.
- August 10, 1958 – Rosie Winterton born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for Doncaster Central since 1997; Parliamentary Undersecretary of State (2001-2003) Minister of State for: Health (2003-2006), Transport (2007-2008), Work and Pensions (2008-2009) and Local Government (2009-2010); appointed to Privy Council in 2006.
- August 10, 1962 – Suzanne Collins born, American television writer and science fiction/fantasy Young Adult novelist; known for her best-selling Hunger Games trilogy; began her TV career writing for several Nickelodeon children’s television series, becoming head writer for Clifford’s Puppy Days; her first novel was Gregor the Overlander, which began The Underland Chronicles. The Hunger Games won the 2008 CYBIL Award for Fantasy and Science Fiction.
- August 10, 1963 – Phoolan Devi born to a poor family in rural India as Phoolan Mallah; notable as a Dacoit (bandit) who became a Member of Parliament. Sold off in marriage by her family to a much older man at the age of 11, she was abused physically and sexually. After multiple attempts, while still a teenager she finally managed to run away, becoming the only woman in a gang of bandits. She became lovers with one member of the gang, who took over after killing the gang’s leader, but this split the gang into two factions, and he was killed by the rival faction. The rivals took her to their village and held her prisoner, repeatedly gang raping her over several weeks. She escaped, found the remaining members of her faction, took another lover from among them, and a few months later, they descended upon the rival’s village and killed as many as 22 men, most of whom had raped her. The massacre was portrayed in some of the press as righteous, and she was dubbed Phoolan Devi (a respectful title), but also called the Bandit Queen. She evaded capture for two years before she and the few remaining gang members surrendered to police in 1983. She was charged with 48 crimes, including multiple murders, and spent 11 years in jail, as the charges were tried in court. In 1994, the state government summarily withdrew all charges against her, and she was released. She ran for parliament and was twice elected (1996-2001). In 2001, she was shot to death by relatives of the men she and her gang massacred.
- August 10, 1966 – Charlotte “Charlie” Dimmock born, English gardening expert and television presenter, known for Ground Force, a BBC garden makeover programme (1997-2005), Charlie’s Garden Army (1999-?) and as a commentator for the Chelsea Flower Show.
- August 10, 1974 – Haifaa al-Mansour born, the first and best-known Saudi Arabian woman filmmaker; after making three short films, she directed the documentary Women Without Shadows, which received the Golden Dagger for Best Documentary at the Muscat Film Festival in Oman. She wrote and directed her first feature film, Wadjda, the first full-length feature made entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first directed by a woman. It made its world premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. It was also the official Saudi Arabian entry for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film. Her focus on women’s issues brought her criticism and hate mail, as well as praise. In 2015, she was selected as a jurist for the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of the Cannes Film Festival. Mary Shelley, her romantic drama about Shelley’s early life, premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
- August 10, 1974 – Rachel Simmons born, American research scholar at New York’s Hewitt School; author of the 2002 book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and the 2009 book, The Curse of the Good Girl.
- August 10, 1984 – Cyrille Aimée born, French jazz singer, daughter of a French father and a mother from the Dominican Republic. She won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Competition in 2012. She now makes her home in New Orleans, Louisiana.
- August 10, 1993 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman on the Supreme Court.
- August 10, 2019 – The Royal Bank of Scotland names Allison Rose as its new CEO, effective November 2019, following Ross McEwan. Allison Rose, a 25-year veteran at RBS, was McEwan’s deputy chief at NatWest Holdings. She is the first woman to head a major bank in the UK. RBS is currently partly state-owned, but the government is expected to sell off its final stake in the bank by 2024. RBS made Katie Murray its finance chief in January. None of banks which are RBS’s main rivals, including Barclay’s, Lloyd Banking Group, and HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), has ever appointed a woman to any of the top three boardroom positions in the male-dominated banking industry.
- August 10, 2020 – Steve Easterbrook, British chief executive of McDonald’s (2015 -2019), was sued by McDonald’s in an attempt to recover tens of millions in compensation and severance payments after new allegations of sexual misconduct emerged against him. Easterbook was fired in November 2019 over a sexual relationship with a staff member, but McDonald’s listed his termination as “without cause,” signaling that the Chicago-based company considered Easterbrook’s transgressions insufficient to prevent him from receiving exit payments. Easterbrook apologized and stepped away with stock awards worth more than $37 million USD, as well as about $675,000 in severance pay. McDonald’s lawsuit alleges that he lied, concealed evidence, and committed fraud, based on new evidence from an anonymous tipster, consisting of dozens of nude, partially nude, and sexually explicit photographs and videos of women employees that Easterbrook had sent as attachments to messages from his company email to his personal email account in late 2018 and early 2019. During the 2020 investigation, Easterbrook allegedly assured the company that he had an intimate relationship with only one employee. “The company’s complaint alleges that Mr. Easterbrook breached his fiduciary duties as an officer and director of the company and committed fraud in the inducement,” the company told investors in its filing, and that it is seeking compensatory damages “for all the amounts paid to Mr. Easterbrook under the separation agreement and other costs and expenses incurred by the company by virtue of his misconduct.”
- August 10, 2021 – A news journalist, who could not identify herself because she is hiding from the Taliban in Afghanistan, got her story out to the Guardian newspaper. “Two days ago I had to flee my home and life in the north of Afghanistan after the Taliban took my city. I am still on the run and there is no safe place for me to go ... I can’t write under my own name or say where I am from or where I am ... In the past days my whole province has fallen to the Taliban. The only places that the government still controls are the airport and a few police district offices. I’m not safe because I’m a 22-year-old woman and I know that the Taliban are forcing families to give their daughters as wives for their fighters. I’m also not safe because I’m a news journalist and I know the Taliban will come looking for me and all of my colleagues.” She fled with her uncle, but when they got to his village it was under Taliban control and they were told if the Taliban found out she was being hidden in the village, “they’d kill everyone.” She walked for hours to reach the home of a distant relative in a remote rural area with no electricity or running water. There is no route out of there that is not blocked by the Taliban. “Right now, everything is tense. All I can do is keep running and hope that a route out of the province opens up soon. Please pray for me.”
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- August 11, 1384 – Yolande of Aragon born, titular queen regnant of Aragon, denied rule because she was a woman, and forced to marry Louis II of Anjou over her objections; she later supported the claim to the French throne of Charles the Dauphin, and helped finance Jeanne d’ Arc’s army, tipping the balance in favor of the French during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France.
- August 11, 1862 – Carrie Jacobs Bond born, American singer-songwriter of popular music; “I Love You Truly” and “A Perfect Day.”
- August 11, 1897 – Enid Blyton born, prolific English children’s author and poet; The Enchanted Wood, The Yellow Fairy Book, and many, many others. Some of her books have been controversial, because of content considered xenophobic or racist.
- August 11, 1897 – Louise Bogan born, American poet, U.S. Consultant in Poetry (re-named Poet Laureate in 1986) to the Library of Congress (1945-1946), poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine (1931-1970).
- August 11, 1909 – Marie-Madeleine Fourcade born in Marseille, but grew up in Shanghai, where her father was with the French Maritime service. She attended convent schools. She married young, but became estranged from her husband, a career French officer. In 1936, she began working with a former French military intelligence officer, Major Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, on his magazine L’ordre national, and after the German invasion, he recruited her for his French Resistance network “Alliance.” In 1941, Loustaunau-Lacau was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. He chose Fourcade to lead “Alliance.” One of her agents obtained a drawing of a German rocket and testing station which revealed the V2 rocket program to the Allies. When the Nazis took over Vichy France, she went on the run, eventually making her way to England in 1943. She worked with British intelligence at MI6 until 1944, when she returned to France. Fourcade took care of 3,000 resistance agents and survivors, as well as social works and the publication of Mémorial de l'Alliance, dedicated to the resistance group's 429 dead. Despite her high profile position in the French resistance, as leader of the longest-running spy network, Charles de Gaulle did not include her among the 1,038 people he designated resistance heroes (which included only 6 women). She was not given the Order of the Liberation, though her estranged husband was. She chaired the Committee of Resistance Action from 1962 until shortly before her death. She died at age 80 in 1989. Her funeral at the Église Saint-Louis des Invalides, known as the “Soldiers’ Church,” was the first funeral for a woman held there.
- August 11, 1912 – Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs born, German astronomer; assistant astronomer at the Sonneberg Observatory (1945-1954); noted for her observations of variable stars.
- August 11, 1919 – Ginette Neveu born, French classical violinist, child prodigy, won the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition at the age of 16; she achieved international fame, but died in a plane crash at age 30.
- August 11, 1929 – Cora de Man-Canne Meyer born, Dutch mezzo-soprano who began her career at the Nederlandse Opera in 1950, then was a member of the ensemble of the Opernhaus Zurich (1960-1962). She was a notable Carmen in Bizet’s opera, and later became a vocal coach. She died at age 91 in August, 2020.
- August 11, 1937 – Allegra Kent born as Iris Cohen, American ballet dancer, children’s book author, and columnist. After graduating from the School of American Ballet, she joined the New York City Ballet in 1953 at age 15, and was promoted to principal in 1957. George Balanchine created many roles in his ballets for her, including Seven Deadly Sins, Ivesiana, and Bugaku. She retired in 1981, and became a ballet teacher. In 1997, her autobiography, Once a Dancer, was published. In 2012, her first book for children, Ballerina Swan, was published. In 2013, the New York City Children’s Theater adapted it for the stage.
- August 11, 1941– Elizabeth Holtzman born, New York Democrat, youngest woman elected to U.S. Congress (1973-1981) to that time; served as the first woman District Attorney in New York City (1981).
- August 11, 1941 – Alla Kushnir born in Russia, Israeli chess champion, Woman Grandmaster, three-time winner of the Women’s Chess Olympiads.
- August 11, 1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil receive a patent for a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that later became the basis for modern technologies in wireless telephones and Wi-Fi.
- August 11, 1946 – Marilyn vos Savant born, American author and “Ask Marilyn” magazine columnist; noted for The Power of Logical Thinking.
- August 11, 1955 – Sylvia Hermon born, Lady Hermon, lawyer and Northern Irish independent unionist politician, regarded as socially liberal, concerned with pensioner’s and women’s rights; she first entered politics in 1998, and became the Member of Parliament for North Down in 2001, her current position; lecturer in Law at Queen’s University of Belfast during the 1980s; longstanding supporter of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, helping to launch its Northern Ireland network centre.
- August 11, 1965 – Viola Davis born, American actress, producer, and activist; first black actor to win the “Triple Crown” of American acting: the Academy Award (2008 and 2016), the Tony Award (2001 and 2010) and the Emmy Award (2015 – for How to Get Away With Murder). She is also the first black woman to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Davis is the co-founder with her husband Julius Tennon of JuVee Productions. She is a feminist and an activist for human rights and equal rights for women, and for women of color. She is also an active supporter of the Hunger Is campaign to eradicate childhood hunger in America.
- August 11, 1972 – Yvonne Wanrow, member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, shot and killed a man who attempted to molest her son. The trial, State of Washington v. Wanrow, was grossly mishandled, and the feminist and American Indian movements rallied to her defense. She was found guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree assault. In January, 1977, the Washington state Supreme Court ruled that Yvonne Wanrow was entitled to have a jury consider her actions in the light of her “perceptions of the situation, including those perceptions which were the product of our nation's long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination.” The ruling was the first in America recognizing the particular legal problems of women who defend themselves or their children from male attackers, and was again affirmed by the Washington Supreme Court in denying the prosecutor's petition for rehearing in 1979. Before the Wanrow decision, standard jury instructions asked what a "reasonably prudent man" would have done, even if the accused was a woman; the Wanrow decision set a precedent that when the defendant is a woman in a criminal trial the juries should ask "what a reasonably prudent woman similarly situated would have done." Wanrow became an active speaker for the women's movement, which had raised funds on her behalf. The American Indian Movement also helped Wanrow, and used the opportunity to highlight unequal treatment of Native Americans by the criminal justice system.
- August 11, 1974 – Hadiqa Kiani born, Pakistani singer-songwriter, social activist, and the first Pakistani woman UN Goodwill Ambassador, in 2010. After the devastating 2010 floods in Pakistan, she volunteered with her siblings, working alongside the Pakistani Army distributing food, water, clothing, and shelter to flood victims, and visiting with refugees; she helped finance and oversaw construction of over 250 houses for families who had lost their homes. A supporter of Yeh Hum Naheen, an anti-terrorism campaign, she also joined with other Pakistani musicians in 2007 to produce an anti-terrorism song, and in 2015 became one of ten mentors who are part of an initiative to support Pakistani women in becoming community and national leaders, and overcoming gender discrimination. Kiani is outspoken on the issue of sexual abuse of children, criticizing actor Yasir Hussain for joking about child molestation, and expressing disappointment in the Pakistani entertainment industry for its support for him.
- August 11, 1974 – Audrey Mestre born, French marine biologist and record-setting free diver; after her family moved to Mexico when she was in her teens, she studied marine biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur; in 2000, she broke the female world record for free diving, reaching 410 feet (125 meters) on a single breath, then broke her own record in 2001; she was killed in a diving accident in 2002.
- August 11, 1978 – Lillian Nakate born, Ugandan civil engineer and politician; Member of the Ugandan Parliament representing the Luweero District Women’s Constituency since 2016; worked as an engineer in the private sector on construction projects and as a consultant (2011-2016); Town Engineer for Wobulenzi Town Council (2007-2011); Assistant Engineering Officer for Loweero District Local Government (2001-2006).
- August 11, 2019 – According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, at least 79 bills relating to sex education were introduced in legislatures in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Most of the bills aimed at expanding youth education around healthy sexuality and relationships — and reducing the reach of the abstinence-only ideology which became part of many sex ed classes over the past four decades. In Colorado, a law passed in 2019 requires any sex education taught in the state’s public schools to be medically accurate and, in an unusual move, carved out $1 million to pay for it. California’s Board of Education updated its statewide framework in May 2019 for teaching comprehensive sex education that prioritizes medical accuracy and sensitivity to diverse sexualities. And in Virginia, a measure signed into law in March 2019 requires school-based sex education to include instruction on human trafficking. In Tennessee, where Republicans control the Senate, House, and governor’s office, lawmakers passed a bill encouraging schools to provide education on sexual violence awareness. Utah’s Republican governor signed a law allowing educators to discuss contraception in public school classrooms. Renewed interest in the issue was fueled in part by legislative flips during last November’s midterm elections that brought into office more Democrats — and more female lawmakers — but also by questions about sexual assault and consent raised by the #MeToo movement. Although women held fewer than 30% of state legislative seats, they introduced five out of every seven state bills updating sex education standards that were enacted in the past year, according to a recent brief by the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank. Women also introduced over half of the bills to modernize sex education in the 2020 sessions.
- August 11, 2020 – Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden named California senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, is the first Black woman and the first Asian American to be nominated by a major party for the vice presidency.
- August 11, 2021 – In the UK, a Green Party’s key plank is expansion of opportunities for young, intersectional, feminist political leadership. Tamsin Omond, who identifies as trans and non-binary, will stand with Amelia Womack for election as co-leaders of the Green Party, in an attempt to increase the party’s national membership and prepare for a general election. It is believed that this will be the first time a non-binary person has contested the leadership of a national political party. Omond, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and a longtime activist against airport expansion and other climate issues, told the Guardian: “There is a stranded majority of people who are desperate to do something about the climate emergency, who are feeling anxious, who are doing everything they can … They need a national political party that has transformative policies, and the Green party is here for this moment.” Womack has been deputy leader of the Greens, and pointed to the finding of the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warns of climate calamity with the next two decades unless drastic action is taken urgently on greenhouse gas emissions. Womack said, “People are desperate for a clear vision,” she said. “It’s not about individual action but genuine political change, structural change.”
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- August 12, 30 BC – Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII Philopator, last ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, commits suicide rather than be displayed in Rome as a prisoner of Octavian in his triumphal procession.
- August 12, 1806 – Elizabeth Oakes Smith born, prolific American author, poet, lecturer, and women’s rights activist. She was one of the speakers at the Seneca Falls Convention, but one who has been largely forgotten. Noted for "Woman and Her Needs," a series of essays published in the New York Tribune between 1850 and 1851 that argued for women's spiritual and intellectual capacities and woman's equal rights to economic and political opportunities, including a right to higher education and the right to vote.
- August 12, 1831 – Helena Blavatsky born, Russian author and theosophist, co-founder of Theosophical Society, noted for Isis Unveiled and The Key to Theosophy.
- August 12, 1833 – Lillie Devereux Blake born, American author (sometimes under the pen name Tiger Lily), suffragist, reformer, and Civil War correspondent for the New York Evening Post, New York World, and the Philadelphia Press. She is best known for her novels, Southwold and Rockford.
- August 12, 1857 – Ernestine von Kirchsberg born in Italy, Austrian painter; part of the atmospheric Stimmungsimpressionismus school of landscape painting.
- August 12, 1859 – Katharine Lee Bates born, American writer, poet, academic, and social activist; her poem “America the Beautiful” became the lyrics for the song; she was one of the pioneers in creating American Literature as a field of study, teaching one of the first college courses, and writing one of the first textbooks on the subject. She co-founded Denison House, a settlement house in Boston, and worked for the rights of women, workers, people of color, immigrants, and slum dwellers; after WWI, she was active in the peace movement, and the attempts to establish the League of Nations, opposing American isolationism.
- August 12, 1867 – Edith Hamilton born in Germany, American author and educator, known for her books The Greek Way and Mythology.
- August 12, 1876 – Mary Roberts Rinehart born, American author and playwright, known for mystery and suspense novels, best remembered for The Circular Staircase.
- August 12, 1880 – Radclyffe Hall born, English poet and author; best known for her groundbreaking 1928 novel of lesbian literature, The Well of Loneliness. Though not sexually explicit, it became the subject of an obscenity trial in the United Kingdom which resulted in a ruling that all copies of the book be destroyed. Its U.S. publication was allowed only after an extended court battle.
- August 12, 1889 – Zerna Sharp born, American author and educator, creator of the Dick and Jane series for beginning readers. She was an elementary school teacher and part-time principal when William Gray of the University of Chicago Education department hired her to collaborate with him on developing a fresh approach to beginning reading. Primers of the day were text-heavy, often based on Biblical stories or fairy tales, even at the lowest grades. Sharp and Gray developed a new series of progressively higher readers that were heavily illustrated with children acting in typical ways, using Gray’s idea of the “look-say” method of learning. Sharp provided the story lines and the vocabulary. In 1930, Foresman Press in Chicago began printing the first Dick and Jane books.
- August 12, 1907 – Gladys Bentley born, African American lesbian cross-dressing blues singer, pianist, and lyricist who reached the height of her career during the Harlem Renaissance. She appeared in her signature white tails and top hat, and sang in a deep, booming voice her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day. As a headliner at Harlem’s Ubangi Club, she backed by a chorus of drag queens. With the repeal of Prohibition, the Harlem speakeasies began closing, and she moved to Southern California, but without recreating her past success. She was often harassed for wearing men’s clothes. During the McCarthy era, she started wearing dresses, claimed to have been “cured” of lesbianism by taking female hormones, and was briefly married. She died of pneumonia in 1960 in Los Angeles, at age 52.
- August 12, 1914 – Ruth Lowe born, Canadian songwriter; her songs “I’ll Never Smile Again” and “Put Your Dreams Away” were early major hits for a young Frank Sinatra. The recording of “I’ll Never Smile Again” by Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra with Frank Sinatra was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1982.
- August 12, 1919 – Margaret Burbidge born in England, British-American astrophysicist; did her undergraduate and graduate studies in astronomy at University College, London (1936-1939, Ph.D. 1943). She was turned down for a Carnegie Fellowship in 1945 for the Mount Wilson Observatory because only men were allowed there at the time. She did come to the U.S. in 1951 on a grant for the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, focusing on chemical abundances in stars. Returning to England in 1953, she collaborated with her husband and others on the stellar nuceleosynthesis theory, that all the chemical elements could be synthesized within stars by nuclear reaction. In 1955, she finally made it to Mount Wilson, posing as her husband’s assistant. When management found out, they agreed to let her stay on condition that the couple live in a cottage on the grounds instead of in the segregated dormitory. In 1972, for the first time in 300 years, the directorship of the Royal Greenwich Observatory was not combined with the post of the Astronomer Royal, but was given to Margaret Burbidge, while Martin Ryle got the more prestigious post of Astronomer Royal. Her appointment was short-lived. In 1974, she left after controversy broke out over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from its place in the observatory to a more useful location. Burbidge became one of the foremost and most influential advocates for ending discrimination against women in the field of astronomy. In 1972 she turned down the Annie J. Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society because it was awarded to women only. In 1984, the Society awarded her its highest honor, regardless of gender, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. Burbidge was the first director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California San Diego (1979-1988). In 1976, she became the first woman president of the American Astronomy Society. In 1977, she became an American citizen. Elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1981. In 1983, she was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1988, she received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science.
- August 12, 1925 – Sybil Michelow born, South African contralto and composer; best known for performing the oratorio repertoire from Handel to Elgar. She also played piano, and composed scores for two plays by Bertolt Brecht in the 1950s. She sang in the choir at Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Michelow appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, at the BBC Proms, and was a soloist in a concert of Vaughn Williams’ Serenade to Music which marked the 50th anniversary of the BBC. She died at age 87 in 2013.
- August 12, 1928 – Fatima Meer born, South African writer, academic, feminist, human rights and anti-Apartheid activist, a leader in the South African Indian community. In 1976, Meer became the first woman to be banned by the Apartheid regime, and was put in solitary confinement. The ban was extended until 1981. She also survived two assassination attempts. She published over 40 books, including Higher than Hope (1988), the first biography of Nelson Mandela.
- August 12, 1932 – Sirikit, current Queen mother of Thailand, born; the world’s longest-serving consort to a reigning head of state; took on duties as queen regent in 1956, when the king entered the Buddhist monkhood for a time.
- August 12, 1945 – Dorothy E. Denning born, American computer scientist, software engineer and information security researcher, innovator in lattice-based access control (LBAC) and intrusion detection systems (IDS); inducted into the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2012; now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School; author of Cryptography and Data Security; named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery in 1995; recipient of the 2001 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
- August 12, 1955 – Ann M. Martin born, American children’s book author, best known for The Baby-Sitter’s Club series.
- August 12, 1969 – Tanita Tikaram born in West Germany to an Indo-Fijian British Army officer and a Sarawakian mother. British pop singer-songwriter, known for her songs “Good Tradition” and “Twist in My Sobriety” from her 1988 debut album Ancient Heart, her singles “Thursday’s Child” (1990) and “Don’t Let the Cold” (2005).
- August 12, 1972 – Wendy Rue founds National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), the largest U.S. businesswomen’s organization.
- August 12, 1990 – American paleontologist Sue Hendrickson discovers the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton yet found, in South Dakota. It is dubbed “Sue” in her honor, and displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.
- August 12, 2017 – Violence erupted at the white nationalist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heather Heyer, age 32, one of the anti-racist demonstrators staging a counter-protest, was killed in a vehicle attack by a white nationalist. He deliberately rammed his car into the anti-racist crowd, killing Heyer and injuring 19 more. At least 15 other counter-protesters were hurt by four other white supremacists, who were arrested for inciting a riot and attacking the counter-protesters. Their actions were under consideration as hate crimes.
- August 12, 2019 – In the UK, Elena Bunbury, a Young Conservative activist, said she submitted a complaint in 2018 alleging that the organiser at a Young Conservative panel event rubbed his crotch repeatedly while she was speaking, and made her feel “continually objectified” with his comments. She said that “numerous other young females within the party” have alleged that they “have been continually harassed and made to feel uncomfortable by the accused.” After she went public with her claims, at least five other women said they had been targeted by the man, who is involved with a regional Conservative policy forum. Some of the women were attacked on Twitter for raising the issue, but Conservative activist Emily Hewertson responded, “The problem is, the party has had ample opportunity to investigate this after a number of formal complaints. Taking it to Twitter was a last resort, as people were not getting listened to.” A party source claimed the Conservative party’s central office had only received a complaint the day before, and acted immediately to suspend the member pending an investigation. A Conservative spokesperson said: “We take any allegations of this type incredibly seriously and are investigating this matter in line with our procedures.” While Bunbury declined to name the man in question, reports in the British press later revealed he was Robert Winfield, a prominent member of Leeds City Conservatives, and the party had suspended him during its investigation.
- August 12, 2020 – The British Labour Party called on the government to take urgent action to ensure that women who have been pregnant during the pandemic don’t have their maternity pay wrongly docked, warning that many could lose out on thousands of pounds. When the lockdown was imposed in March, pregnant women were added to the list of people seen as clinically vulnerable. Where workplaces were unable to be made Covid-secure, pregnant staff unable or unwilling to work should have been sent home on full pay. However, according to research by the Labour party, many were instead put on statutory sick pay (SSP). To qualify for statutory maternity pay (SMP) – the government support to new mothers paid over 39 weeks – pregnant women must have earned at least £120 a week on average during an eight-week lead-up period. But SSP is just £95.85 a week, meaning women who have been shielding on that level of pay for eight weeks or more would miss out on SMP. In April, the government changed the regulations to make sure pregnant women and expectant fathers did not lose out on maternity or paternity pay if they had been furloughed on 80% of their normal wage and had seen their pay fall below £120 a week. Labour is calling for the same change to be made for sick pay. Andy McDonald, Labour’s shadow employment rights minister, said: “It is wrong that pregnant women have not only lost income as a result of being wrongly sent home on sick pay rather than their full wage, but have had their maternity pay slashed as well. “Covid-19-related spells on statutory sick pay should not mean women have their maternity pay cut, and the government needs to act now, end this injustice and protect pregnant women’s rights.”
- August 12, 2021 – In the UK, Safe Spaces Now was launched, a music industry and UN Women UK initiative whose organizers say over 40% 0f women under age 40 have been sexually harassed at a live music event. The statistic does not surprise Claire Barnett, Executive Director of UN Women UK. She said recently released data shows just 3% of 18-to-24-year-old women had not been harassed in a public space. “We had a lot of messages from people in that age group saying they were surprised it was as high as 3%. With young people it feels like a constant experience ... Live music is one of those spaces where people expect to be free. It is escapism, it’s your place of joy, and if that is somewhere we are hearing people are afraid then we need to take action. It is not OK for women to be constantly worried about their safety at festivals, to make sure they always have phone chargers on them so they can call someone if they feel unsafe.” Mabel, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Glastonbury Festival’s Emily Eavis, Anne-Marie, Clara Amfo, MNEK, and Rudimental are among the performers and industry leaders who are backing this call for change.
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- August 13, 1752 – Maria Carolina of Austria born, Queen consort of Naples and Sicily, the wife of King Ferdinand IV & III and sister of Marie Antoinette; de facto ruler of her husband’s kingdoms, she oversaw many reforms, including revocation of a ban on Freemasonry, enlargement of the navy, and expulsion of Spanish influence; a believer in enlightened absolutism until the French Revolution, during which she made Naples a police state.
- August 13, 1818 – Lucy Stone born, abolitionist, women’s rights pioneer, and author; the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree. She was hired by William Lloyd Garrison to write and deliver speeches for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Though she was often heckled, she became such a popular speaker that she out-earned many male lecturers. Stone was the co-organizer of the first National Women’s Convention in 1850, two years after Seneca Falls; a co-founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and co-founder with Henry Blackwell of the Woman’s Journal (1970-1931), a weekly newspaper “devoted to the interests of women – to their educational, industrial, legal and political Equality, and especially to their right of Suffrage.” She was courted by Blackwell, the brother of Doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who persuaded her to marry him by promising they would create an egalitarian marriage. They omitted “obey” from her vows to love and honor him, and she kept her maiden name. Their daughter Alice Stone Blackwell became a feminist and abolitionist, working with her parents. Stone set another precedent in 1858 when she reminded Americans of the “no taxation without representation” principle. Her refusal to pay property taxes was punished by the impoundment and sale of the Stones’ household goods, but friends bought their property and returned to them. In 1879, Stone registered to vote in Massachusetts, since the state allowed women’s suffrage in some local elections, but she was removed from the rolls because she did not use her husband’s surname. Stone gave her last speech in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the same year she died at age 75.
- August 13, 1829 – Martha J. Lamb born, American author, editor, historian, and reformer; owner-editor of The Magazine of American History; co-founder of the Home for the Friendless and the Half-Orphan Asylum; secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission.
- August 13, 1849 – Leonora Kearney Barry born in Ireland, American labor reformer and women’s rights activist, the only woman to hold national office in the Knights of Labor.
- August 13, 1860 – Annie Oakley born, the stage name of Phoebe Ann Moses Butler, American target and exhibition shooter, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
- August 13, 1890 – Ellen Osiier born, Danish 1924 Olympic champion; winner of the gold medal in the first women’s fencing event in the Olympics, the Women’s Individual Foil competition; her teammate, Grete Heckscher, won the Bronze.
- August 13, 1904 – Margaret Tafoya born, matriarch of the Santa Clara Pueblo potters. Honored with a 1984 National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. government’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. By the 1960s, she was well-known for the quality of her work, and especially for large blackware jars, some measuring as high as three feet. She used traditional techniques dating back at least 1200 years, but developed her own artistry and style, raising utilitarian objects to works of art.
- August 13, 1914 – Grace Bates born, American mathematician and academic, one of the few women who earned a Ph.D. in math in the 1940s. She had to fight to get into advanced classes in mathematics in high school and college, and had to petition to become the only woman studying differential equations at Middlebury College, which was segregated by sex. She got her master’s at Brown University in 1938. Bates taught in elementary and secondary schools for several years, then went to the University of Illinois to get her Ph.D., in 1949. She taught at Mount Holyoke College, becoming a full professor, then emeritus before her retirement in 1979; author of The Real Number System and Modern Algebra, Second Course.
- August 13, 1918 – Opha May Johnson becomes the first of the 305 women to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.
- August 13, 1933 – Joycelyn Elders born, American physician and research scientist, public health administrator as vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps; first African American and second woman appointed as U.S. Surgeon General (1993-1994).
- August 13, 1943 – Ertha Pascal-Trouillot born, acting President of Haiti (1990-1991), the first woman in Haiti to hold the office; she is also one of the first women in Haiti to earn a law degree. After several years as a federal judge (1975-1988), she became the first woman justice on Haiti’s Supreme Court.
- August 13, 1947 – Margareta Winberg born, Swedish Social Democratic politician; Swedish Ambassador to Brazil (2003-2007); Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden (2002-2003); Minister of Gender Equality (1998-2002); Minister for Labour (1996-1998); Minister for Agriculture (1994-1996). Outspoken feminist: in her interview for the 2005 Swedish documentary The Gender War, she expressed strong support for radical feminism, particularly feminist sociologist Eva Lundgren’s theory of the process of normalization of violence against women, including the role played by religion, which got Winberg into political hot water.
- August 13, 1948 – Kathleen Battle born, American operatic coloratura soprano; she started singing gospel music with the choir at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in her hometown of Portsmouth, Ohio, but her professional career began in 1972 when she auditioned for Thomas Schippers, who chose her to sing the soprano solo in Brahms’ German Requiem at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. This led to more orchestral concerts back in the U.S., a 1973 grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music to support her career, and her 1975 opera debut in The Barber of Seville with the Michigan Opera Theatre. She was an established artist at the Metropolitan Opera in NY by the 1980s. But her temper and increasing demands caused a parting of the ways with the Met, for what the opera company termed “unprofessional behavior.” She returned to the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, with a recital of spirituals called “Kathleen Battle: Underground Railroad—A Spiritual Journey.”
- August 13, 1956 – Habib Bourguiba, Prime Minister of Tunisia (1956-1957) and then the nation’s first president (1957), decrees the Code of Personal Status, which gave women a unique place in the overwhelmingly Muslim region. The code abolished polygamy; created a judicial procedure for women to initiate divorce; and required the mutual consent of both parties for marriage to take place. Women earned the right to vote, and then the right to seek office. In 1962, women were able to access birth control and by 1965, abortion was legalized. Tunisian women were required by law to be obedient to their husbands until an agreement presented by Tunisian feminist groups was ratified in 1985. Bourguiba's successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, announced two bills on the 50th anniversary of the Code of Personal Status that reinforced housing rights of mothers having custody of children, and established 18 as the minimum age for marriage for both sexes. Tunisia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1980, but with several reservations because of conflicts with the Quran. In 1994, National Women’s Day became a public holiday in Tunisia.
- August 13, 1963 – Valerie Plame Wilson born, American operations officer at the CIA (1985-2006) until her identity as a covert officer was leaked to the press by Richard Armitage of the State Department and Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, during the George W. Bush administration; when the information was made public, she resigned, and worked with a ghostwriter on Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House; since then, she co-authored with Sarah Lovett a spy novel called Blowback, published in 2013.
- August 13, 1973 – Kamila Shamsie born Pakistani-British writer and novelist; best known for her novels: Home Fire, which won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, In the City by the Sea, and Burnt Shadows. Shamsie was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.
- August 13, 1977 – Karine Jean-Pierre born, Haitian-American political analyst and advisor. She became the White House Press Secretary in May, 2022, the first black woman and first openly LGBTQ+ person to hold the position. She worked on Kamala Harris’ campaign during the primaries in 2020, and was the senior advisor and national spokeswoman for the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org (2016-2019). She has also been a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a lecturer in international and public affairs at Columbia University. Her book Moving Forward: A Story of Hope, Hard Work, and the Promise of America, was published in 2019.
- August 13, 2014 – Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, becoming the first woman and first Iranian to win the award. The Fields Medal is viewed in the field as at least equivalent to a Nobel Prize, but is awarded only every four years.
- August 13, 2018 – A study of the pain drug reminfentanil to relieve labor pains during childbirth, showed that it may be more effective than pethidine, the most widely used drug for labor pain since the 1950s, which is given by injection. Pethidine is not effective for up to 40% of women, who then need an epidural to block the pain, which often leads to a forceps or vacuum delivery, and can have damaging side effects to women as well. Remifentanil is delivered by a drip attached to the woman, who controls the amount by pressing a button when she feels pain. Women in the study who were using remifentanil were half as likely to end up asking for an epidural. Remifentanil has the added advantage of being cleared from the body very fast – within 10 minutes – so women are able to dose themselves just during contractions. One downside is that it can lead to low oxygen levels. That happened to 14% of women taking the drug, compared to 5% of those on pethidine, and all were given additional oxygen. Reminfentanil has been used during some surgical procedures, such as gastric bypass surgery, since the 1990s.
- August 13, 2019 – The Los Angeles Opera announced it would "engage outside counsel" to look into the allegations of sexual harassment by opera star Plácido Domingo. Nine women have come forward to accuse Domingo, who has been the L.A. Opera's general director since 2003. In an Associated Press article, several women said Domingo pressured them into sexual relationships, and that when they rebuffed his advances, he sometimes punished them professionally. Some of the accusations date back to the late 1980s. Domingo, 78, told AP the allegations are "deeply troubling and, as presented, inaccurate." He said he "believed that all of my interactions and relationships were always welcomed and consensual." By September, 2019, eleven more women had come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment. A number of women who worked backstage said in interviews with Associated Press that his reputation for inappropriate conduct was so well known that they made a point of trying to keep him separate from young women performers and backstage workers. Melinda McLain, a production coordinator at both the LA Opera and Houston Grand Opera, said, “We created these elaborate schemes for keeping him away from particular singers.” She also said that they invited Domingo’s wife Marta to company parties “because if Marta was around, he behaves.” Domingo spokesperson Nancy Selzer issued a statement that “we strongly dispute the misleading picture that the AP is attempting to paint of Mr. Domingo.”
- August 13, 2020 – Violence in Sudan’s Western Darfur region forced 2,500 refugees to flee into Chad, over 70% of them women and children. Attacks, believed to have been carried out by armed nomads in the town of Masteri in Western Darfur, killed 61 people in the Masalit ethnic community and injured at least 88. Houses were burned to the ground in the town and the surrounding villages. A 25-year-old woman told UN staff that “her husband was stabbed to death in front of her eyes and she had to run for her life with her three children, making the journey to Chad riding a donkey,” Babar Baloch, a spokesperson for the UN agency said. An estimated 20,000 Sudanese in Western Darfur were affected by the attacks, most of them women and children. Federal authorities in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, deployed additional forces to control and calm the situation, but the situation remained unstable, and many of the displaced people were reluctant to return home. Chad had been hit by heavy rains which made travel more difficult, so getting refugees to camps further inland where food, water, and shelter are more available was slow.
- August 13, 2021 – In the UK, a large crowd gathered at a vigil in Plymouth to mourn the five people killed the previous day by a 22-year-old gunman. He killed his 51-year-old mother, a 43-year-old man and his three-year-old daughter, a 66-year old woman, and a 59-year-old man. He also wounded two others who survived. The shooter then killed himself as police closed in. The shooter’s firearms licence had been revoked in December 2020, but police reinstated it in July 2022 after he attended an anger management course. Police will face an investigation over their dealings with the shooter, who expressed sympathy for the “incel” movement and a keen interest in mass shootings. Detectives are also facing questions over the decision to treat the attack – Britain’s worst mass shooting in over a decade – as a domestic incident rather than a terror attack.
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- August 14, 1802 – Letitia E. Landon born, British author and poet, known by her initials L.E.L., a popular writer in the 19th century; her first poem to appear in print was published in the Literary Gazette in 1820. Landon later became the Gazette’s chief reviewer but she also continued to write poetry, and may have carried on a secret affair with the Gazette’s editor, William Jerdan, 20 years her senior. Rumours of an affair, which grew to be rumours of multiple affairs, whether true or not, damaged her reputation. After her father’s death in 1824, she had to write to help support her family. She married George Maclean, governor of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1838, and they sailed to Ghana shortly after the wedding. She was found dead, two months after they arrived in Africa, with a bottle of prussic acid in her hand, but no autopsy was performed. Best known for her novel Romance and Reality, and for her poetry collection, The Improvisatrice.
- August 14, 1814 – Charlotte Fowler Wells born, American phrenologist, teacher, and publisher. She taught classes in phrenology (the study of head bumps, which at the time were believed by some to indicate the individual’s mental traits – discredited by the 1900s as pseudo-science) until 1837, when she ended teaching to help run the family business. O.S. & L.N. Fowler was a lecture bureau, museum, and publishing house. As her husband and brothers travelled frequently, she was often left in charge of the business. In 1875, upon becoming a widow, she was sole proprietor and manager until 1884, when she formed a stock company, Fowler & Wells Company. She served as the new company’s president, and published the American Phrenological Journal. She was also a co-founder in 1863 and a trustee of the New York Medical College for Women, one of the first medical schools founded exclusively to train women as doctors. Susan McKinney Steward graduated as valedictorian from the school in 1869, the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in New York state, and the third black woman doctor in the U.S.
- August 14, 1848 – Margaret Lindsay Huggins born, Anglo-Irish astronomer and scientific investigator; her grandfather was an amateur astronomer, and shared his enthusiasm with her from an early age; she was unable to receive formal training in astronomy, but studied by reading many books, and viewing the stars, with her grandfather, and on her own with a spectroscope she constructed; she also became interested in photography. When she was introduced to astronomer William Huggins, it was the beginning of lifetime collaboration, and they were married in 1875. They were the first to observe and identify hydrogen lines in the spectrum of the star Vega, and observed the Nova Aurigae of 1892. She was in charge of visual observations, and photography, mainly at the Tulse Hill Observatory, while they both kept meticulous notes, and he did more of the writing on publications of their findings. Beginning in the 1880s, she was listed as co-author of their publications, a rare acknowledgement for a woman at the time. They worked together for 35 years as equal partners. After Williams’ death in 1910, Margaret faced increasing health problems of her own. She donated her scientific papers to Wellesley College in the U.S., as she was a supporter of women’s education, and greatly admired the advances American women were making in education, and in opening up career opportunities for women.
- August 14 or 15 (?), 1882 – Gisela Richter born, prominent British-American classical archaeologist, art historian and author; attended Girton College (1901-1904) at the University of Cambridge, but Cambridge did not award degrees to women at that time; spent a year at the British School in Athens, then moved to the U.S. in 1905 and became an American citizen in 1917. She was hired as an assistant at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1905, was promoted to assistant curator in 1910, then to associate curator in 1922. Richter was the Met’s first woman curator, of Greek and Roman art (1925- 1948), and one of the most influential figures in classical art history of the day; she wrote several popular books on classical art, which increased the general public’s understanding and appreciation of the subject, including Animals in Greek Sculpture: A Survey, Roman Portraits, A Handbook of Greek Art and Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes.
- August 14, 1895 – Amaza Lee Meredith born, African American architect, artist, and educator. Her father was a white master stair builder, and her mother was black. They were unable to marry in Virginia, so they were married in Washington DC. Her father’s business suffered, and he committed suicide in 1915, when she was 20 years old. She never received formal training in architecture both because of her race and her gender, so she became an art teacher at Virginia State College, where she was the founder of the Fine Arts Department. In spite of her lack of training, she designed homes for many friends and family; her most notable design was for Azurest South, her own home which she shared with her companion, Dr. Edna Meade Colson. After teaching elementary and high school classes for several years, she moved to New York to attend the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts by 1934. In 1935, she began her career at Virginia State University, and started work on Azuret South, which was completed in 1939. In 1947, she formed the Azuret Syndicate to create Azurest North, an African American leisure community of 120 lots in Sag Harbor, where several of the homes were her designs. She retired from teaching in 1958, but continued to design buildings through the 1960s.
- August 14, 1900 – Margret Boveri born, German journalist and writer who survived an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime during WWII to become one of the best-known writers in Germany after the war. She worked for the Foreign Affairs section of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper (1934-1939), then was a foreign correspondent in Stockholm and New York City for the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper. After the U.S. entered the war, she was interned in New York, but was returned to Europe, arriving in Lisbon in 1942, still working as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, until it was banned in 1943. Boveri then returned to Berlin, where her apartment was destroyed by an air strike. She then worked as a report writer in the German embassy in Madrid. Although she was never a member of the National Socialist Party, she worked as freelance writer for the National Socialist weekly Das Reich (1944-1945). After the war, she was an outspoken critic of the division of Germany by the Allies into separate political zones. In 1968, she was awarded the German Critics’ Prize, and in 1970, the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the highest civilian honour in West Germany, for promoting understanding between East and West Germany. Boveri died in West Berlin in 1975.
- August 14, 1901 – Alice Rivaz born, Swiss author and feminist, wrote about women in art and the family including Nuages dans la main (Clouds in your Hands) and Jette ton pain (Cast your Bread).
- August 14, 1908 – Jean Knox born, Jean Marcia Montagu, Baroness Swaythling; first wartime director (1941-1943) of the UK’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She began her career with the ATS, a women’s support service, performing kitchen duties, but was promoted in April 1941 to second subaltern and commanded a company. In July 1941, at age 32, she was given the acting rank of chief controller and was appointed as ATS director. Her rank was equivalent to a general in the British army. She travelled to Canada in 1942 to inspect the Canadian Women’s Army Corp and worked there for six weeks on a recruiting campaign. After her return to the UK, she was forced by health problems to relinquish her appointment, and retired from service in December 1942. By September 1941, the ATS had 65,000 enlistees, and that number grew to 190,000 before VE Day. Women served in communications, as orderlies, drivers, postal workers, ammunition inspectors, radar operators, military police, and collected trajectory data on missiles, rockets, aircraft, and data on fire suppression systems. Some operated searchlight equipment, or worked on crews of anti-aircraft guns. About 10% of the work done by the Royal Corps of Signals was taken over by women of the ATS, and some ATS companies were sent to active overseas theaters to handle communications. According to the Imperial War Museum, 717 of the women died in service to their country. Princess Elizabeth, future Queen Elizabeth II, was an ATS lorry driver and mechanic.
- August 14, 1909 – Winifred C. Stanley born, American lawyer and politician; as a member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1940s, she was the first to propose a bill for equal pay for equal work in HR 5056.
- August 14, 1911 – Ethel Payne born, American writer, journalist and columnist for The Chicago Defender; “The First Lady of the Black Press” with a reputation for asking tough questions; the first African American woman radio and television commentator for a national news organization, for CBS (1972-1982); civil rights activist; associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press; Payne was the inaugural recipient of the Ida B. Wells Distinguished Journalism Chair at Fisk University in 1973.
- August 14, 1926 – Lina Wertmüller born, Italian writer and director, first woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for her film Seven Beauties; she is also known for The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away.
- August 14, 1932 – Lee Hoffman born as Shirley Bell Hoffman, American author and editor of early science fiction and folk music fanzines. She was the editor (1950-1953) of the highly regarded science fiction fanzine, Quandry, and began publication of the Science-Fiction Five Yearly in 1951, which continued until 2006. She was assistant editor (1956-1958) on the magazines Infinity Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures, and also edited and published the folk music fanzines, Caravan and Gardyloo. From 1966 through 1977, she wrote 17 Western novels, and 4 science fiction novels. Her book, The Valdez Horses, won the 1967 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel. Under the pen name Georgia York, she wrote historical romances from 1979 through 1983. She died of a heart attack in 2007.
- August 14, 1940 – Judith Kazantzis born, English poet, social activist, anthologist, and feminist. She was the sister of novelist and playwright Rachel Billington, and of historian and writer Antonia Fraser. She was a contributor to the feminist magazine Spare Rib, campaigned for prison reform and nuclear disarmament, and contributed to a collection of poems entitled Emergency Verse - Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State. Just After Midnight, Flame Tree, Freight Song, and Let’s Pretend are among her twelve volumes of poetry. Kazantzis was the editor of several anthologies, including Poems on The Underground (a collection of poems originally displayed on the London Underground), Red Sky at Night, and A Ring of Words.
- August 14, 1956 – Erica Flapan born, American mathematician, known for research in low-dimensional topology and knot theory; professor of mathematics at Pomona College in California; recipient of a 2011 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, from the Mathematical Association of America; became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.
- August 14, 1966 – Halle Berry born, African American actress, producer, environmental activist. and political activist. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Monster’s Ball, and both a Golden Globe and a Prime-Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Her Executive Producer credits include the 2017 film Kidnap, and the current television series Boomerang. She was a member of the group which successfully fought against a proposed liquefied natural gas facility to be sited in the Pacific Ocean near Malibu, and has campaigned to raise funds for women’s health and education issues. She also campaigned in 2008 for Barack Obama, and testified with Jennifer Garner before the California State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee in support of the 2013 bill to protect celebrities’ children from harassment by photographers.
- August 14, 1968 – Medy van der Laan born, Dutch Democrats 66 politician and chair or member of various councils and associations; chair of Energie Nederland, an energy company (2014 to present); member of the Supervisory Board of the Consumers Association (2007-2015); chair of the AOC council (2009-2014), a green education organization; Dutch Secretary of State for Culture and Media (2003-2006).
- August 14, 1969 – Tracy Caldwell Dyson born, American chemist and NASA astronaut; Mission Specialist on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2007, and Expedition 24 crew member on the International Space Station in 2010; she completed three space walks, logging 22 hours, while repairing a malfunctioning coolant pump.
- August 14, 2004 – Marsai Martin born, African-American actress and producer; best known for playing Diane Johnson on the TV sitcom Black-ish (2014-2022), for which she was honored with the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy. In 2019, Martin starred in the comedy film Little, which she executive produced. At age 15, she was the youngest producer of a studio film.
- August 14, 2019 – Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz, now age 21, went on trial for the second time, an example of the aggressive criminal persecution in El Salvador of women who suffer obstetric complications. Cruz, a victim of rape, was 18 years old when she entered the outside latrine at her family home suffering diarrhea and severe abdominal pain. She gave birth to a stillborn boy, and lost consciousness due to heavy bleeding. Her mother, a domestic worker, found Hernández passed out and covered in blood and took her to the nearest public hospital, unaware of the cause of her daughter’s condition. The emergency medical staff called police and prosecutors. Three days later, Hernández was transferred to the women’s prison to await trial for deliberately killing her unborn baby. She insisted that she did not know she was pregnant, and occasionally menstruated after being raped. The medical coroner recorded aspiration pneumonia as the cause of death, having discovered meconium, fecal matter, in the baby’s lungs and stomach. Despite the autopsy results, in July 2017 Hernández was sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide. She was freed in February, however, after serving 33 months in an overcrowded jail, when an appeal judge quashed the conviction on the grounds that the evidence presented at trial did not prove Hernández intended – directly or indirectly – to harm the fetus. Prosecutors then retried Hernández on the same charge. “Why? Because in El Salvador all women are considered second-class citizens, and poor vulnerable women like Evelyn, third-class citizens, so the full weight of the justice system is thrown at them regardless of the evidence,” said Paula Avila-Guillen, director of Latin America initiatives at the New York-based Women’s Equality Centre. Hernández Cruz was acquitted in the retrial. Abortion has been illegal in El Salvador under all circumstances since 1998, when legislators voted to strip women of their reproductive rights without any public debate or medical consultation about the consequences. Dozens of women have since been prosecuted for homicide and manslaughter after suffering miscarriages or still births. There is growing public support for allowing abortion in circumstances such as rape, incest, or if the woman’s life is at risk, but hopes of change were dashed in 2018 when a legislative bill to ease restrictions failed at the last hurdle.
- August 14, 2020 – A second day of protests in Belarus, as growing numbers of women, many wearing white and holding flowers, paraded the broad avenues of central Minsk, in response to the gruesome violence which has been inflicted on thousands of Belarusians. After Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1994, claimed to have won the August 9 election by an implausible 80%, Belarusian workers took to the streets in protest, only to be met by some of the worst police violence in modern European history. Even some people who were not protesting, including a man on his way home from work, and an accredited journalist waving his ID, were arrested and badly beaten by police gangs. “We are here to show solidarity with all our men who were beaten up and abused,” said Tatyana, a 31-year-old waitress who was at the very front of a column of about 1,000 women holding a white flag with her friend, which she said was a sign of their desire for no more violence. By the following evening, thousands of protesters descended on the Belarusian parliament, potentially setting the scene for a new show-down with riot police. As the demand for change intensifies and reaches even the factories that are the pride of Alexander Lukashenko’s neo-Soviet economy, the authoritarian ruler ends the week clinging on to power in defiance of an ever-broader coalition of opponents. But from the beginning, this has been an uprising inspired and led by women. After several male presidential candidates were arrested or fled in the run-up to the vote, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of one of them, stepped in. Together with two other women, Veronika Tsepkalo and Maria Kolesnikova, they offered a simple program that inspired many Belarusians: swift new elections that would be free and fair. Lukashenko, misreading the mood of the country he has led for 26 years, laughed at Tikhanovskaya, suggesting she should focus on cooking dinner for her children. The attacks only made people admire the resolve of Tikhanovskaya more. “The three of us were able to show that we had taken responsibly for what is happening and for the future of Belarus,” said Maria Kolesnikova, the only one of the all-female trio who remained in Belarus, in an interview in central Minsk. “The West won’t help, Russia won’t help, we can only help ourselves. Our female faces became a signal for all women – and for the men too – that every person should take responsibility.”
- August 14, 2021 – As Taliban insurgents continued to seize territory from government forces across Afghanistan, armed fighters walked into the offices of Azizi Bank in Kandahar, and told nine women employees they must leave. According to the bank’s manager and three of the women, the gunmen escorted them to their homes, and told their male relatives that they could take the women’s places. Noor Khatera, a 43-year-old woman who worked in the accounts department of the bank said, "It's really strange to not be allowed to get to work, but now this is what it is. I taught myself English and even learned how to operate a computer, but now I will have to look for a place where I can just work with more women around." Two days after the incident in Kandahar, women working at Bank Milli in Herat were berated by armed Taliban fighters for showing their faces in public, and told to leave. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a request for comment about the two incidents, and when asked whether women would be allowed to work in banks in areas controlled by the Taliban, Mujahid said no decision had yet been made.
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- August 15, 1787 – Eliza Lee Cabot Follen born, American writer, editor, poet, hymnist, and abolitionist; she became a Unitarian, known for her piety; among her many works are two which she edited for the Sunday school classroom: the Christian Teacher's Manual and a periodical called The Child’s Friend. She also wrote Anti-Slavery Hymns and Songs, and To Mothers in the Free States, as well as a collection of poems for children called The Lark and the Linnet.
- August 15, 1818 – Bridget “Biddy” Mason born as a slave, separated from her parents, given as a wedding gift to Robert Smith and his bride; she bore three children whose likely father was Robert Smith. When Smith converted to Mormonism, he moved his entire household West, ending in the free state of California, where Biddy Mason filed a petition for her freedom in Los Angeles County Court, but was not allowed testify in her own behalf. When Smith failed to appear, she, her three daughters and 13 other slaves were granted their freedom, a landmark decision in California law. While she had no formal education, she had been trained by other slave women as a midwife, and found work in Los Angeles delivering babies. She saved enough to buy a house and land, one of the first black women to own property in Los Angeles, then successfully bought and sold property during the land boom, amassing a substantial profit, a great deal of which she used to start a daycare center, a shelter, and soup kitchen for the poor, and gave much of the money to build the Los Angeles First AME Church.
- August 15, 1841 – Julia Tutwiler born, American educator and social reformer; advocate for women's rights, especially to higher education, and for prison reform. She was the only woman president of Livingston Normal College (1890-1907), now University of West Alabama, and a key figure in the creation of the Alabama Girls' Industrial School in 1896. Tutwiler was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.
- August 15, 1858 – Edith Nesbit born, British author, poet and political activist, published children’s books under the name E. Nesbit. She was a co-founder of the Fabian Society in 1884. The society’s early members included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Ramsay MacDonald, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Emmeline Pankhurst.
- August 15, 1860 – Henrietta Vinton Davis born, American orator and playwright; first international organizer for the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL); Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World signatory, served as an officer in the UNIA-ACL and later the rival UNIA, Inc.
- August 15, 1860 – Florence Kling Harding born, American newspaper business manager and U.S. First Lady (1921-1923). When she married Warren G. Harding in 1891, he was five years younger than she was, and he was the publisher of The Marion Star, the only daily newspaper in Marion, Ohio. She became deeply involved in the newspaper, running the paper’s circulation department, and then the business office when the manager quit. Many considered her the real brains behind the operation. She kept the paper running during her husband’s recurring illnesses, which were later recognized as early signs of the heart condition which would kill him. When he entered politics, she helped keep his adulterous affairs under wraps, carefully managing his public image. She was the first First Lady to vote, the first to ride in an airplane, to own a radio, to operate a movie camera, and the first to invite movie stars to the White House. She also had a strong influence over the selection of cabinet members. She praised Madame Curie when Curie visited the White House, as an example of a professional woman who was also a supportive wife. Her special project as First Lady was the welfare of war veterans. Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco in August, 1923, after falling ill during a coast-to-coast rail tour dubbed the ‘Voyage of Understanding.’ Florence Harding died of renal failure in November, 1924, at the age of 64.
- August 15, 1879 – Ethel Barrymore born as Ethel May Blythe, American stage, screen, radio and television actress, member of the Barrymore acting dynasty. Along with her friend, actress Marie Dressler, she was a strong supporter of the Actors’ Equity Association, and had a high-profile role in the 1919 strike, when the AEA was fighting for performers to have a bigger share in the profits of stage productions, and to provide benefits for elderly and disabled actors. Her participation ended her friendship with George M. Cohan, who was both a performer and a producer, after he took the producers’ side during the strike. Her career began while she was still in her teens, after her mother’s death from tuberculosis at age 36 in 1893. Barrymore and her brother Lionel both had to earn a living, and neither finished high school. She found success onstage both in the U.S. and Great Britain, where Winston Churchill was among her many admirers. By 1928, she was so popular on Broadway that when the Shuberts opened a new theatre on 47th Street, they named it the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, and she appeared in its first production, The Kingdom of God. It is now the only theatre named by the Shuberts for one of their stars that has remained as a legitimate theatre in New York. She won the 1944 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the film None but the Lonely Heart, and was nominated as supporting actress for three additional films. She died in 1959 of heart disease, shortly before her 80th birthday.
- August 15, 1882 – Marion Eugenié Bauer born, American composer, teacher, and author; composed piano, orchestral and voice pieces; associated with New York University and Juilliard; editor of The Musical Leader, and author of Twentieth Century Music.
- August 15, 1885 – Edna Ferber born, American novelist and playwright; 1925 Pulitzer Prize for So Big; novels Giant, Showboat, Saratoga Trunk: also co-author with George S. Kaufman of the plays Dinner at Eight and Stage Door.
- August 15, 1886 – Gerty Radnitz Cori born, Jewish Czech-American biochemist; one of the few women in medical school in Prague in 1917, where she met Carl F. Cori; they were married upon graduation in 1920, and emigrated to America in 1922. They collaborated on medical research, and published their findings as co-authors at Carl’s insistence, in spite of attempts by the institutions who hired him to discourage the practice; Gerty Cori became the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1947), shared with her husband and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay (who did related work on the role of the pituitary gland), for their discovery of the mechanism by which glucogen is broken down in muscle tissue into lactic acid, then resynthesized in the body and stored as a source of energy (known as the Cori cycle). They also identified the important catalyzing compound, the Cori ester. She died in 1957, after a ten-year struggle with myelosclerosis, a rare form of bone cancer, but still active in research until the end. In 2004, both Carl and Gerty Cori were honored posthumously by the American Chemical Society for their achievements in expanding knowledge of carbohydrate metabolism.
- August 15, 1896 – Catherine Doherty born in Russia, Baroness Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine de Hueck Doherty; Russian Canadian Catholic social worker, social justice activist, author, and notable public speaker. Ekaterina, born into a family of minor Russian nobility, was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1912, she was married at age 15 to her first cousin Baron Boris de Hueck. During WWI, she became a Red Cross nurse at the front. She and her husband barely escaped during the Russian Revolution, and endured near-starvation as refugees in Finland before they reached England in 1919. She converted to Catholicism. Next, they emigrated to Canada. She began earning money as a speaker, becoming a regular on the U.S. Chautauqua lecture circuit, but the strain of long absences shattered her marriage. In 1932, she gave up all her possessions to establish Friendship House in downtown Toronto, running a soup kitchen, teaching, and living among the poor. Labeled a communist sympathizer, she had to close Friendship House in 1936. She spent a year in Europe observing Catholic lay action groups, and then established a new Friendship House in Harlem in New York. The interracial center distributed goods to the poor, hosting lectures and discussions to promote racial understanding. In 1943, after her first marriage was annulled because they were first cousins, she married Eddie Doherty, an American journalist. The Dohertys left New York in 1947, moving to Combermere, Ontario, Canada, to retire, but she was soon running a new rural apostolate, Madonna House, which now has field-houses throughout the world. She died in 1985, at the age of 89.
- August 15, 1912 – Julia Child born, American author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and pioneer in television cooking; columnist for the Boston Globe; host of The French Chef (1963-1973), one of the first cooking shows on American television.
- August 15, 1913 – Aurora Castillo born, community activist and environmentalist, co-founded Mothers of East Los Angeles in 1984, which successfully opposed a planned building of a toxic waste incinerator and state prison in East Los Angeles. Castillo was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995.
- August 15, 1920 – Judy Cassab born as Judit Kaszab in Austria; artist who emigrated to Australia in 1950; first woman to win the Archibald Prize twice, in 1960 and 1967; appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1988.
- August 15, 1924 – Hedy Epstein born in Germany, Jewish-American political activist; she was rescued from Nazi Germany by the Kindertransport in 1939. In England she worked in a munitions factory. All but two of her family were killed at Auschwitz. After the war, she worked with Allied occupying forces in Germany, then immigrated to the U.S. in 1948. She became an activist for affordable housing, the antiwar movement, and reproductive choice. In 1982, after reading news reports of massacres committed by a Lebanese Phalangist militia with the complicity of the IDF during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Epstein became an opponent of Israel's military policies. In 2001, she founded the St. Louis chapter of the anti-war group, Women in Black. In 2003, she began traveling to the West Bank to work with the International Solidarity Movement, reporting in 2004 that at the age of 80, she had been strip searched and cavity searched by guards at Ben Gurion International Airport. When she tried to speak on U.S. college campuses about what she had observed and experienced, she was vilified by several Jewish organizations for “demonizing both Israelis and Jews” and inflaming anti-Semitism. Ill-heath curtailed her participation in attempts to break Israel’s naval blockade of ships attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, but she was arrested in 2014 for failure to disperse at a Black Lives Matter protest in St. Louis against the killing of Michael Brown and subsequent police actions. She died at age 91 from cancer.
- August 15, 1925 – Gertrude Shope born in South Africa but raised in Zimbabwe; South African politician and activist; became a member of the Government of National Unity Parliament in 1994. She was a teacher in Natal and Soweto, who joined the African National Congress in 1954, then resigned her position as part of the boycott of the Bantu Education Act, which reinforced apartheid by insuring an inferior education for black children. Was active in the Federation of South African Women, but Shope had to join her husband in exile (1966-1990), and they travelled to lobby for support of the ANC. She also worked for the World Federation of Trade Unions during their exile. Shope was elected in 1991 as president of the ANC’s Women’s League, serving until 1993, and also worked with Albertina Sisulu on convening the ANC’s Internal Leadership Corps Task Force (1990-1991)
- August 15, 1935 – Régine Deforges born, French author, editor, and playwright; she was the first woman to own and operate a publishing house in France, and was frequently censored, prosecuted, and heavily fined for publishing “offensive” literature. Her best-known novel, La Bicyclette bleue (The Blue Bicycle), became a bestseller in France in 1981, and was followed by six sequels. It became a major international intellectual property case when Deforges was accused of plagiarizing Gone With the Wind. She was initially found guilty, but won her case on appeal, and the order to pay damages was rescinded.
- August 15, 1938 – Maxine Waters born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Representative from California since 1991, member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus; California State Assembly (1976-1990); outspoken opponent of the administrations of both Bushes and Donald Trump.
- August 15, 1943 – Eileen Bell born, Northern Irish Alliance Party politician; Member of the Northern Irish Assembly (1998-2007), the second Speaker of the Assembly (2007); General Secretary of the Alliance Party (1986-1993); left politics in 2007, and became the Legislative Advisor and Vice President of Autism NI, a charitable organization which promotes collaboration between parents and professionals, and to support families of children with autism.
- August 15, 1945 – Khaleda Zia born, Bangladeshi politician; Leader of the Opposition (2008-2014); the first woman Prime Minister of Bangladesh from 1991 to 1996, and again from 2001 to 2006; leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (1984-2018); found guilty of corruption in 2018 for embezzling funds from an orphanage trust she set up.
- August 15, 1951 – Ann Biderman born, American screenwriter and television producer; adapted screenplay for the English language version of Smilla's Sense of Snow; creator and producer of the TV series Southland and Ray Donovan.
- August 15, 1956 – Lorraine Desmarais born, French Canadian jazz pianist and composer; noted for her album Couleurs de Lune.
- August 15, 1961 – Suhasini Mani Ratnam born, Indian actress known as Suhasini; director, producer, and writer. She directed the film Indira in 1995, and Penn in 1991 for television, and was one of the writers on Ravanan (epic adventure film), and Iruvar (political film).
- August 15, 1962 – Inês Pedrosa born, Portuguese author, journalist, and playwright; director of the Casa Fernando Pessoa cultural center.
- August 15, 1962 – Vilja Toomast born, Estonian politician; member of the Estonian Riigikogu (legislature, 1992-2008), then served in the European Parliament (2009-2013).
- August 15, 1974 – Natasha Henstridge born, Canadian actress known for her debut role in the science fiction film, Species, and its two sequels, and her role as Colleen on the Canadian television drama Diggstown. In 2017, she joined six other actresses in accusing director Brett Ratner of sexual assault and harassment. Warner Brothers severed its ties with Ratner.
- August 15, 1983 – Anita Sarkeesian born, Canadian-American blogger and feminist media critic. She launched her website Feminist Frequency in 2009, and became known for her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which made her a target for online harassment and threats.
- August 15, 2012 – “Young and Strong” is a model of a program developed at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to address the significant challenges facing young women with breast cancer. The new model has been designed to serve young women with breast cancer who are receiving care outside of the comprehensive cancer setting, particularly in places where resources are limited. Ann H. Partridge, MD, MPH, director of the Program for Young Women with Breast Cancer, heads the multidisciplinary advisory group composed of patient advocates; providers from medical oncology, breast surgery, radiation oncology, nursing, and social work; and translational, psychosocial, and population-based investigators.
- August 15, 2019 – Israel announced it would block the U.S. representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country after public pressure from Donald Trump. The official reason given was their advocacy of a boycott and sanctions against Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians. The women are among the four new Democratic representatives in Congress that Trump said in July 2019 should go back to the countries they “originally came from.” Three of the four women were born in the U.S. but Ilhan Omar, daughter of Somali refugees, moved to America in 1995 with her family after four years in a Kenyan refugee camp. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Rashida Tlaib is of Palestinian descent, and wanted to see her 90-year-old grandmother who lives in the occupied West Bank.
- August 15, 2020 – A century after U.S. women won the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, a Pew Research Center survey shows that overall, 49% of Americans say women getting the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing American women’s position. Of those in the survey, 12% of men and 8% of women thought the U.S. has gone too far on gender equality; 49% of men and 64% of women say the U.S. hasn’t gone far enough on equal rights for women; and 37% of men and 27% of women thought women’s rights in the U.S. were about where they should be. Of Republicans and those who lean Republican, 17% said Gone Too Far, 33% Not Far Enough, and 48% About Right. Of Democrats/Lean Democratic, 4% said Gone Too Far, 76% Not Far Enough, and 19% About Right. Americans are more dissatisfied with the state of gender equality now than when the question was asked in 2017. Three years ago, half of adults said the country hadn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men, compared with 57% of adults today. This attitudinal shift has occurred across both gender and party lines.
- August 15, 2020 – In a report on the PBS News Hour by journalist Amanda Zamora, she cites statistics on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on U.S. women wage earners: “... women are experiencing double-digit unemployment for the first time. We had made such tremendous gains in the workforce over the last half of the century and women have seen those virtually evaporate overnight. Women have lost 11 million jobs in the first months of this pandemic. And experts say that 8% of those jobs, that's tens of thousands of women at work, are not coming back ...”
- August 15, 2021 – The Taliban took control of Kabul, and immediately imposed severe restriction on women and girls. Apart from healthcare workers, women have been told they cannot return to work or travel in public without being accompanied by a Mahram (male guardian). By mid-September, girls above the age of 12 were not allowed to go to school, and rigid gender segregation at universities severely curtailed women in higher education. Preventing women from working has exacerbated economic problems for many families, and removing women from government jobs is leaving a huge hole in the state’s capacity to govern effectively. Fawzia Amini, who was a senior judge in Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, said, “The Taliban have institutionalized discrimination against women: they are denying our fundamental rights … they want to wipe women from the face of society and make us all prisoners in our own homes.”
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- August 16, 1565 – Christina de Lorraine born, Grand Duchess consort of Tuscany; dowager Grand Duchess after her husband’s death in 1609, wielding great influence in her son’s court. After his death, she served as co-regent of Tuscany (1621-1628) with her daughter in-law during the minority of her grandson. Christina was particularly involved in dealing with the Florentine religious establishment. Galileo wrote a long letter to her concerning his belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of the other way around. He wrote to her because Benedetto Castelli, a former student of his, who’d been a guest at a dinner with Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, told him she was the only person who kept asking questions after philosopher Cosimo Boscaglia argued that the motion of the Earth could not be true because it was contrary to the Bible, and Castelli was called upon to respond. Galileo’s letter was really a treatise that he hoped would be shared with others, but it didn’t help his cause, because Christina’s primary interest was in advancing the cause of the Medici.
- August 16, 1637 – Emilie Juliane, Countess of Barby-Mühlingen born, most prolific German woman hymn writer, with approximately 600 hymns attributed to her.
- August 16, 1813 – Sarah Porter born, American educator, founder of Miss Porter’s School, a private girl’s college preparatory school; she acquired her education through private tutoring by Yale professors, and continued study on her own. Her school was a pioneer in offering an expansive curriculum for women, including the sciences.
- August 16, 1832 – Helen Knowlton born, American artist and author, principal biographer of William Morris Hunt.
- August 16, 1836 – Virginia Thrall Smith born, American social and charity worker, City Missionary Society member, established Connecticut’s first free kindergarten; elected to the Connecticut State Board of Charities, started the Connecticut Children’s Aid Society, founder of a children’s home that became the Newington Children’s Hospital.
- August 16, 1864 – Dr. Elsie Inglis born in India where her father was a magistrate, a commissioner of the East India Company, and an advocate for educating women. After her father’s retirement, the family returned to Edinburgh, where Elsie was educated, then went to finishing school in Paris. She nursed her mother, who had contracted scarlet fever, until she died in 1885. Inglis became an innovative doctor, a pioneering surgeon, a suffragist, and the founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. She was also the first woman honored with the Serbian Order of the White Eagle, in recognition of her work during WWI. In 1887, Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake opened the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, and Inglis started her studies there, but disagreements with Jex-Blake escalated until two of classmates of Inglis were expelled. Inglis and her father then founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women, under the auspices of the Scottish Association for the Medical Education of Women, whose sponsors included Sir William Muir, a friend of her father from India, now Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Inglis's sponsors also arranged clinical training for women students under Sir William MacEwen at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. In 1892, Inglis earned the Triple Qualification, becoming a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. She was appalled by the standard of care and lack of specialisation in the needs of female patients, and took a post at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's pioneering New Hospital for Women in London, and then at the Rotunda in Dublin, a leading maternity hospital. Inglis gained her MBChM qualification in 1899, from the University of Edinburgh, after it opened its medical courses to women. While taking this course, she was also nursing her father until his death in 1894. Inglis said, “Whatever I am, whatever I have done - I owe it all to my father.” She was a lecturer in gynaecology at the Medical College for Women, then set up a medical practice with former classmate Jessie MacLaren MacGregor. They opened a maternity hospital, named The Hospice, for poor women alongside a midwifery resource and training centre, initially with an operating theater and eight beds, then moved into larger quarters. The Hospice would later be renamed the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital. She expanded her knowledge while visiting an innovative maternity hospital in the U.S. in 1913. Inglis often waived her fees, and even paid costs for some patients to recover at the sea-side. She joined the suffrage movement in the 1880s, and served as secretary (1906-1914) of the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage, then worked with English suffrage leader Millicent Fawcett, and spoke at events all over Great Britain. She spearheaded the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service initiative, and raised money for the Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH). Sir George Beatson of the Scottish Red Cross turned down her request for assistance and funding, declaring he would have “nothing to say to a hospital staffed by women.” Beginning with her own contribution of £100, by the end of her first month of fundraising, Inglis had raised £1,000 toward her goal of £50,000. The efforts of her Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service during WWI to treat the wounded at the front, was opposed by the government. When she offered the Royal Army Medical Corps a ready-made medical unit of qualified women, she was told to “go home and sit still.” But the French government immediately took up her offer, and established a unit in France, while she led her own unit in Serbia. The French unit began with 100 beds, but expanded to 600 beds to cope with the huge number of casualties from the battles, including the Somme. Inglis worked to improve sanitary conditions in Serbia, greatly reducing the number of deaths from typhus and other diseases, which also took the lives of four of the SWS’s staff there. In all, the SWS sent 14 units to Belgium, France, Serbia, and Russia. Inglis died of cancer in November 1917, at the age of 53. Her body lay in state at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. British and Serbian royalty attended her funeral, and the buglers of the Royal Scots played the Last Post. People lined the streets as her coffin was carried to burial at the Dean Cemetery near her parents. Winston Churchill said of Inglis and her nurses "they will shine in history." The Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital was operational until 1988.
- August 16, 1865 – Mary Gilmore born, Australian writer, journalist, poet, labor movement activist, and crusader for the disadvantaged; inaugural editor of the women’s section of The Australian Worker (1908-1931), advocating for women’s suffrage, pensions for the elderly and invalids, and just treatment of the Aboriginal people. During this time she also wrote for The Bulletin and The Sydney Morning Herald. Her first volume of poetry was published in 1910, which was followed by 20 additional collections; her best known poem is “No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest,” a morale booster during WWII. She was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1937 for her contributions to literature. By the late 1940s, she was the doyenne of the Sydney literati, and in the 1950s and 60s became a well-known personality on radio and television. At 87, she began writing “Arrows,” a column for The Tribune, the Australian Communist Party’s newspaper (1952-1963), but never joined the party. When Dame Mary died at age 97, she was accorded a state funeral, one of the few writers to be so honored. Her likeness has been featured on the Australian ten-dollar note since 1993.
- August 16, 1900 – Ida A. Browne born, Australian geologist and palaeontologist; graduated from the University of Sydney with Honors in 1922, and won the University medal in geology. She then worked as a demonstrator in geology and petrology at the University (1922-1927), researching the minerals and geology of New South Wales. A Linnean-Macleay Fellowship (1927-1931) enabled her to extensively map the region, and also paid for travels overseas to research facilities and conferences. In 1932, she was the second woman at the University of Sydney to earn a doctorate in Geology, but was unable to find work in her field. No mining company would hire her because women were forbidden to work underground. She returned to the University, and was promoted from demonstrator to Assistant Lecturer in palaeontology when Professor W.S. Dun became ill, putting aside her geology studies to gain extensive knowledge of palaeontology, and keep ahead of her students. She became a full Lecturer in 1940. Moving from hard rock to soft rock studies, Brown's research evolved into the study of Palaeozoic invertebrates, specifically brachiopods, and stratigraphical studies. She had exceptional mapping skills; her Taemas map continues to be used. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1945, but resigned from teaching in 1950 when she married to fellow geologist and colleague, William Rowan Browne. She then worked with him, often in the field, and continued publishing papers under her name. Browne was a member and first woman president of both the Royal Society of New South Wales (president 1942-1950) and of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (president in 1953); member of the Australian National Research Council, and the Geological Society of Australia.
- August 16, 1902 – Georgette Heyer born, British novelist, author of contemporary mystery novels, but much better known for her historical romances, often set in the Regency period. Admired for her wit, extensive research, and meticulous depiction of the period, her description of Battle of Waterloo in An Infamous Army was so definitive, military history instructors at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst have used it in their classes.
- August 16, 1912 – Marga Klompé born, Minister of Social Work (1956-1963), first Dutch woman minister.
- August 16, 1928 – Eydie Gormé born, American pop show tune singer-songwriter, Grammy and Emmy Award-winner; inducted with husband Steve Lawrence into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 1995.
- August 16, 1934 – Diana Wynne Jones born, British author of science fiction, fantasy, and children’s books; known for Howl’s Moving Castle.
- August 16, 1945 – Suzanne Farrell born as Roberta Sue Ficker, American lyric ballerina, founder of Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center.
- August 16, 1947 – Carol Moseley Braun born, American politician and diplomat; U.S. Ambassador to Samoa (2000-2001); U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand (1999-2001); the first African American woman U.S Senator, and first woman U.S. Senator from Illinois (1993-1999); considered centrist or conservative on economic issues, but liberal on social issues; strongly pro-choice, against the death penalty, and in favor of gun control; voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 1993, she convinced the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s application for renewal of its design patent because the design contained a Confederate flag. With Senator Barbara Mikulski, in 1993 she broke the ban on women wearing pants on the Senate floor, which was finally amended in 1994 to allow pants on the floor as long they were worn with a jacket. Moseley Braun delivered the eulogy for Thurgood Marshall in 1993.
- August 16, 1957 – Laura Innes born, American actress and television director; known for her work on the medical drama ER. An advocate for persons with disabilities, as a director she helps them find employment, and supports the Performers with Disabilities Committee of the Screen Actors Guild.
- August 16, 1958 – Angela Bassett born, African American actress and activist, known for her performances in the biopics What’s Love Got to Do with It as Tina Turner, Malcolm X as Betty Shabazz, and Betty & Coretta as Coretta Scott King. She also played the title role in the television film The Rosa Parks Story, for which she won a 2003 Black Reel Award. She is a supporter of arts programs for youth, and programs for children with diabetes, and an Ambassador for UNICEF. She contributed to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and made appearances to urge people to vote. She also endorsed Hilary Clinton for president in 2016, and introduced survivors of the 2015 Charleston church shooting at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
- August 16, 1958 – Diane Dodds born, Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party politician; Member for Northern Ireland of the European Parliament since 2009; Member of the Northern Irish Legislative Assembly for Belfast West (2003-2007).
- August 16, 1960 – Rosita Baltazar born in Guatemala, Belizean Garifuna choreographer, dancer, dance instructor and founding assistant director of the Belize National Dance Company in 1990. In 2009 she was honored with the Chatoyer Recognition Award from the National Garifuna Council of Belize for her efforts at preserving Garifuna culture. The Garifuna are a mixed indigenous people originally from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, who speak an eponymous Arawakan language.
- August 16, 1961 – Angela Smith born, British Independent (previously Change UK) politician; Change UK Spokesperson for Energy and Environment and for Transport, Local Government and Housing (2019); Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (2011-2014); Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge Sheffield Hillsborough (2005–2010).
- August 16, 1972 – Emily Strayer born, American country singer-songwriter; The Chicks.
- August 16, 1990 – Rina Sawayama born, Japanese-British singer-songwriter and producer; known for “Hold the Girl,” “Chosen Family,” and “Catch Me in the Air.”
- August 16, 2002 – The Africa Women’s Peace Train leaves Kampala, Uganda, to run through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana and finally to Johannesburg in South Africa, for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). Their goal was to bring an end to the civil wars, corruption, and genocide which make their families unsafe.
- August 16, 2019 – After India revoked the limited autonomy status of Kashmir on August 4, thousands of Indian troops were sent in, who arrested political leaders, imposed a strict curfew, and shut down telecommunications and internet access. Iltija Mufti, daughter of Mehbooba Mufti, former chief minister of Kashmir, was reached by the Guardian on this day while under house arrest. She pleaded for the international community to act over the unprecedented clampdown on millions of Kashmiris, warning they are being “caged like animals” and treated as “cannon fodder.” She said as many as 25 armed security personnel had surrounded her house the previous week, locking all entrances. The government of Pakistan protested, and downgraded its diplomatic relations with India. Kashmir has long been a disputed territory between Indian and Pakistan. There were over 700 protests in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar just since the August 4 takeover and August 16, and about 200 civilians and 415 security forces have been wounded or injured.
- August 16, 2020 – Belarusian officials say Alexander Taraikovsky was killed when an explosive device that he intended to throw at police blew up in his hand during growing protests in Minsk against President Alexander Lukashenko, who claimed he won 80% of the vote in the recent election, as well as the violent crackdown by riot police on protesters. But Taraikovsky’s partner Elena German, who saw his body at the morgue, said, “There is a seam in the chest area – the hole was sewn up, but there is a black bruise; it’s small but we noticed. His hands and feet are completely intact, there are not even bruises. Obviously, it was a shot right in the chest.” Video taken by an Associated Press journalist showed Taraikovsky with a bloodied shirt before collapsing on the ground. Several police then walked over to where Taraikovsky was lying on the street and stood around him. The video didn’t show why he fell to the ground or how his shirt became bloodied, but it also didn’t show an explosive device, and his hands are both intact. German is seeking a full investigation, calling on a Belarusian human rights organization and international experts for support. “I am feeling outraged. I’m angry. That is why I want to achieve justice,” she said. “In fact, I am very scared. I was left alone, without support. I feel empty.”
- August 16, 2021 – As the Garrick, one of London’s last remaining gentlemen-only clubs, celebrates its 190th anniversary, a growing number of women barristers and judges are signing a petition calling on the club to change its rules. It is a frequent meeting place for cabinet ministers, supreme court judges, academics, diplomats, senior civil servants, journalists, and well-known actors and writers. While club rules ban talking about work on the premises, most members recognise that this rule does not preclude more subtle forms of networking. Emily Blendell, founder and CEO of a successful women’s wear company, who started the petition, said, “The issue is most apparent in the legal community. With so many senior members of the judiciary [being club] members, it is a concern that women can’t access the club … these subtle discriminations continue to impair our progression.” Actor Nigel Havers, a Garrick member, signed the petition, saying, “Surely it is time for the Garrick to haul itself into the 21st century.”
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Nature’s Hard-Working Single Moms:
Gray Kangaroos
For gray kangaroos, motherhood is all about multitasking. Babies are born at an early stage in development — just 36 days — and then make their way to their mother's pouch, where they will remain for further gestation and feeding until finally venturing out about nine months later. Because the initial development period is so short, female kangaroos can get pregnant in quick succession, meaning they are nearly permanently pregnant.
If they are carrying two joeys at different stages of development simultaneously, they can even produce two different types of milk at once to ensure that each baby gets the nutrients it needs at that time. Even more impressive is that if needed, a female kangaroo can freeze the development of an embryo so she does not give birth again until a previous joey is able to leave her pouch.
Gray kangaroos are rated “least concern,” with populations that are stable in eastern areas and increasing in western areas of Australia.