WOW2 – February 2023: Women Trailblazers and Activists, 2-9 thru 2-14

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” – Cheris Kramarae, Women’s Studies Scholar

February is Black History Month

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“We are the ones we have been waiting for, because we live in an age in which we are able to see and understand our own predicament.” ― Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple

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WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women.

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“I've heard of nothing coming from nothing, but I've never heard of absolutely nothing coming from hard work.” ― Uzo Aduba, Actress and Heifer International ambassador

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“Accomplishments have no color.” ― Leontyne Price, International opera diva

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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books.

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.

WOW2 began as a once-a-month post, then as more and more trailblazing women were added to the lists, it expanded until it became a four-times-a-month post. The lists became so long that I’m switching to posting only a selection of these amazing trailblazers — for those who want to see the glorious and much more complete list of outstanding women for this week, click:

www.dailykos.com/...

THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.

Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.

Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History

_{Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.}

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• February 9, 1849 – Laura Clay born, suffragist, orator, Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) co-founder and first president; lobbying (1880s to  1900s) by Clay and other KERA members resulted in state legislative and educational victories, including protection of married women’s property and wages, requiring women physicians in state women’s insane asylums, admission of women to several all-male colleges, a women’s dormitory at the University of Kentucky, establishment of juvenile courts and detention homes, and raising the sexual consent age for girls from 12 to 16. Clay’s name was placed in nomination for U.S. president at the 1920 Democratic National Convention.

• February 9, 1854 – Aletta Jacobs born, Dutch physician, a leader of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and an ardent pacifist, who went on a world speaking tour, meeting with feminists and pacifists around the world. She was the first woman to officially attend a Dutch university, and the first woman physician in the Netherlands; a pioneer in the study of contraception and a birth control advocate. Jacobs set up the Netherlands’ first family planning centre, a free clinic for poor women and prostitutes. She also taught hygiene, maternal care, and childcare courses. She campaigned for social justice and labor rights, including breaks for women working 10 hour days on their feet in shops; her efforts led to new health and safety laws.

• February 9, 1865 – Mrs. Patrick Campbell born as Beatrice Rose Tanner, notable English actor-manager-director. She played Eliza Doolittle in the original West End production of Pygmalion, which George Bernard Shaw had expressly written for her. She and Shaw frequently exchanged letters, a legendary correspondence in which her sharp wit kept pace with his. Most of these letters were not published until 1952, two years after Shaw’s death.

• February 9, 1874 – Amy Lowell born, American poet, editor, and translator, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 for What’s A Clock. She wrote over 650 poems, some with feminist themes, but she was also a tireless promoter of modern poetry. As an editor, she introduced poets like Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and H.D. to American readers, beginning with Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology, published in 1915.

• February 9, 1907 – The ‘Mud March’: The United Procession of Women was a peaceful demonstration organized by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) to coincide with the opening of Parliament in London. Over 3,00o women from all classes marched from Hyde Park Corner to the Strand in support of women’s suffrage. It took place during incessant heavy rain, so it was dubbed the Mud March. NUWSS leader Millicent Fawcett: “The London weather did its worst against us; mud, mud, mud, was its prominent feature, and it was known among us afterwards as the ‘mud march.’” This was the largest demonstration supporting enfranchising women up to that date. The march failed to influence members of Parliament, but it had considerable impact on public opinion, and set the pattern for the movement’s future tactics. The press coverage gave the movement "more publicity in a week", according to one commentator, "than it had enjoyed in the previous fifty years." The march showed that the fight for women's suffrage had the support of women in every stratum of society, who despite their social differences were able to unite and work together for a common cause. Large public demonstrations became standard features of the suffrage campaign. By June 1908, when Women’s Sunday, a Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) rally was held in Hyde Park, about a half a million people came to hear the speakers.

      The ‘Mud March’ headlines the front page — Millicent Fawcett

• February 9, 1911 – Bessie Stringfield born, “Motorcycle Queen of Miami.” She was the first African-American woman solo rider across U.S.; served as a WWII U.S. Army dispatch motorcycle rider.

• February 9, 1923 – Chava Rosenfarb born, Jewish-Canadian author of Yiddish poetry and novels, and Holocaust survivor. After surviving the Łódź Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Rosenfarb was deported to Auschwitz, and then sent with other women to a work camp at Sasel (subcamp of Neuengamme concentration camp), where she built houses for the bombed-out Germans of Hamburg. Towards the end of war she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she nearly died of typhus in April 1945. After the war, Rosenfarb married Dr. Henry Morgentaler, and in 1950 they emigrated to Canada, where he would become a nationally-famous Canadian abortion rights activist,. She was pregnant with their daughter Goldie at the time. Rosenfarb published three volumes of poetry in Yiddish between 1947 and 1965. In 1972, she published her best-known work, Der boim fun lebn, a three-volume novel detailing her experiences in the Łódź Ghetto. As the number of Yiddish-language readers declined she became a translator, and was also a regular contributor to the Yiddish literary journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain). She was honored in 1979 with the Itzik Manger Prize, Israel’s highest award for Yiddish literature. She died in 2011 at the age of 87.

• February 9, 1939 – Mahala Andrews born, British vertebrae  palaeontologist whose work became the principal foundation on which research about the origin of amphibians is based. After graduating from Cambridge, she worked for seven years as a research assistant to geology professor Thomas Stanley Westoll at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Andrews then returned to Girton College at Cambridge to complete her Ph.D. thesis on fossil lobe-finned fish and also co-authored a paper on the subject in 1970. She was appointed as the Senior Scientific Officer in the Department of Geology at the Royal Scottish Museum (now the National Museum of Scotland) in Edinburgh in 1968 and became a Principal Scientific Officer in 1973. In 1982, she published The Discovery of Fossil Fishes in Scotland up to 1845. Andrews also made drawings of many of the fossils which she studied and travelled extensively including joining the first official palaeontology party to work in China in 1979. She retired early due to ill health in 1993, and died at age 58 in 1997. 

• February 9, 1944 – Alice Walker born, American author, poet, essayist, and activist for minority and women’s rights; she won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Literature and the National Book Award for her novel The Color Purple. Muriel Rukeyser was her professor and mentor at Sarah Lawrence, who showed Walker’s poetry to her agent, which led to the publication of her first poetry collection, Once, in 1968. After graduation, Walker worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jackson, Mississippi, and was also a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program. She was a writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (1968-1969) and Tougaloo College (1970-1971). She published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970.  In 1973, she became editor of Ms. Magazine, where her 1975 article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," helped revive interest Hurston’s work. On March 8, 2003,  International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. She wrote about the experience in her essay "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For." Her other works include the novels The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy, as well as the short fiction collection, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart.

• February 9, 1945 – Carol Wood born, American mathematician who researched mathematical logic, model-theoretic algebra, and the theory of differentially closed fields; program officer in the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation; deputy director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute; President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1991-1993); served on board of trustees for the American Mathematical Society (2002-2007).

• February 9, 1947 – Carla Del Ponte born, Swiss prosecuting attorney and ambassador; member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (2012-2017); Switzerland’s Ambassador to Argentina (2008-2011); Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, 1999-2007), and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR, 1999-2003); Swiss attorney general (1994-1999).

• February 9, 1960 – Peggy A. Whitson born, American biochemist, and NASA astronaut; the first woman to serve as NASA Chief of the Astronaut Office (2009-2012); and the first woman commander of the International Space Station. Whitson holds the women’s record for number of days in space, a total of 665 days accrued.

• February 9, 2020 – 63.1% of voters in Switzerland voted in favor of a referendum to extend anti-racism legislation to cover sexual orientation, in spite of a campaign against the measure which claimed it would be an infringement of free speech. Switzerland had no law in force that specifically protected LGBTQ+ people from discrimination or hate speech. The law was passed by the country’s government in December 2018 to close this loophole, but an alliance of rightwing parties including the conservative Christian Federal Democratic Union (EDU) and the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) opposed the change and sought a referendum to prevent it from coming into effect. On flyers and posters, opponents framed the law as a “gagging clause” that would restrict freedom of speech and demote gay and bisexual members of society to a “weak minority in need of protection.” Lesbenorganisation Schweiz (LOS), an advocacy group representing Swiss lesbian, bisexual and queer women, welcomed the referendum result. “We have won, and how! Next stop: same-sex marriage.” In September 2021, in a referendum, same-sex marriage was approved by 64% of Swiss voters.

Swiss couple Anouk Oswald and Corinne Guntern — Marriage for All referendum banner

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• February 10, 1842 – Agnes Mary Clerke born, Irish astronomer and author; her treatise, A Popular History of Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century, was recognized as authoritative, and remains her best-known work. Clerke also wrote biographies of famous scientists for the 9^th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and 55 of her articles appeared in the Edinburgh Review. In 1903, she and Lady Huggins were elected as honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society, an honor previously held by only two other women, Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville.  

• February 10, 1843 – Adelina Patti born, Italian opera singer born in Madrid to parents who were both professional singers. Famed for the purity of her lyrical voice, and the quality of her bel canto technique, she earned huge fees, and composer Giuseppe Verdi called her “a stupendous artist.” After her disastrous first marriage cost her half her fortune in the divorce, she became financially astute, demanding to be paid $5000 a night, in gold, before her performances, and specifying in her contracts that she receive top-billing in larger type than the rest of the cast. She was careful with her investments, so unlike many other opera stars she remained well-to-do until her death at age 76 in 1919.  Though she retired from the stage and touring in 1903, her final public performance was given in 1914 as part of a Red Cross concert at London's Royal Albert Hall that was organized to aid victims of WWI.

• February 10, 1870 – The first U.S. branch of the YWCA was founded in New York City. Philanthropist Grace Hoadley Dodge was the New York YWCA’s first president, and Mabel Cratty was the first general secretary; they initiated typewriter and sewing machine instruction for women, and the first employment bureau for women in the U.S.

   Grace Hoadley Dodge and Mabel Cratty

• February 10, 1875 – Elvira Notari born Elvira Coda, pioneering and prolific Italian filmmaker and screenwriter; credited as the first woman to direct over sixty feature films and about a hundred shorts and documentaries. Co-founder with her husband, cinematographer Nicola Notari, of their own film production company, Dora Film, in 1905. Her films were distributed in America in the 1920s after several of them were denied national circulation in Italy because Italian censors blocked them for “crude language and sexual undertones.” Increasing censorship and the arrival of sound combined to bring an end to Dora Films. A list of film titles is all that has survived of most of her work – only three of her feature films are still in existence. She died in 1946 at age 71.

• February 10, 1881 – Pauline Brunius born, Swedish actress, screenwriter, and director for both stage and film; she was the managing director (1938-1948) of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Sweden’s national stage which was founded in 1788.  Originally, she trained as a ballet dancer, but decided to become an actress instead.

• February 10, 1883 – Edith Clarke born, orphaned at 12, used her inheritance to study mathematics and astronomy at Vassar College, graduating in 1908. After a teaching job, and working as a “computer” for George Campbell at AT&T, in 1918 she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the following year she became the first woman to earn an M.S. in electrical engineering from MIT. Unable to find work as an engineer because no one would hire a woman, she returned to “computing” but as a supervisor, and in her spare time, invented the Clarke Calculator which solved line equations involving hyperbolic functions ten times faster than previous methods – she patented it in 1925. She was the first woman to: deliver a paper at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers; win the AIEE Best National Paper Prize (1941); write an influential textbook in the field of power engineering, Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems; first woman professor of electrical engineering in the U.S. (1947), at University of Texas at Austin; first female Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

• February 10, 1901 – Stella Adler born, American actress and highly influential acting teacher; founder of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949. Born into a Yiddish theatre family, she began acting at age  four. She studied with Konstantin Stanislavski (1922-1923), during his only American tour with the Moscow Art Theatre, then joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925, where she studied with two former members of the Moscow Art Theatre, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1934, she went to Paris and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. She was the only member of the Group Theatre to study with Stanislavski, and she left the group because of differences with Lee Strasberg. In 1988, Adler published her book, The Technique of Acting, and in 1991, she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

• February 10, 1907 – Grace Towns Hamilton born, Atlanta Urban League Executive Director (1943-1960); first African-American (post-Reconstruction) in Deep South state government, elected to the Georgia General Assembly (1966-1984); her legislative reapportionment battles were credited by Andrew Young with his 1972 victory when he was elected as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

• February 10, 1908 – Jean Coulthard born, Canadian composer, pianist, and composition teacher at the University of British Columbia and the UBS School of Music. A major influence on orchestral music in Canada, she wrote sonatas, concertos, and symphonies, and an opera based on Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.  Coulthard was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978.  She died at age 92 in 2000.

• February 10, 1927 – Leontyne Price born, American lirico-spinto soprano, one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera; honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, she also won 19 Grammy Awards, and the National Medal of Arts in 1985, the year she retired from the Met. Price continued to appear in recitals and orchestra concerts until 1997.  Breaking into opera was difficult, but a door opened for her through the NBC Opera Theatre, under music director Peter Herman Adler. In January 1955, she sang the title role in Puccini's Tosca, the first appearance by an African American in a leading role in a televised opera. She starred in three other NBC broadcasts. The Tosca was not controversial – Price's appearance had not been widely advertised – and the Jackson, Mississippi, NBC affiliate carried the broadcast, but her later opera broadcasts were boycotted by several NBC affiliates, most of them in the South, because of her race. Her grand opera debut occurred in San Francisco in 1957, and led to her European debut in 1958 at the Vienna Staatsoper, followed by appearances at London’s Royal Opera House.  It wasn’t until 1961 that she made her debut at the Met, but her first season was a triumph. TIME magazine put her on their cover, with a feature article headlined, "A voice like a banner flying."

• February 10, 1937 – Anne Anderson born, Scottish reproductive physiologist, researcher, lecturer, and author, noted for research on the birth process, medical care during labour, and women’s overall health. Anderson was elected as a fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1981. She was co-editor with Ann McPherson of the first edition (1983) of Women’s Problems in General Practice. Anderson was one of the initial editors of a companion volume, Effective Care in Labour and Delivery, but her illness and death in 1983, from breast cancer at age 46, ended her career.

• February 10, 1937 – Roberta Flack born, African American singer, first artist to win the Grammy for Record of the Year two years in a row, in 1973 and 1974. She is a member of the Artist Empowerment Coalition, which advocates the right of artists to control their creative properties. She is also a spokeswoman for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; her appearance in commercials for the ASPCA featured "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." In the Bronx section of New York City, the Hyde Leadership Charter School's after-school music program is called "The Roberta Flack School of Music" and is in partnership with Flack, who founded the school, which provides free music education to underprivileged students.

• February 10, 1939 – Deolinda Rodrigues Francisco de Almeida born, Angolan nationalist, militant, writer, poet, translator, and radio host. She received a scholarship to study in Brazil, and while there corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr. She continued her education in the U.S. before returning to Angola. Rodríguez was a member of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and co-founded its women's wing, the Organização da Mulher de Angola (Organization of Angolan Women, the OMA). As a revolutionary movement leader and activist, she campaigned for human rights in Angola, and was associated with the Corpo Voluntário Angolano de Assistência aos Refugiados (CVAAR). In 1963, the government expelled the MPLA leadership, forcing them to flee to Brazzaville in the Congo. Her writings from the time show an increasing move towards  Marxism–Leninism, and a painful awareness that her gender made her invisible even though she was part of the leadership. She expressed her frustration at the discrimination she faced because she was unmarried, saying that she was treated as if being single were "shameful or of the devil.” In 1967, she and four other OMA members were captured by the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA) guerrilla group, tortured, and dismembered alive. She was 28 years old.

No longer the Luanda we once knew the shade of the Mulemba tree the Caconeiras and Piteiras bringing us joy. Instead, in their place hi-rise buildings occupy the sacred land where familiar lovely gardens grew. I am distressed because Luanda is no longer the beautiful African city of my heart. Do people today find happiness here? Unhappy people greatly need Christ and school. A sad truth. How long can we wait?

Deolinda Rodrigues Francisco de Almeida

• February 10, 1944 – Frances Lappe Moore born, American vegetarian author of 19 books, including the bestseller Diet for a Small Planet. She also co-founded three organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty, and environmental crises, as well as solutions now emerging worldwide through what she calls Living Democracy. In 2003, she received the Rachel Carson Award from the National Nutritional Foods Association. In 2008, she was honored by the James Beard Foundation as Humanitarian of the Year.

• February 10, 1945 – Delma S. Arrigoitia born, Puerto Rican historian, author, biographer, and lawyer; first person at the University of Puerto Rico to earn a master’s in the field of history; after getting her doctorate at Fordham University, she helped develop UPR’s graduate school for history.

• February 10, 1947 – Louise Arbour born, French Canadian lawyer, prosecutor, and jurist; United Nations Special Representative for International Migration (2017-2018); UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2004-2008); Puisne Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1999-2004) – Puisne means a lower-ranking, or regular member of a judicial group, in this case, other than the Chief Justice. She was research officer for the Law Reform Commission of Canada (1972-1973), then Vice-President of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, as well as working her way from Lecturer to Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, Yorke University (1974-1987). Appointed to the Supreme Court of Ontario (1987), then to the Court of Appeal for Ontario (1990). President of a Commission of Inquiry (1995), investigating allegations of prisoner abuse at the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. Appointed in 1996 as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. She indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes, the first time a serving Head of State was called to account before an international court.

• February 10, 1966 – Natalie L. Bennett born in New South Wales, Australia; British politician and journalist; Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales (2012-2016); worked for regional newspapers in Australia until she moved to Thailand in 1995, where she worked for Australian Volunteers International and the Bangkok Post (1995-1999). She moved to Britain in 1999, becoming a contributor to the Guardian, Independent, and Times newspapers. She joined the Green Party in 2006, and served as its internal communications coordinator on the national executive committee (2007-2011), and founded the Green Party’s women’s group. She was a trustee of the Fawcett Society, a women’s rights group, from 2010 to 2014.

• February 10, 1967 – Laura Dern born, American actress, known for her performances in Blue Velvet and Jurassic Park; she is an advocate for Down syndrome awareness, women’s rights, and the rights of farmworkers and immigrants. In 2018, she was part of a Families Belong Together protest of the Trump Administration policies which separate immigrant children from their families. She is also an activist for sensible gun laws and environmental protection.

• February 10, 1970 – Åsne Seierstad born, Norwegian freelance journalist and writer, noted for her accounts of everyday life in war zones, including Kabul after 2001, Baghdad in 2002, and Grozny, Chechnya, in 2006, and for her 2004 best-selling book, The Bookseller of Kabul, an account her time living with an Afghan family in Kabul after the 2001 fall of the Taliban.

• February 10, 1973 – Martha Lane Fox born, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, British executive, philanthropist, and public servant; founder and executive chair of Doteveryone.org.uk, a think tank and charity championing responsible technology. In May 2004 she was severely injured in a car accident in the tourist resort of Essaouira in Morocco and was flown to England for treatment at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, and later Wellington Hospital in London. She was discharged from hospital in December 2005. From 2009 to 2013 she was the Digital Champion for the UK and helped to create the Government Digital Service – this team launched gov.uk, and was given the task of spearheading a two-year campaign to improve computer literacy. She became the youngest woman member of the House of Lords in 2013, as a crossbencher and Life Peer; appointed as Chancellor of the Open University in 2014.

• February 10, 1981 – Uzo Aduba born, American actress best known for her performance as “Crazy Eyes” Warren on the television series Orange is the New Black (2013-2019). In 2020, she portrayed Shirley Chisholm in the miniseries Mrs. America, which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie. In April 2017, Aduba received the Point Courage Award from the Point Foundation for her support of the LGBTQ community. In June 2018, Aduba became Heifer International's first celebrity ambassador to Africa. She saw Heifer's impact firsthand during 2016 and 2018 field visits to Uganda.

• February 10, 1994 – Jean Flynn became the first woman combat pilot in the U.S. Air Force when she completed her flight training in an F-15 at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

• February 10, 2020 – Research from the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen shows that development of glandular breast tissue in girls is now starting earlier than it was in the late 1970s. Dr. Alexander Busch, co-author of the research, thinks that the growing problem of obesity in children is probably a factor, “It is important to proceed to monitor this as early puberty has implications. However, fighting childhood obesity and avoiding excessive exposure to environmental chemicals could help to avoid early pubertal onset.” The team says the new findings matter since they may mean that experts need to rethink current age cut-offs used to determine early puberty, in order to avoid sending healthy children for brain scans and other tests. Dr. Anna Symonds, a Midlands-based clinical psychologist, says, "The impact on body image, and self-esteem, can also be significant. Children in this situation tend to be a lot bigger than the other children around them, so everyone is well aware that something is different. Things like gym lessons, and having to wear a bra before your classmates, make children very self-conscious."

                      Younger teens now face early pubertal onset — Dr. Anna Symonds

• February 10, 2021 – In the UK, Stella Creasy, a senior Labour Member of Parliament, threatened to take the government to court over a bill giving six months’ paid maternity leave to cabinet ministers only – as she disclosed she was nine weeks’ pregnant. Creasy had a history of miscarriages, and was reluctant to reveal she was in the early stages of pregnancy, but felt she must draw attention to a system that would effectively award better maternity rights as a bonus for political promotion. The government announced plans to change the law to give cabinet ministers six months’ maternity leave in order to allow the attorney general, Suella Braverman, to keep her post after having a baby, but would not extend similar rights to MPs who are not ministers. Creasy said she “does not begrudge” Braverman her maternity leave, but she was prepared to make a legal case that she was discriminated against as an MP who is not also a cabinet minister. Creasy said her case would be intended to highlight the discrimination faced by pregnant women across all sectors. “There’s no difference between myself and the attorney general in terms of the impact of having a baby on you. We are in an environment where thousands of pregnant women are facing risks in the workplace, including the risk of the loss of their job. The message that we’re sending is that we treat maternity leave like a benefit, like a company car. In other words, only paid maternity leave for management.” Creasy pioneered a system of having a “locum MP” in place to continue her constituency work when she had her first child in 2019, but had to fight for support from the MPs’ funding body in order to hire cover. She has been the only MP to gain that funding, with several others privately admitting they feel there is no formal, transparent system for MPs, apart from ad-hoc requests for funding where the burden is on the pregnant woman. Creasy said she had been given legal advice that the government’s move could be a breach of human rights law – of a right to equal treatment and the right to a family life.

• February 10, 2022 – In the rural Afghan province of Zabul, Parveen Tokhi, head teacher of Bibi Khala School, was asked in mid-August 2021 by the Taliban for the use of her school as a temporary barracks. She had spent the bleak years of the first Taliban government in the 1990s stuck at home like almost all Afghan women, barred from education and work. Determined that the same shadow wouldn’t engulf another generation, she said, “OK, you can stay there overnight, but these buildings are a girls’ school, and I have sacrificed all my life for the education of these girls.” The men had to be out in time for morning classes to start as usual, she insisted, undaunted by their guns. Then she got the contact number for senior Taliban officials and rang them directly to say there was no Islamic justification to bar girls from the classrooms and corridors where she had spent most of her life, first as a student, then for four decades as a teacher. She told them, “I will not close the school, even if someone kills me for this, because the girls come in hijab, and the teachers are female.” To the surprise of many, in Zabul and beyond, the new Taliban officials agreed to let all girls carry on with their classes, under the condition that the girls must wear the burqa to and from school, and primary school classes for boys, taught by male teachers in the same building, be moved. The school, and three other girls’ schools in Zabul, have stayed open even after the central Taliban government brought in a de facto ban on high school education for girls in September, 2021, shrugging off years of international promises to recognise women’s right under Islam to study and to work. Local women activists in Zabuk said Tokhi’s outspoken stance helped persuade the Taliban to take an unexpected path, although she has since been demoted. “From the beginning I was very straightforward,” she says, sanguine about the change. “That’s probably why I lost my job. All because of my commitment to the students of Zabul.”

Bibi Khala School 

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• February 11, 1802 – Lydia Maria Child born, abolitionist, women's rights and Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism; remembered for her poem, “Over the River and Through the Wood” which became the lyrics for the song.

• February 11, 1813 – Harriet Jacobs born into slavery in North Carolina; her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was published under a pseudonym in 1861. Her mother, the slave of a tavern keeper, died when she was six, and Harriet became the property of the tavern keeper’s daughter. The woman taught her how to sew, but also how to read and write, before the 1830 North Carolina law outlawing teaching slaves to read or write. In 1825, Harriet’s owner died, willing Harriet Jacobs to her three-year-old niece Mary Maltilda Norcom. This made Mary Matilda’s father, Dr. James Norcom, Jacob’s de facto master. James Norcom soon started harassing her sexually, causing his wife to be jealous. Hoping for protection from Norcom's harassment, she started a relationship with Samuel Sawyer, a white lawyer. He fathered Jacobs's children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. When Mrs. Norcom learned of her first pregnancy, she forbade Jacobs to return to her house, so Jacobs lived with her grandmother. Still, Norcom continued his harassment; the distance between the two houses was only 600 feet. In 1835, Norcom moved Jacobs to his son’s plantation, threatening to make her children plantation slaves, and then sell them separately. Jacobs ran away and hid in her grandmother’s tiny attic crawlspace, only three feet high at its highest point. Norcom reacted by selling her children to a slave trader he told to sell them separately in a different state, but the trader sold them to their father Samuel Sawyer. Though Sawyer did not keep his promise to Jacobs to immediately manumit the children, he did later send their daughter to live with his cousin in Brooklyn, where slavery was already abolished, and their son to live in a Free State. In 1842, after seven years in the crawlspace, Jacobs was escaped by boat to Philadelphia, and then to New York City. She still had many obstacles to overcome, including the threat that Norcom would come North to take her back under the Fugitive Slave Law. But in 1852, when Jacob’s actual owner, Mary Matilda, came to New York with her husband to reclaim her, Mary Matilda was persuaded by Cornelia Grinnell Willis, for whom Jacobs worked as a nanny, to sell Jacobs to her for $300 instead. Though Jacobs bitterly resented that she could still be sold in a “free” state, she was grateful to Willis that she now was truly a free woman. In 1853, she began writing her life story. She spent several fruitless years trying to find a publisher before the Boston publishers Thayer and Eldridge agreed to publish her book if the well-known abolitionist Lydia Maria Child would write the preface. Childs meet with Jacobs, and agreed to write the preface. She also became the book’s editor, rearranging it into a more chronological order. But after the book had been stereotyped (the process of making metal printing plates), the publishers failed her. Jacobs bought the plates from them, and the book was printed and bound. It appeared in January 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, and with names changed of people and locations. It was widely promoted by abolitionist groups, and well received by the critics. During and immediately after the Civil War, Jacobs went to the Union-occupied parts of the South and founded two schools for fugitive and freed slaves.

• February 11, 1855 – Ellen Day Hale born, American Impressionist painter, printmaker, and author of History of Art: A Study of the Lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer; she mentored the next generation of New England women artists.

‘Self Portrait’ — by Ellen Day Hale

• February 11, 1860 – Rachilde born as Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, French symbolist novelist, playwright, and theatre director, the most prominent literary woman associated with the French Decadent Movement; noted for her novels Monsieur Vénus, and The Juggler, and for her experimental plays, Madame la Mort, and  L'Araignée de Cristal (The Crystal Spider). Rachilde wrote countless reviews and essays for the various magazines and newspapers in Paris, and biographical portraits of writers. Her works were considered scandalous and decadent – writer Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly is said to have described her as "A pornographer, yes, she is, but such a distinguished one!"

• February 11, 1872 – Hannah Mitchell born, English suffragette, socialist, worker’s rights activist, and pacifist. Although both her parents could read and write, she only had two weeks of formal schooling, and endured corporal punishment for trying to learn on her own. Education was considered unnecessary by her hard-pressed farming family, especially for a girl. She left home at age 14 in 1885, and became a factory worker. By 19, she was working as a dressmaker and in domestic service for the family of a schoolmaster, who allowed her to borrow books from his library. She became involved in the socialist movement, and began speaking at Independent Labour Party meetings. In 1904, she was appointed by the party as Poor Law Guardian for Newhall. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and worked  as a part-time WSPU organizer, until she collapsed from overwork and malnourishment in 1907. She supported the pacifist movement during WWI. In 1924, she was elected to the Manchester City Council  and served until 1935. In 1926, she also became a magistrate, and remained one for the next 20 years. After WWII, Mitchell wrote articles for newspapers, and her autobiography, The Hard Way Up, which was not published until after her death. She died at age 84 in 1956.

• February 11, 1900 – Ellen J. Broe born, Danish nurse and administrator; after many years of education and experience abroad, she returned to Denmark, and helped establish educational and training initiatives, including drafting minimum curriculum requirements for nursing students; she was a member of the International Council of Nurses (CCN); Broe received the 1961 Florence Nightingale Medal.

• February 11, 1916 – Emma Goldman was arrested for distributing a pamphlet called Family Limitation, and speaking on birth control, and jailed for two weeks.

• February 11, 1918 – Anne Stine Ingstad born, Norwegian archaeologist; with her husband, explorer Helge Ingstad, she discovered the remains of a Viking (Norse) settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1960. She led an excavation of the settlement (1962-1968), which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Site of Canada.

• February 11, 1925 – Virginia E. Johnson born, American psychologist; the Johnson of Masters and Johnson; she and William H. Masters were pioneers in the study of human sexuality. She died in 2013, at the age of 88.

• February 11, 1925 – Aki Kurose born in Seattle to Japanese immigrant parents; American teacher, and peace and social justice activist. She and her family were interned in 1942 at a camp in Idaho. The American Friends Service Committee paid for her to go to college. She began at the University of Utah, but had to move to the Latter Day Saints Business College. After the war, she completed her education at Friends University in Kansas. She campaigned against housing discrimination, joined the Congress of Racial Equality, and took part in civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations. Kurose took classes in early education and earned her master’s degree. She helped launch Washington State’s pilot Head Start program, and taught elementary school. In 1980, President Carter appointed her to the National Advisory Council on the Education of Disadvantaged Children. Her work integrating peace advocacy with education was recognized internationally in 1992, when she received the UN Human Rights Award. She died of cancer in 1998, at age 73.

Aki Kurose in Girl Scout leader uniform

• February 11, 1958 – Tina Ambani born, Indian actress and philanthropist; she is active with Aseema, an NGO engaged in rehabilitating street children; in 2004, she established the Harmony for Silvers Foundation, to enhance the quality of life for the elderly; in 2009, she launched the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital & Medical Research Institute (KDAH), the first comprehensive centre for liver transplant and the first integrated centre for children's cardiac care in western India. KDAH also in the process of opening 18 cancer care centres in rural areas.

• February 11, 1958 – Ruth Carol Taylor becomes the first black woman to work as a stewardess on a U.S. airline flight, for the Mohawk Airlines flight from Ithaca to New York City. However, due to the wide-spread prejudice of the time against married women having careers, she was let go by the airlines after only six months because she got married. She had a degree in nursing, and was a civil rights and women’s rights activist who took part in the 1963 March on Washington. In 1985 Taylor wrote The Little Black Book: Black Male Survival in America, a survival guide to help young black men succeed in a racist society.

• February 11, 1959 – Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi born, Iranian university professor and politician; faculty member at Tehran University for 13 years, and  director of the Nursing and Obstetrics Department for 6 years. She was a founding member of Iran's Specialized Scientific Association of Reproduction and Sterility, and the head of Arash Hospital (2004-2009); Minister of Health and Medical Education (2009-2013); Member of Iran’s Parliament (1992-2000). Vahid-Dastjerdi is culturally and politically conservative, but supports a role for women in society. She told parliamentarians "Women must have a greater role in the country's affairs."

• February 11, 1962 – Tammy Baldwin born, American politician; U.S. Senator (Democrat-Wisconsin, since 2013); U.S. Representative (D-WI,1999-2013); first woman elected to Congress from Wisconsin, and first openly gay U.S. Senator in history; member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; outspoken advocate of single-payer, government-run universal healthcare.

• February 11, 1969 – Jennifer Aniston born, American actress, producer, and director; best known for playing Rachel on the TV series Friends (1994-2004), as well as appearing in films, including She’s the One, The Break-Up, and Marley & Me. In 2006, she directed the short film Room 10. Since 2019, she has produced and starred in the Apple TV+ series The Morning Show. Among her many charitable projects, she made commercials for St. Jude’s Hospital, hosted the 2008 Stand Up to Cancer show, and was honored by GLAAD for her contributions to the increased visibility of the LBGTQ+ community. She also publically supports Clothes Off Our Back, Feeding America, EB Medical Research Foundation, Project A.L.S., OmniPeace, and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). Aniston donated $500,000 to Doctors Without Borders, Haitian health care provider Partners in Health and AmeriCares. She took part in the Hope for Haiti Now telethon, and donated $500,000 to the Red Cross and another $500,000 in 2017 to help victims of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Aniston donated to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, took part in a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, and endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

• February 11, 1989 – Reverend Barbara Harris is ordained as the first woman bishop of the American Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion worldwide.

• February 11, 2004 – The city of San Francisco, California begins issuing  marriage licenses to same-sex couples in response to a directive from Mayor Gavin Newsom. The first license is for lesbian activists Del Martin, 83, and Phyllis Lyon, 79.

• February 11, 2015 – Özgecan Aslan, a 19-year-old Turkish university student was murdered when she tried to use pepper spray fend off an attempted rape by three men, including the bus driver, aboard a minibus in Mersin, Turkey. When her burnt body, with its hands cut off, was found on February 13, it sparked days of nationwide protests and public outcry over violence against women. The funeral of Özgecan was attended by some 5000 people, and women defied the imam at the funeral by attending the prayer together with the men and carrying the coffin of Özgecan, against Islamic tradition. The three perpetrators were convicted of a “monstrous and torturous homicide” and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reacted negatively to criticism aimed at his government by women’s rights activists. On 17 February, he slammed the women's rights movement in Turkey, for criticizing him when he said that "women are entrusted to men by God.” Women's rights activists also brought up previous comments made by Erdoğan and his fellow party members, such as  Erdoğan’s "you cannot make men and women equal," saying that he and his party were trying to solidify gender roles and suppress women's rights. The hashtag #sendeanlat (you must tell) became very popular, encouraging women to tell their own stories on social media of harassment and fear in Turkey. A campaign was started in Azerbaijan, where men posted photos of themselves wearing mini-skirts in protest, with the hashtag #ozgecanicinminietekgiy (wear a mini-skirt for Özgecan). The men’s campaign soon spread to Turkey. A petition for a law to prevent reduction of sentences in cases of violence and murder of women garnered more than 700,000 signatures within 48 hours, and went on to become the most popular petition in Turkish history, with more than 1,125,000 signatures.  While promises were made during the next election campaign, the proposed "Özgecan Law" got bogged down in debates, and the Turkish law remained in force which allows reduced sentences for perpetrators of violence and murder against women on grounds of "good behavior" and "unjust provocation."

Turkish women protesting murder of Özgecan Aslan

• February 11, 2016 – The first UN International Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated, with a goal of gender equality in the sciences by 2030. As of 2016, women are only about 30% both of researchers and of students enrolled in STEM fields. As of 2022, only 9% of STEM jobs held by U.S. women are held by African American women. Long-standing biases, and gender and racial stereotypes are steering girls and women away from science related fields. The 2015 Gender Bias Without Borders study by the Geena Davis Institute showed that of the onscreen characters with an identifiable STEM job, only 12 per cent were women.

• February 11, 2020 – Lloyd’s of London confirmed that they appointed Jayne-Anne Gadhia, former Virgin Money chief executive, to its new culture advisory group, led by Lloyd’s board member Fiona Luck, which is tasked with scrutinizing changes at the insurance market as it tries to recover and move on after a scandal over bullying and harassment in 2019. Lloyd’s of London, which was founded in 1686, released a survey which revealed that nearly 500 of its underwriters and brokers either suffered or witnessed sexual harassment in the previous year. The survey was commissioned after evidence from 18 women alleging widespread sexual harassment, ranging from inappropriate remarks to physical assault, was reported by Bloomberg Businessweek. The venerable insurance market also set up a confidential helpline for Lloyd’s staff, and launched a poster campaign to encourage reporting of sexual misconduct, put up both inside the building and in nearby pubs. John Neal, Lloyd’s chief executive, has pledged to create a working environment “where everyone feels safe, valued and respected.”

         Fiona Luck and Jane-Anne Gadhia

• February 11, 2021 – In Saudi Arabia, campaigners and human rights groups welcomed the release of the prominent women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul from prison, while urging the international community not to forget the other female prisoners of conscience still behind bars for their activism in the ultra-conservative kingdom. Hathloul was granted probation by a judge in Riyadh and allowed to go home to her family, but is subject to a travel ban, and a suspended sentence if she breaks the terms of her release. Hathloul, a leader of the campaign for Saudi women’s right to drive, was abducted and detained along with several other women in an unprecedented state crackdown on female activists in May and June 2018,  just before the law on women driving was changed. The journalist and activist Nouf Abdulaziz, who had written in support of Hathloul and was detained at the same time, was also released. However, activists Samar Badawi, Nassima al-Sadah, and Mayaa al-Zahrani were not released until summer 2021.

Loujain Al-Hathloul —  Nouf Abdulaziz —  Samar Badawi —  Nassima al-Sada —  Maya’a al-Zahrani

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• February 12, 1775 – Louisa Adams born as Louisa Johnson in London and grew up in England; her mother was English and her father was an American colonist. She became the 6^th First Lady of the United States (1825-1829), and was the only first lady born outside the U.S., or preceding the 13 colonies, until the 45^th First Lady. When John Quincy Adams was appointed as Secretary of State in 1817, her drawing room became a center for the diplomatic corps and other notables, but she found being First Lady more difficult: during the bitter politics of the election campaign, she was painted in the press as a foreigner and a Tory of aristocratic birth because of her English mother. She always took particular pains to describe herself as “the daughter of an American Republican Merchant.” Her frequent severe migraines, and her eldest son’s struggles with alcohol which led to his suicide in 1829, left her deeply depressed. Louisa Adams expected their retirement to Massachusetts upon leaving the White House to be permanent, but her husband was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1831, where he served until his death in 1848. She stayed in Washington until she died at age 77 in 1852. The day of her funeral was the first time both houses of the U.S. Congress adjourned in mourning for any woman.

• February 12, 1831 – Myra Colby Bradwell born, editor, publisher, and suffragist-political activist, founder of the Chicago Legal News. After studying law in her husband’s law office, she was denied admission to the Illinois bar because of her gender, and because as a married woman, she was not legally allowed to enter into contracts; her case goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the decision by justices is 8-1 in favor of the state of Illinois; she was eventually granted a state license to practice law, and worked tirelessly to change laws that discriminated against women.

• February 12, 1855 – Fannie Barrier Williams born, African American educator and women’s rights advocate; in 1870, she became the first African American to graduate from Brockport Normal School (now College at Brockport, State University of New York). She taught black students in Hannibal, Missouri, then freed men and women in the Washington DC area, and encountered a level of racism in both cities which growing up in New York State had not prepared her to deal with. She had to overcome significant difficulties when she enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Washington DC to study portrait painting, and again when she tried to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. After she married, she and her husband moved to Chicago, where she was the director of the art and music department of the Prudence Crandall Study Club, and became involved local politics and social reform efforts. In 1893, she helped to found the National League of Colored Women, and was one of the earliest members of the NAACP. In 1894, she was the first black woman nominated to the Chicago Women’s Club, but wasn’t inducted until 1896, because of opposition and threats made against her and her supporters. In 1905, she was involved in the establishment of the Frederick Douglass Center, a settlement house. She was one of the few black women in the Illinois Women’s Alliance, and lectured frequently on the need for all women, but especially black women, to have the vote. Williams was the only African American to eulogize Susan B. Anthony at the 1907 National American Woman Suffrage Association convention.

• February 12, 1870 – Women in the Utah Territory gained the right to vote. The first constitution adopted in Utah, in 1849, granted voting rights only to white males. However, Utah’s leaders wanted statehood, and hoped by granting women the vote they could dispel the idea that Mormon society oppressed women. Mormon men also probably assumed Mormon women would uphold church doctrine at the ballot box. The move did little to overcome outside attitudes toward the territory, and in 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disenfranchised polygamous men and all Utah women (even those that did not practice polygamy) in the territory. In response, Utah women like Emmeline B. Wells, editor of the Woman’s Exponent, formed suffrage organizations across the state, giving prominent positions to women in monogamous marriages. The church soon issued the 1890 Manifesto, which declared an end to polygamy. The new Utah constitution, guaranteeing the rights of women to vote and hold office, was adopted in November 1895. In 1917, two Utah women, Lovern Robertson and Minnie Quay, despite being disavowed by the Utah State Suffrage Association, which disapproved of the militant tactics being used in Washington D.C., went to join the Silent Sentinels’ picket line in front of the White House to campaign for the 19^th Amendment. They were among the suffragists who were arrested and sent to the infamous Occoquan Workhouse, where they were terrorized by the male guards. In a notarized affidavit Minnie Quay said she was dragged in the dark to a filthy freezing cell and the superintendent threatened to use straitjackets, gags, handcuffs, and the whipping post. Lovern Robertson in her affidavit said she heard the superintendent guarantee that “these men will handle them rough” and then order that Lovern and others be kept away from the leaders of the group, whom he said ought to be “locked up in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives” or “taken out and shot.” The suffragists went on a hunger strike in protest. Both Quay and Lovern spent much of their time in the prison hospital, where the hunger strikers were brutally force-fed, before their early release on November 29. Although the protest was considered radical, press reports of the Silent Sentinels’ mistreatment angered many Americans and created more sympathy for the suffrage movement. In 1918, President Wilson dramatically reversed his stand on women’s suffrage and gave a speech in support of the suffrage amendment. By the time the suffrage amendment became law in 1920, a U.S. Court of Appeals had cleared the Silent Sentinels of all charges for their civil disobedience, creating an important legal precedent that paved the way for generations of protestors.

             Utah Suffragists: Emmeline B Wells — Lavern Robertson — and Minnie Quay

• February 12, 1884 – Alice Roosevelt Longworth born, American writer, eldest child of Theodore Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Lee, who died two days after her birth. She was fiercely independent, a non-conformist who smoked in public, rode unchaperoned in cars with men, stayed out late, placed bets with bookies, and kept a pet snake. Her Dupont Circle home was the site of a salon where scientists, authors, conservationists, diplomats, and politicians of all persuasions gathered for sixty years. Noted for her razor-sharp wit, for her autobiography, Crowded Hours, and as co-editor with her brother Ted of The Desk-Drawer Anthology: Poems for the American People.

• February 12, 1891 – Hanna Rydh born, Swedish archaeologist and politician for the Liberal People's Party. She served as a Member of Parliament in the Riksdag (1943-1944) and the third President of the International Alliance of Women (1946-1952). She and her husband conducted archaeological excavations at Adelsö (1916-1930) and at Gästrikland (1917-1921). In 1922, she was granted a research grant from the International Federation of University Women. When asked if she should be given the scholarship, as she had just become a mother, she famously replied: "my son's birth makes no difference." She published articles in a number of popular scientific journals, and was regarded as an example of a successful ‘New Woman’ because she had an internationally respected career, and was also a married woman with a family.

• February 12, 1909 – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded. Charter members include  Mary Church Terrell, Ida Wells-Barnett, Anna Garlin Spencer, and Mary White Ovington. The NAACP is now the oldest and largest grassroots-based civil rights organization in the U.S.

    Ida Wells-Barnett —  Mary White Ovington —  Mary Church Terrell —  Anna Garlin Spencer

• February 12, 1914 – Johanna von Caemmerer Neumann born in Germany, British mathematician noted for her work on group theory. She was an outstanding student at the University of Berlin, and became a part-time assistant in the Mathematical Institute’s library. She met Bernhard Neumann in 1933. When the Nazis came to power that year, Neumann, who was Jewish, left Germany and moved to Cambridge, England. She visited him there, and they became secretly engaged, but she returned to Germany to continue her studies. She lost her job in the library after she joined a group of students who tried to prevent Nazis’ disruption of lectures by Jewish academics, but was able to complete her undergraduate degree by 1936, with distinctions in mathematics and physics, and began working toward her Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1937. She and Bernard corresponded anonymously through friends, but were only able to meet once, in Denmark while he was attending the 1936 International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. In 1938, she left Germany, and married Bernhard in Cardiff. The couple moved to Oxford in 1940, where she completed her Doctor of Philosophy in group theory at the Society of Home Students, Oxford. She became a British citizen, and took a teaching position at the University of Hull in 1946, then became a lecturer at the Mathematics Department of Manchester College of Science and Technology in 1958. In 1963, she and her husband took academic positions at the Australian National University in Canberra. She became chair of mathematics in 1964, and dean of students (1968-1969). In 1969, she became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 1971, she died from a cerebral aneurysm at age 57 while she was on a lecture tour in Canada.

• February 12, 1915 – Olivia Hooker born; after her application to join the U.S. Navy’s WAVES was rejected because she was black, she became the first African American woman to join the Coast Guard, becoming a SPAR, the Coast Guard’s Women’s Reserve during WWII (1945-1946), and a Yeoman, Second Class; after the war, she earned her degree as a psychologist, and was an associate professor at Fordham University, and a founding member of the American Psychological Association’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Division.

• February 12, 1925 – Joan Mitchell born, American abstract expressionist painter, noted for her very large canvasses with animals, and her poetry, which also included nature and animal subjects. Mitchell was one of a handful of women painters who gained critical acclaim and international recognition in the post-WWII era. She moved to Paris in 1959, and spent most of the rest of her life in France. In 1993, the Joan Mitchell Foundation was founded, which awards grants and stipends to painters, sculptors, and artist collectives, and sponsors an artist-in-residence program. She died of lung cancer at age 67 in 1992.

• February 12, 1934 – Anne Krueger born, American economist, former World Bank Chief Economist, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

• February 12, 1948 – Nancy Leftenant-Colon becomes the first black woman accepted in the regular U.S. Army nursing corps.

• February 12, 1961 – Di Farmer born, Australian Labor politician; Deputy Speaker of the Queensland Legislative Assembly (2015-2018); Minister for Child Safety, Youth and Women, as well as Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence (2017-2020); Member of the Queensland Parliament for  Bulimba (2015 to present, previously 2009-2012).

• February 12, 1980 – Christina Ricci born, American actress and producer. She made her acting debut at age 10 in Mermaids, and appeared in the 1991 motion picture version of The Addams Family. She made the transition from child characters to teen roles in The Ice Storm, and then transitioned into adult roles, often playing offbeat characters. She was a producer on The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (2015) and Z: The Beginning of Everything (2017). Ricci is the national spokesperson for RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network).

• February 12, 1983 – Two hundred women protest in Lahore, Pakistan, against the proposed Law of Evidence of military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, which declared that the testimony of two women in a lawsuit is equal to the testimony of one man; the women, carrying only petitions to the Lahore High Court, are tear-gassed, baton-charged, and thrown into jail. In 2006, the women succeeded in getting the Women’s Protection Bill passed. It repealed the Law of Evidence and the infamous Hudood Ordinance (which brought back stoning, lashing, and amputation as punishments, and made adultery and fornication criminal offences, with no distinction between rape and consensual sex, so rape victims could be tried for fornication or adultery).

• February 12, 1990 – Carmen Lawrence becomes Premier of Western Australia, the first woman premier of an Australian state.

• February 12, 2020 – A hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives on the proposed Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), the first hearing on proactive legislation to protect abortion access in the House in nearly thirty years, was well attended by women’s rights activists, who filled the hearing room, submitted testimony for the record, and mobilized women’s networks to support the bill. Holly Alvarado testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health: “I am a decorated campaign veteran who was taught Geneva Conventions, NATO rules of engagement, and trusted to be competent in my abilities enough to teach them to future Airmen. Yet, when making a decision over my own life I was not trusted to know what was best for myself. Several state laws had made that clear to me. The decision to continue or end a pregnancy is a healthcare decision that cannot be made by one individual for another individual. I cannot reconcile that our government trusted me to hold weapons of protection for our country and serve as a respected member of our armed services, but could not trust me to make the right decision over my own body.”

Holly Alvarado, on right, testifying —  Nancy Northup, President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, on left —  Cal Cary photo

• February 12, 2021 – Marta Lempart, a key leader of the Polish Women’s Strike movement, was charged with criminal felonies, including insulting a police officer, praising vandalism of churches, “malicious obstruction of religious services,” and causing an epidemiological threat for organizing protests during the coronavirus pandemic. Under Polish law, a person can face from six months to eight years of imprisonment for causing an epidemiological threat. The movement has been leading mass nationwide protests against Poland’s near-total ban on abortion. Lempart said that she sees the charges as an intensification of political pressure on her movement. Many protesters have previously been charged with misdemeanors for participating in the protests. Lempart said that in almost all of the cases the courts have dropped those charges. The protests began in October, 2020, when the constitutional court ruled to ban abortions in the case of fetal defects, growing into the largest anti-government mass movement in Poland since communism fell more than 30 years ago. The ruling took effect in late January. The abortion restriction was widely denounced by lawmakers in the European Parliament earlier in the week, with most saying it marks a violation of women’s rights.

Marta Lempart — photo Czarek Sokolowski/AP

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• February 13, 1879 – Sarojini Naidu born, Indian author, poet, activist, and politician; first woman to be President of the Indian National Congress, first woman to be Governor of Uttar Pradesh.

• February 13, 1889 – Leontine Sagan born, Austrian-Hungarian film director and theatre producer; her family moved to South Africa when she was ten, but she worked in Germany in the 1920s as an actress. She became notable for her film directing debut, the 1931 film, Mädchen in Uniform, which featured an all-woman cast, and a ground-breaking portrayal of lesbianism. The production was also one of the earliest films to use co-operative and profit-sharing financing. After its success, she moved to England, where she directed Men of Tomorrow, and worked in Alexander Korda’s film studio. Later she was a theatre producer in Manchester, then became the first woman producer at London’s Drury Lane, producing a series of Ivor Novello musicals in the West End. In the 1940s, Sagan returned to South Africa, and co-founded the National Theatre in Johannesburg.

• February 13, 1906 – Pauline Frederick born, pioneering American woman  television news correspondent; she also worked in newspapers and radio, and was the first woman reporter to broadcast from China. She was on a team that covered the Nuremberg Trials, but Frederick was often relegated to “women’s interest” stories. In 1948, she finally got her opportunity when she was the only reporter available to cover a breaking story at the United Nations. Later in 1948, she was selected to cover the first televised political convention, an experience that gained her instant credibility. In 1949, after years of struggle, Pauline Frederick became the “first women ever to work full-time for a U.S. television Network,” ABC. Also in 1949, she premiered a weekday news program entitled “Pauline Frederick Reports”, and ABC promoted her as the only female commentator broadcasting on-air. She worked for ABC until 1953, when NBC hired her to cover the United Nations, which she did for the next 21 years, and it made her a familiar face and name on American television. Anchorman Chet Huntley commented about her reporting, “She is our dependable right arm in sorting out the legalities, the propaganda, the nationalistic sensitivities and the international nuances which frequent the UN.” But when she retired from NBC in 1975, she was earning not only much less than her male counterparts, but was being paid close to the salaries of other women who had only been in broadcast news for a year. She worked for National Public Radio until 1980, when she retired from the airwaves, but gave lectures on the United Nations until her death at age 82 in 1990.

• February 13, 1911 – Jean Muir born, American actress, first victim of Hollywood blacklisting. She debuted on Broadway in 1930, then was signed by Warner Brothers in 1933, and made 14 films for the studio before returning to Broadway in 1937. She appeared in a few films after that, and had been considered for the role of Melanie in Gone With the Wind, but displeased the studio executives because of her involvement in the formation of the Screen Actors Guild, her questioning of the way the film business operated, and her resistance to posing for publicity photos. In 1950, Muir was named as a Communist sympathizer in the notorious Red Channels pamphlet, and was immediately removed from her role in the television series The Aldrich Family, in spite of thousands of phone calls protesting the decision, and only a few calls complaining about her appearance on the show, because General Foods, the primary sponsor of the program, threatened to pull their ads if she stayed. Muir was the first performer to be deprived of employment because of the Red Channels pamphlet. The ‘sympathizer’ label was apparently based on her six-month membership in the Congress of American Women, a women’s rights organization founded in 1946 by Elinor Gimbel, widow of a member of the department store family, following a feminist conference in Paris. The CAW became affiliated with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which had the stated goal of working for women’s rights, but was widely believed to be a pro-Soviet communist front organization, and later did support the East German communist regime. Muir began teaching drama and directing plays at community theatres in New York, then moved to Missouri in 1968 to be the Master Acting Teacher at Stephens College, until she reached the college’s mandatory retirement age.

• February 13, 1916 – Dorothy Bliss born, American carcinologist (study of crustaceans), Curator of Invertebrates (1967-1980) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and editor-in-chief of the 10 volume series The Biology of Crustacea. Bliss was a pioneer in the study of hormonal control in crustaceans, and was president of the American Society of Zoologists.

• February 13, 1919 – Evelyn Freeman Roberts born, Black American bandleader, songwriter, arranger, and composer; co-founder with her husband Tommy Roberts of the Young Saints Scholarships Foundation, which provided training in the arts in South Central Los Angeles. They were honored in 1993 by the NAACP with a Community Service Award. Freeman also ran her own nightclub, The Upstairs, on the Sunset Strip. She died at the age of 98 in 2017.

• February 13, 1926 – Fay Ajzenberg-Selove born in Germany to a Jewish family; American nuclear physicist. She and her family fled the Nazis in 1940, via a torturous route through the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean before reaching the U.S. in 1941. She was known for experimental work on nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, and her reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei; recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Science. Her memoir, A Matter of Choices, was published in 1994.

• February 13, 1932 – Susan Oliver born as Charlotte Gercke, American actress mostly in theatre and television, television director and aviator. She was one of the original 19 women admitted to the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women.  In 1977, she wrote and directed her AFI-DWW short film, Cowboysan, and then began directing episodes of several network television series, including M*A*S*H, Magnum PI, and Murder She Wrote. She was also an accomplished pilot, and was the fourth woman to fly a single-engine plane solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1968, she was offered a chance by Learjet to earn a type rating in one of their jets, and added that rating to her commercial pilot certificate in single- and multi-engine land airplanes. In 1970, Oliver was the co-pilot of the victorious Piper Comanche in the 2760-mile transcontinental race for women pilots, dubbed the “Powder Puff Derby.” In 1972, she got a glider rating. Oliver died of cancer at age 58 in 1990.

• February 13, 1943 – Elaine Pagels born, biblical scholar, author, Princeton professor of religion, known for work on Nag Hammadi manuscripts, won a National Book Award for The Gnostic Gospels; also wrote Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity.

• February 13, 1943 – The first women to sign up for non-clerical duties enlist in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, inducted into specialties ranging from cooks to transport personnel and mechanics. One-third of the women served in aviation-related jobs. Almost 18,000 women went through training at Camp Lejeune, but the entire women’s reserve was discharged in March 1946.  The first director of the Women’s Reserve was Colonel Ruth Cheney Streeter.

Marine Corps Women's Reserve Schools, Camp Lejuene — WWII recruitment poster — Colonel Ruth Cheney Streeter

• February 13, 1945 – Marian Dawkins born, British biologist, professor of Animal Behavior, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford; noted for research in animal signaling, vision in birds, behavioral synchrony, animal consciousness, and animal welfare. Dawkins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014, for her substantial contributions to natural knowledge.

• February 13, 1950 – Dame Vera Baird born, British Labour politician and barrister; serving as Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales (2019-2022); Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner (2012-2016); Solicitor General for England and Wales (2007-2010); Member of Parliament for Redcar (2001-2010); noted for her advocacy of neighbourhood policing and making ending violence against women a priority.

• February 13, 1960 – Diane Nash became a leader of the Nashville sit-ins, part of the protests against segregation at lunch counters and other venues in the American South. The Nashville campaign, which began on February 13 and lasted into May, 1960, was coordinated by the Nashville Student Movement and the Nashville Christian Leadership Council. Nash was a student at Fiske University, but she was born and grew up in Chicago, so she had not faced the blatant discrimination and Jim Crow laws in Southern states before. After attending workshops led by James Lawson in nonviolent civil disobedience, she became chair of organizing nonviolent protests at Fiske, and of student participation in the Nashville sit-ins, one of the first sit-ins to be primarily composed of college students and other young people. Students continued the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters for months, accepting arrest in line with nonviolent principles. Nash, with John Lewis, led the protesters in a policy of refusing to pay bail. When Nash asked Nashville's mayor, Ben West, on the steps of City Hall, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?," the mayor admitted that he did. Three weeks later, the lunch counters of Nashville were serving blacks. After the success of the lunch counter sit-ins, Diane Nash and three other students were served at the Post House Restaurant in Nashville. Nash later served jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" — nine students jailed in 1961 after a lunch counter sit-in in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They were all sentenced to pay a $50 fine for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter. Chosen as spokesperson, Nash said to the judge, "We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants."

• February 13, 2012 – Rita Dove, poet and author, the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987), and U.S. Poet Laureate (1993-1995), is awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

• February 13, 2020 – In her first public remarks since leaving the U.S. foreign service on January 31, 2020, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, said that the Trump administration’s handling of foreign policy risked alienating allies and driving them into the arms of other partners they find more reliable. The veteran former ambassador was ousted from her post in Kyiv by Donald Trump in May, 2019, at the time the president and his associates were putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to launch investigations of Trump’s political opponents. Yovanovitch gave evidence about the pressure campaign at congressional impeachment hearings before retiring from the foreign service altogether. She told impeachment investigators she felt “shocked and devastated” by Trump’s personal attacks on her, which he tweeted even before she testified. “We need to be principled, consistent and trustworthy,” she said while accepting an award for diplomacy at Georgetown University. “To be blunt, an amoral, keep-them-guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear, and confusion for trust cannot work over the long haul.”

• February 13, 2021 – In a new biography of painter and designer Isabel Rawsthorne, Out of the Cage, author Dr. Carol Jacobi shows how the artist became a footnote because of her change of surnames during her three marriages. Dr. Jacobi makes a powerful argument that generations of women artists, composers, and writers have been lost to history because their names changed after marriage. “Power really does reside in a name,” said Jacobi, a curator at Tate Britain. “When Rawsthorne died no one connected her to the artist known as Isabel Lambert, who had created so many designs during the Festival of Britain, nor to the bohemian muse Isabel Delmer, and certainly not to the promising artist Isabel Nicholas [her maiden name], who had exhibited in London in the 1930s.” Jacobi believes many artistic legacies have been mislaid this way. A child prodigy such as Emma Jones, said Jacobi, has limited recognition now only because her husband, Alexis Soyer, made sure her work was credited when she died in childbirth at age 28, in 1842. Other artists yet to be retrieved from the margins include the American modernist Helen Torr, whose career, despite early acclaim in the 1920s in New York, was overshadowed by her husband, abstract artist Arthur Dove. In Scotland, the contributions of Margaret Macdonald, wife of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, are becoming known. She created many features of her husband’s popular work, shaping the “Glasgow Style” of the 1890s, as he acknowledged, writing: “Margaret has genius, I have only talent.” The problem is widespread across culture, according to the crusading academic Anna Beer, author of Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music.  She says, “The problem really started in the 19th century with the idea of a wife as property … Before that, in the previous 200 years, women artists and musicians often hung on to a family name if it positioned them helpfully as part of a creative dynasty.” Beer also believes an immoral taint on artistic effort in the Victorian era stopped women putting themselves forward. Writing for public consumption was seen as akin to prostitution. “So you can see why women chose to publish anonymously or adopted men’s names,” Beer said.

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• February 14, 1813 – Lydia Hamilton Smith born, African-American businesswoman and abolitionist, daughter of a free biracial woman and an Irish father.  She married a free black man, Jacob Smith, with whom she had two sons, but she separated from her husband, and moved in 1847 with her mother and her sons to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She went to work as a housekeeper for Thaddeus Stevens, one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party, and a fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against black Americans. There was much speculation about the relationship between Stevens and Smith, and many of their contemporaries considered her his common-law wife, but there is no evidence beyond rumor of what was between them. In a brief surviving letter to her from Stevens, he addressed her as “Mrs. Smith.” When he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1848, she also kept his house in Washington DC when he was in residence there, serving as his unofficial hostess for political dinners, until his death in 1868. They were both involved with the Underground Railroad, which later led to the burning of the Stevens ironworks in Pennsylvania during the U.S. Civil War. During and after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Smith hired a horse and wagon, collecting food and supplies for the wounded from neighbors in Adams, York, and Lancaster counties, then delivered them to the makeshift hospitals. In his will, Stevens left her the choice of a $5,000 lump sum, or an annual allowance of $500, and any furniture she wanted from his house. With the inheritance, Smith became a successful businesswoman, buying Stevens’ house and the adjoining lot, and running a prosperous boarding house in Washington. She also invested in other real estate and various business ventures.

• February 14, 1838 – Margaret E. Knight born, American inventor; held 87 patents, including one for a machine to fold and glue paper bags with flat bottoms, a new valve sleeve for an automobile engine, and six patents for machines used in manufacturing shoes. She did not make much money from her inventions because, as an unmarried self-supporting working-class woman, she was not able to wait for royalties, but had to sell the rights to her inventions outright. She never married, and died in 1914 at age 76. Knight was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. A scaled-down but fully functional patent model of her original bag-making machine is in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

• February 14, 1847 – Anna Howard Shaw born, America minister and physician, one of the first U.S. women ordained as a Methodist minister, and one of the most influential leaders of the women’s suffrage movement and the temperance movement. She helped broker reconciliation in 1890 between the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Equal Rights Association, which had split in 1869 over whether or not to support the 15^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Shaw became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) after the two groups merged, and focused on securing a national constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. She resigned as NAWSA president in 1915 because she opposed the militant tactics being employed by younger NAWSA members Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, such as picketing the White House. Carrie Chapman Catt took over as NAWSA president. For Shaw’s service as head of the Women’s Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense during WWI, she became the first woman awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, for exceptionally meritorious service to the government in a duty of great responsibility related to the U.S. military. In a speech shortly before her death in 1919 she said that “the only way to refute” the argument that America was a democracy and therefore American women were entitled to vote was “to prove that women are not people.”

• February 14, 1870 – Esther Hobart Morris, suffragist, begins her tenure as the first female U.S. Justice of the Peace. She was appointed after the previous justice resigned in protest over Wyoming’s December 1869 passage of a women’s suffrage amendment to the state constitution. She played a large part in getting Wyoming to pass the first woman suffrage law in the U.S. by lobbying 22 members of the territorial legislature, arguing that legalizing women’s suffrage would “prove a great advertisement” to induce more women and families to settle in Wyoming, and the increased number of residents would help the territory gain statehood. William Bright, urged by his wife Julia, introduced the suffrage measure. When Wyoming did become a state in 1890, suffrage became Article 6 of the new Wyoming state constitution, ensuring universal suffrage.  

• February 14, 1874 – Charlotta A. Spears Bass born, newspaper publisher and civil rights activist, worked for the California Eagle newspaper in Los Angeles (1904-1951), taking over after the owner/editor died – by 1925 it was the West Coast’s largest Black newspaper, circulation 60,000; she was the first African American woman U.S. Vice Presidential candidate when the Progressive Party chose her as their nominee in 1952.

• February 14, 1891 – Katherine Stinson born; at 16, she started learning to fly, and became the 4th licensed U.S. woman pilot in 1912; she was the first woman to “loop the loop” (1915), and the first woman to fly in Asia, drawing a crowd of 25,000 to watch in Tokyo.

• February 14, 1898 – Angela Bambace born, union organizer; in 1956, she became the first Italian-American immigrant to serve as a Vice President of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and a member of the General Executive Board.  

• February 14, 1904 – Jessie Lloyd O’Connor born, journalist, social reformer, and political activist. She reported on textile strikes in North Carolina and coal strikes in Harland Co., Kentucky, and brought attention to those accused of communism, Vietnam anti-war opposition, and anti-Reagan protests. O’Connor, like her mother, she was a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

• February 14, 1914 – Nancy Love born, pilot, ferried planes to Canada during World War II as Commander of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) 1940-1942; her group was later absorbed into WASPs.

• February 14, 1920 – The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago by Carrie Chapman Catt and Emma Smith DeVoe. Maude Wood Park  became its first president. The LWV mission included registering newly enfranchised women voters, providing information on the voting process, and on issues on the ballot, and advocating for voting rights. It has grown to be a reliable non-partisan source of information on ballot measures, and an advocate for campaign finance reform, universal health care, abortion rights, civics education, climate change action and environmental regulation, and gun control. The LWV sponsored the U.S. Presidential debates in 1976, 1980, and 1984 (until the Republican Party objected.)

 Emma Smith DeVoe and Carrie Chapman Catt

• February 14, 1921 – Hazel McCallion born, Canadian independent politician; she was the first Chancellor of Sheridan College (2016-2023); longest-serving Mayor of Mississauga, Ontario (1978-2014), dubbed by her supporters as “Hurricane Hazel” for her outspoken style. In 2016, February 14 was declared ‘Hazel McCallion Day’ across the province of Ontario, in honor of her birthday. She died at age 101 on January 29, 2023.

• February 14, 1941 – Donna Shalala born, University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor (1988-1993), U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (1993-2001), president of the University of Miami (2001- 2015), awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.

• February 14, 1952 – Sushma Swaraj born, Indian politician and lawyer, India’s second woman to be Minister of External Affairs (2014-2019); Minister of Overseas Indian Affair (2-14-2016); selected seven times as a Member of Parliament; The Wall Street Journal called her one of India’s “best loved” politicians by. She died of a heart attack at age 67 in 2019.

• February 14, 1952 – Dorothy V. Bishop born, British psychologist specializing in developmental disorders and language impairments; Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford since 1998; Principal Investigator for the Oxford Study of Children’s Communication Impairments (OSCCI), and a supernumerary fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.

• February 14, 1955 – Carol Kalish born, American writer, editor, comic book retailer, wholesaler, and sales manager; Direct Sales Manager and Vice President of New Product Development at Marvel Comics (1981-1991), where she was a pioneer in the comics direct market, starting a Marvel program which helped pay for the purchase of cash registers by comic book stores. Kalish won the 1991 Inkpot Award. She died suddenly at the age of 36 of a brain aneurysm.

• February 14, 1967 – Aretha Franklin records her iconic song “Respect.”

• February 14, 1973 – Annalisa Buffa born, Italian mathematician, known for numerical analysis and partial differential equations; Director at the Istituto di matematica applicata e tecnologie informatiche "E. Magenes" (IMATI) of the CNR (National Research Council) in Pavia (2013-2016). Buffa was awarded the 2007 Bartolozzi Prize and the 2015 Collatz Prize.

• February 14, 1974 – Rie Rasmussen born, Danish actress, film director, writer, and photographer; she wrote and directed the short film Thinning the Herd before writing, directing, and producing her first feature film, Human Zoo, which was an official selection at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival.

• February 14, 1977 – Anna G. Erschler born in Russia, mathematician working in France, specializing in geometric group theory, and probability theory, especially random walks (a mathematical object consisting of a succession of random steps) on groups; awarded the 2001 Möbius Prize of the Independent University of Moscow, the 2002 Annual Prize of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical Society, and the 2015 Élie Cartan Prize of the French Academy of Sciences.

• February 14, 1980 – Michelle Ye, aka Michelle Ye Xuan, born in China, actress and producer; she is fluent in Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. Ye immigrated to the U.S. at age 10, and in high school won first place at the 1998 International Science and Engineering Fair in the Botany sector. In 1999, she began working for TVB, a Hong Kong-based television broadcasting company, playing leading roles in several dramas, and was their on-site reporter during the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. She is the founder and chair of her production company, Michelle Ye Studios-Zhejiang Bohai Television Ltd, and vice president of the Hengdian Film Association.

• February 14, 1988 – Katie Boland born, Canadian film producer, director, screenwriter, and actress; wrote and directed Lolz-ita, and was the producer and writer on Long Story, Short, Fateful and Sweetieface.

• February 14, 2011 – In northern Malaysia, 55-year-old Han Besau heard her husband Tambun Gediu screaming when he was attacked by a tiger, so she rushed out with a wooden soup ladle and began hitting the tiger with it. The tiger fled. Her husband received hospital treatment for injuries to his face and legs. He said, “I had to wrestle with it to keep its jaws away from me, and it would have clawed me to death if my wife had not arrived."

• February 14, 2018 – In Kenya, years after her baby was lead-poisoned, Phyllis Omido is the nation’s leading anti-pollution campaigner. She has been threatened by thugs, arrested by police, and forced into hiding after being beaten up, all for organising opposition to a lead-smelting factory in Mombasa, which was poisoning residents in the neighbouring shantytown of Owino Uhuru. The Centre for Justice, Governance, and Environmental Action, which Omido founded in 2009, forced the closure of the plant. In 2016, her NGO group began signing up thousands of local residents for a class action suit against the government and two companies – Metal Refinery EPZ Ltd and Penguin Paper and Book Company (no connection with the global publishing company) for 1.6bn Kenyan shillings (£11.5m) in compensation and for cleaning up the contaminated land. Her day in court, in what the UN hopes will be a landmark case for environmental defenders across Africa, finally began March 19, 2018, when the plaintiffs in the suit were called as witnesses in the environment and land court. In August, 2020, the court awarded £9.2 million ($12 million USD) to the community to compensate the victims and begin the clean-up.

• February 14, 2021 – The U.S. Senate voted to allow the managers to request witness testimony on the 13th, but the managers instead chose to simply add a Republican congresswoman’s statement to the official trial record without calling any witnesses. “I know that people are feeling a lot of angst, and believe that maybe if we had this, the senators would have done what we wanted,” House impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett told CNN. “We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines.” Plaskett, who is the delegate for the U.S. Virgin Islands in the House of Representatives, was the first non-voting member of the House to be on a team of impeachment managers in American history.  

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Sources

• http://www.nwhp.org/events/february/
• http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/important-dates-us-womens-history

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

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Feminist Cats Learning Black History Online

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For those of you who want to dive deeper, the rest of the list of this week’s Women Trailblazers and Events in Women’s History is here:

www.dailykos.com/...