WOW2 - March 2023: Women Trailblazers and Activists, 3-17 thru 3-24

officebss for This Week in the War on Women

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

Saturday March 18, 2023 · 3:29 PM PDT

2023/03/18 · 15:29

no image description available — “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” – Cheris Kramarae, Women’s Studies Scholar

March is National Women’s History Month

“Some men say that they think
a tax-paying woman should
have the ballot. I contend that
the poorest factory girl is
helping pay the taxes and she
should have a right to say
something about the
care, fire protection and
sanitary condition
of property.”

– Margaret Foley in 1911,
Boston suffragist and
labor organizer

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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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“Our problems, our experiences
as women are profoundly unique
as compared to the other half
of the human race.”
– Lorraine Hansberry,
American playwright of
A Raisin in the Sun

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“Patriarchal religion and ethics
tend to lump the female and sex
together as if the whole burden of
the onus and stigma it attaches to
sex were the fault of the female
alone. Thereby sex, which is known
to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating,
pertains to the female, and the male
identity is preserved as a human,
rather than a sexual one.”
― Kate Millett,
American feminist,
author of Sexual Politics

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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 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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March 17, 1665 – Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre born into a family of master musicians instrument-makers, French harpsichord player and composer; noted for the 1687 publication of Premier livre de pièces de clavessin (First Book of Harpsichord Pieces), one of the few harpsichord collections printed in France in the 17^th Century, and Céphale et Procris, the first opera written by a French woman to be produced.

March 17, 1842 – Rosina Heikel born, Finnish doctor and feminist; the first woman physician in Finland (1878); her license was limited to treating women and children. The city of Helsinki created the post of city gynecologist for her in 1883, but she couldn’t register as a member of the Finnish Medical Society until 1884. Helsinki expanded her position to include pediatrics in 1889, and she served until 1901, while also maintaining a private practice until 1906. Heikel was an advocate for women's rights, and a member of Naisasialiitto Unioni (Union of Women’s Societies). She helped found Konkordia-liitto, an organization for academic women. In 1892, Heikel addressed the Naisasialiitto Unioni to promote equal educational opportunities for girls and boys, and was an advocate for children's health in rural Finland.

March 17, 1849 – Cornelia M. Clapp born, notable American zoologist and marine biologist; earned the first and second Ph.D. awarded to an American woman, at the University of Syracuse and the University of Chicago. She studied chick embryos and earthworms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and toadfish at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. As an instructor, her philosophy was "Study nature, not books!" In 1904, Clapp became a professor of zoology at Mount Holyoke. Her students learned by doing, often going out of doors; she influenced generations of students, and encouraged many young women to pursue careers in science; noted for The Lateral Line System of Batrachus Tau.

March 17, 1873 – Margaret Bondfield born, British Labour politician, feminist, and trade unionist; first UK woman Cabinet minister and first female privy council member; one of the first three Labour Party women elected as Members of Parliament (1923-1931).

March 17, 1877 – Edith New born, English suffragette; she left her teaching career shortly after 1900 to work as an organizer and campaigner for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and in January, 1908, chained herself railings at 10 Downing Street shouting “Votes for Women!” to create a diversion for other protesters to sneak past the railings before being arrested. In June, 1908, she and Mary Leigh were the first two suffragettes to use vandalism as a tactic, breaking two windows at 10 Downing Street. They were arrested and sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison. New staged a hunger strike. When New and Leigh were released from prison, a parade was held in their honor, with suffragettes pulling them in a carriage through the streets. She continued to address crowds until 1911, when she returned to teaching, in Lewisham, a small town southeast of London.

March 17, 1902 – Alice Greenough born, carried mail at age 15, joined a Wild West show, became a professional rodeo rider in 1921, earning about $12,000 yearly, and toured Australia and Spain as well as the U.S. She started her own rodeo business, and was the first inductee to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

March 17, 1903 – Vera Leigh born, Englishwoman adopted as an infant by American racehorse trainer H. Eugene Leigh and his English wife, and raised in France around the stables at Maisons-Laffitte near Paris. When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, she left to join her fiancé in Lyon, and began helping Allied servicemen to escape over the Pyrenees into Spain. In 1942, she took the route herself, making her way to England via Gibraltar. With her perfect French, she was quickly recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). At age 40, she returned to France in 1943, as “Suzanne Chavanne,” a milliner’s assistant. She was a courier for the Donkeyman network and the subcircuit Inventor, and also escorted downed airman who spoke no French from safe houses to their next point of contact on the escape route. The Inventor group was betrayed by a double agent, and she was arrested in October 1943. In May, 1944, she and several other captured women SOE agents were sent under guard to a prison in Karlsruhe, Germany. In July, 1944, Leigh was one of four SOE women who were moved to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France, where they were dosed with phenol and then shoved unconscious into a crematorium oven. One of the women, never identified by name, regained consciousness and fought for her life, but was overcome and pushed into the flames. Four of the men responsible were tried after the war. Leigh posthumously received the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct, and she is listed on the “Roll of Honor” of SOE agents who died for their country.

March 17, 1905 – Billie/Lillian Yarbo born as Lillian Yarbough, African American stage and screen comedienne, dancer, and singer who worked at Harlem night spots and on the Broadway stage in the 1920s. She made her screen debut in 1936, and appeared in at least 50 films, including Stella Dallas, You Can’t Take It With You, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Destry Rides Again, They Drive By Night, and Saratoga Trunk, but was often uncredited, and usually cast as a maid. Her last film appearances were in 1949. She had managed her finances well, and spent most of the remainder of her life living in relative comfort in Seattle, Washington, where she died at age 91 in 1996.

March 17, 1910 – Camp Fire Girls established as the first interracial, non-sectarian American organization for girls, founded by Luther Gulick, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, and Charlotte Alien Farnsworth.

March 17, 1917 – Loretta Perfectus Walsh becomes the first woman to join the U.S. Navy and first woman to officially join the military in a role other than a nurse.

March 17, 1921 – Dr Marie Stopes opens Britain’s first birth control clinic, in London.

March 17, 1933 – Myrlie Evers-Williams born, American journalist and activist, Chair of the NAACP (1995-1998); fought for 30 years to bring her husband’s killer to justice, after two all-white juries failed to convict; the first woman and first layperson to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration, for President Obama’s second inaugural.

March 17, 1955 – Cynthia A. McKinney born, African American politician and activist; first black woman elected to represent Georgia in the U.S. House (D-GA 1993-1997 and 2005-2007); left the Democratic Party in 2008 to join the U.S. Green Party.

March 17, 1962 – ‘Ank’ Anna Bijleveld born, Dutch civil servant and politician; Minister of Defence (2017-2021); King’s Commissioner (2011-2017) of Overijssel, a Dutch province; State Secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations (2007-2010); Mayor of Hof van Twente (2001-2007); Member of the Netherlands House of Representatives (2010-2011).

March 17, 1969 – Golda Meir, whose father moved their family to Milwaukee from Ukraine when she was 8 years old, is sworn in as the first woman and fourth Prime Minister of Israel (1969-1974).

March 17, 1979 – Mineko Nomachi born, Japanese essayist, columnist, illustrator, cultural commentator, and radio and television co-host; best known for her blog, I'm Queer but I'm an Office Lady, which was published in book form in 2006.

March 17, 2015 – The Presbyterian Church (USA), the largest Presbyterian denomination in the U.S., formally changed its constitution to permit same-sex weddings. Over half of the church's 171 regional presbyteries voted in favor of changing the church's definition of marriage from a union "between a woman and a man" to "between two people, traditionally a man and a woman." The change took effect June 21, 2015.

March 17, 2020 – Legislation to make abortion a crime in Idaho if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade headed to the governor’s desk after both houses of the state legislature voted to approve the measure, which includes exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, but would make it a felony to perform an abortion, and doctor’s licenses could be suspended or revoked. Opponents say the measure takes away women’s rights and doesn’t include provisions for the health of the woman, because pregnancy can cause serious lifelong health problems. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Senator Todd Lakey, has said the woman’s health is a secondary consideration. “The health of the woman does matter,” said Democratic Representative Brooke Green, arguing against the bill. All 13 Democrats present voted against the bill and were joined by five Republicans. Maternal mortality in Idaho in 2018 was 21.2 deaths per 100,000 births, higher than the national average of 19 deaths per 100,000 births, and higher than many so-called ‘third-world’ countries. On January 5, 2023, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that the Idaho Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion, rejecting a challenge to the states' abortion laws by Planned Parenthood.

March 17, 2021 – In an interview on NPR, Dr. Eric Vilian, a pediatrician and geneticist who studies sex differences in athletes, and an advisor to the International Olympic Committee and the NCAA, said bills being introduced in state legislatures to limit or prohibit transgender women from competing in women's athletics in school generally aren't based on scientific evidence. Earlier in March, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed into law the "Mississippi Fairness Act" prohibiting schools from allowing transgender female students to compete in female sports, citing "inherent differences between men and women" as one of the reasons to block these athletes from competition. “We know that men have, on average, an advantage in performance in athletics of about 10% to 12% over women … But the question is whether there is in real life, during actual competitions, an advantage of performance linked to this male hormone and whether trans athletes are systematically winning all competitions. The answer to this latter question, are trans athletes winning everything, is simple — that's not the case. And higher levels of the male hormone testosterone are associated with better performance only in a very small number of athletic disciplines: 400 meters, 800 meters, hammer throw, pole vault … I would say that every sport requires different talents and anatomies for success. So I think we should focus on celebrating this diversity, rather than focusing on relative notions of fairness. For example, the body of a marathon runner is extremely different from the body of a shot put champion, and a transwoman athlete may have some advantage on the basketball field because of her height, but would be at a disadvantage in gymnastics ... I will say that there is a huge difference between elite sports and sports in schools. Sports in schools are supposed to be primarily about inclusivity, setting individual goals, collective goals and well-being. And it is not supposed to be about crushing the competition. But if we want to make it this way, then the rules still need to be inclusive, or at least not come up with arguments that are not based in science.”

ChelseaMitchellCantonHighleftandTerryMillertransgenderBloomfieldHighattheClassSstatechampionship.MitchelllawsuitagainstConnecticuttobantransgenderathletes.jpg — Chelsea Mitchell of Canton High (left), and Terry Miller, who is trangender, of Bloomfield High at Class S state championship.

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March 18, 1634 – Madame de La Fayette born, French author who published La Princesse de Clèves, her most famous work anonymously, which was a very early French novel, and was probably France’s first historical novel.

March 18, 1827 – Janet Burnside Soga born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a family in the weaving trade who were members of the Hutchesontown Relief Church. She defied convention by marrying Tiyo Soga in 1857, a black South African studying for the ministry at the Presbyterian Church College in Edinburgh, who became the first ordained black Christian minister. She went with him to South Africa after their marriage, and they founded a mission at Mgwali, living in poor huts while raising money to build the church. The foundation stone was laid in 1861. Between 1858 and 1870, she gave birth to five sons and three daughters, but their second son was stillborn. After the family moved to a new mission station at Tutura, her husband died in 1871. She moved with the children to Emgali, where Tiyo’s aged mother was living, then later moved the family to Dollar, Scotland, where the children were educated at the Dollar Academy. All but one daughter returned to South Africa after completing their education. Janet Soga died in Glasgow in 1903.

March 18, 1863 – Salisbury Bread Riot: 50 women, wives of Confederate soldiers, attack stores with axes for selling food at higher than government prices in Salisbury NC; the “Female Raid” nets the women 23 barrels of flour, and quantities of molasses and salt. As more married men went off to war, farm production dropped, and women struggled to feed their families, but the Confederacy made little provision to assist the families, as was noted in newspaper coverage and editorials; no charges were filed against the women.

March 18, 1875 – Margaret Foley born, Boston labor organizer, suffragist, and social worker, she was an outspoken suffrage activist who would loudly confront anti-suffrage speakers. She made a solo balloon flight over Lawrence, Massachusetts, tossing suffrage literature from the basket in 1910.

March 18, 1904 – Margaret Tucker born, Aboriginal rights activist, a founding member of the Australian Aborigines’ League, founder of the United Council of Aboriginal and Islander Women; first indigenous appointee to the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board; author of If Everyone Cared.

March 18, 1922 – The first Bat Mitzvah in the U.S. is held for Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

March 18, 1927 – Lillian Vernon born as Lili Menasche in the Weimar Republic, American businesswoman and philanthropist after her Jewish family fled from Nazi Germany in 1937. She became an American citizen in 1942, and took her new last name from Mount Vernon; at age 24, she founded the Vernon Specialties Company in 1951, a mail order service, selling personalized handbags and belts, which became the Lillian Vernon Catalog in 1956, and the Lillian Vernon Corporation in 1965. When her company went public in 1987, it was the first company founded by a woman to be traded on the American Stock Exchange. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed her as chair of the White House National Business Women’s Council. Vernon sold her company in 2003. She was a strong supporter of Emily’s List, and the Women’s Campaign Fund, and a major donor for many civic organizations and charities, through the Lillian Vernon Foundation, which has continued since her death in 2015.

March 18, 1933 – Unita Z. Blackwell born, civil rights activist and politician; project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration drives; in 1965, she filed suit, Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, after the principal suspended over 300 black children, including her son, for wearing SNCC pins showing black and white hands clasping; in the suit, she also asked the school district to desegregate their schools per Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the U.S. District Court ruled that students wearing the pins was disruptive, but the school district must desegregate. The ruling was upheld on appeal, leading to one of the first desegregation plans in Mississippi. In 1976, she was elected mayor of Mayerville, Mississippi, and held the office until 2001, the first African American woman mayor in the state of Mississippi.

March 18, 1935 – Frances Luella Welsing born, American Afrocentrist psychiatrist; her 1970 essay, The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy) analyzed the origins of what she called white supremacy culture. Her opinions in The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, that homosexuality among African Americans was a ploy by white males to decrease the black population, that white people are genetically defective descendants of albino mutants, and that AIDS and crack cocaine were “chemical and biological warfare” by whites were highly controversial.

March 18, 1938 – Because of growing national concern over the spread of syphilis, New York state begins requiring serological blood tests of pregnant women – but not the fathers.

March 18, 1942 – Kathleen Collins born, African American playwright, civil rights activist, and pioneering director of films centered on black stories, including Losing Ground, which in 1982 was the first feature-length drama directed by a black American woman, and won First Prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, but was unable to get large-scale exhibition in the U.S. Collins died in 1988, but thanks to the efforts of her daughter, Losing Ground was restored and re-issued in 2015, and had its first theatrical release at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

March 18, 1947 – Deborah Lipstadt born, American historian; Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lipstadt is the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory; History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier; and The Eichmann Trial. In 1996, Holocaust denier David Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books for libel in an English court for characterizing some of his writings and public statements as Holocaust denial in her book Denying the Holocaust. English libel law places the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff. Lipstadt and Penguin won the case using the justification defence, namely by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous.

March 18, 1950 – Linda Partridge born, British geneticist whose field is the biology and genetics of aging and age-related diseases; founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Aging; a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1996, and elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2004.

March 18, 1964 – Isabel Noronha born, Mozambican documentary filmmaker; began her career at the National Cinema Institute as a production assistant, rising to continuity editor and production manager before becoming a director. In 1985, she, with other young filmmakers, made O Tempo dos Leopardos (Time of the Leopards), considered the first feature film made in Mozambique. Noronha helped co-found Coopimagem, a cooperative of the Mozambique directors’ guild. In 1991, she made Así na Cidade (Once upon a time in the city), a documentary about child-soldier war refugees who sold newspapers in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. In 2009, Noronha won the Cineposible Film Festival Creative Woman award for her film Mãe dos Netos (Mother of the Grandchildren).

March 18, 1970 – Queen Latifah born as Dana Owens, American rapper, singer-songwriter, actress, and producer, long considered one of hip-hops pioneering feminists, and recipient of two NAACP Image Awards.

March 18, 1979 – American feminist Kate Millet went to Iran with Canadian journalist Sophie Keir, under the auspices of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom, an organization Millet helped found seven years earlier. They were concerned for the rights of Iranian women. Under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the government abolished coeducational schools, revoked a law allowing wives to divorce their husbands, and warned working women to return to the veil in public or lose their jobs. “I was there as a friend,” Millet explains. “There was never a question of me organizing anything. I don’t even speak Farsi.” On March 8, a small rally planned for International Women’s Day at the gates of Tehran University unexpectedly attracted 20,000 women, who surged into in Tehran’s Freedom Square. Some men attacked the women with knives and acid, while other men linked arms struggling to form a protective barrier. Iranian authorities arrested Millet and Keir on March 17, refusing to tell them what the charges were. They were held overnight under armed guard at the immigration center, awaiting deportation. The next day, they are put on a plane, but not told its destination. After takeoff, their passports were returned, but stamped as barred from entering Iran again. Their flight landed in Paris. This was the largest women’s uprising in Iran’s history, but it was swiftly crushed by the new regime.

March 18, 1985 – ‘Bia’ Ana Beatriz born, Brazilian racing driver; first woman to win a race in the Indy Lights series, at Nashville Superspeedway in 2008, then won her second Indy Lights race in 2009 at Iowa Speedway.

March 18, 1989 – Lily Collins born, British-American actress and author; noted for performances in Abduction; The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones; and Rules Don’t Apply. Her first book was Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me (2017). An outspoken advocate against bullying, she serves as an ambassador for Bystander Revolution and for for the GO Campaign, a nonprofit working to improve the lives of orphans and vulnerable children by partnering with local grassroots projects that provide shelter, food, clean water, medical care, and education.

March 18, 2018 – Tennis champion Martina Navratilova accused the BBC of valuing male voices more than female voices, after discovering that fellow Wimbledon pundit John McEnroe was paid far more than she was. Navratilova, nine times Wimbledon ladies’ champion, was paid about £15,000 by the BBC for her commentator role at Wimbledon while McEnroe earned at least £150,000. McEnroe’s pay packet was revealed in a 2017 list of the BBC’s top-paid talent. Navratilova said she was told her pay was “comparable” to men doing the same job, “We were not told the truth, that’s for sure. It’s still the good old boys network.” She added her agent would be asking for more money in future.

March 18, 2020 – New Zealand’s parliament passed a landmark bill to decriminalise abortion after decades of campaigning. Previously, jail terms of up to 14 years for those who procured a termination were possible under the Crimes Act, but the law was never enforced and women who underwent abortions were not prosecuted. Justice Minister Andrew Little said, “For over 40 years, abortion has been the only medical procedure considered a crime in New Zealand. But from now abortions will be rightly treated as a health issue. The previous law required a woman seeking an abortion to go through many hoops. That resulted in delays in the procedure, and that was less safe. The changes agreed to by parliament will better ensure women get advice and treatment in a more timely way.” Key elements of the bill included removing abortion from the Crimes Act, allowing women to choose abortion up to 20 weeks after consultation with a General Practioner, and promoting counseling options for women choosing an abortion. Terry Bellamak, director of Alranz Abortion Rights Aotearoa, celebrated the move, “Finally the New Zealand parliament has brought abortion legislation into the 21st century …”

March 18, 2021 – In Italy, the ASST Rhodense health authority in Milan came under fire after distributing a questionnaire to recovering Covid-19 patients that included questions about cooking and housekeeping aimed solely at women. Intended to gather data on lingering symptoms of coronavirus, it asked about performing simple tasks like doing the shopping, using the telephone, driving a car, or using public transport. However, three of the questions – on preparing food, managing the home, and doing laundry – were marked “for women only.” After Luca Paladini of Sentinelli di Milano, an anti-discrimination group, posted the questionnaire on his Facebook page, authorities investigated and found the questions were based on the U.S.method “Lawton instrumental activities of daily living scale,” from the 1960s, used mainly to assess the ability of elderly people to independently perform daily tasks. However, the original American format has no questions marked exclusively for women. “So how come this wasn’t the case for the Italian one? Am I the only one who noticed?” asked Paladini. ASST Rhodense withdrew the questionnaire, saying there had been an “error in translation” and that “there was no discriminatory intent.”

MilanCovidquestionnairewithWomenOnlyhouseworkquestions2021.jpg

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March 19, 1844 – Minna Canth born, Finnish author, playwright, and women’s rights activist; known for The Pastor’s Family and The Worker’s Wife; she has been honored in Finland on her birthday since 2007, which is also the country’s Social Equality Day.

March 19, 1859 – Ellen Gates Starr born, American activist for child labor laws and safer industrial working conditions. Co-founded Hull House with Jane Addams in 1889, starting a kindergarten, then a day nursery, an infant care center, and a center for continuing education for adults. Starr added the Butler Art Gallery, a class in bookbindery, and an arts and crafts business school. She became paralyzed from the waist down in 1929 because of complications during spinal surgery. She was still seriously ill in 1931, and retired, to be cared for in a Catholic convent. She died in 1940 at the age of 80.

March 19, 1861 – Dame Nellie Melba born, Australian operatic soprano, first Australian internationally recognized as a classical musician.

March 19, 1879 – Nancy Langhorne Astor born in America, English politician; first woman elected to the British House of Commons.

March 19, 1880 – Ernestine Rose born, American librarian, named for 19^th century feminist Ernestine Polowsky Rose. She studied at the New York State Library School, and had a summer job at the Lower East Side branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), helping Russian-Jewish immigrants to adjust to a new country without trying to ‘Americanize’ them. During WWI, she was director of hospital libraries for the American Library Association (ALA). She worked as head librarian (1915-1917) at the NYPL Seward Park Branch, encouraging her staff to become well versed in the Jewish, Yiddish, and Russian literature, and the culture of the surrounding community. In 1920, she was promoted to branch librarian at Harlem’s 135^th Street Branch. She hired four new librarians, all African-American, to help her turn the library into a community center, where local groups could hold meetings. She instituted readings, story hours, free public lectures, exhibitions of Black artists and sculptors, and a reference collection of Black Literature. In 1922, she worked with Franklin Hopper, Central Branch’s chief of circulation, the National Urban League, and the American Association for Adult Education to secure a combined $15,000 grant from the Rosenwald Fund and the Carnegie Corporation to form the Harlem Committee, which developed cultural programs with well-known speakers, vocational programs at the YWCA and the Urban League, and social programs within the Harlem community. In 1926, the committee oversaw purchasing the Arthur A. Schomburg collection for the Division of Negro Literature and History, which later became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The collection had over 5,000 volumes, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, and several thousand pamphlets, showcasing African American history and culture. In 1933, Rose worked with the Works Progress Administration on a writers’ project for the library. She worked for the NYPL until her retirement in 1942.

March 19, 1881 – Edith Nourse Rogers born, American politician, first woman elected to the U.S. Congress from Massachusetts. In her 35 years in the House, she was an advocate for veterans, sponsoring the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (AKA the G.I. Bill), the 1942 bill that created the Women’s Army Auxiliary (WAAC), and the 1943 bill that created the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).

March 19, 1882 – Minnie Fisher Cunningham born, first woman to earn a pharmacy degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch. In 1901, she discovered that less-educated men working next to her made twice the pay she did, and “that made a suffragist out of me.” She was a founding member of the Women’s National Democratic Club, and active in politics at both the state level in Texas and the national level. A gifted coalition builder and effective speaker for suffrage, she also campaigned for legislation to lower infant mortality, to recognize married women’s citizenship as separate from their husband’s, for prison reform, and for enriched flour to help improve nutrition for the poor. She was a founding member and first executive secretary of the League of Women Voters, and served on the Democratic National Committee at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt – FDR nicknamed her ‘Minnie Fish.’

March 19, 1893 – Gertrud Dorka born, German archaeologist, prehistorian, museum director, and teacher. After qualifying as a teacher in 1914, she taught in Berlin during WWI. She studied anthropology, geography, and prehistory at the University of Berlin and the University of Kiel (1930-1936), and completed her doctorate at Kiel. She was offered a job in a museum in Kiel on condition she join the Nazi Party, but she refused, and worked again as a teacher instead. Dorka was evacuated to Zeitz with her school classes at the start of WWII. She returned to Berlin in 1946, and resumed teaching. She was hired in 1947 as director of the State Museum for Prehistory and Early History. Many of Berlin’s museums had been badly damaged or destroyed during the war, or looted by the Red Army and locals. She began searching the rubble for artifacts, and bribed locals, especially children, to help her. She collected 280 boxes of artifacts, some related to Heinrich Schliemann. Dorka re-opened the museum in 1955, and led excavations throughout Berlin while it was in the process of being rebuilt. Among her discoveries was a 6^th century AD grave found in 1951, containing the bones of two young women, and iron tools, bronze buckles, a bone comb, a glass bowl, and a gold coin. She retired as museum director in 1958. After her retirement, Dorka published a book on archaeological discoveries. She was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1973. She died at age 82 in 1976.

March 19, 1903 – Ruth Ella Moore born, American bacteriologist, first African-American woman to gain a Ph.D. in a natural science; Howard University head of the Department of Bacteriology; worked on tuberculosis, immunology, and African-American blood types.

March 19, 1906 – Clara Breed born, American librarian and activist in San Diego, California, who supported Japanese American children, many of whom she knew from her work, while they were interned in camps during WWII. When several children came by the library to turn in their library cards before being sent to the camps and to say goodbye to her, she gave them stamped, self-addressed postcards so they could write to her and tell her what they needed. She not only sent them books, but often sent items like soap and toothpaste as well. Even though many of the children were sent to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, she visited them multiple times, and received over 250 post cards and letters from the children. She wrote letters to many members of Congress, and published articles about the unfair treatment of the children and other Japanese Americans, including “Americans with the Wrong Ancestors” for a magazine in 1943. Breed wrote letters for college-age students requesting they be allowed to attend colleges in the Midwest. She worked for the San Diego Public Library system for over 40 years. She began in 1928 as the children’s librarian at the East San Diego Branch, was named as acting city librarian in 1945, then became city librarian in 1946, and held the position for the next 25 years. She oversaw the expansion of the library system, adding several branches and was the driving force behind the opening of a new main library in 1955. She also established the Serra Cooperative Library System, which allowed patrons to borrow books through their local branch from libraries throughout San Diego and Imperial Counties. The letters and artifacts from her former pen pals are now part of the permanent collection of the Japanese American National Museum, which featured them in an exhibit called “Dear Miss Breed: Letters from Camp.”

March 19, 1930 – White women win voting rights in South Africa, after a campaign originally started by women reformers crusading against alcohol.

March 19, 1930 – Lorraine Hansberry born, influential American playwright and civil rights activist. Best known for A Raisin in the Sun, the
first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway; it was directed by Lloyd Richards, the first black director to have a show on Broadway. Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award at the age of 29 — she was the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to win. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

March 19, 1932 – Elena Poniatowska born in France, Mexican author and journalist; first woman to win Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Periodismo (National Journalism Prize), and numerous other awards, including the 2006 International Women's Media Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

March 19, 1935 – Nancy Malone born, American actress, director, and producer; made the transition from actress to successful television producer and director; first woman vice-president of television at 20^th Century Fox (1976); board member of The Alliance of Women Directors; won an Emmy Award for producing Bob Hope: The First 90 Years (1993).

March 19, 1941 – Nora Ephron born, American author, essayist, journalist, director, producer, and screenwriter; she wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and Julie & Julia, which she also directed. In 2012, Ephron died at age 71 of complications from leukemia.

March 19, 1942 – Heather M. Robertson born, Canadian journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer; Reservations are for Indians, Grass Roots, and Walking into Wilderness; a founding member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Professional Writers Association of Canada; launched the Robertson v. Thomson Corp. class action suit regarding freelancers’ retention of electronic rights to their work.

March 19, 1946 – Nederlandse Vereniging voor Seksuele Hervorming (NVSH), the Dutch Society for Sexual Reform, is founded, a birth control organization which becomes the only source of condoms in the Netherlands. It gains 220,000 members and runs over 60 birth control clinics at its height. When contraceptives become legal in the country in 1970, the society’s membership drops to only a few hundred by 2008.

March 19, 1947 – Glenn Close born, American actress, singer, producer, activist, and philanthropist; winner of three Tonys, three Golden Globes and an eight-time nominee for Academy Awards for acting, currently the record for a living actor with the most Oscar nominations without a win. She campaigned for same-sex marriage, women’s rights, and mental health. She took part in a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues which raised $250,000 for prevention of violence toward women, and volunteered to produce a documentary for Puppies Behind Bars, which provides service dogs for wounded war veterans. Her sister has bipolar disorder, so Close volunteers at NYC’s Fountain House, a facility helping people suffering from mental illness, and she founded and chairs BringChange2Mind, a campaign to end the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness. In 2016, she donated $75,000 to the Mental-Health Association of Central Florida to fund counseling and other assistance for victims of the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando.

March 19, 1952 – Lillian Hellman sends her letter to the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities in which she refuses to testify against friends and associates, saying “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

LillianHellman-quoteSince-when-do-you-have-to-agree-with-people.jpg

March 19, 1954 – Jill Abramson born, author, journalist, first woman to be executive editor of the New York Times (2011-2014). She and Richard Reeves collaborated on The Kennedy Years in 2013; she worked on the New York Times book Obama: The Historic Journey (2009); co-wrote with Jane Mayer 1995’s Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.

March 19, 1960 – Eliane Elias born, Brazilian jazz singer, composer-arranger, and pianist; 2016 Grammy winner for Best Latin Jazz Album, and winner of the Edison Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.

March 19, 1963 – Yoko Kanno born, Japanese composer, arranger, and musician, noted for scores for Japanese film, television, anime, and video games.

March 19, 1966 – Jodi Picoult born, American author and feminist; advocate for literary gender parity, and advisory board member of Vida: Women in the Literary Arts; also campaigns against the death penalty; co-founder of the Trumbull Hall Troupe (theatre for kids); her books include My Sister's Keeper, The Tenth Circle, and Change of Heart.

March 19, 1982 – Hana Kobayashi born, Venezuelan singer in multiple genres, including pop, jazz, rock, soul, and R&B, daughter of a Japanese father and a Venezuelan mother. In 2021, she was part of the Goethe-Institut Music in Transit recording project with six other Latin American artists. She is a supporter of the Basta de Balas (Enough of Bullets) campaign against the sale and carrying of firearms, and is an ambassador for the Remángate campaign against anti-personnel mines.

March 19, 2008 – Certified Nurses Day created by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) and the American Nurses Association (ANA); now an official National Day by Congressional proclamation.

March 19, 2017 – Uber's president, Jeff Jones, left the ride-hailing company after just six months on the job, Recode reported. Jones left Target in the fall of 2016 to join Uber as its No. 2 executive, and one of his jobs was repairing the business' image, which was tainted by charges of sexism and sexual harassment. "It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber," Jones said in a statement. In 2019, Uber established a $4.4 million fund to compensate victims of sexual harassment and retaliation to resolve an EEOC Commission’s finding of sexual harassment at Uber.

March 19, 2019 – The Food and Drug Administration approved the first postpartum depression drug, called brexanolone or Zulresso, a synthetic form of the allopregnanolone hormone, a progesterone derivative that increases during pregnancy and plummets after childbirth, possibly contributing to postpartum depression. The drug is administered intravenously to treat the sometimes life-threatening condition, which affects about one in nine new mothers, according to the CDC. Due to risks such as excessive sedation, or losing consciousness, Zulresso can only be administered in a certified health care facility. The infusion takes 60 hours, and during a clinical trial, most participants showed improvement within 24 hours of receiving the drug, reporting they still felt the effects 30 days later. However, the estimated cost, before discounts, for a course of treatment for a single patient is $34,000 USD, and it is not covered by insurance.

March 19, 2021 – The UN released an annual update on how the organization is working to stamp out sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) through its zero-tolerance policy, which required special measures in 2021 for the COVID-19 pandemic. Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, at a press briefing, said UN teams worked to adapt their practices in every country to continue lifesaving efforts “without disruption.” UN Victims’ Rights Advocate Jane Connors focused on prioritizing the rights and dignity of victims by institutionalizing these rights systemwide. And while this is “gaining traction,” she said, “we are constantly looking for ways to do more, particularly as the needs are great.” Ms. Connors pointed to a pilot programme, mapping services and assistance for victims in 13 countries with a differing UN presence, noting that partners generally supported those affected through programmes to combat gender-based violence.

Jane Connors — UN Victims’ Rights Advocate

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March 20, 1612 – Anne Bradstreet born in England, American Puritan poet, first writer in the British North American Colonies to be published; she had a better education than most women of the time, and became a well-read scholar, but met criticism for her writing (especially after her brother-in-law sent her work to be published without her knowledge) as being an unsuitable occupation for women, who were put down by the Puritans as inferior to men.

March 20, 1845 – Lucy Myers Wright Mitchell born; American author and art historian, one of the first women in the field of archeology, and mostly self-taught. She spoke Syriac, Arabic, French, German, and Italian. By 1873, she was one of the foremost archeologists of her time, and an internationally recognized authority on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. Known for her 1888 two-volume work, A History of Ancient Sculpture, one of the earliest books on the subject by an American.

March 20, 1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is published, the best-selling novel of the 19^th century.

March 20, 1872 – Karin Michaëlis born, Danish journalist, novelist, short story writer, children’s author, and peace activist. She wrote over 50 books in Danish, German, and English, published under Karin Michaëlis Strangland after her second marriage. Her best known novel Den farlige Alder (The Dangerous Age), published in 1910, was a groundbreaking story about a woman divorcing her husband, and the then-taboo subject of a 40-year-old woman’s sexual desires. In 1912, Michaëlis published the sequel, Elsie Lindtner, named for the title character. During WWI, Michaëlis was active in humanitarian work in Austria. She saw the rising danger from Hitler and Mussolini early on, and issued warnings. In 1932, she spoke for conscientious objection and peace education for children at an anti-war congress in Amsterdam. Beginning in 1933, she sheltered German emigrants on her property in Thurø, including Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel, who remained in Denmark until 1939. Her books were banned in Germany and Italy. In 1940, when Denmark was invaded by the Nazis, she emigrated to America. She returned to Denmark in 1946. She died at age 77 in 1950.

March 20, 1879 – Maud Menten born, Canadian physician, biochemist, and medical researcher; one of the first Canadian women to earn a medical doctorate. Unable to work in Canada, she went first to Germany, where she collaborated with Leonor Michaelis on the Michaelis-Menten equation (1913), and then to the U.S., where her contributions to histochemistry and enzyme kinetics included inventing the azo-dye coupling reaction, which is still used in histochemistry.

March 20, 1888 – Amanda Clement born, first woman paid to umpire a baseball game, serving as an umpire for semi-professional games in the American Midwest on a regular basis for six years (1904-1910), earning $15 to $25 per game, then continued occasionally umpiring into her forties. Clement was first hired as a teenager when she came to watch her brother play, and the umpire hired for the game didn’t show up. She was an accomplished athlete in baseball, basketball, sprinting, hurdles, shot put, gymnastics and tennis. She used money she earned as an umpire to pay for her college education. Because of her reputation for fair calls and being unsusceptible to bribery, baseball marketers listed her by name as the umpire at the games to bring in crowds. She wrote an editorial for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1906 declaring that women made better umpires than men, in part because the men would not speak abusively to women umpires. A devout Congregationalist, she refused to umpire on Sundays, and often stayed at the homes of clergy while umpiring on the road. After college and regular umpiring, she taught physical education at the University of Wyoming, and other schools in North and South Dakota, then managed the YWCA in La Crosse, Wisconsin. In 1929, she returned to South Dakota to care for her ailing mother, until her mother’s death in 1934. Clement then became a social worker for 25 years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before retiring in 1966.

March 20, 1890 – The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) was founded by Jane Cunningham Croly and other members of the Sorosis Club (see also March 21, 1868). The GFWC is now an international women’s organization dedicated to community improvement by enhancing the lives of others through volunteer service.

GeneralFederationofWomensClubs-GFWCclubwomeninDC1920s.jpg — 1920s — GFWC members in front of federation’s headquarters in Washington DC

March 20, 1900 – Amelia Chopitea Villa born, Bolivia’s first woman physician and its first graduate the field of pediatrics; then as a surgeon, specializing in gynecology and pediatrics. She represented Bolivia at the 1929 Congress of the Association internationale des femmes-médecins (International Association of Women Doctors) in Paris; her sister Ella was Bolivia’s second woman doctor.

March 20, 1915 – ‘Sister’ Rosetta Tharpe born, American singer-songwriter, and guitarist with cross-over appeal in gospel, jazz, blues, and pop; “the original soul sister.”

March 20, 1917 – Dame Vera Lynn born, extremely popular English singer during WWII, who gave outdoor concerts for British troops in Egypt, India, and Burma. She raised funds for cerebral palsy and breast cancer research, was a patron of Forces Literary Organisation Worldwide for ALL, the Dover War Memorial Project, and a project to aid refuges from Burma. She also supported a PETA campaign against pigeon racing. She died on June 18, 2020 at age 103.

Vera Lynn becomes Dame Commander of the British Empire

March 20, 1920 – Pamela Harriman born, American who devoted herself to Democratic Party politics and fund-raising after death of her husband Averell; the first woman to be named U.S. Ambassador to France (1993-1997).

March 20, 1925 – Romana Acosta Bañuelos born in Arizona, first Hispanic-American Treasurer of the United States, (1971-1974); businesswoman, owner of a multimillion-dollar business, Ramona’s Mexican Food Products, Inc. She also co-founded the Pan American National Bank in East Los Angeles.

March 20, 1935 – Bettye Washington Greene born, first African American woman chemist to work as a professional at the Dow Chemical Company, researching latex and polymers; there are several patents under her name related to advances in latex and polymers.

March 20, 1959 – Mary Roach born, American non-fiction and popular science author of such titles as Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

March 20, 1961 – Ingrid Arndt-Brauer born, German Social Democratic Party politician; member of the Bundestag (1999-2021), noted for working on the gender equality and municipal policy committees; member of the Kreistag, district parliament of Steinfurt (1994-1997).

March 20, 1961 – Sara Wheeler born, British travel author and biographer; first woman writer-in residence for the U.S. National Science Foundation at the South Pole. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica is her account of spending 7 months in Antarctica; wrote a biography of polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Gerrard, member of the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition; elected as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (1999).

March 20, 1985 – Libby Riddles wins the 1,135-mile Anchorage-to-Nome dog race, becoming the first woman to win the Iditarod.

March 20, 1991 – U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, Inc. that employers cannot exclude women from jobs where exposure to toxic chemicals could potentially damage a fetus.

March 20, 2020 – In India, four men were hanged, the nation’s first execution in five years, after being convicted in 2013 of the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in Delhi, who clung to life for two weeks before succumbing to her injuries. The story caused mass protests in India, and international outrage. Their executions were repeatedly postponed by appeals to India’s Supreme Court. Hundreds gathered outside Tihar prison shouting “death to rapists.” Prevented from using her real name, the Indian press christened the young woman Nirbhaya, meaning fearless. Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother, had campaigned fiercely for her daughter’s murderers to be hanged. She told the press that “today is dedicated to daughters of the country.”

March 20, 2021 – In the UK, the Observer reported obtaining documents revealing 594 complaints of sexual misconduct against Metropolitan police officers between 2012 and 2018, of which 119 were upheld in disciplinary proceedings, but only 63 led to dismissals, retirements, or resignations. The Observer requested information on complaints regarding sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape against officers, community support officers, and special constables, but no information was given on how many, if any, cases, were turned over to the criminal justice system for prosecution. Separate data confirmed that sexual misconduct among officers is a continuing problem. Figures from the Royal College of Policing’s current “barred list” – officers dismissed from a force and banned from joining another – show that nearly a fifth of offences include abuse of position for sexual purposes, domestic violence, or harassment against the public and colleagues.

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March 21, 1752 – Mary Dixon Kies born, American inventor, who received one of the first patents given to a woman in May, 1809, signed by President James Madison, for a new technique of weaving straw with silk and thread to make hats.

Hat made using Mary Dixon Kies patented technique

March 21, 1831 – Dorothea Beale born, English suffragist, educational reformer, and author. She graduated from the newly opened Queen’s College, a school for girls aged 11-18, in London. In 1849, she was appointed mathematics tutor at the college. In 1854, she became head teacher in the prep school for girls aged 4-11 attached to the college. In 1857, she became head of the Clergy Daughters' School, but her insistence on the need for reforms led to her resignation a year later. Beale then taught mathematics and Latin at Miss Elwall’s School, and compiled her Students' Text-Book of English and General History from B.C. 100 to the Present Time. In 1858, she became principal of Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, spending the rest of her career at Cheltenham. When she began as principal, the school had 69 pupils and only £400 of its original capital remained. For the next two years the college struggled. By 1873, under her leadership, it moved to buildings of its own, which were enlarged three years later, when the school had 310 pupils. By 1912, the school expanded to house 1,000 pupils and 120 teachers, 14 boarding houses, a secondary and a kindergarten teachers' training department, a library of over 7,000 volumes, and 15 acres of playing-fields. She founded The Cheltenham Ladies' College Magazine, and remained its editor until her death. Beale saw that absence of training for teachers was a main obstacle to improvement. Her campaign led to the establishment of St. Hilda’s, England’s first residential teachers’ training college in 1885. She purchased Cowley House in Oxford in 1892, which became St. Hilda’s Hall of Residence for Women. Beale was president of the Headmistresses' Association (1895-1897), and vice-president of the Kensington Society, an early women’s rights discussion group, which organized campaigns for woman suffrage, higher education, and women’s property rights. She continued working, in spite of increasing deafness, and signs of cancer, until her death in 1906 at age 75.

March 21, 1857 – Alice Henry born, Australian suffragist, journalist and trade unionist who became a leader in the American Women's Trade Union League.

March 21, 1866 – Antonia Maury born, American astronomer, one of “Harvard’s computers,” skilled women who processed astronomical data. Maury developed a catalog of stellar spectra, and published a spectroscopic analysis of the binary star Beta Lyrae (1933). She was unappreciated by the Harvard observatory director, Edward C. Pickering, but her work was important in Ejnar Hertzsprung's verification of the distinction between dwarf stars and giant stars, as now seen in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. After Pickering discovered Mizar, the first spectroscopic binary star, Maury was the first to measure its period, 104 days. In 1889, she identified the second such star, Beta Aurigae, with a period of about 4 days. Maury was the daughter of John William Draper, a pioneer in using photography in astronomy.

March 21, 1868 – The Sorosis Club for Professional Women is instigated in New York City by Jane Cunningham Croly, after women journalists weren’t allowed to purchase tickets for a New York Press Club banquet. Croly began her career at the New York Tribune in 1855, and became one of the first women to write a syndicated column. Croly was also a founder of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (see March 20, 1890).

NYC Sorosis Club cica mid-1930s— **Jane Cunningham Croly**

March 21, 1937 – Ann Clwyd born, Welsh Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for the Cynon Valley (1984-2019); advocate for human rights and international women’s rights; member of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service (1976-1979); helped pass the Female Genital Mutilation Bill in 1985, which bans Female Circumcision in the UK and prohibits parents sending/taking their daughters abroad for the procedure.

March 21, 1942 – Amina Claudine Myers born, African American jazz pianist, singer-songwriter, composer, and arranger.

March 21, 1943 – Cornelia Fort born, pilot in the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, she became the first American woman pilot to die while on active duty.

March 21, 1944 – Gaye Adegbalola born as Gaye Todd, African American blues singer, guitarist, and activist; founding member of Saffire – The Uppity Blues Women (1984-2009). She also releases recordings on her own label, Hot Toddy Music. She grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she sat-in, picketed, and protested against racism. She graduated as valedictorian from a segregated high school, then went to Boston University, majoring in biology. She was a science teacher in Fredericksburg for 18 years, moonlighting in local clubs before she became a full-time blues singer and musician.

March 21, 1950 – Elena Firsova born, Russian composer of over 100 compositions, mostly chamber cantata for solo voice and ensemble, but also orchestral works, and a chamber opera, The Nightingale and the Rose. In 1979 she was blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West.

March 21, 1962 – Kathy Greenwood born, Canadian comedian and scriptwriter; performer and writer in the Toronto branch of Second City (1988-1992); was a regular cast member of the Canadian television drama Wind at My Back (1996-2001); member of the sketch comedy quintet, Women Fully Clothed.

March 21, 1962 – Rosie O’Donnell born, American comedian, author, TV producer, and LBGTQ rights activist; host of The Rosie O’Donnell Show (1996-2002), which won five Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show.

March 21, 1966 – Moa Matthis born, Swedish author and literary critic; she writes historical books, and articles for the Stockholm daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (The Day’s News), from a feminist point of view.

March 21, 1973 – Ananda Lewis born, African American television host and social activist; host of the talk show The Ananda Lewis Show in 2001, which unfortunately never recovered from debuting the day before 9-11; worked as a correspondent on The Insider 2004-2005.

March 21, 1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win the World Figure Skating Championships, and the first black athlete to win a medal in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary; she later became an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip and knee replacement, but lost of most of her savings in two divorces and the financial failure of her medical practice in the dying coal-mining town of Richlands, Virginia. Thomas was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She sold her Olympic Bronze Medal to help pay some of her debts, but was reported as of early 2021 to still be living precariously. In February 2023, Thomas stepped out on the ice at Lake Placid, home of the 1980 Winter Olympics, to promote the importance of compulsory figures, which the International Skating Union voted in 1990 to discontinue as part of competitions.

March 21, 2019 – The Trump administration denied visas to dozens of women scheduled to attend a United Nations women’s conference. Campaigners say at least 41 women were denied entry to the U.S. to attend the annual Commission on the Status of Women — most of them from nations blacklisted under Trump’s travel ban. It was an apparent violation of a 70-year-old treaty which obligates the U.S. to allow entry to people attending the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Women from Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Syria were asked to provide supporting documents like marriage certificates, proof of property ownership, letters stating employment status, proof of finances, proof of birth certificates, or proof showing that they have children.

March 21, 2020 – Lucy Clarke revealed the online abuse she suffered after appearing with her team on the British quiz programme University Challenge. Many comments were about her appearance: “What a mess, did she get dressed in the dark?” – one man, who identified himself as a “granddad of six, married to my lovely teacher wife” tweeted, “... I’ll guess Clarke sucks like a f*cking Dyson.” She went on: “One tweeted me to tell me how ‘ugly’ I was; another told me that with my teeth I should never laugh again ... The reason I was so defective? No ‘heteronormal man’ would want to f*ck me.” She noted that “Women are grossly under-represented on University Challenge: of 28 teams this year, only five were equally gender-balanced, and no team had more than two women. This is no fault of the lovely production team, but down to selection within institutions. After my experience with the social media circus, though, I think there’s another big reason: women don’t apply because being on the show is horrible. Female contestants walk an impossible tightrope. Answer more than a couple of questions, or smile after you get an answer right, and you are arrogant: I became ‘showoff’ and ‘Ol’ bighead.’ In 2009, contestant Gail Trimble was ‘smug’ and ‘cocky’ because she answered more questions correctly than anyone on the show, ever. Quieter female contestants are ‘useless.’ During the 2020 season, Nancy Collinge was targeted: ‘Did they tell Collinge to just sit on the end, be quiet and just try to look pretty?’ Quiet male contestants rarely face this.” After her team won an episode, a man tweeted that she “ought to be launched into the sun”, and “did nothing in the contest, Cashman [her teammate] smashed it,” but Clarke was that match’s highest scorer.

Lucy Clarke — first on left on the bottom row

March 21, 2021 – In the UK, a pilot program launched by women in Nottingham, aimed at making misogyny a hate crime, took a big step forward when the government announced that police forces across England and Wales will be required to collect data on crimes apparently motivated by hostility towards women. In 2015, a hate crime commission set up by Nottingham Citizens, allied with the national civil society alliance Citizens UK, held a meeting of community leaders, local officials, and members of the public, in a packed room at Nottingham Trent University. Melanie Jeffs, then manager of Nottingham Women’s Centre, listened to discussion of different forms of hate to be examined: racism, homophobia, disability hate crime, and so on, then: “I suddenly found myself saying ‘what about women?’ What about all the things that women experience simply because they are women: being threatened, touched, stalked, whistled and generally made to feel uncomfortable in public spaces. We had learnt to accept this as part and parcel of womanhood – but maybe we didn’t need to? Surely this should be part of the hate crime spectrum too?” In 2016, under then Police Chief Sue Fish, Nottinghamshire became the first force in the UK to record public harassment of women – groping, using explicit language, or taking unwanted photographs – as well as more serious offences like assault – as potential misogyny hate crimes. The force charted the scale of the problem for the first time and tailored their responses. Since the pilot began, reports of harassment increased by 25%, and in the first two years 265 misogyny hate crimes were recorded. Researchers from Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities in 2018 found that 75% of those who reported incidents had a positive experience, although harassment of women and girls, particularly from black and minority ethnic groups, in public spaces across the city remained endemic, with nine out of 10 respondents either having experienced or witnessed it. Initially belittled as “arrests for wolf-whistling,” Fish was refreshingly blunt when she first spoke to the Guardian about the pilot in 2016. “Some trivialise it and say: ‘Oh, so I can’t chat up a woman now.’ But I think there’s a significant difference between ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and ‘Do you want some cock?’ This is about the unacceptable abuse of women because they are women and it has to stop.” Over 2,000 officers and call handlers received training, much of it done by Martha Jephcott, cofounder of the women’s group Love and Power: “I remember I made a slide of all the different things women did to make themselves safe, walking in the middle of the road, keys through the knuckles; obviously the people I was training were predominantly men and at the beginning it was so obvious to me, but I had to get them to see it.” By August 2016, ‘Mel’ Jeffs, the woman who spoke up at the first meeting, had received hundreds of threatening messages and derogatory remarks about her appearance on Twitter and Facebook. Jeff said she “brushed off” most of the messages, but “There is one that I’m having discussions with the police about … People think it’s completely acceptable to target women this way.” Nottinghamshire Police said, “We will be speaking to one of the perpetrators to reiterate the seriousness of their actions.” Reflecting on the scheme in 2021, Fish remembers women saying they felt proud to be from Nottingham. “What we heard in feedback from women’s centre was that women walked taller, they had their heads held high, their shoulders back, it was very physical. As opposed to what we’ve heard very viscerally [since Sarah Everard was killed by a police officer in March 2021] about how women make themselves smaller and less visible.”

PoliceChiefSueFish-MelanieMelJeffs-MarthaJephcott-Nottinghamshire.jpg — Police Chief **Sue Fish — Melanie Jeffs — Martha Jephcott**

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March 22, 1615 – Katherine Boyle Jones born, Viscountess of Ranelagh, Irish scientific and political philosopher; member of the Hartlib Circle, a correspondence network which discussed and influenced issues of agricultural and scientific innovation, developments in mathematics and medicine, and educational reform; also a member of the Great Tew Circle, a group concerned with literary and religious matters. Her correspondence with her brother, chemist Robert Boyle, shows she had considerable impact on his work, and her notebooks recorded results of her researches in medicine and chemistry. Her London salon during the 1650s was frequented by the era’s notable figures in mathematics, the sciences, medicine, finance, agriculture, and Protestantism. She was an advocate for the education of girls.

March 22, 1638 – Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her religious dissent. Her strong religious convictions, combined with her popularity and charisma as a speaker, helped create a theological schism among the Puritans. An adherent of Free Grace, a belief in the Covenant of Grace (all believers in Christ will be granted eternal life), she accused most of the Boston area ministers of preaching a Covenant of Works (a promise of redemption from the sins of Adam and Eve only for those who obeyed all of God’s commandments).

March 22, 1808 – Caroline Sheridan Norton born, English author and social reformer. At 19, she married George Chapple Norton, barrister, M.P. for Guildford, and younger brother of Lord Grantley, but he was jealous, possessive, often drunk, violent-tempered, and mentally and physically abusive to her. This escalated as he became less and less successful as a barrister, and debts began to mount. Caroline became a major society hostess, and it was her influence which secured for her husband the position of Metropolitan Police Magistrate in 1831. She wrote prose and poetry for solace and to earn money, publishing her poetry collections, The Sorrows of Rosalie and The Undying One, and two novels, which were well received, before she left her husband in 1836. Norton sued her close friend, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, for ‘criminal conversation’ (a euphemism for adultery). The jury threw out the claim, but the scandal almost brought down the government, and Caroline was unable to get a divorce. She was also barred from seeing her children, who by English Law belonged to the father, and they were kept hidden from her by Norton. She at first lived on the income from her earnings as an author, but Norton successfully argued in court that as her husband, all her earnings were legally his. With no support from Norton, and her earnings confiscated, Caroline turned the law to her advantage by running up bills in her husband’s name, and telling the creditors to sue him if they wished to be paid. She became passionately involved in campaigns to pass the Custody of Infants Act 1839, and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. When Parliament was debating reforming the divorce laws in 1855, she submitted to the members a detailed account of her marriage, and described the difficulties women faced under the existing laws. An English wife did not have the right to leave her husband. Not only could he sue her for restitution of “conjugal rights,” he could enter any house where she was staying and carry her off by force. If the husband sued for divorce the wife could not defend herself, or be represented by an attorney, or be considered a party to a suit between her husband and her supposed lover for “damages.” Only a man could divorce his wife on grounds of infidelity; a wife could not divorce her husband on those grounds, so matter how profligate he might be. Her intense campaigning was a substantial factor in passage of these acts, and also influenced passage of the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, because her story was widely known by Members of Parliament. These combined acts gave British wives a limited but separate legal identity from their husbands for the first time. Caroline Norton was not in favor of women getting the vote, and never espoused women’s equality. She simply wanted to earn her own living, and the right to be with her children.

March 22, 1861 – Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell began drawing up a course of nursing to train women, which becomes the nursing curriculum for thousands of women nursing the sick and wounded of the Union Army during the American Civil War. Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke worked throughout the war to establish standardized and professional care for Union soldiers. What they learned and turned into standard practice become the core curriculum for schools of nursing springing up immediately after the war.

Elizabeth Blackwell — Dorothea Dix — Clara Barton — **Mary “Mother”** Bickerdyke

March 22, 1882 – The Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act is signed into law, making polygamy a felony in the U.S. The act also prohibited “bigamous” or “unlawful cohabitation” making them a misdemeanor, removing a need to prove that actual marriages had occurred. It also made it illegal for polygamists or cohabitants to vote, hold public office, or serve on juries.

His second wife is the much younger blond on the far left holding the baby

March 22, 1886 – Isabella Selmes Greenway born, rancher, social activist, businesswoman, and Democratic politician; Arizona’s first woman representative in the U.S. House of Representatives (1933-1937). She owned the Quarter Circle Double X Ranch in northern Arizona, and during the late 1920s, she opened Arizona Hut, a furniture factory employing disabled veterans and their immediate families. In 1928, she became Arizona's Democratic national committeewoman. In 1930, she founded the Arizona Inn in Tucson, a 14 acre resort, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Though a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and a New Deal Democrat, she broke with President Roosevelt on some provisions of the Social Security Act, and opposed reducing WWI veterans’ pensions.

Arizona Inn in Tucson — Isabella Selmes Greenway

March 22, 1899 – Ruth Page born, American ballerina and choreographer; the first American accepted into the Ballets Russes; best known for choreographing Frankie and Johnny (1938), but also known for The Merry Widow and Billy Sunday. Page combined opera and ballet in a school for young dancers.

March 22, 1909 – Gabrielle Roy born, highly regarded French Canadian author and novelist; Bonheur d'occasion (published in English as The Tin Flute) won the 1947 Prix Femina, and the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal; other translated works include Streets of Riches, The Fragile Lights of Earth, and Children of My Heart. Her words appear on the Canadian $20 bill: "Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?"

March 22, 1920 – Katsuko Saruhashi born, Japanese geochemist, pioneer in measuring carbon dioxide levels in seawater, showing evidence in seawater and the atmosphere of the dangers of radioactive fallout; after graduating from the Imperial Women’s College of Science in 1943, she worked in the Geochemical Laboratory of the Meteorological Research Institute; in 1950, she began studying CO2 levels in seawater, having to develop her own measuring techniques for this new study. After the 1954 Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, the Japanese government asked the Geochemical Laboratory to analyze and monitor radioactivity in seawater and rainfall; Sarushashi’s study showed the radioactivity reached Japan in 18 months, and traces spread throughout the Pacific by 1969; her research was some of the earliest proving that the effects of fallout could spread over the entire globe, not just the immediate area of the blast; by the 1970s, she was studying acid rain.

March 22, 1963 – Deborah Bull born, English ballet dancer, article author and broadcaster; founder of the Artists’ Development Initiative, which opens resources and expertise of the Royal Opera House to small-scale companies and independent artists; Creative Director of ROH2 at the Royal Opera House (2002-2008); promoted to Creative Director of the Royal Opera House (2008-2012).

March 22, 1966 – Pia Cayetano born, Filipino lawyer and politician; the youngest woman elected to the Senate in the Philippines (2004-2016 and since 2019); advocate for the rights of women and children; noted for pushing passage of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012; serving as a Representative and as Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, since 2016.

March 22, 1972 – U.S. Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification; it is ratified by 35 states, but falls three states short of the required 2/3 majority needed to be ratified. It had been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923, but women’s equality is still not in the Constitution, 100 years later.

March 22, 1972 – In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the U.S. Supreme Court rules unmarried persons have the right to possess contraceptives. William Baird was arrested and went to jail eight times, in five different states for distributing or displaying contraceptives to unmarried persons. Baird, a medical researcher, attributed his birth control crusade to seeing a 29-year-old mother who already had numerous children die in a Harlem hospital after she tried to self-abort with a coat hanger. She didn’t have the right to a legal abortion, and she didn’t have the right to contraception, or even information about it. Baird dedicated his life to providing contraception and abortion care to women, particularly poor women, and to challenging the laws that denied these things to them. In Massachusetts in 1967, he gave a lecture to approximately 2,000 students at Boston University. He displayed contraceptives during the lecture and closed by giving contraceptive foam and a condom to a young woman. He was arrested and convicted of displaying and distributing contraceptives. On appeal, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court unanimously set aside the conviction for exhibiting contraceptives as a violation of Baird’s First Amendment rights, but sustained the conviction for giving away contraceptives. In Massachusetts, fornication was a misdemeanor punishable by a $30 fine or three months in jail; distributing contraceptives was a felony punishable by five years in prison. Baird spent 36 days in Boston’s Charles Street Jail, where the conditions were so bad that a court later found them unconstitutional. In 1965, the Supreme Court held that Connecticut’s prohibition against the use of contraceptives was an unconstitutional infringement of the right to marital privacy. But that decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, wasn’t much help to single people or people like Baird willing to help them. In Eisenstadt v. Baird, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. wrote, “the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup.” That is not how the law treated marriage historically. Married women were once considered the property of their husbands, rather than separate persons. In holding that prohibiting contraception only for unmarried people denied them the equal protection of the law in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the court recognized the individual autonomy of women. The case was important to the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade the following year.

WilliamBairdgivescontraceptivestostudentsat1967BUlecturejustbeforehisarrest-Bettmann-Getty.jpg — William Baird gives contraceptives to students at 1967 BU lecture just before his arrest — Bettmann-Getty photo

March 22, 1976 – Reese Witherspoon born as Laura Reese Witherspoon, American actress, producer, and supporter of women and children’s advocacy groups. Winner of an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and two Golden Globes. In 2016, Hello Sunshine was launched, Witherspoon’s joint venture with Otter Media to produce woman-character-driven films and television stories. She is a member of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund. She went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as part of a 2006 CDF project to publicize the ongoing needs of the hurricane’s survivors. She is honorary chair of the Avon Foundation, which supports breast cancer research and prevention of domestic violence.

March 22, 2011 – Former Israeli President Moshe Katsav sentenced to seven years in prison, two years probation and payment of compensation to his victims on charges of rape, indecent assault, sexual harassment, and obstruction of justice. President Shimon Peres said, "This is a sad day but everyone is equal before the law." The rape victim, known in public as Complainant ‘Aleph’ told the Israeli press: "Regardless of how many years he spends in prison, Katsav will always be a villain … Katsav committed these despicable acts and raped me."

March 22, 2019 – United Airlines announced customers could now choose non-binary gender options, making it the first U.S. airline to provide the expanded choices. Customers can choose the prefix "Mx." during bookings, and they'll have the option of identifying as male, female, undisclosed, or unspecified. The airline says it’s been working with the Human Rights Campaign and The Trevor Project in training employees on the new changes.

March 22, 2019 – San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, an outspoken critic of the Trump administration's response to a hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, announced her run for governor in 2020. Cruz rose to national prominence after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017. When President Trump called the response to the hurricane "incredible," Cruz responded by saying "Where have you been?" and lambasted his administration's slow response to supplying emergency aid. Trump criticized Cruz for being "nasty" and reflecting "poor" leadership. She ran as a member of the Popular Democratic Party, which opposes statehood for Puerto Rico, but did not win.

March 22, 2020 – Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat-Massachusetts) called the Republican’s proposed $500 billion loan plan for businesses, states, and localities, to be handled by the Treasury Department, a "slush fund to boost favored companies and corporate executives — while they continue to pull down huge paychecks and fire their workers." The plan was included in a much-amended $1.8 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill, which Democrats blocked from moving to a final vote, saying the legislation didn't go far enough to protect workers and placed too few restrictions on businesses receiving bailouts.

March 22, 2021 – A report, jointly published by UN Women, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the University of Pittsburgh’s Gender Inequality Research Lab, shows women were the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, through job loss as the informal economy shrinks, an alarming spike in domestic violence, and the unpaid care burden that threatened to push 47 million additional women into extreme poverty. The report also shows women were excluded from the decision-making processes aimed at ending the pandemic, including government-run task forces around the world. Of 225 COVID-19 task forces up and running across 137 countries, only 24% of their members were women. “Women have been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response … however, they have been systematically excluded from the decision-making processes on how to address the impacts of the pandemic,” according to UNDP chief Achim Steiner. “It is inconceivable that we can address the most discriminatory crisis we have ever experienced without full engagement of women,” said UN Women chief Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.“At the moment, men have given themselves the impossible task of making the right decisions about women without the benefit of women’s insights. This needs to be set right without delay so we can work together on a future that is equitable, gender-responsive and greener.”

PhumzileMlambo-Ngcuka-CovidandDomesticViolencequote.jpg

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March 23, 1430 – Margaret of Anjou born, to René, Duke of Lorraine and King of Naples, and Isabella of Lorraine. Margaret at age 14 took part in the negotiations with English envoys sent to arrange her marriage to Henry VI of England, and became Queen consort of England in 1445. Due to Henry’s frequent bouts of insanity, she was the de facto ruler of England, and sometimes personally led the Lancastrians during the War of the Roses. The Duke of Suffolk praised “her valiant courage and undaunted spirit,” and historian Edward Hall described her: "This woman excelled all other, as well in beauty and favour, as in wit and policy, and was of stomach and courage, more like to a man, than a woman." The Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 was a disaster for the Lancastrians. Margaret’s only son, Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, was killed, and she was taken prisoner by the victorious Yorkists. In 1475, she was ransomed by her cousin, Louis XI of France. She lived the rest of her life in France as a poor relation of the king, and died there at age 52 in 1482.

March 23, 1614 – Jahanara Begum born, Mughal Empire princess, eldest and favorite daughter of her father, Shah Jahan. She became the Padshah Begum (First Lady) when her mother died, chosen over her father’s three other wives, and considered “the most powerful woman in the empire” during her father’s reign because of her influence with him. When Shah Jahan became ill in 1657, a war of succession erupted among her four brothers. She sided with Dara Shikoh, eldest son and heir-apparent, but he lost to Aurangzeb, who then besieged Shah Jahan in the Agra Fort, cutting off the water supply, which forced the Shah’s surrender. He was kept imprisoned at the fort, where Jahanara nursed him until his death in 1666. After their father’s death, she reconciled with Aurangzeb, who gave her the title of Empress of Princesses, and she was once again Padshah Begum. She used this privileged position to urge her brother to ease his strict regulation of public life in accordance with his conservative religious beliefs, and argued against his decision in 1679 to restore the poll tax on non-Muslims, which she said would alienate his Hindu subjects. Upon her death in 1681, Aurangzeb gave her the posthumous title Sahibat-uz-Zamani (Mistress of the Age).

March 23, 1838 – Marie Adam-Doerrer born, Swiss women's rights activist and unionist; trained as a goldsmith but worked more often as a washerwoman, she joined the Parti Socialiste (PK - Social Democratic Party of Switzerland) after losing her savings in a bank crash; co-founder of the Bernese Women Workers' Association (Arbeiterinnenverein), and the Bernese Women Day Laborers' Association (Tagelöhnerinnenverein).

March 23, 1842 – Susan Jane Cunningham born, American mathematician and astronomer; a student of Maria Mitchell’s in mathematics and astronomy at Vassar College, she was instrumental in the founding of Swarthmore College, becoming the first professor of its mathematics and astronomy departments, from 1869 until she retired in 1906, and Chair of the Mathematics Department (1888-1906); one of the first six women to join the New York Mathematical Society; Swarthmore’s Cunningham Observatory, now the Cunningham Building, is named in her honor.

March 23, 1857 – Fannie Farmer born, author American culinary expert, author of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, still in print over a hundred years after its first publication under the name Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Farmer was the first author to introduce precise standard measurements in her cookbook.

March 23, 1882 – Amalie ‘Emmy’ Noether born in Germany, American mathematician and physicist, made landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Noether’s Theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws. Completed her dissertation in 1907, but was excluded from any academic positions because of her sex, so worked for 7 years without pay at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen. In 1915, David Hilbert invited her to join the University of Göttingen world-renowned mathematics department, but university’s philosophical faculty objected, so she spent 4 years lecturing under Hilbert’s name. Her habilitation was finally approved in 1919, as a Privatdozent. In 1933, when the Nazi government dismissed Jews from university positions, she moved to the U.S., taking a position at Bryn Mawr College, funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. She also lectured at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but commented she was unwelcome at the “men’s university, where nothing female is admitted.”

March 23, 1884 – Florence Ellinwood Allen born, American judge; first woman to serve on a state supreme court and one of the first two women to serve as U. S. federal judges. In 2005, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

March 23, 1895 – Encarnacion A. Alzona born, pioneering Filipina historian, scholar, and suffragist; first woman in the Philippines to earn a PhD. Even though the Philippines was an American colony when U.S. women won the right to vote in 1920, Filipina women weren’t given the vote; Alzona became a leader in the struggle for women’s suffrage, helping to make it a goal of the Philippine Association of University Women when she became the organization’s president in 1928; author of A History of Education in the Philippines 1565-1930; The Filipino Woman: Her Social, Economic and Political Status (1565-1933), and several biographies of notable Filipino women. In 1985, she was honored with the rank of National Scientist of the Philippines, the nation’s highest award to its scientists, for her achievements in the fields of social science and history.

March 23, 1917 – Virginia Woolf established the Hogarth Press with her husband, Leonard Woolf — early publisher of translations of Freud and Russian authors such as Dostoyevsky, and works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and E.M. Forster.

March 23, 1918 – Helene Hale born, Hawaii politician, first woman in Hawaii elected as an Executive Officer of the County of Hawaii; at age 82, she won a seat as a Democrat in the Hawaii House of Representatives (2000-2006). She retired following a stroke, and died in 2013. Ralph Bunche was her uncle.

March 23, 1924 – Bette Nesmith Graham born, invented Liquid Paper correction fluid which became an office staple; created two foundations to support women’s businesses and art; mother of Michael Nesmith of The Monkees.

March 23, 1924 – Olga Kennard born, British scientist in crystallography; Director of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (1965-1997); Fellow of the Royal Society since 1987.

March 23, 1949 – Karen English born, American Democratic politician; Representative in the U.S. House from Arizona’s 6^th District (1993-1995); Arizona State Senator (1991-1993); Arizona House of Representatives (1987-1991); Coconino County Supervisor (1981-1987). In 1982, in spite her Republican opponent heavily outspending her, she won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, in part because he’d only been in the state for two years, but mainly because former Republican U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater endorsed her. He supported abortion rights, and also thought English’s much greater experience in Arizona politics made her a better candidate to represent the state. She was the second woman to represent Arizona in Congress, after Isabella Selmes Greenway (1933–1937). English currently works with the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and is a member of the ReFormers Caucus of Issue One, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, to reduce the role of money in politics.

March 23, 1950 – Ahdaf Soueif born, Egyptian novelist, political and cultural commentator; most of her work is written in English, noted for her novels, In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love, and her non-fiction writing about Egyptian history and politics, and about the Palestinians. Soueif is a contributor to the British newspaper, The Guardian. She founded and was first chair of the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008. Her sister Laila Soueif is a mathematician, and human and women’s rights activist.

March 23, 1956 – Laura Thorne born, American chef, named by Town and Country magazine as one of America’s top ten women chefs in 1985. She left working as chef in 1993 to move to Grass Valley, California, so her sons could attend better schools, and got a job working with children with disabilities at Union Hill Elementary. While helping a student retrieve money stuck in a vending machine, she was hit by a severe electric shock, which put her in a wheelchair. Worker’s compensation consultant Alice Johnson worked with Thorne to figure out a new career, given her new limitations. “I told her I didn’t know what else I could do besides making sushi,” said Thorne. “Alice advocated for me — she asked the state to pay for a portable sushi bar, and worker’s comp actually paid for it. Alice is my hero.” She began booking street fairs. Inside her pop-up sushi bar, her sons took orders and ran the cash register while she made the sushi. Thorne next opened “Sushi to Go” inside an upscale grocery store. She opened Way Yum Sushi in 1997, a wholesale business, that also handles catering, and Thorne teaches sushi-making classes. “I feel so grateful that things turned out the way they did,” she said. “The best part about this experience was having my kids grow up with the business. I was a single mom and we did it together.”

March 23, 1972 – Judith Godrèche born, French actress, screenwriter, and director; best known to U.S. audiences for her roles in the 1998 film The Man in the Iron Mask, and her continuing role in season three (2012) of the TV series Royal Pains. She co-wrote, directed, and starred in the 2010 film Toutes les filles pleurent (All the Girls Cry). Godrèche was one of over 80 women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment or assault in 2017.

March 23, 1976 – Smiriti Malhotra born, Indian politician, former actress and television producer. Minister for Textiles since 2016; Minister of Information and Broadcasting (2017-2018); Minister of Human Resource Development (2014-2016); Member of Rajya Sabha (Parliament) for Gujarat since 2011; Vice President of Bharatiya Janata Party since 2011.

March 23, 1981 – U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in H. L. v. Matheson that states can require, with some exceptions, parental notification when teenage girls seek abortions. Because the court ruled that states may not give parents an absolute veto over their daughter’s decision to have an abortion, 38 states have parental involvement requirements, which include a judicial bypass procedure that allows a minor to receive court approval for an abortion without her parents’ knowledge or consent. However, many states require a judge to use the unusually strict legal standard of “clear and convincing evidence” to determine whether a minor is sufficiently mature and the abortion is in her best interest prior to waiving the parental involvement requirement.

March 23, 1984 – In South Africa, Dorothy Nomzansi Nyembe, ANC Women’s League activist and member of the Federation of South African Women, was released from prison, after serving a 15 year sentence for harbouring members of the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

March 23, 2011 – U.S. Ambassador to the UN Eileen Chamberlain called on the UN Human Rights Council to fight discrimination against gays and lesbians: “Human rights are the inalienable right of every person, no matter who they are or who they love.”

March 23, 2018 – Donald Trump issued an order banning transgender people who "may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery" from the military "except under certain limited circumstances." The question of transgender troops was in limbo for the better part of a year since Trump's surprise announcement via Twitter in 2017 of a complete ban on transgender service. That initial rule was blocked in court, and the Justice Department dropped its challenge to the stay in December, pending a recommendation from Defense Secretary James Mattis. In January 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to grant a Trump administration request to lift injunctions blocking the policy while challenges continue in lower courts. On April 12, 2019, Directive-type Memorandum-19-004 took effect and transgender personnel in the U.S. military were no longer allowed to serve or enlist in the United States military, except if they serve in their original sex assignment, had been grandfathered in prior to April 12, 2019, or were given a waiver.

March 23, 2020 – Dr. Rosena Allin-Khan, British A&E doctor (accident and emergency care specialist), also the Labour MP for Tooting, wrote in The Guardian: “I’ve been an A&E doctor for 15 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. The departments are quieter because people are staying away from hospital, but the patients are sicker. We’re seeing a distinct rise in the numbers coming in with respiratory symptoms, who are testing Covid-19 positive … Very early in the morning, the entire resuscitation department, where the absolute sickest patients go, was full to capacity with patients with breathing difficulties. We had to move other very ill patients to the pediatric resuscitation area to keep them safe. This is only going to get worse … Doctors and nurses are brave, and the A&E department is known for being on the frontline and high risk, but there’s a palpable fear among staff … they’re frightened for their own health and those of the people they love. When I finished my shift yesterday, which was Mother’s Day, I came back to the house and I couldn’t touch or hug my two little girls until I put all my clothes in the wash and had a shower … Staff expect, very soon, potentially to have to make heart-wrenching choices about whose life can be saved if we don’t have enough ventilators. That goes counter to everything you’ve ever learned as a doctor or nurse – to make life-and-death decisions, where we could possibly have saved every one of those people, is unimaginable. This is what our colleagues in Italy are living through now …”

March 23, 2021 – UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings Agnès Callamard told the Guardian newspaper that a UN colleague alerted her in January 2020 that a senior Saudi official had twice threatened in a meeting with other senior UN officials in Geneva to have Callamard “taken care of” if she was not reined in by the UN. She was the first official to publicly investigate and publish a detailed report on the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent former insider who used his column at the Washington Post to write critically about the Saudi government. Callamard’s 100-page report, published in June 2019, concluded that there was “credible evidence” that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and other senior Saudi officials were liable for the killing, and called the murder an “international crime.” The Biden administration released its own unclassified report, which concluded that Prince Mohammed had approved the murder. The Saudi government denied the killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was ordered by the future king. Asked how the alleged comment was perceived by her Geneva-based colleagues, Callamard said: “A death threat. That was how it was understood.” The alleged threats were made, she said, at a “high-level” meeting between Geneva-based Saudi diplomats, visiting Saudi officials, and UN officials in Geneva. During the exchange, Callamard was told, they criticised her work on the Khashoggi murder, registering their anger about her investigation and her conclusions. The Saudi officials also raised baseless allegations that she had received money from Qatar – a frequent refrain against critics of the Saudi government. When the rest of the Saudi group left the room, the visiting senior Saudi official stayed behind, and repeated the alleged threat to the remaining UN officials in the room, saying he knew people who had offered to “take care of the issue if you don’t.” The Guardian independently corroborated Callamard’s account of the January 2020 episode. Callamard, a French national and human rights expert, gave the interview as she was about to leave her UN position to take up her new post as secretary general of Amnesty International.

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March 24, 1628 – Sophie Amalie of Brunswick-Lüneburg born, Queen consort of Denmark and Norway, known for her political influence and for introducing ballet and opera to Denmark. Betrothed at age 12 to Prince Frederick, the second son, who was archbishop of Bremen at the time and never expected to be king. They were married in 1642, and fled from Bremen during the war between Denmark and Sweden. When his brother, known for being a heavy drinker, became ill and died suddenly, Frederick was elected to the Danish throne in 1647, and was crowned Frederick III in February, 1648, but he was introverted, so she became the center of court life, replacing medieval entertainments with ballet and opera, and engaging performers, instructors, and theatre companies from France and Germany. She influenced politics as a trusted advisor to her husband, and a participant with his blessing in state affairs. During the renewed war with Sweden in 1657, both the King and Queen appeared on horseback during the Siege of Copenhagen at weak spots throughout the city by day and night, and strengthened the morale of the people. After the introduction of the Kongeloven (Lex Regia – a Royal Decree of absolute monarchy) in 1665, her influence declined, and she was notably excluded from the regency in event of her son succeeding to the throne while still a minor.

March 24, 1820 – Fanny Crosby born, although blinded in infancy, she became an American missionary, poet, author, lyricist, and composer, who created over 8,000 hymns and gospel songs including “Blessed Assurance.” She was one of the first women to speak before Congress, reciting a poem in support of education for the blind in 1843.

March 24, 1826 – Matilda Joslyn Gage born, American abolitionist, suffragist, advocate for Native American rights, and women’s rights speaker, freethinker and author of many articles and books, including Woman’s Rights Catechism, and Woman, Church and State; founder and first president (1890-1989) of the Woman’s National Liberal Union. The ‘Matilda Effect’ was named for her – the bias against acknowledging the achievements of women scientists and inventors, and their work being attributed to their male colleagues, which Gage described in her essay “Woman as Inventor” (1870). The term "Matilda effect" was coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret Rossiter.

March 24, 1827 – Candace Thurber Wheeler born; a pioneer in American interior and textile design, she helped open interior design to women, supported craftswomen, and encouraged development of an American style of design. She was a founding member in 1877 of the Society of Decorative Arts in New York, which led to decorative arts societies across the U.S., and helped launch the New York Exchange for Women’s Work in 1878, where women could sell on consignment handiwork they made at home, from baked goods to household linens. In 1883, Wheeler formed Associated Artists, a textile firm, which employed only women to manufacture a wide range of textiles, including tapestries and curtains. She also helped found the artist colony Onteora in the Catskill Mountains in 1892. Wheeler was asked to serve as the interior decorator of the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. She spent much of her later life writing books and articles, from Household Art and Content in a Garden to her last book, The Development of Embroidery in America, published in 1921. She died at the age of 96 in 1923.

March 24, 1853 – Mary Shadd Cary, the first black woman publisher in North America, sent the first issue of her anti-slavery newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, to press in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

March 24, 1855 – Olive Schreiner born, South African author, anti-war activist, free thinker, and feminist. Her novel The Story of an African Farm, published under the pen name ‘Ralph Iron’ in 1883, dealt not only with the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier, but also with agnosticism, the professional aspirations of women, existential independence, and individualism. She also wrote A Track to the Water’s Edge; Thoughts on South Africa; and From Man To Man Or Perhaps Only, published after her death, with the ending only sketched out, which began with white women’s confinement to domesticity in late 19th century South Africa and England, but expanded to include black women and girls as the central character struggles to re-create herself and educate her children against the racism and sexism of the time.

March 24, 1870 – Amanda V. Gray born, African-American pharmacist, educator, and activist; earned her pharmaceutical graduate degree from Howard University in 1903. She was the first black woman to co-own and operate a pharmacy in Washington, D.C., with her husband Arthur. She was active in the National Medical Association, the NAACP, and the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society. During WWI, she was a director of YWCA hospitality for African American soldiers at Camps Upton, Dix, and Taylor.

March 24, 1890 – Agnes Macphail born, Canadian progressive politician, newspaper correspondent, and columnist; first woman elected to the Canadian House of Commons (1921-1940). She was a strong voice for rural issues, penal reform for women prisoners, senior pensions, and workers’ rights; sponsor of the first equal-pay legislation in Ontario; advocate for more women in politics: "Most women think politics aren't lady-like. Well, I'm no lady. I'm a human being."

March 24, 1899 – Dorothy Constance Stratton born, educator and director of SPARS, the United States Coast Guard Women’s Reserve during WWII.

March 24, 1905 – Pura Santillan-Castrence born, essayist, newspaper columnist, feminist, and diplomat, one of the first Filipina women to gain prominence writing in the English language; served as Chief of the Translation Section of the Philippine Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the WWII Japanese occupation of the country; after the war, she worked in the Philippine embassy in Bonn, West Germany, and then as Assistant Secretary for Cultural Affairs; author of As I See It: Filipinos and the Philippines.

March 24, 1912 – Dorothy Height born, African American civil rights and women’s rights activist; served over 40 years as president of the National Council of Negro Women (1957-1997); focused on black women’s problems of unemployment, illiteracy, and exercising voting rights, and also took part in multiple global conferences and delegations. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.

March 24, 1921 – The 1921 Women’s Olympiad begins in Monte Carlo, the first international women’s sports event. Women were excluded from international sports competitions, so Alice Milliat founded the Federation Feminine Sportive de France in 1917. She went on to organize the 1921 games; five nations took part – France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland, competing in ten track and field events, and several other sports. The IOC objected to FSFI’s use of the word ‘Olympiad’ in the title of their championships. FSFI agreed to drop the word in exchange for the IOC holding ten events for women in the 1928 Olympic Games, but the IOC included only five women’s events in the 1928 games.

March 24, 1921 – Martha Cowan born, American pilot and engineer; she was a WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilot) during WWII, spent 13 years in the military, then later worked as an engineer in ship-building. She celebrated her 100^th birthday in 2021, and is still with us as of this posting.

March 24, 1946 – Kitty O’Neil born, American stuntwoman and race driver; her women’s absolute land speed record set in 1976 stood until 2023, when it was broken by Jessi Combs. An early childhood illness left O’Neil deaf, and in her late 20s, she underwent treatment for cancer. She performed stunts on The Bionic Woman, Airport '77, The Blues Brothers, Smokey and the Bandit II, and Wonder Woman. Mattel made a Kitty O’Neil action figure in 1978. She ended her stunt and speed work in 1979 after stunt colleagues were killed on the job. O’Neil died of pneumonia at age 72 in 2018.

March 24, 1947 – Christine O. Gregoire born, American lawyer and Democratic politician; second woman Governor of Washington state (2005-2013); Washington State Attorney General (1993-2005); cancer survivor; advocate for healthcare, biomedical research, and life sciences.

March 24, 1953 – Anita L. Allen born, African American Professor of Law and Vice Provost for Faculty at University of Pennsylvania Law School; senior fellow in former bioethics department of UP’s Perelman School of Medicine; collaborating faculty member in Africana studies and women’s studies; served on 2010 Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

March 24, 1962 – Star Jones born, African American lawyer, journalist, and author, best known as television co-host on The View (1997-2006); served as president of the National Association of Professional Women, and the Professional Diversity Network.

March 24, 1970 – Erica Kennedy born, African American news correspondent, publicist, fashion correspondent and novelist; author of the novels Bling and Feminista. She was found dead in her home at age 42 in 2012, but her cause of death has never been disclosed.

March 24, 1977 – Jessica Chastain born, American actress and producer; in 2016, she founded Freckle Films, a production company headed by women executives. In 2017, Chastain was executive producer and narrator on I Am Jane Doe, a documentary on sex trafficking. She is a feminist, a vocal supporter of gender and racial equality, and for animal welfare and mental health access. She has worked with Planned Parenthood, campaigning for maintaining access to affordable healthcare for women, and refuses to work in states that have passed restrictive abortion laws.

March 24, 1990 – Keisha Castle-Hughes born, New Zealand actress and activist. She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for the 2002 film Whale Rider, and played Obara Sand (2015-2017) in the television series Game of Thrones. In 2009, she campaigned for Greenpeace and the SignOn New Zealand climate campaign. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key admonished her to "stick to acting," but offered a week later to discuss the issues with her over tea after she maintained she knew more about them than he gave her credit for.

March 24, 2002 – Halle Berry becomes the first African-American woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, for Monster’s Ball.

March 24, 2015 – Editors at the Swedish Academy announced that the official dictionary of the Swedish language will add a gender-neutral pronoun in April. “Hen” will be added to “han” (he) and “hon” (she) as one of 13,000 new words in the latest edition of the Swedish Academy’s SAOL. The pronoun is used to refer to a person without revealing their gender – either because it is unknown, because the person is transgender, or the speaker or writer deems the gender to be superfluous information. The word “hen” was coined in the 1960s when the ubiquitous use of “han” (he) became politically incorrect, and aimed at simplifying the language and avoiding the clumsy “han/hon” (s/he) construction. Mostly used by feminist activists, it never really took hold with most Swedes. “Hen” resurfaced around 2000, when the country’s transgender community began using it, and it can now be found in official texts, court rulings, media texts and books. The Swedish Academy’s dictionary is updated every 10 years. New entries are determined by their frequency and relevance.

March 24, 2021 – British-based multinational pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKlein fired their former US vaccine chief Moncef Slaoui over a sexual harassment allegation. He was GSK’s head of research before he became U.S. chief of Operation Warp Speed in the Trump administration, then joined Galvani Bioelectronics, a joint venture majority owned by GSK. GSK said it terminated Slaoui’s role at Galvani Electronics, with immediate effect, after an investigation by Grace Speights, of the Washington-based law firm Morgan Lewis, hired in February after GSK managers received a letter containing allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. Emma Walmsley, GSK chief executive since April 2017, wrote in a letter to employees that she was “shocked and angry,” but also “resolute” … “I want to be clear that sexual harassment is strictly prohibited and will not be tolerated.”

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Sources

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

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The Feminist Cats Learn Women’s History Online

“A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine, a pie without fromage, a dinner without wine.” – Julia Child

Julia Child, world famous author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and star of The French Chef cooking show, loved cats. In fact, there’s a whole book about Julia and her cats, called Julia’s Cats: Julia Child’s Life in the Company of Cats, written by Patricia Barey and Therese Burson.

In 1948, as honeymooners Julia and Paul Child began their new life in Paris, a French cat they named Minette came into their kitchen, and Julia became a cat lover. On August 13 2004, her last cat, Minou, sat on the pillow next to her head, keeping watch over Julia on her last night. For 56 years, she had lived in the company of cats.

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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/...

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